Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right? (Published 2021)
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.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/magazine/black-rifle-coffee-company.html
“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.”