True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 307: Lite Power
Aired: 2023-07-27
Duration: 01:29:03


=== Dylan's Name Conundrum (13:25) ===

[00:00:00]  Now, something we said recently is that we famously have not had any press.
[00:00:06]  None.
[00:00:07]  We were talking about this just a couple, just a mere couple episodes ago, actually.
[00:00:12]  Nary the day do you see the Truanon name in print?
[00:00:15]  The only time we've seen it was when we were called anti-Semitic.
[00:00:17]  Anti-Semitic by the Daily Beast.
[00:00:19]  Yeah.
[00:00:19]  Thank you very much, Daily Beast, for calling us anti-Semitic in your newspaper.
[00:00:23]  Yes.
[00:00:24]  It's on a newspaper.
[00:00:25]  It's like a blog in your blog.
[00:00:28]  Web blog.
[00:00:30]  Thank you for having one of your bloggers call us anti-Semitic.
[00:00:34]  And that was a while ago.
[00:00:37]  That was literally three years ago.
[00:00:38]  Three years ago.
[00:00:39]  And they said that Matt Christman was a host of the show.
[00:00:41]  They did also say, it was clear a guy listened to the first Alexander Reed Ross, who is.
[00:00:47]  Which is crazy because we actually did an episode where we called him out by name like six episodes later.
[00:00:53]  For what he did.
[00:00:54]  But yeah, he was.
[00:00:55]  One of those bozo, like, proud boys kind of guys.
[00:01:00]  Apparently didn't like the fact that we called rich people blood suckers, Dracula style vampires.
[00:01:08]  Not George Soros-style vampires.
[00:01:10]  Yeah.
[00:01:11]  We didn't say anything about anyone like that.
[00:01:12]  It's not like they're getting the blood from a Briss, you know what I'm saying?
[00:01:16]  Anyway, we have a big announcement because just about a week or so and some change ago, we had our second, our second mention in the papers.
[00:01:32]  There we go.
[00:01:32]  And this one in a real paper.
[00:01:34]  A real live, legit paper, an issue of which, not this one, but another issue I have framed in my office.
[00:01:43]  You do?
[00:01:43]  Yes.
[00:01:44]  The thing that wounds me so much about this, right?
[00:01:48]  The Daily Beast, the Daily Whatever.
[00:01:50]  The Daily Beast.
[00:01:51]  The Daily Planet.
[00:01:52]  Who cares?
[00:01:52]  Okay.
[00:01:53]  Who are you?
[00:01:54]  The Gaily Beast is the Gaily Least.
[00:01:58]  Here, the New York Post.
[00:02:00]  Now, this is real.
[00:02:03]  Imagine this.
[00:02:04]  You've been married to a woman for 50 years and you love her.
[00:02:07]  You love her so much.
[00:02:09]  You guys still love each other.
[00:02:11]  You think.
[00:02:13]  You think so.
[00:02:14]  You tell your friends funny things she says.
[00:02:16]  You sometimes send your friends articles about Hunter Biden that she has written on her body, on her flesh and pen.
[00:02:22]  And pen.
[00:02:23]  I meant to say not pen.
[00:02:25]  And then all of a sudden one day you wake up and there's a knife in your back and it's buried to the hill.
[00:02:29]  Oh my God.
[00:02:30]  San Fran socialists killed historic anchor brewing critics say in the New York Post, July 15th, 2023.
[00:02:39]  Now, if anyone has listened to our podcast for more than three episodes, they'd know that your name is going to be all over this story.
[00:02:49]  And in fact, it is.
[00:02:50]  But not just your name, also Truanon's.
[00:02:52]  Truanon's name.
[00:02:53]  We got mentioned in the New York Post.
[00:02:55]  We did.
[00:02:55]  Which is crazy because we covered the Ghulane trial, which the New York Post did quite extensively.
[00:03:01]  Nothing.
[00:03:02]  Right at the same time.
[00:03:03]  We were right there with them.
[00:03:04]  Nothing.
[00:03:04]  They don't care for us.
[00:03:05]  Nothing.
[00:03:06]  They don't care for us when we're in the same room as them.
[00:03:08]  I was sketching everybody in there like a crazy man.
[00:03:10]  I know.
[00:03:13]  I think we should probably – I mean the article is about Sapporo closing Anchor Brewing Company where I used to work and where I was part of a successful unionization campaign.
[00:03:26]  And it seems to revolve around the criticism of one Richie Greenberg.
[00:03:32]  Yeah, who's that?
[00:03:33]  Richie Greenberg is the corpulent and failed and bald, a perennial mayoral candidate.
[00:03:40]  Every city's got him.
[00:03:41]  Every city's got him.
[00:03:42]  These three attributes, by the way, and unrelated, unless maybe they are.
[00:03:46]  So the only difference between this guy and like one of them pigs that searches for roots or truffles is that those pigs actually get what they want after a while.
[00:03:53]  This pig is just all through San Francisco, never gets a fucking thing.
[00:03:58]  Yeah, which he's pat on the back from their friendly farmer owner.
[00:04:00]  Not going to say that he doesn't get truffles as his massive girth would show.
[00:04:08]  But I had called him fat and bald on the internet, or at least our intern, I whacked the whip and had the chewing on Twitter account called him fat and bald for Marcos.
[00:04:20]  Well, Marcos unfortunately died from lashings.
[00:04:23]  This is, well, this is the Colonel Fontanua guy for us.
[00:04:27]  Okay.
[00:04:27]  What's his name?
[00:04:28]  We don't have him.
[00:04:29]  We just call him kind of boy, whatever, dog sometimes.
[00:04:32]  It.
[00:04:33]  Most of the time, I just snap without saying a name or a pronoun or anything.
[00:04:36]  Non-verbal situation.
[00:04:37]  Non-verbal.
[00:04:38]  Yeah.
[00:04:38]  Well, he's verbal, but anyways, I had him call Richie Greenberg fat and bald.
[00:04:44]  Okay.
[00:04:45]  And Richie Greenberg ran to his little fucking friends, the New York, the Lion New York Post, to talk shit about me.
[00:04:53]  Yeah, this is, I mean, the article is very long for the New York Post and really goes through.
[00:04:59]  There's a great little picture of you with Bernie Sanders here, which is very cute.
[00:05:03]  I always like this.
[00:05:03]  It's you and the rest of a group of workers from Anchor Brewing Company back in San Francisco.
[00:05:09]  When was this?
[00:05:10]  This was in.
[00:05:10]  I remember when you.
[00:05:11]  This was, it must have been 2019 because Bernie was actually interviewing at ILW for an endorsement.
[00:05:18]  Yeah, I remember.
[00:05:18]  That was so cute.
[00:05:20]  But the whole story is about how Anchor, which I think some of our listeners will know, but we did an episode sort of about Anchor a couple episodes ago, and it hadn't yet shut down.
[00:05:32]  But Anchor has been shut down by its parent company, Sapporo.
[00:05:36]  Evil Sapporo.
[00:05:37]  That's not racial.
[00:05:39]  Oppenheimer.
[00:05:39]  Interesting.
[00:05:40]  Oppenheimer.
[00:05:42]  Getting back.
[00:05:43]  They're getting back at us.
[00:05:46]  And the New York Post seems to, along with Mr. Richie Greenberg, blame the union for this loss.
[00:05:55]  And the piece goes further to not just blame the union, but let's say one specific union member.
[00:06:03]  And here it is.
[00:06:03]  But pay and working conditions were secondary to union organizer Brace Belden.
[00:06:09]  Look at you in the papers.
[00:06:12]  A self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist.
[00:06:16]  citation.
[00:06:16]  They're missing a little missing a hyphen and another M word there.
[00:06:20]  Okay.
[00:06:21]  Missing another modifier.
[00:06:23]  And DSA member, again, is that current?
[00:06:26]  I'm not sure.
[00:06:26]  Who recruited his comrades to Canvas for the Union Drive.
[00:06:30]  Quote, we didn't just dedicate ourselves to this project for the sole reason of starting a union.
[00:06:35]  Belden crowed.
[00:06:37]  Crowed.
[00:06:38]  Talk about it.
[00:06:38]  IT720.
[00:06:39]  Crowd.
[00:06:41]  I've never crowed in my life.
[00:06:44]  Campaigns spearheaded by socialist labor organizers give us a foundation for a labor movement ready to take on the power of capital.
[00:06:53]  So that, well, that's from an article I wrote in 2019 with my old-time friend, Brennan Kierans, who's an IATSI electrician and fucking Evan McLaughlin, who McLaughlin, McLaughlin, who's lead organizer for LWU, Northern California.
[00:07:12]  So I don't even know if I wrote that.
[00:07:14]  Interesting.
[00:07:15]  But you're taking credit.
[00:07:16]  I'll take credit in the context of this.
[00:07:18]  Okay.
[00:07:19]  Yes.
[00:07:19]  Other than them talking shit.
[00:07:22]  There's another quote where basically this woman or an investor, I don't even know who this is, Carol Roth.
[00:07:29]  Do you know who this is?
[00:07:30]  She basically calls you a socialist grifter.
[00:07:33]  Well, I want to take issue an umbrage with the G word there.
[00:07:37]  Please.
[00:07:37]  Umbridge away.
[00:07:38]  I love when you um be.
[00:07:40]  A lot of people call podcasters grifters.
[00:07:42]  Now here's the deal: it's a very simple economic setup.
[00:07:46]  $5 a month and you get some amount of episodes.
[00:07:51]  Now, if I told you you get 40 episodes a month and I gave you four, that would be a grift.
[00:07:56]  Now, if I said, if you listen to these episodes, you'll become smarter, more well-informed, that would be a grift.
[00:08:02]  If I told you, if you listen to these episodes, you know how to crow like the best of them, caca, that would be a grift.
[00:08:09]  I don't tell you that.
[00:08:10]  None of them own here at True Anon would give you any kind of crazy fucking promises such as that.
[00:08:18]  We tell you exactly what you're getting.
[00:08:20]  She says the unions triumph turned Belden, who had previously won national attention for an ill start, ill-starred, ill-starred, stint fighting the serious civil war.
[00:08:32]  I love, I gotta say, I'm sorry, the post with its alliteration is just in the biz.
[00:08:40]  Into a lefty darling.
[00:08:42]  He scored a visit from Bernie Say.
[00:08:45]  I didn't score a visit.
[00:08:47]  I went to Van S because the fucking guy from the union texted me with my coworkers during the 2020 presidential campaign, then parlayed his heightened profile to a top-ranked podcast.
[00:08:58]  Citation needed, lady.
[00:09:02]  Those two things just happened concurrently.
[00:09:04]  But it wasn't like we were like, we got attention because of the anchor thing.
[00:09:09]  Truanon, which now earns him more than $1.2 million a year from Patreon subscribers alone.
[00:09:16]  And that is why I would like to announce my retirement right here and right now.
[00:09:20]  Now, the woman who wrote this article is herself a rather, let's say, sonic after a couple impregnations style bodied woman with an equally ugly family.
[00:09:33]  And you better know that I've looked at all of them.
[00:09:35]  Lady, Amary Kay Lynch, I have looked at your son's YouTube channel.
[00:09:38]  I have downvoted every single fucking video on there.
[00:09:41]  And I got to tell you this.
[00:09:43]  He is in his, what, 30s?
[00:09:44]  God, I hope so, considering how he looks.
[00:09:47]  You have an ugly son.
[00:09:48]  You have an ugly son.
[00:09:49]  And I want to tell you this.
[00:09:51]  Your son is a failure.
[00:09:53]  Your son is a failure.
[00:09:54]  Unlike you, who somehow got off your CPAP machine and waddled your ass to fucking Manhattan into the New York Post offices, your son has never made it off of Staten Island.
[00:10:07]  And he never will.
[00:10:10]  You're a loser, Mary Kay Lynch.
[00:10:12]  Your husband's a loser with his fucked up weird last name that I noticed that you didn't take because you don't love him because it's a sexless marriage.
[00:10:19]  And your son, your son, who, you know what?
[00:10:22]  I'm going to say, your gay son.
[00:10:24]  Your gay son will never make it off of Staten Island.
[00:10:28]  But you know who might make it to Staten Island one day, considering somebody doesn't use those privacy things that you can get your address off the internet, is me.
[00:10:38]  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is called Crowing.
[00:11:03]  My other favorite part of this piece, by the way, I got to just sneak this in there, is that it's just you compared to basically Dylan Mulvaney.
[00:11:11]  You two are the cult are rocking the culture war within the brewery industry.
[00:11:19]  Me and Dylan Mulvaney are going to start a fucking, kind of like a beer super group.
[00:11:24]  Can I tell you my thing about Dylan Mulvaney?
[00:11:26]  What about Dylan Mulvaney?
[00:11:28]  The name's too close to Dylan McDermott and Dermot Mulroney, which is the famous like that's a mouthful.
[00:11:36]  I don't know who either are those real people.
[00:11:38]  Who are those people?
[00:11:38]  Is it the same person in verse?
[00:11:40]  Do you know?
[00:11:41]  What's the difference between Dermot Mulroney and Dylan McDermott?
[00:11:45]  Am I saying those names correctly?
[00:11:46]  I don't know who those names are referring to.
[00:11:48]  No one knows.
[00:11:49]  Dermot, Dylan Mulvaney.
[00:11:51]  You know?
[00:11:51]  Dermot Mulroney, Dylan McDermott.
[00:11:53]  Dermot, says Mr. Dick.
[00:11:54]  Say it three times fast.
[00:11:55]  Dylan McDermott.
[00:11:56]  Dylan Mulvaney, I can't do it.
[00:11:59]  My thing is, it sounds too close to Mick Mulvaney.
[00:12:03]  Mick Mulvaney is a crazy name because it sounds like that would be an off-brand, like the Safeway, you know, Mucinex, which I'm very familiar with intimately at this point.
[00:12:12]  The Mucinex man.
[00:12:13]  Yeah.
[00:12:13]  Hate him.
[00:12:14]  You, well, I don't like him.
[00:12:17]  But would you?
[00:12:18]  I think he's a bit aggressive.
[00:12:19]  You think he's a bit aggressive, but you'd like him if he was a little more tender and sensual.
[00:12:23]  No, no.
[00:12:24]  Anyways, the Mucinex guy, if there was like a Safeway off-brand version of Musinex, which there is, and that Safeway off-brand version of Mutenex had a character, it would be like a Mick Mulvaney.
[00:12:35]  Interesting.
[00:12:36]  Dylan Mulvaney, the last name's too similar to that.
[00:12:41]  Just go by Dylan.
[00:12:43]  Like, no last name, sort of like a share situation.
[00:12:46]  Interesting.
[00:12:46]  Because I think Bob Dylan's weak enough now that you can take the singularity of the brain.
[00:12:50]  I think it'd be very difficult to position yourself as a performer in any capacity with just, I'm Dylan.
[00:12:57]  Dylan.
[00:12:58]  Dylan.
[00:12:58]  But I think you could, because what you got to do or a mick.
[00:13:02]  This is my new record.
[00:13:03]  Dylan.
[00:13:04]  Dylan.
[00:13:05]  Keith.
[00:13:06]  I think you could do that.
[00:13:07]  I think that now.
[00:13:08]  That's different.
[00:13:08]  Dylan is different.
[00:13:09]  Dylan is different because Dylan's weak now.
[00:13:11]  Dylan was arrested for being a vagrant like 2014 outside of one of his own concerts.
[00:13:15]  But the name's not weak.
[00:13:17]  The man is.
[00:13:17]  The man is weak.
[00:13:18]  I could fuck Dylan up in a, even in my weakest state.
[00:13:23]  He's about to collapse.
[00:13:24]  Oh, burf.
[00:13:25]  Follow.

