Anheuser-Busch fired a brewer for posting about Charlie Kirk

In the two weeks since right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk was fatally shot by a gunman in Utah, private companies across the country have rushed to punish employees for making social-media posts and public comments critical of the deceased. Looming behind this extraordinary crackdown is President Donald Trump’s equally extraordinary use of federal power as a cudgel to force Corporate America, universities, and other institutions to do his bidding.

You’ve surely heard about Jimmy Kimmel, whose employer American Broadcasting Company pulled his late-night show off the air last week for criticizing conservatives’ grotesque scramble to canonize Kirk and leverage his grisly killing to advance their anti-democratic agenda.³ You may even have heard of the plight of opinion journalist Karen Attiah, who was fired by the Washington Post for accurately describing a racist comment the demagogue made about Black women.² Beyond these high-profile instances of corporate kowtowing are an unknown number of rank-and-file workers across the country who’ve been forced out of work for posting facts, opinions, even memes that cast Kirk in an unflattering light.

This brings us to Alex Weatherhead, a 31-year-old West Point graduate, military veteran, and—until recently—production brewer at Wicked Weed Brewing Company. Last week, the company fired him for posts about the right-wing operative that he was told “celebrat[ed] violence” in violation of the social-media policy of the firm’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI). Weatherhead’s abrupt termination after speaking unfavorably about Kirk to friends and family online stands as a grim reminder of the scant protections that the vast majority of beverage-alcohol industry workers have on the job, and comes as the country’s biggest macrobrewer continues to cozy up with key Trumpworld figures and right-wing drinkers in the wake of 2023’s catastrophic Bud Light fiasco.

ABI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

As far as he knows, Weatherhead’s path to a pink slip began September 10th, the day Kirk was gunned down at Utah Valley University. He logged onto Facebook to see conservative acquaintances from his childhood that he considered “good, kind Christian people” hustling to lionize Kirk without acknowledging his career spent stoking reactionary outrage. “Knowing all of the things that Charlie Kirk has said that I find hateful,” he told Fingers, the experience was “devastating.” Weatherhead used his personal account—which did not feature information about his employment on Wicked Weed, he said, because he had stopped regularly using Facebook years prior to getting hired there—to make his own post. It included three screenshots:

“Genuinely wild for me to get on here and see people mourning a bigot who treated politics like a game, collected money by sowing hate, and lived none of the supposed Christian values I’ve seen attributed to him in memoriam,” he wrote. “If you’re going to miss Charlie Kirk I truly don’t understand your heart.” In a comment exchange with a Facebook friend below the post, he added: “I do feel bad for his kids. But this is a chicken coming home to roost. If you live on hate, do not expect love in return.” In a follow-up post the next day, he listed out some of Kirk’s more vile claims and asked how they could be squared with the “happy warrior” hagiography that his Facebook network was drafting for the slain pundit. He concluded, “I can’t say enough how disappointed I am in the people I love who have fallen for the media’s bait.”

In the week that followed, Weatherhead’s posts seemed to pass unnoticed at the brewery, which ABI acquired in 2017. But on September 17th, he was about 100 barrels into his brewing shift when his manager pulled him off the line and into a conference room. A Wicked Weed human-resources staffer on Zoom was on the screen, and she began to read his Facebook posts back to him, asking him to confirm he’d posted them. “I said, ‘Yes, I did,’ and then I was informed that I would be terminated, effective immediately” because the posts violated ABI’s policy against “celebrating violence” on social media.

“I don't remember specifically signing anything pertaining to any sort of social-media policy, but I’m sure a company Anheuser-Busch’s size has it written down somewhere,” he told Fingers. “That said, I haven’t heard a single word about it since I started.” In fact, the first employee of the macrobrewer’s dozen-odd craft breweries across the country that he’s ever heard of getting fired for social-media posts is himself.

There’s not much new to be learned from pointing out the brazen hypocrisy on display as Republican officials wield state power to pressure the private sector to suppress workers’ speech after years of screeching about “social justice warriors” doing “cancel culture” by being mean to them online and on college campuses. Dog bites man, etc. But Weatherhead eschewed ABI’s severance offer—around $2,200, or four weeks of wages, in exchange for a signed non-disclosure agreement—to speak out about his termination in order to highlight how Trump’s consolidation of power over America’s supine CEOs is especially dangerous for workers at a moment of acute economic uncertainty and dwindling union density.

