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Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right?
The company doubled its sales last year by leaning into America's culture war. It's also trying to distance itself from some of its new customers.
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Like most Americans, Evan Hafer experienced the Jan. 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol from a distance, watching it unfold on his television and his iPhone from Salt Lake City. What he saw did not surprise him. Hafer, who is 44, voted for Donald Trump. He was even open at first to the possibility that Trump's claims of sweeping voter fraud were legitimate, until William Barr, Trump's attorney general, declared in early December that he could find no evidence that such fraud occurred. Still, Hafer told me recently, "you're told by the commander in chief for months that the election was stolen, so you're going to have a group of people that are really pissed." While he disapproved of those who stormed the Capitol, he didn't believe that they or their actions constituted a real threat to the republic. "I've seen an insurrection," said Hafer, a former Green Beret and C.I.A. contractor who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. "I know what that looks like."
But Hafer's distance from the incident collapsed that same afternoon, when he was alerted to a picture taken by a Getty photographer in the Senate chamber that immediately went viral. The photo showed a masked man vaulting over a banister holding several sets of plastic restraints, an apparent sign that the insurrectionists planned to take lawmakers hostage. The unidentified man, soon dubbed "zip-tie guy," was dressed in a tactical vest, carried a Taser and wore a baseball hat with an image of an assault rifle silhouetted against an American flag — a design sold by the Black Rifle Coffee Company, of which Hafer is the chief executive. "I was like, Oh, [expletive]," he recalled. "Here we go again."
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Black Rifle was founded in 2014 by Hafer and two fellow veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and who were enthusiastic enlistees in America's culture wars too. The company billed itself as pro-military, pro-law enforcement and "anti-hipster." Early customers could download a shooting target from the company's Facebook page that featured a bowtied man with a handlebar mustache. Its early coffees included the Silencer Smooth roast and the AK-47 Espresso blend. During Trump's presidency, Black Rifle's gleeful provocations grew more directly political. It endorsed Trump's Muslim ban and bought Google ads based on searches for "Covfefe." ("They should be running Trump's comms shop," the alt-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec wrote in a tweet praising the Google maneuver.) Before long, Black Rifle became the unofficial coffee of the MAGA universe, winning public endorsements from Sean Hannity and Donald Trump Jr.
J.J. MacNab, a fellow at George Washington University's Program on Extremism, noted that Black Rifle apparel was a recurring feature in footage of last summer's anti-lockdown and anti-Black Lives Matter demonstrations in various states. When Kyle Rittenhouse, the Illinois teenager who is charged in the fatal shootings of two people at a B.L.M. protest last August in Kenosha, Wis., was released on $2 million bail in November, his first post-jail photo showed him wearing a Black Rifle T-shirt. (Rittenhouse used a black Smith & Wesson AR-15-style rifle in the shootings.) Elijah Schaffer, a reporter and host for Glenn Beck's Blaze Media, whose "Slightly Offensive" podcast was sponsored at the time by Black Rifle, tweeted the picture with the message "Kyle Rittenhouse drinks the best coffee in America" and a promotional code for Black Rifle's website.
In this context, the appearance of Black Rifle merchandise at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not exactly shocking. Nevertheless, Mat Best, the company's 34-year-old executive vice president, insists that Black Rifle was singled out unfairly. "Every brand, name the brand, it was probably there: Walmart jeans, Nike shoes," he said. "And then it's like one patch from our company. There's certain terrorist organizations that wear American brands when they go behead Americans. Do you think they want to be a part of that? And I'm not drawing a parallel between the two. I'm just simply saying there are things in business, when you grow, that are completely outside your control."
It was several months after Jan. 6, and Best and Hafer were revisiting the episode in Black Rifle's offices in Salt Lake City — a converted warehouse with a lot of black metal and reclaimed wood, as well as concrete floors stained in a swirly light-brown pattern that Hafer calls "spilt latte." Best, a former Army Ranger who stands over six feet and has the physique of an Ultimate Fighting Championship contender, recalled the initial internet rumors that he himself was "zip-tie guy," who was later identified as a considerably smaller man named Eric Munchel, a 30-year-old Tennessean recently employed by a Kid Rock-themed bar and restaurant in Nashville. "I was like, 'That guy's a buck forty and five-seven!'" Best said in mock umbrage.