=== Mostly Give Women (03:07) ===

[00:13:26]  Easily.
[00:13:26]  And I could smash him like you see me kick those pigeons on the way here.
[00:13:30]  Yeah.
[00:13:30]  Which don't put that video.
[00:13:32]  The frailest bones.
[00:13:33]  I got scared and I lashed out.
[00:13:35]  At a pigeon?
[00:13:36]  Yeah, and I tackled it.
[00:13:37]  Yeah.
[00:13:37]  And just.
[00:13:39]  Hello, everyone.
[00:13:40]  Hello.
[00:13:41]  My name is Liz.
[00:13:41]  My name is Mick Mulvaney.
[00:13:43]  And we are joined here today by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:13:47]  The podcast is called.
[00:13:48]  It's called Trinon.
[00:13:49]  Hello, everyone.
[00:13:50]  Hello.
[00:13:50]  And you know what?
[00:13:53]  I don't know why I did that.
[00:13:54]  I already opened the can.
[00:13:55]  I didn't even see.
[00:13:56]  We went to the store together and I was like so in the zone that I didn't even see and you know clock your purchases.
[00:14:02]  I'm freaking drinking a pure green cold pressed juice.
[00:14:06]  Now I don't usually drink cold pressed juices because I did get a barf experience from one like 15 years ago when they first came out.
[00:14:14]  With a moon juice, you really did not feel well.
[00:14:16]  Literally, yes, barfed because of that carrot juice.
[00:14:20]  Yes.
[00:14:20]  And which you also couldn't finish.
[00:14:22]  That is too much.
[00:14:23]  But because of my, we're now entering day 10 of me being sick.
[00:14:28]  Well, we know that you have a sinus infection.
[00:14:29]  I do have a sinus infection.
[00:14:30]  So I told Frace that he had to go to the doctor to get a real course of antibiotics, not just a ZPAC, which is not going to do it if you've got a real sinus infection.
[00:14:40]  And he did, but you got some serious things, which I got to tell you, these ones playing xylophone on my guts here.
[00:14:48]  It's making me feel crazy.
[00:14:50]  Yeah, you can take a probiotic with those.
[00:14:52]  Well, I'm going to tell you guys, I'm going to be in the interest of being honest with you guys.
[00:14:57]  Do you remember last time I got pneumonia?
[00:15:00]  When I got pneumonia.
[00:15:01]  I don't have pneumonia right now.
[00:15:02]  When I had pneumonia in February.
[00:15:04]  Remember my health problems due to some of the medication that they gave me?
[00:15:09]  Now they gave me a pill to prevent those.
[00:15:13]  I really don't remember what you're talking about, but I'm happy that you seem to be taking care of them.
[00:15:17]  The guy said, we mostly give these to women is what he told me.
[00:15:21]  You have to power mood sweep?
[00:15:22]  We mostly give this to women is what he told me.
[00:15:25]  The ladies will know what, I finally get to say that.
[00:15:27]  The ladies will know what I'm talking about.
[00:15:29]  We mostly give this to women.
[00:15:31]  Yeah, now I know what you're talking about.
[00:15:32]  Yeah.
[00:15:32]  That's very funny.
[00:15:33]  You gave me a motherfucking time because I was like, you know what, though?
[00:15:38]  I'm happy that you are advocating for yourself because that is really important and difficult to do in the American health industry.
[00:15:44]  Men can get yeast infections.
[00:15:47]  Men can get yeast infections.
[00:15:49]  And I'm tired of people pretending that that's something or even until they're 33 thinking that's something that only women can get.
[00:15:55]  And then when it really hurts for your addict to pee, you're like, what the fuck?
[00:15:58]  Do I have an STD?
[00:15:59]  I wanted something dormant in me.
[00:16:01]  Holy shit.
[00:16:02]  You freak out and then you Google a bunch of stuff and you throw up because you're so anxious.
[00:16:05]  And then you realize it is because of the antibiotics.
[00:16:08]  And there is a simple pill that you can take in just one pill and then it gets rid of it that day.
[00:16:13]  Speaking of yeast, we have an episode today about beer.
[00:16:20]  We're talking beer.
[00:16:21]  And speaking of magical cure silver bullets, we're talking about Coors.
[00:16:29]  Yeah.
[00:16:29]  This will be fun.
[00:16:30]  We've talked about the Bush family.