While some 5,000 workers at ABI’s mega-breweries across the country are organized with the Teamsters, the conglomerate has successfully fought off or bogged down the few union drives that workers have launched at its craft breweries. Wicked Weed workers are not union; Weatherhead’s former coworkers, like the vast majority of Americans, are employed “at will.” Without the fairly standard “just cause” protection of a union contract, or a federal law preempting states’ at-will labor regimes (lol), a firm can typically fire workers for “any reason or no reason at all.” Or in Weatherhead’s case at Wicked Weed, political speech it doesn’t like.

“I think there's a belief among [conservative activists] who are trying to get people to lose their jobs over criticism of Charlie Kirk, that that is limited to rich liberals,” he said, citing Kimmel’s since-reversed termination. “I don’t make much money, I’m not a political elite, I'm a nobody. I'm a working-class person who lost their job or expressing their beliefs on social media, and I think there are people who would otherwise support Charlie Kirk or conservative media’s interpretation of events who would be surprised to hear that.”

Media conglomerates firing high-profile commentators for speaking ill of Kirk’s (nasty) legacy may be a more extreme example of the conservative campaign to silence dissent than ABI doing the same to a lowly production brewer, but the latter should be no less alarming. The labor movement can be a powerful bulwark against fascism, but in order to organize for a voice on the job, workers must be able to use their voices off the job.

“Ideas about justice and solidarity are highly threatening to the current economic order in the United States,” argued labor scholar Terri Gerstein in a 2022 piece for The American Prospect. “These ideas are also potentially far more transformative than most of what gets attention these days from anti-cancellation activists.”¹ If ABI considers Weatherhead’s Facebook discourse a “celebrat[ion] of violence,” what might it say about provocative statements of solidarity (e.g., “Billionaires should not exist,” “No justice, no peace”) or satire that highlights workers’ shared grievances on the job, like The Onion’s classic 2018 piece entitled “Report: 99% Of Employees Would Use Boss As Human Shield In Event Of Workplace Attack”?

Weatherhead’s termination is a brewing-industry example of the vicious cycle that the majority of the American workforce finds itself in: corporations like ABI are punishing politically sensitive speech that might offend conservative customers and/or the Trump administration as the Trump administration continues to eviscerate labor rights, which gives corporations like ABI a freer hand to punish politically sensitive speech. And so on. Whether his firing was an explicit part of ABI’s post-Bud Light fiasco pivot to the right—the $100-million endorsement deal and energy-drink tie-up with anti-woke wife-slapper and UFC head honcho Dana White, the ingratiating jingoism of its push to rebrand “domestic” beer as “American,” the $10,000-per-plate fundraising dinner its DC lobbyist held for Trump during the 2024 campaign—or just a coincidence is impossible to say. But Weatherhead sees a through-line.

“With the Dylan Mulvaney ad campaign, they quickly capitulated to the far right,” he said. “What that told the far right is, we can keep bullying this company to [advance] our goals.” There’s no evidence that anybody in the Trump administration told ABI to fire Weatherhead, and it seems very unlikely, given the former production brewer’s low place on the corporate ladder. More likely, it was a conservative Facebook user that complained to the company via social media.⁴ But the outcome is the same.

Jobless Asheville is no way to be. Since being fired, Weatherhead has begun applying for jobs, but given the craft brewing industry’s soft sales, and Asheville’s ongoing struggle to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Helene, the pickings are slim. He and his wife will likely be forced to sell their house—the first they’ve ever managed to buy, and given his military service, the longest single place he’s lived since college—and move to elsewhere for work. It’s a tough pill to swallow made tougher by the chilling effect Weatherhead fears it will have on other workers, in the brewing industry and beyond. “I don't want to tell people just bend [a knee] and let the right walk all over you, but the job market is what it is,” he said. “I hate that that’s the takeaway.”

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1  Of course, three years after Gerstein’s column published, with Trump back in power, those standard-bearers of free expression have been much more muted about the perils of actual state-backed suppression of speech than they ever were about, like, the pronouns in Oberlin undergrads’ email signatures, or whatever. Funny how that works.

2  She’s now threatening to sue the Washington Post, alleging Jeff Bezos’ henchmen fired her in violation of the paper’s labor agreement.

3  On Monday, ABC and parent company Disney reversed course, demonstrating yet again that America’s c-suite is fundamentally unprepared for everything being Gamergate now.

4  WIRED and other outlets have documented the massive coordinated doxxing efforts to get Kirk’s many social-media critics fired, one of which was promoted by Vice President JD Vance.