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Hafer, who is of far more relatable stature (Best likened him to Rocket, the genetically enhanced raccoon in the Marvel cinematic universe), was more offended by the continued identification of Munchel with Black Rifle. This link was advanced not just by headlines — "Man at Capitol Riots Seen With Coffee Company Hat On" — but also by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In identifying "zip-tie guy" as Munchel, agents used his affection for Black Rifle as a crucial clue. Security-camera footage from a Washington hotel on Jan. 6 showed Munchel wearing the Black Rifle hat. A photograph on Facebook from September showed Munchel at a political rally in Nashville, draped in an American flag and again wearing the hat. And there was another Facebook photo of him holding a shotgun in front of a television tuned to a Fox News broadcast of a Trump appearance, with a Black Rifle hat visible on a nearby desk. In the 13-page affidavit the bureau filed in support of Munchel's arrest, the words "handgun" and "shotgun" appear once, "Trump" twice, "Taser" three times and "Black Rifle Coffee Company" four times.
"I would never want my brand to be represented in that way, shape or form," Hafer said, "because that's not me." And yet Black Rifle has made conspicuously little public effort to separate itself from Munchel. This is a sharp departure from its handling of the Rittenhouse incident: Following pressure from the company, Schaffer deleted his tweets, and Hafer released a video statement in which he clarified that while Black Rifle believed "in the Constitution, the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms," and "that a person is innocent until proven guilty," the company didn't sponsor Rittenhouse; "we're not in the business of profiting from tragedy."
The limited disavowal triggered fury on the right. "The people that run Black Rifle Coffee are no different than most scammers involved in the conservative grift," Nick Fuentes, a prominent white-nationalist activist, wrote on Twitter. "They're giant douche bag posers in flip flops and baseball caps. When push comes to shove they are [expletive] liberals." Hafer, who is Jewish, was bombarded on social media with anti-Semitic attacks. He estimates that the Rittenhouse episode cost the company between 3,000 and 6,000 subscribers to its various online coffee clubs. Black Rifle was caught off-guard by the backlash, and when the F.B.I. identified Munchel, the company said nothing at all.
The coffee company "is much bigger," Hafer insisted, than "a hat in the [expletive] Capitol." But the uncomfortable truth remained: that someone like Munchel would have thought to wear the company's hat to the Capitol was a large part of how Black Rifle had gotten so big in the first place. This was the dilemma in which Black Rifle now found itself. "How do you build a cool, kind of irreverent, pro-Second Amendment, pro-America brand in the MAGA era," Hafer wondered aloud, "without doubling down on the MAGA movement and also not being called a [expletive] RINO by the MAGA guys?"
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Until very recently, most companies did everything they could to keep their brands free of political associations. This is not to say they avoided politics, of course: Corporations and business associations hired lobbyists and made political contributions in order to guarantee favorable treatment from public officials. But this was typically done behind a scrim of private meetings and campaign-finance reports, and while the business community's own politics might have tended toward chamber-of-commerce conservatism, the lobbying and giving were usually calculatedly bipartisan. There have always been firms — oil companies, defense contractors — whose work inevitably placed them in the political conversation, but for most, trying to stay neutral made economic sense.
A sign that this conventional wisdom was changing came five years ago, after North Carolina's Republican-led Legislature passed a law prohibiting transgender individuals from using public restrooms that match their gender identity. Social conservatives blithely assumed the state's business community would have no objections to "the bathroom bill." But by the turn of this century, North Carolina's big money had shifted from textiles in Greensboro and tobacco in Winston-Salem to the financial center of Charlotte and the pharmaceutical and technology hub of Raleigh. The gravitational pull of those inherently more liberal industries and cities was profound. Bank of America (based in Charlotte), Pfizer (which has a manufacturing facility in Rocky Mount), Facebook and Apple (both of which have large data centers in the state), as well as some 200 other major corporations, publicly called on Gov. Pat McCrory to repeal the law. When he didn't, the business community contributed fulsomely to the campaign of his Democratic rival, Roy Cooper, who defeated him in 2016.