=== Coors: The Brewing Controversy (14:56) ===

[00:16:33]  Well, that Bush family and then the other Bush family.
[00:16:36]  But we have not talked about the Coors conglomerate, I guess.
[00:16:42]  No.
[00:16:42]  This is a fucked up, crazy family.
[00:16:44]  Yeah, and I think in, I feel like people might have some parts of the history.
[00:16:49]  Yeah.
[00:16:49]  You know, whether it's the boycott, whether it's some of the right-wing stuff, whether it's just the name Adolph being, you know, it's still in the show.
[00:16:55]  Showing up over and over again.
[00:16:57]  And I get it, you know, common name until, until.
[00:17:03]  And then you'd think you'd move away from it.
[00:17:05]  But that's when the right wing stuff comes in.
[00:17:07]  The right-wing stuff comes in.
[00:17:08]  And we're talking, we've got Ukrainian Nazis in here.
[00:17:11]  We've got Jerry Falwell in here.
[00:17:14]  We've got Elvira.
[00:17:16]  Ronnie.
[00:17:16]  Oh, Ronnie Reagan.
[00:17:17]  Ronnie Reagan and his game.
[00:17:20]  God, Ronald Reagan's, Nancy Reagan would have the craziest podcast if she was alive today.
[00:17:24]  Oh, my God.
[00:17:25]  That podcasting could have saved her, I think.
[00:17:28]  Yeah.
[00:17:30]  We're talking all that.
[00:17:31]  We're talking about an anchor.
[00:17:32]  are meeting with Dave Infante right now.
[00:17:47]  Ladies and gentlemen, this is the moment you've all been waiting for.
[00:17:51]  The moment we've teased for years.
[00:17:54]  That some of you say we should midwife into existence.
[00:17:58]  Some of you have called us mother for teasing it.
[00:18:01]  And that's right, folks.
[00:18:02]  We're doing the adult baby episode.
[00:18:04]  And who better to join us for this than Dave Infante, the man so good.
[00:18:10]  They had to name him Dave Baby.
[00:18:12]  Dave Baby, I know you don't lie.
[00:18:15]  I can tell by your face.
[00:18:16]  It's actually difficult for me to tell by your expression what you're thinking about that.
[00:18:19]  But I got to tell you, Dave Infante, I am no oblast by y'all over here.
[00:18:23]  I tried to learn Spanish my whole life.
[00:18:25]  I failed, can barely speak English.
[00:18:26]  I got to call you Dave Baby.
[00:18:28]  We are not talking about adult babies, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:18:31]  We are talking about adult beverages.
[00:18:34]  That's right.
[00:18:35]  Dave Infante, the man behind fingers, of which I am a subscriber.
[00:18:42]  I forgot to, I forgot to remember what the rest of that was.
[00:18:46]  But Dave's got a great, fantastic newsletter, substack, about the adult beverage industry.
[00:18:51]  I subscribe to it.
[00:18:53]  I read it.
[00:18:53]  I don't even fucking drink.
[00:18:54]  It's just, you know, it's an interesting thing.
[00:18:56]  One of the only things America produces is Brewski's.
[00:19:00]  And of course, you know, you work for Vine Pear 2, and you've been covering the adult beverage industry, which does make it sad.
[00:19:07]  It's kind of pornographic.
[00:19:08]  The longest intro I've ever done.
[00:19:10]  Don't tell me how to do my job of these intros.
[00:19:13]  Sorry, I'm drunk off of Power Adult Beverages.
[00:19:16]  And Dave, thank you for joining us.
[00:19:19]  Thank you so much for having me.
[00:19:20]  That was quite elite.
[00:19:21]  What do I do now?
[00:19:22]  I'm baby, obviously.
[00:19:24]  I'm Davey.
[00:19:25]  Yeah.
[00:19:26]  And I'm so glad to be here.
[00:19:27]  We are so glad to have you.
[00:19:30]  Liz, what are we talking about today?
[00:19:32]  We're talking Coors.
[00:19:33]  Coors.
[00:19:34]  Coors.
[00:19:35]  We were, you know, before we started recording this, just as a little thing, we were talking about Coors Light and we were trying to remember the last time we all had a Coors Light, which I think is famously, I mean, that is the worst beer ever, right?
[00:19:48]  Coors Light?
[00:19:49]  Oh, well, it's not a good beer.
[00:19:54]  It's not a good bread.
[00:19:55]  I mean, it's bad, right?
[00:19:56]  It's not a good beer.
[00:19:57]  You can house them, though.
[00:19:58]  But it's a bad beer.
[00:20:02]  I don't like it.
[00:20:03]  But it's a very popular bad beer.
[00:20:05]  Yeah.
[00:20:05]  Right?
[00:20:06]  That's a good way to put it.
[00:20:07]  Yeah, it's a very popular bad beer.
[00:20:09]  I also think that because the beer industry is not capable of acknowledging that it maybe has ever done a bad thing, that category is called the premium category that Coors Light is in.
[00:20:22]  And then the shittier stuff, the shittier, like Keystone and Natty and whatever.
[00:20:27]  That's not bad.
[00:20:28]  That's just subpremium.
[00:20:30]  I see.
[00:20:31]  Premium.
[00:20:32]  Coors, the mountains change if it's cold, right?
[00:20:35]  Yeah, they have that.
[00:20:36]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:37]  But it's, you know, despite being the manufacturer of the, let's say, worst premium beer in America.
[00:20:44]  Nice.
[00:20:45]  Coors is, what, the second largest macro brewer in the country?
[00:20:48]  It's a fucking huge company, right?
[00:20:51]  Enormous company.
[00:20:51]  It belongs, it is part of the Molson Coors organization, which is the second largest macro brewer in the country.
[00:20:56]  Yeah, these are, these are heavy hitters.
[00:20:58]  And like Briece, you said, I mean, this is one of the only things that America makes is beer.
[00:21:02]  I mean, it seems maybe it's funny for us to be covered.
[00:21:05]  You know, we did an episode a while back on Anheuser-Busch and the Bush family.
[00:21:09]  And, you know, obviously we've done an episode about Anchor.
[00:21:13]  And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more later on in the episode today.
[00:21:16]  But maybe it seems a little weird for us to be covering, you know, beer three episodes in.
[00:21:22]  That's more than maybe people would think Trouanon would cover.
[00:21:24]  But it truly is.
[00:21:25]  I mean, it is a big American industry, right?
[00:21:28]  I like just the idea of just like, we don't make anything anymore while we like crack beers, you know, like just that sort of like boomer grievance about like in my, I used to make ball bearings.
[00:21:40]  I'm fucking Budweiser.
[00:21:41]  Yeah, exactly right.
[00:21:42]  Like this is a manufacturing industry in the U.S. that can't be offshored.
[00:21:47]  You can't really easily ship brewing jobs to India because then you got to ship the beer back.
[00:21:55]  So it's one of the last sort of, you know, ladders to the middle class for people who work with their hands, for people to come out of the trades.
[00:22:05]  So, you know, another reason that we might on this particular show also cover Coors is because, actually, let me bring this up to the present day.
[00:22:14]  People are always talking about now, like, oh, yeah, well, we talked about this in the intro a little bit.
[00:22:18]  Budweiser, it's like too political or whatever.
[00:22:20]  It's like, you know, they're getting woke.
[00:22:22]  Bud Light is now a woke beer because they're lady.
[00:22:25]  They turn the beer gay.
[00:22:26]  Yeah.
[00:22:26]  Yeah, they turn the beer gay.
[00:22:28]  The people who drink the beer are gay.
[00:22:30]  And now it's gay to be skinny, but also enjoy a nice little tasty beverage treat.
[00:22:35]  But in the past in the beer industry, there has been a company that has been more political than you might want beer companies to ever be.
[00:22:43]  And that would be Coors.
[00:22:44]  I recommended a book on this show before, several years ago, I think, when we were doing an episode about Nazis in South America called The Coors Connection.
[00:22:55]  And, you know, maybe for people of my generation, for all of our generations, really like Coors has kind of been something that's just like, you know, it's like a shitty, cheap, light beer.
[00:23:03]  But for many decades, Coors was one of the main funders and really some of the family members, big faces on what I think you could call sort of the respectable radical right of this country.
[00:23:15]  And today we're going to talk a little bit about that history.
[00:23:18]  So what is going on with this company?
[00:23:20]  Who the fuck is Coors?
[00:23:23]  What the fuck are these guys?
[00:23:24]  Yeah, so the Coors Brewing Company, officially Adolph Koors Brewing Company, gets started in Golden, Colorado in the 19th century.
[00:23:34]  I'll spare you the long and boring history, but they make it through Prohibition by making ceramics, which will be relevant later on in our conversation, I suspect.
[00:23:45]  And they come out the other side with a vastly more wide open beer market than pre-Prohibition.
[00:23:54]  There's just a lot more opportunity because so many breweries went out of business.
[00:23:58]  And the Coors family is still standing.
[00:24:02]  They have cash to spend.
[00:24:05]  They upgrade the facilities in Golden, Colorado, and they get to making the beer that made them famous, which is what we know now as Coors Banquet, but back then was just Coors.
[00:24:16]  There was no other type of Coors.
[00:24:18]  It was just the one.
[00:24:21]  And they have a lot of success, but as you noted, and the reason that it's a true and on, it's in the lane for you guys, is that the Coors family, in addition to making serviceable adjunct lager out in Golden, Colorado, is sort of possessed of a manifest destiny, sort of like a prim and proper Western libertarianism.
[00:24:50]  Just sort of a, the prohibition, you know, prohibition was a huge turning point for many people and for the country, but also for the Coors family in particular, which saw the façade as federal encroachment that, you know, nearly, you know, put them out of business and was an existential crisis for their family.
[00:25:09]  And from that conflict, from that situation flows a deep frustration with and later on, just a paranoia towards federal government, towards really government encroachment of any kind.
[00:25:26]  And they come to be some of the biggest early money spenders on what would come to be known as the new right, like the modern conservative project, the guys who make your beer.
[00:25:39]  I would say you can sort of see the genesis of a lot of this in the original Adolph Koors, who comes over from Germany.
[00:25:48]  I believe, and this is maybe apocryphal, although I think it's technically literally true, but I don't know if this is the exact reason, but comes over to America so that he doesn't have to fight in the Prussian army during the many wars of the mid-18th century or 1800s there rather.
[00:26:05]  And he becomes, there's almost like these two types of German immigrants that come to America, right?
[00:26:11]  There's a lot of them who work in the breweries, particularly in San Francisco.
[00:26:14]  This is something we've covered on the show, where like this very like radical group of people, you know, like the 48ers who come over here who are like very, you know, sort of like they're socialists or proto-socialists, some of them, who are like very into unions and things like that.
[00:26:26]  And then you have someone like Adolph Koors, who inherits some more of the, let's say, Prussian style of doing things.
[00:26:33]  Sensibility.
[00:26:34]  Yes.
[00:26:34]  Yes.
[00:26:35]  I think there's also like a very classic archetype of a kind of person who hates, who's like a worker, but hates labor unions because they want to align themselves and fashion themselves to someday be the boss, right?
[00:26:47]  They want to like imagine themselves as becoming the boss and be next to the boss.
[00:26:51]  And Adolph himself like really fits this type.
[00:26:55]  Yeah.
[00:26:56]  Like he's a small business owner.
[00:26:58]  He's, you know, he's the backbone of this country, petite bourgeois.
[00:27:02]  So we get to, I mean, I know that the, you know, like you said, the company starts a ceramics company during Prohibition, which is actually, I will say, you know, I've read a fair little amount about the brewing industry in America, and that was a smart move on their part.
[00:27:17]  They actually make a shit ton of money from that now.
[00:27:20]  But it's really, it's like, seems like in the post-World War II environment is really when they start like blowing up and like kind of getting the modern beer markets seem to take shape.
[00:27:30]  Is that fair to say?
[00:27:31]  Yeah, oh, totally.
[00:27:32]  I mean, after Prohibition, obviously it clears out a ton of local competition.
[00:27:37]  The premise of a regional brewery was kind of barely existed before Prohibition.
[00:27:44]  But after Prohibition, with the advent of the refrigerated rail car and soon thereafter, you know, like national television advertising, these are kind of the two big catalysts that enable big players like Anheuser-Busch, which is the biggest coming out of St. Louis, but also Miller, Stroh, Schlitz.
[00:28:05]  These are kind of like the big titans of this industry.
[00:28:09]  And the country is theirs for the taking.
[00:28:12]  The American drinking public is thirsty, drinking more per capita than we do now.
[00:28:18]  And beer is the drink because liquor is still stigmatized coming off of Prohibition.
[00:28:23]  And blue laws are keeping it restricted in many states, especially in the Southeast and the Mountain West.
[00:28:30]  And so the big brewers start treating this business like G treated appliance manufacturing.
[00:28:39]  They start making the widgets, right?
[00:28:41]  You open breweries near where your customer base is.
[00:28:44]  So over the course of the 50s and 60s, Anheuser-Busch opens, I think, somewhere like 12 breweries across the country.
[00:28:51]  Schlitz is opening maybe eight or so all around the world or around the country to get access to those markets.
[00:29:00]  And it's a dramatically different business than what it looked like pre-Prohibition, but it's incredibly lucrative for the companies that are able to take advantage of it.
[00:29:09]  But Course resisted going national for a while, right?
[00:29:12]  They wanted to stay regional.
[00:29:14]  Yeah, you're right, Liz.
[00:29:16]  So for a long time, the allure of Coors was this sort of aura that this Rocky Mountain brewed beer was only available in the West.
[00:29:28]  You couldn't get it back east.
[00:29:30]  They distributed only in a handful of states throughout the West, obviously Colorado and the surrounding areas.
[00:29:36]  And they – this was kind of their thing.
[00:29:41]  I mean, the charitable way of looking at it was that, you know, Bill and Joe Coors, who ran the company for most of the 20th century, post-Prohibition, wanted to keep the beer fresh.
[00:29:56]  It was unpasteurized.
[00:29:57]  They wanted to keep it fresh and deliver it to markets you can't.
[00:29:59]  Raw beer.
[00:30:00]  Raw beer.
[00:30:01]  You got to have the raw beer.
[00:30:02]  It's like raw milk, same people drink it, you know.
[00:30:05]  Yeah.
[00:30:06]  And, you know, they, there's like a nice story to be told about that, right?
[00:30:12]  Like in the age of consolidation and of homogenization of foodstuffs, especially, there's this sort of maverick company that's never taken a dime of debt that insists on doing it their way.
[00:30:28]  And for many, many years until like the late 70s, you couldn't get Coors anywhere but those original Mountain West states.
[00:30:39]  Well, I think one of the main reasons that people might know that there was something a little funky going on with Coors during the 20th century was maybe they, I remember this was sort of a part of the biographical movie about Harvey Milk, the Coors boycott.
[00:30:56]  And it's mentioned in various sort of like, I guess, minority histories of America.
[00:31:01]  But the Coors boycott is a pretty big part of the Coors story, both in terms of it's one of the biggest boycotts in, I think, American history, one of the most successful ones.
[00:31:12]  And it's also a pretty galvanizing moment for the Coors family themselves.
[00:31:16]  And you can sort of trace a lot of the political developments of the members of the Coors family, who, by the way, are very, very involved in the actual operations of the company.
[00:31:26]  And like, you know, they got their paws on everything.

