Why Chardonnay is catching (more) strays

Not sure if you’ve heard, but right-wingers are placing Starbucks orders under the name “Charlie Kirk” in order to capture video of baristas calling out the slain pundit’s name for online clout. Or video of themselves melting down when a barista declines to do that on the grounds of it sucks, also for online clout. One thing you might surmise from this ghastly new #content play from the country’s most maladjusted MAGA diehards is that algorithmic social media was a mistake. Which, yes: correct. Another conclusion you could draw is that mass-market drinks are useful political props in the never-ending cycles of conservative grievance because they’re highly recognizable and fairly easy to vilify in partisan terms.

I have written about this a lot, mostly in the context of the transphobic Bud Light fiasco of 2023, in which right-wing operatives succeeded in recoding Anheuser-Busch InBev’s longtime flagship as pernicious woke juice via a combination of corporate bed-shittery, bad-faith media manipulation, and millions of dollars from conservative Supreme Court Svengali Leonard Leo. But this phenomenon has history. Long before there were “limousine liberals,” there were “Champagne socialists”—more effete and delusional than “beer socialists,” maybe, but both equally odious to the conservative establishment for their perceived hypocrisy and boorish egalitarianism, respectively.³  Starbucks, and lattes generally, are a constant target of America’s strip-mall culture warriors going back decades.

Chardonnay has never been quite as much of a right-wing punchline, but it’s in the mix. And so it is again. Earlier this week, Trump’s Secretary of Energy Chris Wright told Fox News (emphasis mine):

It won’t shock you to learn that that’s not really true. Republican tells lies on Fox News, more (lies) at 11. I know. But it might shock to learn the ways in which it’s not true—and specifically, how this cheap shot at the already-reeling American wine industry belies its politics and potential influence.

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