Trump's election that same year and the broader transformation of Republican politics that accompanied it seemed to further divide corporate America and the Republican Party. Although corporations didn't necessarily reduce their political contributions to the G.O.P., they sought greater public distance. In 2017, the chief executives of J.P. Morgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, General Electric and other major firms resigned from the White House's business advisory councils to protest Trump's remarks blaming "both sides" for violence at a deadly white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. This year, after Georgia's Republican-led Legislature and Republican governor enacted a restrictive new voting law, the chief executives of the Georgia-headquartered Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines publicly denounced the law and Major League Baseball moved its 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver. The Texas-based American Airlines and Dell have announced their opposition to new restrictive voting laws enacted by that state's Republican-led Legislature and governor as well.
These corporations often made these political stands defensively, in the face of pressure from activist groups threatening protests and boycotts or from their employees. But other major companies have recently wagered that taking political stances of their own volition is good business. In 2018, Nike built an advertising campaign around Colin Kaepernick, who was driven out of the National Football League the previous year for taking a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter during the playing of the pregame national anthem. During last summer's nationwide protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, YouTube, Procter & Gamble and even NASCAR produced racial-justice TV ads. "There's an imperfect line between what's political and what's cultural these days," says Steve Callander, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "Companies definitely want to tap into cultural trends, because that's how you connect with your customers." In a 2019 survey of more than 1,500 U.S. consumers by the social-media management firm Sprout Social, 70 percent of them said they found it important for brands to take a public stand on sociopolitical issues.
More often than not, companies are aligning themselves with liberal causes — not necessarily for ideological reasons but for business ones. "The marketplace skews younger," Callander notes, "and that's a big difference with the electorate, which skews older." But the rise of "woke capitalism," as the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has called it, has also created a business opportunity for companies that explicitly cast themselves in opposition to the new liberal corporate consensus. American consumers who are alienated by pro-immigration and gun-control messages from the likes of Walmart and Hertz — call these consumers woke capitalism's discontents — need to shop somewhere. And they also need to get their caffeine fix.
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In retrospect, the market opportunity that Black Rifle sought to exploit when it started in 2014 seems blindingly obvious. Over the preceding two decades, Starbucks had made espresso drinks and specialty roasts as ubiquitous in America as McDonald's, in part by wrapping them up inside an aspirational lifestyle brand: a deracinated, mass-market version of the Seattle cultural aesthetic of the 1990s. This aesthetic was implicitly liberal, urban, cosmopolitan and mildly pretentious — the grist for thousands of talk-radio rants about "latte liberals." Now that Starbucks is a mass-market behemoth, with over 15,000 stores in the U.S., it has lost some of these associations, but not all of them. And Starbucks has been so successful at creating a multibillion-dollar market for specialty coffee in the United States that there are now most likely millions of latte drinkers who are not latte liberals.
Black Rifle, too, presents itself as a lifestyle brand, with its hats, T-shirts and other flag-and-firearm-bedecked merchandise accounting for more than 15 percent of the company's 2020 sales. At times, Black Rifle has explicitly presented itself as a troll-y, Trump-y alternative to the Seattle giant. When Starbucks pledged to hire 10,000 refugees to protest Trump's 2017 executive order banning visas to applicants from seven countries, most of whose populations were majority Muslim, Black Rifle created a social-media meme with Starbucks cups Photoshopped alongside ISIS fighters. In 2019, after an Oklahoma police officer posted a photo on Facebook of a Starbucks cup that a barista had labeled "pig," Best appeared on "Fox & Friends," the Trump-beloved talk show, to announce that Black Rifle was giving the officer and his department "enough coffee so they'll never have to go to a Starbucks again," as the host Ainsley Earhardt told viewers. "I want people who voted for Trump to know that there is another option for you," Hafer said in the midst of the feud he orchestrated. "Howard Schultz doesn't want your business. I do." (Black Rifle similarly secured Sean Hannity's endorsement in 2017 shortly after the coffee company Keurig pulled its ads from his show to protest his defense of Roy Moore, a Republican Senate candidate in Alabama, in the face of sexual misconduct allegations against Moore involving teenage girls.)
