In 2014, a former Green Beret named Evan Hafer started roasting coffee in his garage. A decade later, his company—Black Rifle Coffee Company—would be pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, spawning dozens of imitators, and helping to pioneer a new American business model: the monetization of tribal hatred.
This is a story about coffee. But it’s really a story about how American capitalism discovered it could profit from the end of national cohesion, and how major corporations decided that was fine.
The Invention of Patriot Brew
For readers outside the United States, some context: Coffee in America has never been politically neutral, but until recently, the politics were embedded in values rather than identity. Liberal-coded coffee shops emphasized fair trade, sustainability, ethical sourcing—progressive concerns dressed up as consumer choice. Starbucks, the massive chain that dominates American coffee culture, supports Pride parades and posts land acknowledgments while aggressively union-busting and operating as predatory a capitalist venture as one could design. This is standard American corporate progressivism: performative identity politics masking ruthless profit maximization.
What changed in the 2010s wasn’t that coffee became political. It’s that political identity itself became an explicit product you could buy.
Black Rifle Coffee Company launched with a simple pitch: if you’re a conservative who feels alienated by Starbucks’ rainbow flags and refugee hiring initiatives, here’s coffee for you. Coffee with your politics baked in. The branding was deliberately militant—products named “AK-47 Espresso” and “Silencer Smooth,” founder bios emphasizing special operations backgrounds, marketing that positioned coffee drinking as tactical preparation rather than morning ritual.
The genius—if we can call it that—was recognizing that in an increasingly polarized America, people wanted to perform their political identity through every consumption choice. Your coffee wasn’t just caffeine; it was a statement. A flag planted.
A signal to your tribe that you were one of them.
The Marketplace of Rage
Black Rifle Coffee Company exploded. By 2017, they were hiring hundreds of employees and planning their assault on becoming “the Starbucks of the right.” Conservative media personalities like Sean Hannity and Donald Trump Jr. promoted them enthusiastically. The company understood something profound about the American market: anger is incredibly profitable.
But here’s where the story gets interesting, and darker. In 2021, when a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse was photographed wearing Black Rifle merchandise after shooting three people (killing two) at a Black Lives Matter protest, the company faced a choice. They could lean into the association—this armed young man as their customer avatar—or they could distance themselves.
They chose distance. Founder Evan Hafer told the New York Times he hated “racist, Proud Boy-ish people” and would “gladly chop all of those people out of my customer database.” He wanted to build a veteran-focused coffee company that happened to appeal to conservatives, not a haven for extremists.
The response from his customer base was swift and vicious. He was called a traitor, a liberal, a RINO. His donations to then-Democrat (now Republican) Tulsi Gabbard were unearthed as evidence of betrayal. Conservative forums filled with fury: How dare Black Rifle Coffee refuse to fully embrace the most militant elements of the right?
And here’s the crucial part: The market responded by creating alternatives that would.
When the Dog Whistles Become Air Horns
Enter companies like Blackout Coffee.
Founded in Florida by John Santos, a Massachusetts-born son of Portuguese immigrants, Blackout Coffee explicitly positioned itself as the answer to Black Rifle’s “betrayal.” Where Black Rifle tried to maintain some distance from extremism, Blackout leaned in. Their marketing emphasizes “traditional American values” and supporting people who “never back down.” They were endorsed by Dan Bongino and Donald Trump Jr. One of their co-owners runs a pro-gun YouTube channel. They’ve raised over $1.6 million from investors who see conservative rage as a growth market.
But it’s the name that matters most.
“Blackout Coffee” is a clear dog-whistle for anti-black racism, launched at a political moment when the MAGA movement’s racism was moving from dog whistle to bullhorn. When Donald Trump is posting images depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. When the Proud Boys—whose leadership Black Rifle explicitly rejected but Blackout Coffee embraced—were being celebrated in ever-more-Nazified conservative circles.
In this context, “Blackout” isn’t subtle. It’s a racial signal dressed as coffee branding, carefully calibrated to be deniable if challenged (it’s just about strong coffee!) while being perfectly clear to the intended audience. This is the old playbook of racist marketing updated for the subscription economy.
And it works. Blackout boasts a 40% customer retention rate—higher than industry average—and has expanded from a 5,000 square foot facility to 35,000 square feet to meet demand. They’ve served over 45,000 customers and fulfilled more than 130,000 orders.
