Well, it’s Veteran’s Day 2026, and Fingers is pleased to report that the beverage-alcohol industry’s relationship to the American war machine is very normal and cool. Haha just kidding, it’s more insane than ever before. Did you know that Lee Greenwood recently relaunched a vanity whiskey brand called “Soldier Valley”? Of course you didn’t. You probably didn’t even know Lee Greenwood was still alive. Why would you? But he is, and yes, earlier this year Mr. Proud to Be An American himself relaunched a vanity whiskey brand called “Soldier Valley.” Each bottle comes with a set of dog-tags. And if you think that sounds like an unusually tacky instance of troop-humping in pursuit of those sweet, sweet liquor profits, Fingers is displeased to report that… ah… no.

Joining The Fingers Podcast today for a special holiday episode on the sad state of the spirits’ trade’s martial marketing is Kelsey D. Atherton, the editor of the Center for International Policy’s International Policy Journal and the boozeletter’s longtime go-to expert for matters of military-industrial inebriation. It was with Kelsey, who was then publishing the independent newsletter Wars of Future Past, that I wrote “Whiskey For Troops™️,” the instant reader-favorite special edition of Fingers first published for Veterans Day 2023.

On this bonus episode, we talked about how war-themed booze marketing is corny on its own merit—and more insidiously, how it helps to normalize America’s deeply abnormal politics and culture of war into something that can be bought, sold, and even celebrated. Tune in.

This interview was actually recorded back in June 2026, but it got sort of buried over the summer, so it seemed like the right time to release it upon the world.

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The midterms are over, and tetrahydrocannabinol is in the kill zone: as of today, there’s just one month to go until the Trump administration’s de facto federal ban on products infused with a meaningful amount of the substance. (Synthetic versions of THC are actually illegal starting tomorrow, November 12th, but the across-the-board rescheduling of hemp cannabinoids on December 11th is the big one for drinks producers.) There’s still time for a Mary-Jane Hail Mary, and because the expiration date was synched to the day government funding runs out, the dooméd trade will have one more shot at hitching a ride to salvation on a must-pass omnibus bill. But shit is gonna come right down to the wire, and even the biggest boosters are now hedging their bets.

Welcome to Boozeletter Book Reviews, spotlighting new-to-me volumes relevant to the business and culture of drinking in America. Please consider purchasing your books via The Fingers Reading Room to support the boozeletter, thank you.

A few listeners reached out to ask why I abruptly yelled “straight BORKIN’ it, baby!” in a recent interview on The Fingers Podcast with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Ron Knox on how Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits basically got away with its federal price-fixing and bribery cases. For one thing, I have poor impulse control. But more to the point, Ron and I were discussing the prevailing neoliberal antitrust doctrine—briefly interrupted by Lina Khan and The Robinson-Patmans at the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission—that holds “consumer welfare” as the paramount consideration for evaluating the competitiveness of markets. It was a conservative judge from the notorious Chicago school named Robert Bork who popularized this idea in the ‘70s. American industries have been consolidating ever since.

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