How the media misses the story of companies seeking profit by keeping traumatized veterans armed and enraged

[Celerity]

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. Hafer pronounced himself baffled. Why does this keep happening to us? The reader is supposed to be baffled, too—as when we meet Black Rifle employees like the “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.’” No wonder Hafer is so anguished by the thought that racists, of all people, could identify with his brand: “Like, I’ll pay them to leave my customer base.”

Hafer could maybe save that money by not selling a coffee called “Thin Blue Line.” (If you don’t see the racism in that symbolic clapback by politicized cops to the Movement for Black Lives, take your dog whistle in for repairs.) Or by making their YouTube channel, which has 1.19 million subscribers, a bit more of an unsafe space for those who prefer their social media minority-free; I had to scroll some 61 videos before spotting a single patch of non-Caucasian skin, save for the movie fight scenes in the “Veterans react to …” series. None of the videos I reviewed featured women either. In the Black Rifle universe, “veterans” are bearded and beefy, infatuated with the healing power of arms, and, above all, aggressively in the face of anyone who disagrees. That’s the whole point.

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