Black Rifle's executives intend for this sort of provocation to be the basis for the expansion of a brand that, while not the size of Starbucks, could achieve its own kind of red-state ubiquity. In 2015, the company's revenue was $1 million. By 2019, that figure had grown to $82 million. Last year, the company did $163 million in sales. For most of its existence, Black Rifle has been a "direct to consumer" operation, selling its coffee and merchandise primarily through its website. The company opened its first brick-and-mortar store in San Antonio last fall; others are open or under construction in Montana, Oklahoma and Tennessee, with plans to have 15 in operation by the end of this year and 35 by the end of 2022. Black Rifle has also struck a deal with Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's — which already sell Black Rifle coffee beans and merchandise — to operate Black Rifle cafes in some of their stores. ("Their brand is very popular with our customers," a Bass Pro Shops spokeswoman said.)
Tom Davin, a former executive at Taco Bell and Panda Express who two years ago became Black Rifle's co-chief executive, says: "Our customer is driving a tricked-out Ford F-150. It's blue-collar, above-average income, some college-educated, some self-made-type people. It's people who shop at Walmart rather than Target." Hafer put it more bluntly in a 2017 interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business: "Progressives hate me, and conservatives love me."
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In April, Hafer traveled to Clarksville, Tenn., where Black Rifle's second store was scheduled to open the next week on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard, a road just outside Fort Campbell clogged with fast-food restaurants and car dealerships. Baristas in training huddled behind the bar learning how to make drinks, while a giant TV played a slow-motion video of a bullet ripping through a coffee bag and flashed the message "PREMIUM ROASTED COFFEE FOR PEOPLE WHO LOVE AMERICA."
Hafer was conducting a final pre-opening inspection. As he marched around the store, snapping occasional pictures with a Leica that hung from a strap around his neck, he drew up a punch list that his assistant typed into an iPad. The display of coffee mugs designed to look like grenades in the merchandise section was too cluttered. The big empty space above the faux fireplace rankled him. "I'll send an elk head out," he said. The bottles of Torani flavored syrup needed to be hidden from view, or the syrup needed to be decanted into Black Rifle-branded bottles. "It should be Black Rifle with Black Rifle all the way through," Hafer instructed. "There should be zero other exterior branding for anything else."
Hafer grew up in Idaho in a family of loggers. He joined the National Guard before attending the University of Idaho and left school in 1999, just shy of graduation, to join the Army. In 2000, he became a Green Beret. For the next 14 years, first as a Special Forces soldier and then as a C.I.A. contractor, he went on more than 40 deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, the Philippines and elsewhere. By 2013, he was running a C.I.A. program in Kabul, divorced from his first wife and disgruntled with American foreign policy. He concluded that the war there wasn't being waged to defend the United States or promote democracy; rather, it was about enriching "the military industrial complex with the largest transfer of taxpayer wealth in American history." The C.I.A. did not renew his contract the following year.
Back in the United States, newly remarried and with a baby on the way, Hafer searched for a place in civilian life. He connected with Best, whom he knew from the C.I.A.-contractor world. While still a contractor, Best started making bro-ish videos poking fun at military life — blowing up a giant pink teddy bear with Tannerite, for instance — and posting them to Facebook and YouTube. They caught the eye of Jarred Taylor, an Air Force staff sergeant stationed in El Paso who had a video-production company. Taylor helped Best put out a more polished product, with more guns and more women in bikinis. Before long, Best was an internet celebrity in military circles, with over a million subscribers to his YouTube channel. He and Taylor started a military-themed T-shirt company called Article 15, after the provision in the Uniform Code of Military Justice that governs minor disciplinary matters. Their shirts featured designs like a machine-gun-toting Smokey Bear ("Only You Can Prevent Terrorism"). It did more than $1 million in sales its first year.
Although Article 15 ended up grossing nearly $4 million by its third year, Best and Taylor realized that it could make only so much money. "People don't need to buy a T-shirt every week," Taylor says. Partnering with Hafer, they set about trying to better tap the market they had found.
That market included not just military veterans but, perhaps more important, nonveterans who wanted to emulate them. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans who viewed the military as an aspirational lifestyle, as opposed to a professional career or a patriotic duty, were a distinctly marginal subculture, relegated to an olive-drab world of surplus stores and Soldier of Fortune subscriptions. But that changed as veterans began cycling back from Afghanistan and Iraq to a country that — while mostly removed from (and oftentimes painfully oblivious to) the realities of their service — generally admired them and, in some cases, wanted to live vicariously through their experiences. This was especially true of the elite Special Operations personnel who have assumed an outsize role in the post-Sept. 11 wars.
'I hate racist, Proud Boy-ish people. Like, I'll pay them to leave my customer base.'