=== Coors Boycott Battles (10:19) ===

[00:31:30]  And that boycott, I believe, starts in, I actually didn't know it was this long.
[00:31:34]  It started in 1957, right?
[00:31:36]  Yeah, that's when it first kicks off, 1957.
[00:31:40]  You're right.
[00:31:41]  It's like the longest, by some measures, it's the longest ever consumer-led boycott by any American coalition of customers against any company.
[00:31:54]  Lasts for 30 years and maybe even longer, depending on who you talk to.
[00:31:59]  Because in 1987 the AFL CIO, which you know is it, has been party to the boycott at various points in its history um, sort of cuts, a face-saving deal with PETE Coors.
[00:32:12]  Um, at this point obviously, the 87, the AFL CIO is already hemorrhaging.
[00:32:19]  Uh uh, support.
[00:32:21]  You know union density is dropping dramatically.
[00:32:24]  Um, and they're looking for a way to say, you know, we got to win here.
[00:32:27]  Um, it's kind of a pyrrhic victory.
[00:32:29]  They get the Coors Family to commit to not um, or to maintaining neutrality during the?
[00:32:36]  Uh, the union campaign, the current union campaign that's going on at Cores at the time.
[00:32:41]  Coors is able to defeat that union campaign anyway.
[00:32:45]  So like, the AFL CIO basically comes away with nothing.
[00:32:48]  Yeah um but, but yeah no, it's a very, very long uh, very long boycott.
[00:32:53]  What was the?
[00:32:53]  So what was the history?
[00:32:54]  Because that's a big part of this story here uh, what was the history of unions at Cores prior to the 57?
[00:33:01]  I guess you could call it a lockout um, but what was was?
[00:33:05]  Was the?
[00:33:05]  Was the brewery unionized prior to that?
[00:33:07]  I know i've read some sort of like sketchy accounts of it being unionized in like the 20s or the 30s.
[00:33:12]  Uh what, what's the deal with that?
[00:33:14]  Yeah, it has several unions uh, leading up to um, you know prohibition, and then, even coming out of prohibition, many of them are still in place.
[00:33:23]  They're usually pretty small um, you know it's, it employs a lot of people but um, the individual unions that uh, you know, represent different parts of the workforce um, are a little bit split up and this enables Cores to, when they sort of make their pivot into, um you know, full-throated anti-unionism, to sort of divide and conquer, to pick them off one at a time um,
[00:33:51]  which is obviously a common union busting tactic.
[00:33:53]  Um, but yeah no, there were, there were a bunch of unions at Cores.
[00:33:57]  Um, it was a union workforce.
[00:33:58]  The West is obviously not a bastion.
[00:34:02]  The Mountain West, in particular, is not a bastion, a stronghold of, of organized labor at that point or since.
[00:34:08]  But um, these are trades and a lot of the, the workers there are, are consider themselves tradesmen.
[00:34:15]  They're, they're brewers they're uh, they're engineers, they're electricians Electricians.
[00:34:19]  At one point or another, various unions look to organize more of Coors.
[00:34:25]  The Teamsters are sniffing around because Coors is setting up its own natural gas pipeline at one point.
[00:34:34]  And the Teamsters want the people building and manning that pipeline to be Teamster.
[00:34:41]  They're able to be successfully repelled.
[00:34:43]  But the long and the short of it is there are unions at Coors, but eventually the Coors family just kind of sours on the idea.
[00:34:52]  Yeah, and in 57, there's what amounts to basically a lockout.
[00:34:55]  I know.
[00:34:56]  I think some employees go on strike and they replace those striking workers and are able to decertify the union in 57.
[00:35:04]  Yeah, so Colorado has a pretty unusual set of labor laws.
[00:35:12]  And the Coors family was actually pretty instrumental in implementing these labor laws.
[00:35:19]  You don't say.
[00:35:20]  Yeah, I know.
[00:35:20]  Shocking, right?
[00:35:22]  But basically, it's informed by their experience sort of dealing with their own unions.
[00:35:30]  They realize that they can bring in, you know, when workers go on strike, they can bring in scabs.
[00:35:38]  You know, they can get people to cross the picket line, bring them in, and then after a certain amount of time, they're allowed to call for a deep certification vote that then is held not with the striking workers, who obviously are not going to vote to decertify their own union because they're on strike about it.
[00:35:56]  They clearly believe in it enough to be out on the picket line.
[00:35:59]  They're not going to call a D-cert then, but with the scabs in the plant itself.
[00:36:05]  So it's kind of a rigged vote.
[00:36:07]  It's like, yeah, I mean, you know, like, obviously these guys are being treated incredibly well.
[00:36:11]  The Coors family, you know, they, they're, especially Bill Coors, not Joe so much, but are known to be very charismatic, very sort of magnetic, and people like him on the floor.
[00:36:23]  They are, to their limited credit, very capable Nepo babies, you know, like they're not your standard, what we think of them as now, but like they actually come up working the brewery.
[00:36:36]  So they earn a fair amount of respect in the eyes of workers that don't maybe know them as well or are seeing the best possible face of them and are being showered with a fraction of their vast beer fortune.
[00:36:50]  And so it's not difficult for them to sway them to their side.
[00:37:03]  I know that the boycott expands at a certain point.
[00:37:06]  I think this can maybe, we can maybe weave in some other parts of the story with this too.
[00:37:11]  Can expand when minority groups, particularly gay people, Start boycotting Coors due to Coors's, I mean, insane hiring practices.
[00:37:21]  I know, I don't have the statistics in front of me, but it's something like 2% black or Latino workforce.
[00:37:27]  They have a lie detector test that you have to take when you get a job there.
[00:37:30]  They were doing like personality tests too, and like and like IQ quizzes and stuff like that.
[00:37:36]  Just crazy stuff.
[00:37:37]  They just straight up ask you, Are you gay?
[00:37:39]  And if you say yes, or if the lie detector test detects your no as a yes, you just can't get a job there.
[00:37:46]  And because of that, and because of, I think, really led by a gay teamster named Howard Wallace in San Francisco, that that strike really, or excuse me, rather, that boycott really expands to not serving Coors in gay bars.
[00:38:01]  And like, you know, it becomes a really sort of a massive consumer boycott and moves away from just being a labor boycott to being a boycott for all kinds of different groups.
[00:38:11]  Yeah, so there's a few different sort of groups in the coalition.
[00:38:17]  There were Chicano activists that were very frustrated with CORE's hiring practices.
[00:38:22]  They felt that, and the statistics back this up from what I've seen and read, that if there were Latin Chicano workers in the Coors facility, there were very few of them.
[00:38:36]  They typically were not able to advance in the company, more menial jobs, et cetera.
[00:38:41]  So, yes, technically employees, not really what you're looking for from employment.
[00:38:47]  Black activists got involved for similar reasons.
[00:38:51]  Also, Bill and Joe Coors, there's some debate over whether or not they were actually racist or just incredibly bad at talking to the press.
[00:39:02]  They've made incredibly racist comments to the press multiple times over the years.
[00:39:08]  I'm going to go and say, I know that you're a journalist, but we're mere imbiders of the substance of the heavenly grape.
[00:39:18]  They're fully racist.
[00:39:19]  Yeah, they're crazy racist.
[00:39:21]  They said crazy racist shit.
[00:39:24]  Yeah, I mean, they're racist in ways that they're working with guys.
[00:39:27]  They're like, their money is going to Hungarian war criminals and stuff, racist.
[00:39:33]  We're not talking about your racist, like guy on the factory floor.
[00:39:36]  Like, they're finding racisms from Europe and putting their money behind that.
[00:39:40]  That's outrageous.
[00:39:40]  They're racist against other kinds of white people.
[00:39:43]  Yeah.
[00:39:43]  So, I mean, they were saying a bunch of racist shit.
[00:39:45]  You're absolutely right.
[00:39:46]  And, you know, more importantly, as you sort of mentioned, the Coors family around this time starts to flex its political muscles and start funding organizations that dramatically over-index on the amount of harm they cause to minority communities.
[00:40:02]  So you start to see this coalition taking shape.
[00:40:04]  Chicano activists, they had just come off, you know, sort of the boycotts in the California grapefields.
[00:40:14]  Which, by the way, if I may interrupt, Coors sent in trucks to help the grape companies beat the boycotts or compete to strikers.
[00:40:22]  Coors actually literally sent in Coors branded trucks to help them against the strikers.
[00:40:28]  And not for like business.
[00:40:30]  They had no business with the grapes.
[00:40:31]  It was just a motherfucker move.
[00:40:33]  They just bought the grapes and then like handed them out to their wealthy friends.
[00:40:38]  Yeah.
[00:40:39]  Truckloads of grapes just to have so the California land barons had a market, had a scab market effectively for the produce that no one was buying because the farm workers had erected such a successful boycott, which, you know, I don't know, man.
[00:40:57]  Like, say what you will about, you know, labor.
[00:41:02]  I'm not very sympathetic to people who aren't sympathetic to unions and boycotts generally.
[00:41:06]  But like, I suppose you might be able to find some fucking principled gray area in there somewhere.
[00:41:11]  But like, once you're actively sending your company trucks to buy like waste grapes that you don't even want, I think you've sort of crossed a line there.
[00:41:23]  But yeah, no, so the LGBTQ community gets involved.
[00:41:27]  The Teamsters get involved.
[00:41:29]  And at varying points, you know, different parts of the coalition are stronger or weaker, but this thing runs for about 30 years and it does further radicalize, you know, it's sort of further red pills or whatever the Coors brothers and in particular, Joe Coors.

