'Stay Strapped or Get Clapped'

[Nevilledog]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-03-20-stay-strapped-or-get-clapped/

In the summer of 2021, reporter Jason Zengerle published a fluffy profile in The New York Times Magazine of a growing veteran-owned company. “Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right?” was filled with heartwarming photos. The brand’s three founders in baseball caps sitting around a conference table in front of a wall-sized rendition of Washington crossing the Delaware. Employees practicing for an “adaptive athlete” archery competition. (“It’s active meditation, basically.”) The fellas chillin’ out in the company’s “converted warehouse with a lot of black metal and reclaimed wood.” And also, should there be any doubt where readers’ sympathies were meant to lie, CEO Evan Hafer (“who is Jewish”) posing with his puppy dogs.

The gravamen of the piece was examining the risk brands take when they plant a flag on the terrain of contested political issues. Readers were to understand this, naturally, as a problem for #bothsides. One example: the time in 2016, when Apple and Bank of America asked the governor of North Carolina to repeal that state’s hateful, anti-trans “bathroom bill,” and conservative customers balked.

Opposite that: the headache that emerged for the nice fellas at Black Rifle when investigators sought to identity the January 6th fugitive known as “Zip Tie Guy” for the tools he wore on his tactical belt, designed to hog-tie treasonous senators. The FBI had identified the baseball cap he wore, which featured an assault rifle silhouetted over an American flag, as a Black Rifle product.

“I was like, Oh [expletive],” Hafer was quoted. “Here we go again.”

“Again” referred to the time Kyle Rittenhouse was photographed in a Black Rifle tee after bailing out of jail for fatally shooting a Black Lives Matter demonstrator.

*snip*