The fascination with, and romanticization of, Special Operations gave us video games like the later installments in the Call of Duty franchise, movies like "Lone Survivor" and a sagging shelf of Navy SEAL memoirs. It also gave rise to an entire industry retrofitting "operator culture" as a lifestyle. There's Grunt Style, a popular clothing brand founded by a former Army drill sergeant that sells camouflage polyester shorts ("Ranger Panties") and T-shirts with a variety of skull- and ammunition-centric designs. The apparel company 5.11, which manufactured specialty pants for rock climbers, started going by the name 5.11 Tactical in 2003 and soon began selling T-shirts with twin underarm pockets ("a quick, comfortable and covert solution for concealed-carry wear") and "active-shooter response" bags specially designed to carry assault-rifle magazines. It now has 85 retail stores in 27 states. (Before becoming Black Rifle's co-chief executive, Tom Davin ran 5.11.) And of course, there are the gun manufacturers, firing ranges and shooting instructors that cater to people who don't fancy themselves hunters, target shooters or conventional home defenders, as most gun owners once did, but as commandos preparing for theoretical war.
Aspirational brands like Stetson and Breitling sell inclusivity as exclusivity: They are nominally pitched to a romanticized elite — the rugged frontiersman, the dashing yachtsman — but the real money is in peddling the promise of access to that elite to everyone else. The target market for high-end carbon-steel survival knives includes the 7 percent of American adults who served in the military. But it also includes the broader population of web developers and program managers who are unlikely to encounter physical danger in their daily lives but who sport Ranger beards or sleeve tattoos and talk about their "everyday carry." As a Grunt Style motto puts it, "You don't have to be a veteran to wear Grunt Style, but you do have to love freedom, bacon and whiskey."
Best had made fun of this market in his videos: "Now that we've got the superfitted Under Armour shirt and a little operator hat, we need to put on a beard and some body armor," he said in a 2013 video called "How to Be an Operator." Still, he, Hafer and Taylor tried to come up with products that would appeal to it. There was ReadyMan, a survivalist outfit that hawked custom tools (tomahawks, tourniquets, AR-15 cleaning cards) and training in "time-tested man skills," but sales were modest. A crowdfunding website called TwistRate, which was targeted at military and law-enforcement members with entrepreneurial ideas for tactical firearms that Kickstarter wouldn't host, eventually went out of business. Their whiskey, Leadslingers, seemed as though it would be a lot of fun, until they realized all the regulatory headaches that come with alcohol distribution. (The podcast they used to promote it, "Drinkin' Bros," was more successful.) They even made a feature film, partnering with the military-apparel company Ranger Up on a zombie comedy titled "Range 15." They cast themselves but paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for appearances from the likes of Sean Astin, William Shatner and Danny Trejo — spending about $1.5 million (much of it raised through crowdfunding) to make a movie that brought in just over $600,000 at the box office.
It was Hafer who stumbled into the gold mine. Best and Taylor didn't know Folgers instant from Blue Bottle espresso, but Hafer was a genuine coffee nerd; when he deployed overseas, he brought along his own pour-over apparatus and beans he had roasted himself. For a Black Friday promotion for Article 15 in 2014, he roasted 500 pounds — on a one-pound roaster in his garage — of a blend that he and his business partners called Dark Roasted Freedom. Taylor made an ad for the coffee titled "Grinch vs. Operators" in which he, Best, Hafer and some of their friends, on orders from Santa, hunt down and execute a keffiyeh-clad Grinch. They sold 300 bags in the first five days.
The seeds of Black Rifle's success — good coffee and superior memecraft — were planted. Soon Black Rifle was its own stand-alone company, and Best, Hafer and Taylor shuttered or pulled back from their other business ventures. Sure, they rolled their eyes about the commodification of operator culture. But they knew a business opportunity when they saw one. If the people wanted a "tactical caffeine delivery system," as a Military.com writer later referred to Black Rifle, they would give it to them.
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Appearing on "Fox & Friends" in 2017 to respond to Starbucks's pledge to hire 10,000 refugees, Hafer announced that Black Rifle intended to hire 10,000 veterans. Coming from the chief executive of a company that, at the time, had about 50 employees, this was a transparent publicity stunt. Nonetheless, as Black Rifle has grown, it has stayed true to the spirit of Hafer's promise. Black Rifle says that more than half of its 550 current employees are veterans, reservists or military spouses; they work in roles from forklift operators to baristas to senior executives.
