Black Rifle Coffee has been slammed by conservatives for calling their customers racist, with pro-Trump coffee brand Covfefe Coffee highlighting their funding by a liberal venture capitalist firm.
Black Rifle Coffee, a supposedly pro-America, pro-military coffee firm, came under fire last year for distancing themselves from Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager currently charged relating to the shooting of two antifa rioters in Kenosha. Despite the company losing an estimated 3,000 to 6,000 customers, Evan Hafer and Mat Best, the CEO and Executive VP of Black Rifle Coffee respectively, were interviewed for a ~10,000 word piece for the New York Times last week, where they turned their back even further on many of their consumers.
Hafer, who admitted that he stopped believing the myriad claims of election fraud in the 2020 election after then-Attorney General Bill Barr dismissed them in December, despite the recent Arizona audit revealing a vast number of serious issues, said that despite building his entire brand on being pro-Trump, he is now “a man without a party.” The New York Times noted that he was “reluctant to say much positive” about President Trump.
Both best and Hafer railed in the interview about customers who claimed they were “racist,” including the multi-racial Proud Boys organisaion, swearing repeatedly, and describing America First supporters as being “repugnant”:
“You can’t let sections of your customers hijack your brand and say, ‘This is who you are,’” Best told me. “It’s like, no, no, we define that.” The Rittenhouse episode may have cost the company thousands of customers, but, Hafer believed, it also allowed Black Rifle to draw a line in the sand. “It’s such a repugnant group of people,” Hafer said. “It’s like the worst of American society, and I got to flush the toilet of some of those people that kind of hijacked portions of the brand.”
“The racism [expletive] really pisses me off,” Hafer said. “I hate racist, Proud Boy-ish people. Like, I’ll pay them to leave my customer base. I would gladly chop all of those people out of my [expletive] customer database and pay them to get the [expletive] out.”
It looks like Black Rifle Coffee, a company which became famous because of conservatives, is now trying to distance themselves from conservatives.
I never tried their products before and it looks like I never will.
— Brigitte Gabriel (@ACTBrigitte) July 17, 2021
Hafer even confirmed that a new coffee bag design, featuring a “Renaissance-style rendering of St. Michael the Archangel, a patron saint of military personnel, shooting a short-barreled rifle,” would now never “see the light of day,” with Hafer having apparently been told by “a friend at the Pentagon” that supposed “white supremacists” were adopting the design “because it was reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd.”
Black Rifle Coffee takes a knee in a far ranging NYT interview, where they claim St Michael is a white supremacist symbol according to “a friend in the Pentagon,” and that those who believes Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self defense are racists to be “flushed down the toilet.” pic.twitter.com/IoGE3dOcHc
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) July 17, 2021
Black Rifle Coffee prefers St. Milley the Wokeangel
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 17, 2021
National File’s Editor in Chief Tom Pappert spoke to the CEO of Covfefe Coffee, an actual pro-Trump, America First competitor to Black Rifle Coffee, and discussed the article with him.
“They must believe if they’re willing to go to the New York Times, the enemy of the people, and throw their customer base under the bus, they must truly believe that the future is not America First,” Covfefe‘s CEO said. “They saw an onslaught of thousands and thousands of customers reach out to them in disgust about the way they treated Kyle Rittenhouse. They’re already embracing this mass exodus and they’re trying everything that they can do to try and boot more MAGA people out the door in an effort to… bring in as many Democrats or centrists or Jeb Bush-type people. I don’t understand it at all.”
Covfefe’s CEO highlighted one potential reason for Black Rifle Coffee’s conversion into “the official coffee of the woke military-industrial complex” from the pro-Trump, pro-America coffee they had started off as. In December 2017, Sterling Partners, a liberal venture capitalist firm that has donated millions of dollars to Democrats, invested in Black Rifle Coffee.
“Is this the owner’s decision, or is this really the powers that be running these things, and making them apologise for their previous statements, making them distance themselves,” Covfefe Coffee’s CEO said. “It kind of seems like it’s all coordinated… They are doubling down on reimagining their company, they’re reworking their entire brand. They’re trying to be more inclusive.”
“When you have that type of power and responsibility and you’re marketing yourself as fighting the culture war, it’s just really pathetic and pretty cowardly,” he concluded.
