For MAGA Americans, the only things more certain than death (possibly from measles) or taxes (effectively higher, thanks to Trump’s tariffs) is the inevitability of being taken advantage of by a vast constellation of grifters who have learned to exploit the country’s yawning partisan divide. Call it the Black Rifle Coffee effect, perhaps: Since 2014, those military fetishizing bean grinders have stood out as a model for creating a right-wing, culture war-fanning pander brand in the Trump era, although it apparently hasn’t actually helped them reach profitability, more than a decade in. Still, Black Rifle Coffee has at least one thing going for it that many of the other MAGA pander brands can’t match: They seem to actually send customers the products they order.
One would hope this would be the bare minimum of business professionalism that could be expected from companies hawking products like conservative beer or MAGA bourbon: You order a product, and they send you that (probably crappy) product. This is technically, you know, “how business is done” and all. We’re talking day one business school stuff. But if you take a glance at the user feedback for these types of brands, the thing that immediately stands out is that the companies in question quite often seem to fail to hold up their “sending you the stuff you ordered” side of the bargain. Turns out the most profitable business plan is to just accept orders, and then never fill a lot of those orders, relying on your marks customers to be so culturally devoted to your stated MAGA cause that they’ll simply accept being ripped off rather than fight back in any real way.
This is a tale as old as time, although one that has vastly expanded in the era of the Donald Trump presidencies. A flagbearer of the form has of course been the somehow still-in-business Conservative Dad’s Ultra Right Beer, which I first gawked at in disbelief back in 2023 when founder Seth Weathers began selling six-packs of not-yet-brewed beer that ultimately cost $35 to have shipped to your door. Weathers truly filled the role of the consummate MAGA charlatan and scam artist, having gone from proclaiming on Twitter that beer “increases estrogen and decreases testosterone” to beginning to hawk pre-sales of Ultra Right Beer less than two weeks later in an attempt to take advantage of Bud Light’s conservative backlash after they dared to partner with a transgender influencer for a single social media post. At the time, we spent weeks wondering who was even contract-brewing the stuff for Ultra Right Beer, before it was revealed as a Georgia brewery named Big Kettle Brewing … that is now listed as “permanently closed.” Lord only knows who is supplying the cheap lager these days, but Ultra Right Beer has since moved on to hawking distilled spirits in the form of “Tee Kee La,” among other things. One thing that hasn’t changed? That would be the constant customer complaints that no one is sending them the products they paid for, or responding to “What the fuck are you guys doing?” email queries.
What’s worse: Waiting more than a year for a beer order to be filled, or ordering a case of tequila, only for them to send you two bottles before ceasing all communication? Both of those complaints are directly from the sales page for Ultra Right Beer, and there are plenty more just like them. I’m particularly partial to the post of another guy who complains he’s also been waiting for more than a year for a case of beer and two tee shirts to arrive, but still gives the brand five stars anyway because they did him the solid of sending the tequila he paid for. Sure, they also stole another $60 or so from him, but that’s not worth downgrading to only four stars, is it? I’m sure that beer is coming any day now. So what if the company is rocking an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau?
Here’s the thing about grifters in this mold: They truly don’t care who they’re stealing from, and the ideology they’re wearing ends the moment the mark is no longer buying, or the ideology is no longer selling. They will steal from anyone, or appropriate any image, personality or movement without permission, in order to move some units: Look at the guys who swiped the image of Ronald Reagan to sell their conservative-coded wine, or more recently the company that pulled some of the same bullshit with Charlie Kirk (who was sober as well), only to abruptly stop hawking their presumably unlicensed wine the moment that they were called out on it. Props on all of this to alcohol business writer Dave Infante, who has been covering the MAGA booze grifting connection in detail for years, currently through his alcohol newsletter Fingers, diving deeper into this muck than is healthy for anyone to do. Seeing today’s post on the predictable user response to the recently touted Tears of the Left Bourbon, I decided to swing by that Rob Schneider-touting (they even got him a little Prohibition gangster suit and hat) whiskey’s Facebook page to survey the damage. And wow, even in comparison with the lofty standards of a company like Ultra Right Beer, these whiskey pushers have managed to piss some people off. Seemingly every single user response to every post made by Tears of the Left is just a litany of grievances, most of which amount to “You never sent me this bourbon,” or “You sent me this bourbon, and it was broken.”
Names have been removed to protect the MAGA fools in question.
One of the people lodging their complaint even notes that the company’s tracking information claims that the $100 bottle of what is no doubt cheaply sourced bourbon was already delivered to him, when it never actually was. Would you believe that no one has been responding to his repeated inquiries about that? By the end of the post, he’s already settling into exactly the frame of mind that a grifter prizes above all: Annoyance, but resignation. When your political tribe is more important to you than defending your rights as a consumer, that makes you the perfect mark–someone who will lodge a testy complaint, but take it no further than that.
It should go without saying that these grifts expand far past the alcohol world–booze is just a convenient, male-coded delivery vehicle, even if it is an inherently illogical one, given that Donald Trump famously does not drink. Trump himself has provided what is perhaps the most valuable demonstration of how MAGA-identifying people will remain loyal to the cause even after they’ve been repeatedly burned. Look no further than Trump’s own $TRUMP memecoin, which the President of the United States advertised himself, only to see it turn into an immediate crypto rug pull, launching at a valuation of $27.48 before falling almost 90% to where it is today. Even when Trump is stealing directly from his most ardent supporters, they’re all too happy to keep falling for the same con, over and over.
Tears of the Left Bourbon, meanwhile, posted regularly on social media, hyping their product in the build-up to Christmas, before going suddenly silent. I’m sure it’s probably a coincidence that this silence coincides with the first wave of consumer complaints from people realizing that the whiskey they paid for might not be coming. Now if only a few of those dupes could learn to recognize the same scheme when it’s deployed on them a month later, we might be getting somewhere.
Wait, what’s that? Ultra Right Beer is now selling $80 display cases with a single, empty beer can in them? Never mind, we’re all doomed.