Sometimes it seems as if Hafer and his partners invent jobs at Black Rifle for veterans to do. A former Green Beret medic helps Black Rifle with events and outreach and was recently made the director of its newly formed charity organization. Four years ago, Black Rifle received a Facebook message from an Afghan Army veteran with whom Hafer once served; he wrote that he was now working at a gas station and living with his family in public housing in Charlottesville. "We honestly assumed he was dead," Hafer says. Black Rifle found a home for the man and his family in Utah, and he now does building and grounds maintenance at the company's Salt Lake City offices. At those offices, I met a quiet, haunted-seeming man who had been a C.I.A.-contractor colleague of Hafer's and who, for a time, lived in a trailer he parked on the office grounds. Later, I asked Hafer what, exactly, the man did for Black Rifle. "He just gets better," Hafer replied. "He gets better."
This spring, Black Rifle hosted an archery competition for a few dozen disabled veterans and a few dozen of its employees (some one and the same) on a 1,200-acre ranch it leases north of San Antonio, where the company now has a second office. Archery has become the unofficial sport of Black Rifle; the company buys $600 compound bows and $250 releases for employees who want to learn to shoot and employs two bow technicians to teach them. Hafer believes that archery — the mental and physical process of nocking the arrow, drawing the bow, aiming and then releasing the string — is therapeutic. "It's active meditation, basically," he says.
At the "adaptive athlete" archery competition in Texas, participants who had lost their legs navigated around the cactus, live oaks and cow patties in all-terrain wheelchairs; those missing an arm held their bows with robotic prosthetics. Wearing T-shirts and wristbands bearing slogans like "Eat the Weak" and "Kill Bad Dudes," they shot at foam targets in the shapes of various prey — a jaguar, a crocodile, a sasquatch — that had been placed around the ranch and trash-talked one another after every hit and miss.
One of those competing was Lucas O'Hara, a giant, bearded man who is Black Rifle's in-house blacksmith. O'Hara spent eight years in the Army and then settled down in Georgia, where he worked as a bodyguard before falling on hard times. He was a devoted listener to the "Drinkin' Bros" podcast and sent Instagram messages to Best, Hafer and Taylor asking if they could help. Taylor gave him a job in Article 15's T-shirt warehouse. Later, O'Hara took up blacksmithing and began making custom knives. He called his company Grizzly Forge.
"I was struggling to get this business going," O'Hara recalled. "We were two months behind on my mortgage. We had our power shut off. I had two little girls." He was on the verge of selling his shop equipment on Facebook when Hafer called him with an order for 50 custom blades that Black Rifle could give away as coffee-bag openers. "That turned my power back on," O'Hara said. Hafer ordered 300 more. This year, Black Rifle moved O'Hara, his family and Grizzly Forge from exurban Atlanta to Salt Lake City and gave him his own blacksmith shop in a hangar-like structure behind the company parking lot.
O'Hara had been practicing archery for just a couple of weeks but had gotten better by watching online tutorials given by the professional archer John Dudley, who attended Black Rifle's competition. So did the former professional wrestler Goldberg and Keldon Johnson, a forward for the San Antonio Spurs. O'Hara got his picture taken with some of them, and he won the long-range shooting competition. "This whole thing is like a dream," he said.
'Instead of worrying about microaggressions and which bathroom I'm going to use, I believe it's important to support the people that actually serve our country.'
For Hafer, Black Rifle's physical stores represent not just another revenue stream for his business but another business opportunity for his subculture. In his vision, Army staff sergeants and Navy petty officers will leave the military and move back to their hometowns, where, instead of joining the local police department, they'll take a job at a Black Rifle coffee shop and, eventually, operate a Black Rifle franchise of their own. "I would never take anything away from people that want to be police officers, but the guy that's on the fence who needs a job but still wants to be part of the team and still likes the culture and the community, I'm going to get him," Hafer told me. "I want him to be thinking: Man, I'm going to work as a barista. I'm going to work the window. I'm going to move up to manager. And then after three years, I'm going to get a franchise opportunity." He went on: "People that are coming out of the military might be looking at going to work at UPS or FedEx or something like that. I've got to be competitive with those guys."