=== Heritage Foundation Funding (14:15) ===

[00:41:49]  Which I think is a brilliant segue to talking about the Coors brothers.
[00:41:54]  So the main ones that I'm familiar with are Bill and Joe Coors.
[00:41:58]  And like you said, this is a big family.
[00:42:00]  This is a family that was very involved in the operations both of their brewery, but also of their, let's say, charitable arm.
[00:42:07]  And it's really during the Cold War, at least like this from the 60s onwards, and especially towards the Reagan era, that these guys are like up in national politics.
[00:42:17]  And so tell me, talk to me about red pill me on the red-pilled Coors family.
[00:42:22]  So Bill and Joe Coors are the two brothers who, like I said, you know, steward the company through its post-Prohibition era and right up until almost the turn of the 21st century.
[00:42:36]  These guys are in control for a long time.
[00:42:39]  The vibes on the two are a little bit different.
[00:42:43]  Joe is thought of as really sort of ramrod straight.
[00:42:48]  He's tall as shit, by the way.
[00:42:50]  If you look up pictures of this guy, he looks like an undertaker.
[00:42:53]  Yeah, he looks like Slenderman.
[00:42:56]  Right, yeah.
[00:42:57]  And he, you know, he's very, very socially conservative, like not, you know, not gregarious, not effusive.
[00:43:05]  He's not a salesperson at all.
[00:43:07]  You know, this is just, he is more on the business side of things.
[00:43:11]  Bill, William Coors, is kind of, like I said, the more charismatic of the two.
[00:43:18]  And he, you know, at various points, they hold different positions in the company, president, chairman, CEO, yada, yada.
[00:43:26]  But they are de facto sort of like hand in glove running the company for decades.
[00:43:34]  And they kind of diverge in different ways at times on their specific politics.
[00:43:44]  You know, I think Bill is much more thought of as the moderate one and less driven by ideology and more driven by just like a your standard issue like post-war business brain.
[00:43:58]  But that is not true of, and he does some like hippie-dippy shit too.
[00:44:03]  Like he puts in like a wellness center in the in the Coors brewery at one point.
[00:44:08]  And then, by the way, because he like has success with meditation and stuff, which on one hand, it's nice.
[00:44:15]  On the other, at one point, when he's like mad about some bad press, they're constantly getting bad press, obviously, he makes attending like sessions at the wellness center mandatory for his employees.
[00:44:29]  The Nazis are into vegetarianism and nudism.
[00:44:32]  You know, it's hippie-dippy stuff does not preclude extreme right-wing oftentimes.
[00:44:38]  Wellness goes hard right like way faster than anyone.
[00:44:41]  Look at Silicon Valley.
[00:44:44]  Yeah, they're drinking raw water over there and they're also like pivoted with that raw beer stuff.
[00:44:49]  It probably would have done real well.
[00:44:51]  Hire some blood boys, you know?
[00:44:53]  It's crazy.
[00:44:53]  When I drink raw water, when I get down there in the fucking sewer and I lap it up like a little thirsty cat, people stare at me on the street like I'm some kind of maniac.
[00:45:01]  And I say, no, this is what they're doing in the valley.
[00:45:03]  This is what they're doing to live to be 200 years old.
[00:45:05]  And it tastes good after a while.
[00:45:08]  But I mean, really, it's Joe Coors who is like out.
[00:45:12]  And I mean, Bill Coors is a fucking freak, but Joe Coors is like, my God, he is a Cold War mutant.
[00:45:23]  Joe Coors is what we would later come to think of as like the proto money man of the entire American, like modern neoconservative movement.
[00:45:35]  Yeah, he's like, he's sort of like, I mean, Teal isn't a neoconservative.
[00:45:38]  He's something else.
[00:45:39]  But he's like, I feel like he has sort of a tealian posture in this where he like views himself as like someone who can disperse and like make or break these groups, you know?
[00:45:48]  Well, the election of Reagan was like a pretty important point during this, this whole thing, right?
[00:45:52]  Because that comes at the tail end of the boycott and really like supercharges Joe's national profile as well because he's that's his boy.
[00:46:02]  He's super tight with Reagan and had been for some years.
[00:46:05]  Reagan is the culmination of millions of dollars that Joe has been throwing at various levels of the conservative movement for over a decade at that point.
[00:46:18]  So when Reagan gets elected in 1980, this is, I mean, it's a triumphant moment for Joe.
[00:46:24]  He is part of the kitchen cabinet, which is sort of infamously this, you know, like shadow set of officers that surround Reagan and convince him to do various bad shit.
[00:46:41]  He advises on the transition team.
[00:46:43]  He puts at one point Neil Gorsuk's mom, Ann Gorsuk.
[00:46:49]  She's crazy.
[00:46:50]  She was so crazy, she got fired like right away, I think, actually, from the cabinet.
[00:46:55]  Yeah, she didn't lost.
[00:46:56]  She didn't last long.
[00:46:57]  But he put her in charge.
[00:46:58]  She had like written a bunch of like bananas opinions about how the EPA was communism or whatever.
[00:47:05]  And yeah, which is like, you know, shut up and play the hits.
[00:47:09]  Like Nixon had established the EPA.
[00:47:12]  So obviously Reagan's there to blow it up.
[00:47:15]  And he puts her in charge of the EPA right when he gets in.
[00:47:20]  So it's kind of, I mean, now that's not as scandalous because that's the standard move is to put the, you know, sort of revolving door lobbyist/slash, you know, politician who's most has the most animus towards the agency in charge of that agency so they can gut it from the inside.
[00:47:38]  But this is a pretty bold move, and it's one that has Joe Corr's fingerprints on it.
[00:47:44]  So Reagan was absolutely like the fruition of Joe's project to fund the new right.
[00:47:51]  But it starts, you know, like 16, 14, 16 years or earlier, or even earlier, depending on when you first pinpoint it, when he gets involved in Goldwater's campaign and really kind of like starts to realize like, holy shit, like all of the things that I've been frustrated about or I've been kind of like railing on about in terms of the direction this country is going and how, you know,
[00:48:20]  this the free market cannot be fettered, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:48:24]  Like there's, this is not just something I think.
[00:48:27]  There are other people like me out there.
[00:48:29]  And Goldwater is sort of his like aha moment where he realizes like, okay, this is a thing.
[00:48:36]  And oh shit, I have so much money.
[00:48:40]  This thing is going to need a lot of money to grow.
[00:48:42]  I need to start cutting checks.
[00:48:45]  And from there, things kind of, things kind of blossom in some strange directions.
[00:48:52]  I mean, he dabbles in some politics himself.
[00:48:57]  He gets elected to the Colorado University Board of Regents in 1966, which is, you know, the height of the, you know, we're in the 60s.
[00:49:07]  What's happening on campus is captivating the nation.
[00:49:11]  And Joe is going toe-to-toe with students and like yelling at them to like cut their hair and like getting football players, getting jocks to like beat up hippies that are like blocking convention centers where like Reagan is coming to speak on campus.
[00:49:27]  Like it's all happening for Joe.
[00:49:30]  He was not particularly popular as a regent and it became clear at that point that he didn't really have like the finesse to hold like higher office, even though he reportedly had aspirations to.
[00:49:42]  So after the Board of Regents, he recedes a little bit to the background and becomes the money man.
[00:49:50]  Yeah, I mean, there's two things with that, right?
[00:49:52]  Like one is the fact that he really got behind Coors Tech, which at this point had transitioned from making all these different ceramics products to basically making a lot of body armor for the U.S. government, which is, you know, it's the Cold War.
[00:50:08]  The government needs some motherfucking body armor.
[00:50:10]  And he is making a fucking killing building this company up.
[00:50:14]  And at the same time, he starts funding all of these different institutions.
[00:50:18]  Now, I did not know this prior to having read The Coors Connection, but he basically funded the Heritage Foundation.
[00:50:25]  Like he was the, he was one of the people that essentially gave them their seed money.
[00:50:29]  And then I think it was about $250,000.
[00:50:31]  Their entire first year operating budget came from Joe Coors and Coors Beer.
[00:50:37]  And after that, in perpetuity, I'm sure it's changed now, but it was $300,000 every year.
[00:50:43]  And that's just a year, which is crazy.
[00:50:46]  I mean, we're talking early 720.
[00:50:48]  When the Heritage Foundation starts.
[00:50:51]  And this is really like, I mean, you know, Heritage Foundation now, I think a lot of people are like, oh, there's just some goofy, like they're a little out of step with the times, even on the right.
[00:51:01]  But they were, especially in the 70s and 80s, a huge force on the right.
[00:51:07]  And part of what you mentioned earlier, really part of this new right that started emerging during this period.
[00:51:13]  Yeah, so I take that phrase from the guy who wrote Coors Connection, Russ Bellant, the investigative journalist who put together this book.
[00:51:21]  It's not that thick.
[00:51:22]  If you're interested in this shit at all, I highly recommend reading it.
[00:51:25]  It's like where all the bodies are buried in terms of campaign donations and the various quote-unquote philanthropies that the Coors Foundation undertakes and the Coors family personally undertakes during this period.
[00:51:38]  But yeah, the Heritage Foundation is launched in 1973.
[00:51:42]  The other book that I would recommend is Citizen Coors by Dan Baum.
[00:51:47]  And Dan Baum reports that the gestation of the Heritage Foundation comes out of basically like Joe wanting to get more involved, but not knowing how to.
[00:51:59]  And kind of like, I don't know that he was like the country rube.
[00:52:03]  That might be overselling it a little bit, but like, the fact of the matter is, like, Joe is excited.
[00:52:10]  He's found his people.
[00:52:12]  And he is either convinced or delighted to put a quarter million dollars down on what Dan Baum describes as basically like a clubhouse for young conservatives in Washington.
[00:52:29]  Like, they were basically, you know, at least Baum's version of this, and he was at the Wall Street Journal for many years.
[00:52:35]  He's died now, but he's typically, in my understanding, considered a credible reporter.
[00:52:40]  Baum's reporting on this indicates that basically they were envious of like the Brookings Institute and like wanted a cool, wanted like a cool place to hang out and like say mean things about black people and like couldn't find one.
[00:52:56]  Surprised you couldn't do that at Brookings.
[00:52:58]  Well, one of his big sort of guys that he funded was a dude named Paul Weyrich or Weyrich, Weyrick.
[00:53:06]  And the Ballant book, A Coors Connection, has a lot on this because Russ Belant's other big book is about Nazis in the Republican Party, especially during this era.
[00:53:16]  I mean, I think people might forget now because a lot of those people have died off at this point, but during especially Nixon's first or second run for president, the Republican Party sort of activated all of these like ethnic organizations, which were like all led by just like guys who did the Holocaust, but they're Hungarian or whatever.
[00:53:39]  And so this is, it's just like a sort of extraordinary.
[00:53:42]  So some of this Coors money, I mean, via Paul Weyrick, this massive collaboration of like ethnic groups is funded, like these far right-wing ethnic groups that are that are sort of like collaborating with the Republican Party.
[00:53:55]  But really, like, for example, there's one in particular, this is working with a group that the Coors founded called the Free Congress Foundation.
[00:54:02]  Paul Weyrick, also of Heritage, worked with FCF as well.
[00:54:08]  The OUN, the organization of Ukrainian nationalists, who we've covered extensively on this show, they are like being funded by Paul Weyrich.
[00:54:17]  They're funding these like literally Hungarian guys who helped do the Holocaust.
[00:54:22]  And it's just like, it's just part and parcel of Republican activism in the 1960s and 70s because these guys are anti-communists.
[00:54:30]  They have these bona fides, bona fides, whatever.
[00:54:33]  And Joseph Kors is more than happy to support them because frankly, he probably agrees with them on a lot of points.
[00:54:40]  I think there's like, you're right that there's just this kind of like incredible web of organizations and acronyms.
[00:54:47]  They all have acronyms.
[00:54:48]  They're fucking impossible to all keep straight in your head.
[00:54:51]  The Free Congress Foundation is one of the big ones.
[00:54:56]  The Heritage Foundation is obviously one of the other big ones.
[00:55:00]  But it gets the money flows through these different organizations at different times and just gets dispersed like across a much more sort of broad or far flung set of operations that get spun up, you know, based on whatever like particular Cold War sort of outflanking maneuver.
[00:55:30]  I don't know.
[00:55:30]  or anti-communist panic has arisen in the coalescing or the congealing, the new GOP establishment.
[00:55:42]  And always, or not always, but quite often that money, three or four steps removed is flowing through Heritage or flowing directly through the Coors Foundation.
[00:55:55]  And so this isn't to say that Joe is the guy polishing up Laszlo, whatever's Iron Cross and being like, you're doing great work out there, man.

