The anatomy of a right-wing booze grift

It’s not uncommon for celebrities to promote booze brands. It’s decidedly less common for Rob Schneider to do so, though. Companies typically want their endorsers to be popular, attractive, or at least palatable to a wide swath of the American drinking public. The frontman of 1999’s Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and various right-wing conspiracy theories since is none of the above. But the same anti-vaxx paranoia, vile transphobia, and general screeching that make Schneider a bad pick for the face of a mainstream liquor brand make him well-suited to hustle hooch to people who share those views. And so: the reactionary comedian recently endorsed Tears of The Left, a contract brand that bills itself as “100% Kentucky bourbon. 0% safe space.”

The modern history of American politics is riddled with schemes to part right-wing fools with their money. As historian Rick Perlstein noted in a seminal 2012 piece on “mail-order conservatism” for The Baffler, these grifts work not in spite of the faith rank-and-file GOP types place in their pundits and political leaders, but because of it. As the author of Nixonland and Reaganland argued:

In other words, buying gimmicky goods and services—sketchy supplements, suspect stocks, indulgences from this or that TV preacher—is indistinguishable from practicing right-wing politics as such. Or, to put it another way, conservatives are easy marks because they volunteer to be. This has become a lot more obvious since Perlstein filed “The Long Con” 13 years ago, what with the Trump family hawking everything from signed merch to NFTs to milk the MAGA base down to its last penny from the literal White House. But Trump Vodka notwithstanding, the beverage-alcohol business has only recently seen an uptick in this sort of grifting. It’s a more heavily regulated market than any other consumer good,³ and far more logistically complicated than the elegantly simple evangelical pump-and-dump schemes Perlstein chronicled. Still, its relatively high barriers to entry have come down a bit lately,⁴ and its margins can still be attractive. Most importantly, contemporary right-wing partisanship is more of a LiFeStYlE bRaNd than virtually any other time in American history, and drinks are often a big part of the American lifestyle.⁵

Which brings us back to Tears of The Left (ToTL). Having extensively chronicled the rise of right-wing pander brands in beer, wine, and spirits over the past half-decade, from Armed Forces Brewing Co. (AFBC), to We The People Wine, to virtually all this liquor, I’ve noticed they tend to share some basic features with one another. ToTL, marketed by Charleston, South Carolina’s Grain & Barrel Spirits, furnishes a nearly perfect case study of this grifty sub-genre’s anatomy. Here’s how it breaks down:

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