Black Rifle Coffee's CEO Responds to the Social Media Furor Over His New York Times Magazine Interview

Last week, the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee, Evan Hafer, gave a long-form interview to Jason Zengerle for the New York Times Magazine. I don’t know what he expected to achieve by the exercise, but I’m pretty certain that what he accomplished represented a significant deviation from the plan.

The piece framed Black Rifle Coffee as a “Starbucks for conservatives” and promoted the piece by saying that the company was trying to distance itself from some of its customers. Note that Black Rifle Coffee retweeted this tweet and that usually means that the tweet met with the approval of the person sending it:

============================================================================================================ Black Rifle Coffee, which offers an AK-47 Espresso blend, has explicitly presented itself as a troll-y, MAGA alternative to Starbucks. The company doubled its sales last year. It’s also trying to distance itself from some of its new customers. https://t.co/SX1RWupqsS

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Then the article proceeded with some newsworthy quotes by Hafer that Andy Ngo helpfully passed along.

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The executives behind @blckriflecoffee, a coffee and lifestyle brand hugely popular with conservatives, has some choice words to describe part of its customer base. https://t.co/BxTpq0kfQY pic.twitter.com/mbdrBSpwGs

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The pushback from the right was pretty amazing; you can read my take on the brew-ha-ha, sorry, brouhaha here Is Black Rifle Coffee About to Throw Its Customer Base Under the Bus for Fun and Profit? Things got heated on Twitter, and some interesting people ended up blocked by Black Rifle Coffee’s social media flunkies.

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Amusingly, I was the guy telling my con friends, furious at #BlackRifleCoffee's perceived betrayal of its customers by dancing like organ grinder monkeys for the mainstream media, to give BRCC a chance to tell us its side.

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One of the more interesting revelations was that Hafer took his cues from the Pentagon’s “anti-extremist” bureaucracy.

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.

Think about that. An iconic Biblical figure, the angel who will lead the forces of Good to its final victory over Evil (see Revelation 12:7-9), is labeled an extremist symbol by some toad in the Pentagon, and the company immediately kowtows.

By yesterday, things were hot enough that Hafer felt like he had to issue a personal response.

After his disastrous response to Kyle Rittenhouse wearing a Black Rifle Coffee t-shirt when he was released from jail, he probably should have sent out a substitute on this play because I’m not sure that his answer does him a lot of good.

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A message from our CEO @EvanHafer. #brcc #americascoffee pic.twitter.com/QCAvGQezXo

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2. The conversation he had with the New York Times Magazine reporter was in the contest of racism and antisemitism in America in light of an organized attack on Hafer last year because of “my last name and my heritage.” From this, I’m assuming that Hafer is Jewish.

6. He has no personal problem with St. Michael and carried a St. Michael’s medal while on active duty.

7. He does not know why Defense labeled the St. Michael image as extremist, and they are awaiting “clarifcation” from Defense.

8. He gave an interview to the New York Times because he has a “responsibility to give reporters an objective story about the company.”

9. He says he knew the “odds of the New York Times being objective were fairly slim but we gave them the opportunity.”

10. He says he tried to highlight the veterans’ programs that Black Rifle Coffee is involved with, but they “chose to write a salacious headline.”

11. “There is no chance in hell that I’m going to talk sh** about conservatives to the New York Times, it ain’t going to happen.”

13. “We are about having a positive impact on our communities, not about who’s right and who’s wrong.”

Hafer seems to believe what he’s saying, and I don’t know the man, so I’ll take him at his word on his intent.

Re-reading the article with Hafer’s context, it is clear that Hafer did mention the attacks on him and tried to highlight his commitment to serving veterans. However, it is equally clear that Zengerle was not interested in that story.

There is zero linkage in the story between Hafer’s comments about “repugnanat people” and the antisemitic attacks on him. Instead, the article reads, at least to me, as though he’s describing Kyle Rittenhouse’s supporters in that manner.

“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.

There is a vast disconnect between Hafer’s explanation of the Saint Michael incident and the article’s account. According to Hafer, they don’t know the reason that imagery of St. Michael casting Satan into Hell is forbidden, and the coffee bag design is on hold. However, according to the article, they know why, and the bag design is dead.

In my post, I reference Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics, to wit, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” Hafer claims to be conservative but, as best I could glean from his explanation, he doesn’t claim the company is conservative or supports conservative causes. In fact, he says he can’t be bothered to argue about what is right and what is wrong. There is a reason for that.

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As Black Rifle Coffee blocks conservatives, it's important to understand that CEO @EvanHafer hired ActBlue Dem donors to run his IT and social media. pic.twitter.com/XfncLVYN1e

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If key senior staff are donors to ActBlue, your company is not a conservative enterprise.

Hafer is playing a dangerous game and not playing it all that well. His company is a lifestyle brand that will flop the moment the buzz and image about the company stop comporting with its actions. My personal view is that any conservative giving an interview to the New York Times or Washington Post deserves whatever happens to them. In this case, the variance between Hafer’s version of events and the article is serious enough that some sort of clarification needs to be issued in writing by someone. On the plus side, you can see the traces of Hafer’s version of events in the New York Times Magazine story, but they aren’t always easy to find. The question is, how much longer will Black Rifle Coffee’s customers continue to take Hafer at his word?

Gun YouTuber Johnny B was saying something along similar lines regarding the owner of the company running it that way.

Personally, I don’t buy the stuff, I quickly grew tired of Matt Best and the whole bro vet schtick; I tend to keep my service mostly to myself.

See...this is what I mean.

I have no idea what the group is about besides what I have been told by The Media, people whose word I don’t trust or place any value in.

Or the opinions of the SPLC or ADL, both of which are laughable to me.

Anyway, thanks for the link...I had seen that sometime back.

Just a guess...the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company is pandering to the Left because the owners want to cash out their millions and take the company public.

Exactly; he did it for the money. Which also happens to be why a coffee company is selling expensive clothing - they do it to transfer more of your money into their pockets. If it was just to get the company name out there, they would sell hats & shirts at their cost (as I've seen other businesses do).

If you don't sell clothing, you don't have to 'worry' about who's wearing it. And if you're not planning to cash out, you don't have to kiss up to lefty Wall Street 'wankers'; you can serve your actual customers, instead...

The DOD didnt even blink when they saw my Eagle on my arm...it’s a fascist Eagle very distinctive and well known to Italians over a certain age. Today it would give them the vapors I imagine. How the “military” has changed its nothing more than the left’s jackboots now.

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