=== International Controversies (12:24) ===

[00:56:05]  Like, you know, get back out there.
[00:56:08]  But it's the sort of thing, you know, what is it called in like the banking industry?
[00:56:13]  Like, know your customer laws, or right?
[00:56:15]  Like, it's at some point, it strains credulity to imagine that like he just kept on cutting these checks without even being somewhat curious where the money was ultimately ending up, especially given what we know about him as a business owner being fairly frugal and being oriented around sort of, you know, like at a personal level, not being ostentatious, not spending a lot of money, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:56:41]  He was spending a lot of money on the political project and it was, you know, it was going towards a lot of these far-right organizations that were reshaping the country in real time at that point.
[00:56:53]  Yeah.
[00:56:54]  Yeah.
[00:56:55]  And I know that he had a big part to play also in the sort of the conservative Christian movement that rose up around like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, because he himself, Joe Coors, in addition to a lot of the other members of the Coors family, was sort of this millenarian Christian.
[00:57:09]  And I think Joe Coors in particular thought that the apocalypse was going to happen in the year 2000, which unfortunately it just did.
[00:57:17]  Or did it?
[00:57:18]  Or did it?
[00:57:19]  We're living in it.
[00:57:19]  It could be in hell right now.
[00:57:20]  Yeah, you're right.
[00:57:22]  But he was, he would, he had this sort of apocalyptic Christianity that his brothers, even if they were more, well, less, I guess, personally involved in a lot of these unsavor organizations, that they also shared.
[00:57:37]  Apparently, what I've read is they got it from their mother, Holly, who is a very, you know, sort of wacko Christian.
[00:57:45]  You know, a lot of this, though, leads up to eventually Joe Coors is implicated in the Iran-Contra affair.
[00:57:52]  Yeah, like any good Republican moneyman of this era, Joe eventually finds himself testifying before Congress in 1987 for some money that he may have handled or sent to a fellow called Ali North, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was point man on the Iran-Contra incident.
[00:58:16]  Joe is really involved in this for most of the 80s.
[00:58:21]  At different points, he gets involved in these fundraisers for like Nicaraguan refugee organizations that are thinly veiled CIA covers that everyone in Washington sort of knows are ops.
[00:58:40]  Again, whether he knows or not, it would be impossible to say for sure, but it's sort of a thing where you kind of, you, you don't get a benefit of the doubt at that point.
[00:58:51]  Everyone knows and you're the one writing the checks.
[00:58:53]  You got to kind of know where that stuff's going.
[00:58:55]  He also, you know, indicating sort of where his motive is or what his thoughts are on the matter.
[00:59:02]  At one point, he transfers $65,000 directly to what was it called? Lake Corporation.
[00:59:10]  I forget what the shell organization that Ali North was using.
[00:59:13]  It's a Swiss, it was the Swiss bank account of Ollie North's shell company.
[00:59:20]  And that comes, according to Bellance report, that comes directly from Joe Cors's account.
[00:59:29]  And that is something that he testifies to later on in 1987 in front of Congress.
[00:59:35]  So, you know, this is, he's very involved in this.
[00:59:40]  Yeah, it's sort of, I mean, he bought the Contras a plane.
[00:59:45]  And by the way, a lot of these Republican guys, I mean, he is fully, he is like, he's funding the World Anti-Communist League, who we've covered extensively on this show.
[00:59:56]  I mean, this is really like, we are talking about, no, we're no longer talking about just like giving money to these ethnic groups and maybe CIA tied in some way.
[01:00:03]  Like this is fully like, I mean, these are, these are, these are the Contras, right?
[01:00:07]  These are the people running Coke and doing terrorism and, you know, massacring villagers and all that.
[01:00:12]  And they're like getting together for like death squad conventions.
[01:00:16]  Yeah.
[01:00:17]  Like they're not even just doing death squad shit.
[01:00:19]  They're like coming together at like a LinkedIn conference to like share, share best practices about running death squads.
[01:00:27]  Well, it's all about networking at this point, right?
[01:00:29]  It's the 80s.
[01:00:30]  Like you got to like really build your networks, really build out, you know, who you're talking to, build your skill sets so you can ban.
[01:00:37]  I mean, some of these meetings that Joe Cors was at, like there's guys who are tied up in like the Newgan Hand scandal.
[01:00:42]  There's people who are like representatives of the Moonies.
[01:00:45]  There's guys who are like, you know, representative of these like anti-communist groups that are funded by the government of Taiwan, who are basically death squads.
[01:00:53]  And there's like representatives of the Contras.
[01:00:54]  And it's like, he is deep into like 80s black money.
[01:00:59]  I don't even call it conservatism at this point, but like sort of black, international black terror.
[01:01:05]  And, you know, Ryana, this is the mid-80s here.
[01:01:10]  And I, you know, I was born in 1989.
[01:01:13]  And for me growing up, I actually didn't really know that Coors was part of this like big right-wing, sort of like terrifying push.
[01:01:23]  And what, what, like, what, what changed?
[01:01:25]  Like, what happened here?
[01:01:27]  I know that Joe Coors started fucking around on his wife.
[01:01:32]  Does that play any factor in Coors going woke?
[01:01:39]  Yeah, lost his nerve.
[01:01:41]  Yeah, so right, exactly.
[01:01:42]  Like Ramrod Straight, moral majority Joe Coors, as, you know, has since been repeated a hundred times over with other Republican figures, is shown to be having, is, is stepping out on his wife.
[01:01:58]  He's, he's fooling around behind Holly's back.
[01:02:00]  It's a long-standing, reportedly a 13-year affair, bomb fines.
[01:02:06]  And he, even fucking worse than just cheating on her, elopes to California.
[01:02:14]  California.
[01:02:16]  The fucking godless coast.
[01:02:20]  Ever since Reagan left, that is.
[01:02:23]  Right.
[01:02:24]  And Joe sort of becomes, you know, fades into the background at that point.
[01:02:32]  But I think the turn really comes for Coors when, yes, Joe steps away.
[01:02:38]  Yes, Bill, you know, starts slowing down because he's at this point quite old.
[01:02:43]  But they've been grooming Pete Coors, the younger generation.
[01:02:49]  I forget if he's Bill's, I think he's Joe's son.
[01:02:52]  They've been grooming Pete Coors to eventually take over the company.
[01:02:56]  And also Jeff Coors, who's Pete's cousin, I want to say, I don't know.
[01:03:00]  There's so many of them.
[01:03:02]  But they're of the same generation, Pete and Jeff.
[01:03:04]  And they're supposed to be taking over the company.
[01:03:07]  Jeff has a crisis of confidence or crisis of religious faith because he believes that selling beer is actually not sort of compatible with his Christian beliefs.
[01:03:23]  And so it falls on Pete Coors to take the company into the next generation.
[01:03:28]  And with Joe out of the picture and Bill slowing down, there are a few obstructions to Pete taking over.
[01:03:37]  Whereas like his uncle and his dad for years would basically just like kind of, you know, make him do a ton of grunt work, but also not ever really like get to, you know, make any exciting decisions to like take the company forward.
[01:03:51]  He begged them to his limited credit here, he begged them for years to launch Coors Light, seeing that light beer was going to be a thing when Miller rolled it out in 1975.
[01:04:00]  Took him five years to get it or to four years to get it really going.
[01:04:04]  And they lost, you know, they lost a step on that.
[01:04:06]  So Pete Coors has some business chops.
[01:04:09]  He's again presented as the more moderate, more palatable version of the Coors dynasty.
[01:04:16]  And remember, at this point, the boycott has been going on for years and years.
[01:04:20]  And people know Core, like this is a big national thing.
[01:04:23]  It's not like, you know, people see it on Twitter and then forget about it five seconds later.
[01:04:28]  Like this is sustained media coverage.
[01:04:30]  60 Minutes does a whole segment on it, which ultimately wasn't very favorable to the boycotters, but still gets it out there.
[01:04:37]  There are magazine ads.
[01:04:39]  You know, there's people know the Coors family as synonymous with this brand, this strain of conservatism.
[01:04:47]  And Pete Coors has this big challenge in front of him, which is like, okay, like I need to steer the company in a new direction and also like, convince people that like I'm different than you know, my uncle and my dad, who represent the axis of, you know, right-wing evil to a large swath of the country.
[01:05:07]  So how does he do it?
[01:05:08]  He, he doesn't really.
[01:05:11]  He tries um, he tries a bunch of different things.
[01:05:14]  They release cores light in.
[01:05:15]  In 1978, when Bill and Joe are still around, he finally convinced them to do it.
[01:05:20]  That succeeds and it's really, you know, a delicious beer that we all love and enjoy constantly, as we, as we, noted.
[01:05:28]  Yeah um, they push east.
[01:05:30]  Finally they um, you know, there there's a couple unfavorable uh court rulings that dictate the way they can instruct their distributors to handle their product.
[01:05:40]  This makes it even more sort of expeditious for them to finally establish a plant in Virginia, which they do in the late 70s.
[01:05:49]  Um, by the time, Pete really hits his stride and it's, you know, closer to being in control of the company.
[01:05:54]  Um, the beer industry consolidation has reached basically its zenith.
[01:06:00]  There's like Anheuser-busch BUSH.
[01:06:02]  Schlitz is falling apart at that point.
[01:06:04]  Miller has bajillions of dollars of Philip Morris money because Philip Morris had bought into Miller at this point.
[01:06:12]  So Miller has all of Philip Morris's money plus all of their marketing muscle.
[01:06:17]  So they're the number two brewery in the country.
[01:06:19]  And there's going to be a race.
[01:06:20]  It becomes clear to everyone that there's going to be a race for one more brewery to be a big national brewery and the rest are not going to make it.
[01:06:30]  Yeah, there's no way that this company this country can support this many brands.
[01:06:35]  It's got to, there's going to be a falling out.
[01:06:37]  Pete Coors tries to strike a deal with Stroh's to buy the company.
[01:06:42]  It looks great.
[01:06:43]  Wall Street loves it.
[01:06:45]  And then at the last minute, Bill comes in and rumor is it happens behind closed doors, but rumor is Bill kiboshes it.
[01:06:54]  And the company sort of, you know, like limps along.
[01:06:59]  Limps is too strong a word.
[01:07:01]  It's doing okay under Pete's governance, but it's definitely the third wheel between Anheuser-Busch and Miller.
[01:07:13]  And then eventually it gets, it merges with Molson, the Canadian firm, in 2004, I want to say.
[01:07:22]  And that's basically the end of like what we know as the Coors Brewing Company.
[01:07:27]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:07:27]  Like it's no longer like every minute decision is not no longer made by a Coors family, but it's owned by like an international conglomerate.
[01:07:36]  Right.
[01:07:37]  I mean, Molson Coors is literally international.
[01:07:39]  It's a portfolio brand.
[01:07:40]  They manage things just like any other CPG firm.
[01:07:44]  This is the era of, you know, like building out a diversified portfolio of products.
[01:07:49]  And that's the business that all of a sudden the Coors brand is involved in, mostly to their benefit, but certainly not to the benefit of the Coors family's control over the firm that bears their name.
[01:08:13]  Now, it's interesting that you mention international conglomerates there, Senor Infante, because you and I have had a lot of conversations about a certain international conglomerate known as Sapporo.