The commercialization of hate, it turns out, is excellent business.
The Ecosystem of Division
Black Rifle and Blackout are just the most successful examples. The conservative coffee market now includes:
Republican Coffee: Exactly what it sounds like.
Right Wing Brew: Marketing that promises their coffee “may entice you to love guns, ride eagles, eat steak, vote Republican, stand for the national anthem and care less about Europe.”
The Holy Roast: A “conservative, Christian & charitable coffee company” where different blends fund different right-wing causes—the “Patriot Blend” supports Turning Point USA and PragerU, while the “Pro-Life Blend” funds anti-abortion organizations.
Revere Coffee Company: Positioning itself as coffee for “hard working Americans” while supporting “the next generation of patriots.”
Nazi coffee is now a thing in the USA.
There’s even a company in Canada called Resistance Coffee Co. whose explicit pitch is “monetize two of life’s greatest pleasures: great coffee and liberal tears.”
Read that again. The business model is making people happy about other people’s suffering. That’s not subtext—it’s the text.
What Walmart Knows
Here’s where we move from disturbing to genuinely dangerous: Major American retailers stock these products.
Walmart—the largest retailer in the United States, serving millions of customers daily—carries several of these explicitly political coffee brands. Bass Pro Shops stocks them. They’re in firing ranges and tactical gear stores, yes, but also in ordinary retail spaces where families shop for groceries and household goods.
This is the mainstreaming.
When coffee whose entire brand identity is about hating the political other sits on the shelf next to Folgers and Maxwell House, something profound has shifted. This isn’t fringe anymore. This isn’t a subculture. This is America.
The corporations know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve run the numbers. They know these products move units, generate loyalty, create recurring revenue through subscription models. They know that in a divided nation, there’s profit in selling both sides their tribal markers. The culture war isn’t a problem for their business model—it is their business model.
The Performance of Hatred
But it’s worse than simple profiteering. The ubiquity of politically branded products creates a self-reinforcing cycle that makes division deeper and more intractable.
Consider what happens when your morning coffee becomes a political statement. When the brand in your cupboard signals which tribe you belong to. When every sip is a small daily ritual of identity performance.
This is different from previous eras of American political division. During the Civil Rights movement, businesses often resisted integration because they feared losing segregationist customers. But they weren’t built on segregation as their core value proposition. They sold products; segregation was the context.
These coffee companies sell division itself. The product isn’t really coffee—it’s belonging. It’s the feeling that your purchases are fighting back against the other side. It’s permission to see your consumption as virtuous and your neighbor’s as traitorous.
And here’s the insidious part: once hate becomes a viable business model at scale, reconciliation becomes bad for business. If Americans stopped seeing each other as enemies, these companies would lose their entire value proposition. They have a financial incentive to keep us angry, divided, and tribal.
When you can raise $1.6 million in investment capital by promising to serve “conservative coffee lovers,” when your pitch deck to investors includes your political positioning as a competitive advantage, when major retailers see this as just another market segment to serve—the message is clear. American capitalism has decided that the end of national cohesion is profitable, and profit is what matters.
The Sociological Threshold
My father is a retired sociologist, and he recognizes this moment as genuinely dangerous. Not because political coffee exists—consumer culture has always reflected political values. But because of the scale and explicitness of it.
When hatred becomes so ubiquitous that it’s a powerful marketing tool for something as mundane as coffee, we’ve crossed a threshold. We’re not just divided—we’ve built economic infrastructure around our division. We’ve created jobs in the hatred industry. We’ve made it possible for people to build careers, raise families, plan retirements based on keeping Americans at each other’s throats.
History shows us what happens when hate becomes banal. When it’s normalized through daily rituals. When it’s so woven into the fabric of ordinary life that people stop seeing it as hate at all—it’s just their coffee brand, their preferred retailer, their lifestyle choice.
The Weimar Republic had this dynamic. Antisemitism wasn’t just a fringe political movement; it was embedded in newspapers, entertainment, consumer products, everyday commercial life. By the time people recognized it as an existential threat, the infrastructure of genocide was already built.
That’s hyperbolic, some will say. It’s just coffee. It’s just marketing. It’s just capitalism doing what capitalism does—finding market segments and serving them.
But that’s exactly the point. The banality is the danger.
