The unbearable wokeness of drinking
Plus: Saving Narragansett!
Editor’s note: I’m (once again) juggling a few different project deadlines that have me a little underwater at the moment, so I’m reprinting a popular lead item that I originally published a little over a year ago (June 21st, 2023), when the Fingers Fam was ~45% smaller than it is today. Given all the discourse lately about the fundamental weirdness of the American right, the piece below feels pretty relevant. It’s been lightly edited. Hope you enjoy!—Dave.
Perhaps you’ve heard of a conservative influencer named Mike Cernovich? He’s one of those “citizen journalist” types that ascended to right-wing fame during the Trump administration by breathlessly mainstreaming conspiracy theories like Pizzagate one tweet at a time. A few years after getting divorced1 due to what he called his wife’s “feminist indoctrination,” Cernovich wrote a self-help book called Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions, Improve Your Health and Fitness, Make More Money and Live Life on Your Terms.2 In addition to an interminably long subtitle and impossibly broad editorial purview, it also boasted a 4.5-star Amazon rating on 3,441 reviews at the time of publication. He may be a crank, but he’s a fairly influential crank.
In mid-June 2023, Cernovich broke some shocking news to his 1.1M followers on Elon Musk’s Twitter: drinking is woke, actually. Not even “drinking Bud Light,” mind you—drinking, period.
Here’s the whole tweet3 (emphasis mine throughout):
Alcohol culture is woke. Boozing means participating in cultural rot. This is what the left wants. Liquor stores stayed open while gyms and churches shut down. Conservatives don’t want to admit this. Couple drinks here and there fine. Otherwise - WOKE.
This is a rich text we have here, friends. Like the sun itself, you shouldn’t stare directly at it. Me though? Psssh. Years of reading about and occasionally covering freaks like Cernovich have smoothed my lobes to the point that this sort of corrosive brain poison just slides right off. And I’m very serious when I say this flailing gibberish is actually a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the evolving, converging paranoias of America’s too-online right wing.