=== Anchor's Union Troubles (08:12) ===

[01:08:29]  I don't know if this is the best segue I've ever done, but you know what?
[01:08:33]  But it's the segue we're going to get.
[01:08:34]  It's the segue that we're getting today.
[01:08:37]  You know, one of the other reasons that we want to have you talk on the show today is actually to talk about Anchor because you have, I think, without a doubt, covered this story closer than anybody.
[01:08:49]  In fact, I think you were the first person who was not in the union or living with somebody in the union to know about the union.
[01:09:00]  But you have been covering the story of both the Sapporo, you know, the ownership over Anchor Brewing Company, the company I used to work at, and the union stuff and now the sort of decline of Anchor under the aegis of Sapporo USA.
[01:09:18]  And wanted to talk to you about that before we wrap up here, because there's been some, as the developments that we talked about in the intro, and that Anchor is now saying they're shutting down.
[01:09:29]  Yeah, so Anchor, man, that takes as bad as that.
[01:09:33]  That's when we first started talking many years ago.
[01:09:36]  Yes, I found our first email, my first email to you where I think we thought we were going to launch like a month before we did, but we wanted to get some stuff.
[01:09:45]  A little source.
[01:09:46]  Yeah.
[01:09:47]  Little source, first of all.
[01:09:48]  Well, here's what you want to do.
[01:09:49]  Listen, you want to find a guy.
[01:09:52]  And I found, well, Dave was the only guy we had in mind.
[01:09:56]  We were like, we got to get this guy.
[01:09:57]  You want to find a guy who's going to be both, no disrespect to you, but probably sympathetic and who like actually writes about this stuff.
[01:10:04]  He can't get some chump.
[01:10:06]  And so fit the bill 100%.
[01:10:09]  And so, yeah, we took it to Dave.
[01:10:11]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:10:11]  So we started talking about the union in late 2018, I think.
[01:10:15]  And yeah, I mean, I'm not afraid to say I'm sympathetic to organizing efforts.
[01:10:19]  That doesn't color my reporting.
[01:10:21]  I do a ton of reporting on how unions are shitty in various ways in terms of their corruption and their mismanagement.
[01:10:27]  But like, I don't know, I mean, the rest of the fucking mainstream media is incredibly sympathetic to the bosses.
[01:10:32]  So, you know, let's balance the scales here.
[01:10:35]  But yeah, so we started talking in 2018.
[01:10:38]  I covered the union drive at Anchor in 2019.
[01:10:41]  You guys went through some rough union busting.
[01:10:43]  I covered that.
[01:10:44]  You guys ultimately got your contract in place.
[01:10:47]  You had left by the time the contractor was there or no, Brace.
[01:10:50]  No, no, I left after the contract.
[01:10:52]  After the contract.
[01:10:53]  So I covered the first year post-contract.
[01:10:56]  And then I got tipped off to a flurry of news items that I wound up breaking over the course of June and July 2023 about this rapid unraveling that takes place at Anchor, which at that point had only been owned by Sapporo for five plus years, just under six years.
[01:11:17]  They bought it in 2017.
[01:11:19]  And it culminates with news that I broke a couple Wednesdays ago that Sapporo is just going to shut down this firm that's been operating in San Francisco for 152 years.
[01:11:32]  And so obviously the question is, what the fuck happened here?
[01:11:36]  This, you know, the Japanese conglomerate is supposed to be much more patient, much more deliberate with the way they operate their acquisitions than their competitors in Heineken or Anheuser-Busch.
[01:11:50]  And yet they're cutting bait on this on this storied, venerable business that means a ton to a ton of people.
[01:11:58]  And workers and customers alike are kind of left to pick up the pieces and be like, you know, how did we get here?
[01:12:04]  Yeah, I mean, what are the causes for that?
[01:12:07]  Because we covered in the intro to this episode a New York Post article about the union and about also me by name saying that the union was the cause of Anchor shutting down.
[01:12:19]  And, you know, I know that's a popular sort of right-wing talking point.
[01:12:23]  And I'm going to be honest with the audience here.
[01:12:25]  If that was the case here, I would probably be forced in chagrin to admit that.
[01:12:29]  But I have some pretty good indications of how the brewery was being run.
[01:12:34]  I saw how it was being run when I was there.
[01:12:36]  I saw it was being run after I left there.
[01:12:38]  I've kept in contact with the workers.
[01:12:40]  I've been there a couple of times.
[01:12:43]  It seems that Sapporo USA just didn't know what to do with Anchor after they realized that they couldn't actually really brew Sapporo there.
[01:12:52]  Yeah, I mean, a ton of stuff.
[01:12:54]  Obviously, this stuff is never tidy and complete and coherent.
[01:12:58]  But the reporting I've been getting, which has mostly been from the workers themselves, as well as a few former workers who are still relatively recently departed from Anchor, they paint a picture that this big multinational corporation came in, maybe bought the wrong company, bought the wrong brewery, not the one that was going to fit their needs, and then has kind of been frustrated with it and not,
[01:13:27]  you know, has been trying to retrofit it and then has ultimately just decided to kind of neglect it ever since.
[01:13:33]  And so there's a bunch.
[01:13:34]  I don't want to get too in the weeds because I know the True Non audience is not a beer business audience so much as a, I don't know, how do you describe your audience?
[01:13:45]  Let me just say, there's some certain words you can't say on radio, and it's all those in one sentence.
[01:13:51]  A bunch of rascals.
[01:13:53]  Yeah, there you go.
[01:13:54]  But, you know, I think like the long and the short of it is the company gets out this really slick statement from a high-powered third-party crisis PR guy in Sam Singer.
[01:14:08]  Our man, Sammy Sings.
[01:14:11]  And it comes out in the middle of the night and it says basically, Anchor is being liquidated and there's nothing that anyone could do.
[01:14:20]  This is just the way things go sometimes.
[01:14:24]  You know, the market and the pandemic and we've been losing money and blah, blah, blah.
[01:14:30]  Yeah, I remember I read the piece in the Chronicle and it was just like a, I mean, it was just a PR piece written at 2 a.m.
[01:14:36]  It was pretty shocking.
[01:14:37]  It was crazy because it was, it seems like it was like, I mean, obviously was coordinated with Anchor, but like there's no input from any of the workers or anything.
[01:14:44]  It's just like, here's the company's side of the story.
[01:14:47]  Yeah, the Chronicle, I mean, I don't know anyone over there.
[01:14:51]  I think obviously they do some good work sometimes.
[01:14:54]  They, it was, I think it was a lousy frame.
[01:14:57]  I think it was not great the way they did that.
[01:15:00]  Yeah.
[01:15:01]  Also, I knew I had a pretty good idea.
[01:15:03]  I'd been working this beat, you know, at this point pretty hard for a month.
[01:15:06]  So I had gotten the tip that someone, a photographer from the Chronicle was up at Petro Hill at the anchor public taps on Tuesday.
[01:15:16]  The announcement is supposed to go live on Wednesday.
[01:15:18]  Workers tell me they've got a 9 a.m. meeting that morning local time.
[01:15:22]  The Sam Singer, the flack, is trying to basically, you know, brush me off or hold me off and says, you know, he's busy with other clients until Wednesday morning.
[01:15:35]  I had sent him an email being like, hey, is Anchor closing or not?
[01:15:37]  I got a bunch of people saying it is.
[01:15:39]  All you got to do is tell me no and there's no story.
[01:15:42]  And he's like, can we talk Wednesday?
[01:15:45]  Which is dope.
[01:15:46]  You know, like, oh, yeah, sir.
[01:15:48]  Yeah, right.
[01:15:49]  So, so I had gotten the tip.
[01:15:50]  And so we, I ran Tuesday night with it on Vine Pear to make sure I scooped it instead of letting, you know, someone else get the news because I figured he was, he had given the exclusive to the Chronicle.
[01:16:02]  And I was glad I did because like, you know, obviously like part of the business is trying to get scoops.
[01:16:08]  And that's not really my beat, but like it's always fun to get a scoop and it's competitive and whatever.
[01:16:12]  But I was more glad because like when you saw, and I saw their coverage, I was just like, oh man, that stinks, man.
[01:16:18]  It was, it was just basically the guys, the Sam Singer's talking points.
[01:16:23]  And the workers tell a totally different story.
[01:16:26]  They talk about, you know, how Sapporo USA mismanaged the company, you know, by trying to retrofit it to brew Sapporo Rice Lager, by starving it of resources once they acquired Stone Brewery in San Diego.