The community that Black Rifle's founders are building within the company resembles a concentrated version of the community they hope to build among its customers. The funny videos, the online magazine Coffee or Die, the podcast, the T-shirts and hats are about this as much as they are about selling coffee. "When Joe Schmo is getting out of the military and moves back to his hometown, and he's alone and depressed and turns on one of our podcasts, and then gets in one of our local group forums, he starts networking, and now he's got five buddies to hang out with," Best says. "That [expletive] is life-changing." As Best put it in his 2019 memoir, "Thank You for My Service," an account of his combat and sexual exploits that relied on a ghostwriter once used by Tucker Max, his goal with veterans is "to speak to people like me. People who appreciated the gratitude but had no use for the pity."
"You have an entire generation of guys over the last 20 years that were trained to deploy and kill people," Hafer told me. "It's the most politically incorrect profession. Let's just say what it is: You're going to take life. And then you have this evolutionary circumstance in society, which says that everything has to be politically correct. And now what they want a generation of guys to do is to come home and be nice. They want us to be all politically correct. They want us to be watered-down versions of ourselves, because I think they just want to forget and move on with their lives."
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In Black Rifle's early days, the company's avowed "political incorrectness" resembled a militarized Barstool Sports; some of its early ads ran on "Girls for Gunslingers," a self-explanatory Facebook page that Taylor operated, and were of a piece with the rest of the page's content. But over time its political incorrectness became more overtly political. "Instead of worrying about microaggressions and which bathroom I'm going to use, I believe it's important to support the people that actually serve our country," Best says in a 2017 Black Rifle ad, name-checking a couple of conservative cultural grievances. "I've heard people say patriotism is racism. Well, as a veteran-owned company, we give zero [expletive] about your opinion."
It's not too difficult to detect the influence of a certain political figure in this evolution — and not just because Best wears a red "Make Coffee Great Again" T-shirt in the ad. Indeed, Black Rifle's founders not only adapted to but in many instances also adopted the Trump-era Republican Party's approach to politics. On the eve of the Georgia Senate runoffs in January, Taylor directed an ad supporting the two Republican candidates called "Georgia Reloaded." In it, Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Texas Republican and former Navy SEAL, parachutes out of a plane into Georgia to fight the "far-left activists" there who "are attempting to gain full and total control of the U.S. government." The ad ends with Crenshaw landing on the hood of a car with antifa members inside and punching in the windshield.
Last month, Black Rifle donated $32,000 to the sheriff of Bexar County, Texas, home to the company's San Antonio office, so his department could buy a rescue boat. On Instagram, Taylor posted a picture of him and Best presenting the sheriff with a giant check, along with a caption that attacked a female Republican county commissioner who had questioned the boat purchase; Taylor ended it with the hashtag #APAC, which stands for "all politicians are [expletive]." The county commissioner was subsequently the subject of vicious and sexist harassment on social media.
Trump's taboo-breaking extended beyond political culture to the military culture that Black Rifle celebrates. That active-duty military and veterans are predominantly Republican was well known before Trump; the norms of civilian politics, however, demanded that Republican politicians talk about supporting the troops, not the other way around. But Trump, like an American caudillo, treated the military as a political constituency. "I'm not saying the military's in love with me," Trump said during the 2020 campaign. "The soldiers are."
Trump took his courtship of the military to unseemly extremes. As a candidate, he complained that American forces were not permitted to "fight fire with fire" when dealing with terrorists and regaled campaign-trail crowds with the apocryphal story of Gen. John Pershing executing Muslim prisoners in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig blood. As president, he vociferously supported Eddie Gallagher — a Navy SEAL who was court-martialed on charges that he attempted to murder civilians and stabbed a teenage ISIS prisoner to death while serving with a platoon in Iraq in 2017 — and other service members accused of war crimes. "We're going to take care of our warriors, and I will always stick up for our great fighters," Trump said in 2019 after pardoning one Army officer found guilty of war crimes and a Special Forces soldier charged with committing them. "People can sit there in air-conditioned offices and complain, but you know what? It doesn't matter to me whatsoever."