The Two Americas, Drinking Different Coffee
There’s a bitter irony in all of this: the companies selling “patriotic” coffee are often using the same supply chains, the same business models, the same exploitative labor practices as the “woke” companies they position themselves against.
Starbucks union-busts while hanging Pride flags. Black Rifle markets militant patriotism while their founder drives a Volvo and wears Birkenstocks. Blackout Coffee talks about “traditional American values” while participating in the same global capitalism that’s gutted American manufacturing.
The differences are almost entirely aesthetic. Performative. Tribal markers that obscure the fact that we’re all participating in the same economic system, being exploited by the same forces, facing the same material challenges of wages that don’t cover rent and healthcare costs that bankrupt families.
But the performance matters. The aesthetics matter. Because they’re training millions of Americans to see consumption as warfare, commerce as combat, and their neighbors as enemies.
When you can’t even share a coffee brand with someone, how can you share a country?
The Acceleration
Here’s what keeps me up at night: this is accelerating, and it’s spreading beyond coffee.
There’s now a “parallel economy” movement on the right, with explicitly political alternatives for nearly every product category. Anti-woke insurance. Anti-woke cell phone service. Anti-woke job boards. Anti-woke social media. PublicSq, a marketplace that brands itself as the “anti-woke Amazon,” requires businesses to commit to “pro-life, pro-family, pro-freedom” values to be listed.
The left has nothing comparable in scale or explicitness. The left has some reactive attempts—like Bucked Up, a Utah company run by Mormon brothers that makes products like "WOKE AF" pre-workout and posts liberal messages on social media—but these feel more like trolling than genuine movement-building. They're performative responses to right-wing culture war narratives rather than a comprehensive parallel economy. You won't find a "Liberal Coffee" subscription service or "Progressive Wireless" with Democratic Party imagery built into a business model predicated on making conservatives cry. The scale and seriousness are entirely different.Yes, there’s values-based marketing around fair trade and sustainability, but you won’t find “Liberal Coffee” or “Progressive Wireless” with Democratic Party imagery and promises to make conservatives cry.
This asymmetry matters. One political movement has decided that total separation—down to the brand of coffee—is not just acceptable but desirable. That there’s virtue in having nothing in common with half the country. That commerce itself should be a battlefield.
And American capitalism, ever opportunistic, has decided to facilitate this. To profit from it. To build it into business plans and investor pitches and retail strategies.
What Comes Next
I don’t have a tidy conclusion because this story isn’t over. The trends are all pointing in one direction: toward more division, more explicit tribal marking, more economic infrastructure built on hate.
The question isn’t whether this is sustainable. It obviously isn’t. You cannot maintain a democracy when citizens have been trained to see each other as subhuman enemies over breakfast beverages.
The question is what breaks first.
Do the companies run out of ways to differentiate themselves in the hatred market? (Seems unlikely—there’s always someone willing to be more extreme for market share, as Blackout demonstrated after Black Rifle.)
Do consumers get exhausted by the constant performance of identity through consumption? (Some polls suggest Americans are tiring of brands taking political stances, but the sales numbers tell a different story.)
Do retailers decide this isn’t worth it? (As long as it’s profitable, they won’t.)
Or do we just keep going until we’re two separate nations sharing geography, with separate everything, unable to speak to each other, unable to see each other as human, unable to build any kind of shared future?
Because that’s what this is building toward. Not slowly, not subtly, but at the speed of venture capital and viral marketing and major retailers deciding that stocking racist dog-whistle coffee is just good business.
The coffee companies aren’t the cause of American division. But they’re the perfect symbol of how that division has been weaponized, monetized, and normalized. How capitalism has discovered it can profit from national collapse.
And if we can’t figure out how to resist that—how to refuse to let our most basic consumption choices become acts of tribal warfare—then we’re already much further gone than most of us want to admit.
The coffee, it turns out, is the least bitter thing about this story.
If you found this essay valuable, please consider sharing it with others who might benefit from understanding how commercial interests are accelerating American political division. My work is made possible by the generosity of paid subscribers. Consider becoming one today, for less than the cost of a fancy latte.
It’s all so dumb because unless they’re strictly selling coffee beans grown in Hawaii, they’re selling a foreign import. How “patriotic.”
How glad I am I don’t live in the US!
But I’m glad I have read this, Alisa, because as you well know, the far right is on the March in Europe too. This is a timely warning I will pass on.