=== Workers' Voices Unheard (06:19) ===

[01:16:41]  A bunch of other things, you know, spatting with the union like for no fucking reason.
[01:16:47]  Like they bought in, they brought in this like ball buster on the production line who's who is basically seemed like their job was just to like try to like write up union members on infractions.
[01:16:59]  You know, if you want to go like one step further down the, you know, the conspiracy hole, one reason that that might have been what they did was because it would be easier to sell the company if there were no union workforce.
[01:17:13]  You can just kind of sell it for parts with no input from anyone.
[01:17:18]  And so maybe there was a plan there or there was a vague hope there that they could get enough workers who were pro-union to just quit on their own volition that they could call a decertification.
[01:17:31]  Who knows?
[01:17:33]  You know, a lot of that stuff is kind of unknowable or at least like unknowable to the point where I would be able to print something about it.
[01:17:41]  But it's fair speculation to like wonder like, okay, what's the, what was the point of this like ramped up aggressive campaign towards the union that workers say, you know, really started ratcheting up, you know, right at the top of 2023.
[01:17:55]  So I think like, you know, again, I don't want to get too in the weeds just because I don't want to bore you guys, but like the Zoom out story is that like this historic company survives a century and a half of everything the world fucking throws at it, right?
[01:18:11]  Like the boom and bust of the gold rush, the San Francisco earthquake, prohibition, two world wars, fucking God knows what else.
[01:18:23]  And it makes it all the way to 2017.
[01:18:25]  And then six years later, Sapphora is saying there's nothing we could do.
[01:18:30]  It's time to send it to the junkyard.
[01:18:33]  You have to be skeptical of that story.
[01:18:36]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:18:37]  Yeah.
[01:18:37]  Now the plan is to buy, I believe August 1st or August 2nd.
[01:18:42]  It's going to one of those creditor things and they are essentially going to sell it for parts.
[01:18:47]  That's where it looks like it's headed.
[01:18:49]  Yeah.
[01:18:49]  In California, this process is called assignment for the benefit of creditors.
[01:18:54]  So it's basically an alternative to the bankruptcy process.
[01:18:57]  I'm actually hoping to speak with some folks who manage this type of thing later this week and report that out a little bit more.
[01:19:03]  But the long and the short of it is it seems like this is a fiduciary that gets a hold of the business, looks at like what's valuable, how we should package this up to be sold, who the potential buyers would be, and manages this process as a third party.
[01:19:20]  It obviously doesn't feel great for the workers that I'm talking to.
[01:19:28]  As you know, Brace, you worked there.
[01:19:30]  A lot of these people really fucking love Anchor as like an institution, even though they weren't happy with management and weren't happy with their bosses or whatever.
[01:19:40]  It's very important to them.
[01:19:42]  It's important to the city, I would argue, and to some extent, the country.
[01:19:46]  And they're mounting a last ditch bid to try to scrape up the funds to make an offer for Anchor to try to buy it and run it as a worker co-op.
[01:19:58]  I think it's a real long shot.
[01:20:00]  I think, you know, they know that.
[01:20:01]  I think that.
[01:20:02]  I think they think that it's a real long shot.
[01:20:04]  I also give them an enormous amount of credit for trying just because like, I don't know, man, like if when this fucking happens and it happens all over the place, whether it's private equity behind the wheel or a foreign corporation or just a slash and burn publicly traded corporation, this type of collateral damage happens all the time.
[01:20:24]  And we're all told that we just have to accept it as like a byproduct of progress.
[01:20:29]  And these workers are at least going to try to try to give it a fight.
[01:20:34]  And I give them all the credit in the world for it.
[01:20:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:20:37]  I've been talking to them too.
[01:20:39]  And I agree.
[01:20:39]  Like, I think they also, they know it's a long shot, but I mean, it's the only shot.
[01:20:44]  You miss 100% of the shots you don't take, right?
[01:20:46]  That's what they say.
[01:20:48]  And, you know, and credit for trying.
[01:20:50]  They are really trying talking to quite a few people who might be able to help them out with that.
[01:20:56]  Any relevant stuff we have towards that, we'll also put in the show notes here.
[01:21:00]  I know a lot of people have asked how they can get involved.
[01:21:02]  I don't think it's at that stage at right now or anything.
[01:21:05]  It's close, but not yet.
[01:21:06]  Yeah.
[01:21:07]  So, the latest update is that they now have a couple different nonprofit groups that they're working with who specialize in setting up worker co-ops and also like raising public.
[01:21:18]  I think one of them is called like public equity, basically like crowdfunding, but for this specific type of business.
[01:21:25]  One of my sources at Anchor Brewing Union says they're going to be releasing all the information through Twitter or whatever the fuck it's called now that it has X.com.
[01:21:35]  X.com, XVideos.com.
[01:21:38]  Yeah, but so you know, stay tuned there.
[01:21:41]  And also, obviously, I'll be reporting on it as well.
[01:21:43]  And it sounds like it'll be in the liner notes of this episode.
[01:21:46]  But yeah, I mean, it's a shitty situation.
[01:21:49]  It's one that I think, you know, I don't like writing about this stuff, but it's also one of those things that like this is going to keep happening in this country because we have, you know, a system that basically encourages it.
[01:22:04]  This type of consolidatory practice where you extract what you can.
[01:22:10]  If it works out, great, you funnel it upwards.
[01:22:12]  If it doesn't, no big deal.
[01:22:13]  You know, harvest the tax loss and move on to the next one.
[01:22:17]  And that's doesn't, it's never fun for all the workers and the customers and the communities that rely on it.
[01:22:24]  But when it's something as special as Anchor, which has just basically an indelible position in the American culinary canon, the American business canon, whatever, and is synonymous with San Francisco for a century and a half, I think it's particularly tough to swallow.
[01:22:42]  Well, we'll definitely be following.
[01:22:44]  I think that our listeners will be following.
[01:22:46]  And a great way to follow is follow you, Dave.
[01:22:51]  This has been such a pleasure to have you on.
[01:22:53]  Thank you.
[01:22:53]  Thank you so much.
[01:22:55]  This has been, I mean, a long time coming, Dave.
[01:22:59]  I appreciate you so much having me.

=== Water Bottle Warning (03:35) ===

[01:23:01]  I know this is, your listeners will probably laugh at this, but one caveat I just do want to insert because I'm scared of getting sued, even if you guys aren't, is that the company, CORES, has always denied that it was trying to weed out homosexuals with the polygraph test.
[01:23:21]  There are sworn affidavits from many workers saying that that's exactly what they were doing.
[01:23:27]  The company has always denied it.
[01:23:29]  I don't think that they are actually that litigious about this at this point.
[01:23:34]  I just forgot to insert the caveat.
[01:23:36]  I know this makes me sound like a big pussy.
[01:23:38]  No, We are well behind this.
[01:23:40]  We also would never insinuate that.
[01:23:45]  And I think that's just what some have said about it.
[01:23:50]  In sworn affidavits.
[01:23:51]  In snorn affidavits, people have said that.
[01:23:53]  We haven't said that.
[01:23:54]  We are, again, like everything we on the show, it's all alleged by other people, and we're just reporting on it with a neutral.
[01:24:03]  That's just what it says.
[01:24:05]  A swore affidavit is a sworn affidavit.
[01:24:07]  I'm not giving it.
[01:24:10]  You can follow Jay.
[01:24:11]  No, Believe me, there's been many things we have not done on this show due to fear of lawsuit.
[01:24:20]  But perhaps, let me, if I just got to get my law license and then we can start just suing everybody.
[01:24:26]  Oh, yeah.
[01:24:27]  I look forward to this.
[01:24:28]  I'm also, I'm looking forward to you figuring out it's not called a law license.
[01:24:32]  Law license.
[01:24:33]  Yeah.
[01:24:34]  What's it?
[01:24:34]  Oh, what?
[01:24:35]  The bar.
[01:24:37]  People don't want to see the.
[01:24:40]  Speaking of the bar, David Fontaine.
[01:24:43]  Oh, there we go.
[01:24:44]  Dave is the editor of Fingers, a newsletter about drinking in America.
[01:24:49]  Fantastic newsletter.
[01:24:50]  Give it a follow.
[01:24:51]  Do a little subscription to it.
[01:24:53]  He's been, you know, longtime beer writer, actually, just beverage writer in general.
[01:24:58]  And let me ask you this before we finish.
[01:25:01]  Best and worst beer in America.
[01:25:05]  Oh, fuck, man.
[01:25:06]  I mean, worst beer, obviously.
[01:25:07]  We already talked about it.
[01:25:08]  Coors Light.
[01:25:09]  Worst beer in America.
[01:25:10]  Coors Light.
[01:25:10]  Best beer in America is, I don't know.
[01:25:12]  Man, the one I'm drinking, I don't really, I'm not a critic.
[01:25:15]  I don't review beer.
[01:25:17]  I don't really care that much about the beer industry, which is part of the reason I report on it because it's a lot easier when you don't give a shit about it.
[01:25:24]  I drink a lot of beer, and that's the best one, is the one that's available and cold.
[01:25:30]  As long as it's not Coors Light.
[01:25:32]  Liz loves Shock Top.
[01:25:33]  Actually, Liz loves Voodoo Ranger IPA.
[01:25:36]  Liz, no.
[01:25:38]  It's crazy.
[01:25:39]  I actually don't know the last time I drank a beer.
[01:25:41]  You think you see a motherfucking, I think I was probably there the last time you drank beer.
[01:25:44]  You think you see a water bottle on Liz's desk right now?
[01:25:47]  There is, it is a water bottle, but there is a full glass bottle of voodoo ranger IPA in there.
[01:25:55]  And she says he doesn't like the taste.
[01:25:56]  She doesn't like the way it makes her feel, but she likes the aesthetic.
[01:25:59]  Yeah, it matches my little dice tattoos.
[01:26:01]  It does.
[01:26:03]  And that's plural.
[01:26:04]  And for me, I think beer should be illegal.
[01:26:09]  Again.
[01:26:10]  Dave, thank you very much for joining us.
[01:26:14]  And you know what?
[01:26:15]  We'll see you at the motherfucking bar.
[01:26:28]  Well, I'm drunk.
[01:26:30]  It's good to be back.
[01:26:31]  It's good to be back.
[01:26:32]  I know.
[01:26:33]  Ladies and gentlemen, don't you worry.
[01:26:35]  We are back.

=== God Bless Voodoo Ranger (02:26) ===

[01:26:36]  No matter how sick I get.
[01:26:39]  No matter how much Coors Light you drink.
[01:26:42]  No matter how much Coors Light I drink.
[01:26:43]  Coors Light, you should be, if you're sober, you should be able to have like a Coors Light.
[01:26:47]  Because you're not going to get drunk.
[01:26:49]  Shit is nasty.
[01:26:50]  When's the last time you think you had one?
[01:26:51]  A Coors Light?
[01:26:52]  A Coors Light.
[01:26:53]  When was the last time you think you had a Coors Light?
[01:26:54]  Oh, shit.
[01:26:55]  I don't even know.
[01:26:57]  When was the last time, Young Chomsky?
[01:26:58]  You don't know?
[01:26:58]  I couldn't tell you.
[01:27:00]  College?
[01:27:00]  Yeah, a barbecue when I was 22 or something.
[01:27:03]  Yeah, that's crazy, dude.
[01:27:03]  I don't know what to do.
[01:27:04]  Because also any sports thing, I'll have a Budweiser as a like nod to our heroes.
[01:27:11]  Yeah, because, well, it's just like Budweiser hot dog.
[01:27:13]  That's the diet when you go to an athletic sporting event.
[01:27:18]  Well, on that note, I am going to drink.
[01:27:21]  Oh, they come up with a crazy non-alcoholic drink, maybe a hoppy Coors refresher.
[01:27:28]  My name is the Drinker, the Thinker, the Stinker.
[01:27:33]  No, wait, drinking, stinking, and doing no thinking.
[01:27:35]  That's what I used to say when I was going out there.
[01:27:37]  That's awful.
[01:27:38]  That's what you do.
[01:27:40]  I had a couple other ones.
[01:27:42]  Drinking and stinking was the one I would, and people would ask me what I was doing.
[01:27:45]  It's always good when you can figure out a rhyme.
[01:27:47]  Doing no thinking.
[01:27:48]  You never said that?
[01:27:49]  No.
[01:27:50]  No, I certainly spent a lot of years of my life doing that.
[01:27:54]  Here's, you know what?
[01:27:56]  Here's to the Trailblazers.
[01:27:58]  Here's to the badasses.
[01:28:00]  Here's to the innovators.
[01:28:01]  Here's to the salt of the earth.
[01:28:04]  After a long day as a project manager, when I get off and I hit the fucking that like home workout weightlifting thing in the mirror for 30 minutes.
[01:28:15]  I hit that fucking, I go beast mode on that 30 minutes.
[01:28:18]  I open up my HelloFresh.
[01:28:20]  I fucking cook that.
[01:28:22]  I FaceTime the boys and I open up a fucking can of Coors and I say, God bless you and God bless America.
[01:28:29]  And God bless Elvira.
[01:28:33]  All right, I'm Liz.
[01:28:34]  My name is Mistress of the Night.
[01:28:35]  Bryce Belden, we have with us here producer Young Chomsky and the podcast is it's Tronan.
[01:28:41]  We'll see you next time.
[01:28:42]  Bye.
[01:29:03]  Come out.