Gallagher was acquitted of the most serious charges, over the testimony of some of the SEALs in his squad, who had made the initial accusations. Afterward, Black Rifle's leadership hosted him twice on the company's "Free Range American" podcast and collaborated with him on his own line of T-shirts and drinkware called Salty Frog Gear. Gallagher, for his part, wears Black Rifle's gear so frequently that, he has said, some people have mistaken him to be the coffee company's chief executive. Once, Gallagher's case might have been an intramural dispute between "team guys." But thanks in large part to Trump, Gallagher is now a combatant in a larger cultural conflagration — a frequent guest on Fox News and an author of a new book attacking his accusers as "weak-kneed," "weak-bodied" "soft beta" males.
Black Rifle has been right there with him. "It's progressive politics that are trying to fry and paint this picture of moral and ethic problems within the Special Operations community," Best complained on a 2019 Fox Nation segment devoted to Gallagher and the two Army servicemen Trump pardoned. Rather than condemning those accused of war crimes, Hafer added, "the country should be asking themselves, What can we do to help these guys?"
Black Rifle does not and cannot expect to ever again double its revenue, as it did last year, but it projects annual sales of $240 million in 2021 — 50 percent higher than 2020. Considering how much of Black Rifle's previous success was built on Trump-fueled divisiveness and polarization, the question is whether its ambitious projections for future growth could possibly be met without more of the same.
Although Hafer remains a conservative, on more than one occasion he told me, "I'm a man without a party now." He is loath to say anything negative about Trump on the record, but he now also seems reluctant to say much positive about him either. Nevertheless, the Black Rifle executives were unwilling to get too introspective about what their company might have done to lead people on the far right, people they personally revile, to identify with the Black Rifle brand.
When I asked Hafer and Best if they had given any thought as to why the first public thing Kyle Rittenhouse did after getting bailed out of jail was put on a Black Rifle T-shirt and pose for a picture, their answer was procedural. An ex-Special Forces member who helped collect Rittenhouse from jail stopped by a Bass Pro Shop to get some new clothes for the teenager, including the Black Rifle T-shirt, Hafer said. As for why Eric Munchel chose a Black Rifle hat — in addition to a tactical vest and a Taser — as part of his get-up for his "flexing of muscles" on Jan. 6, as he described his actions to a British newspaper, they had no interest in digging too deeply. "He's just some guy that bought the hat," Hafer said. "Just like 10,000 other people who bought the hat in the previous 60 days before that, or whatever it was."
"The Black Rifle guys are not the evil that everybody makes them out to be," says J.J. MacNab, the extremism researcher, "but they've closed their eyes to some of the evil that takes their humor seriously." Still, Black Rifle professes to be eager to put some of its fiercest and trolliest culture-war fights behind it. "What I figured out the last couple of years is that being really political, in the sense of backing an individual politician or any individual party, is really [expletive] detrimental," Hafer told me. "And it's detrimental to the company. And it's detrimental, ultimately, to my mission."
Hafer and Best were talking in a glorified supply closet in the Salt Lake City offices, where potential designs for new coffee bags were hanging on the wall. One of them featured a Renaissance-style rendering of St. Michael the Archangel, a patron saint of military personnel, shooting a short-barreled rifle. In Afghanistan and Iraq, Hafer knew a number of squad mates who had a St. Michael tattoo; for a time, he wore into battle a St. Michael pendant that a Catholic friend gave him. But while the St. Michael design was being mocked up, Hafer said he learned from a friend at the Pentagon that an image of St. Michael trampling on Satan had been embraced by white supremacists because it was reminiscent of the murder of George Floyd. Now any plans for the coffee bag had been scrapped. "This won't see the light of day," Hafer said.
"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." Then again, what Hafer insisted was a "superclear delineation" was not too clear to everyone, as Munchel's choice of headgear vividly demonstrated.
"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." If that was the case, I asked, had Black Rifle — which sells a Thin Blue Line coffee — considered changing the name of its Beyond Black coffee, a dark roast it has sold for years, to Beyond Black Lives Matter? Surely that would alienate the racists polluting its customer base.
Hafer began to laugh. "You wouldn't do that," I ventured.
"I would never do that," Hafer replied. "We're trying to be us."
Jason Zengerle is a writer at large for the magazine. He last wrote an article about public performance in sports and politics. Eli Durst is a photographer based in Austin, Texas, who teaches at the University of Texas. His first monograph, ''The Community,'' was published last year.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/magazine/black-rifle-coffee-company.html
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