The Booze Money That Built Project 2025
The Booze Money That Built Project 2025
Beer money built the Heritage Foundation. In 2024 Coors and Jack Daniel's folded to one MAGA influencer. A dad with a mixing spoon didn't. His cocktail mixes just landed.
In 1973, a brewing heir named Joseph Coors wrote a check for $250,000 and founded the Heritage Foundation.
He kept the money coming, roughly $300,000 a year for years. Heritage’s longtime president put it plainly: there wouldn’t be a Heritage Foundation without Joe Coors. That think tank wrote Mandate for Leadership, the blueprint Reagan governed from. Five decades later, the same outfit wrote Project 2025, and its alumni now run the federal budget office and the deportation machine.
That is what a drinks fortune bought. Not a campaign. A country, on a fifty-year installment plan, using money made off other people’s Friday nights.
Which brings us to this one. The weekend starts in a few hours, earlier for the smart ones, and somebody reading this is already on the hook for what goes in the cooler. That’s a small decision. Small decisions are most of the leverage anybody has left, because the other side has been playing a very long game with money nobody reading this will ever see.
Here’s a cheaper option that doesn’t feed any of it.
MEET THE GUY BEHIND THE BAG
Luke runs Stir Sessions. Owner, CEO, and the person who answers the email, which tells you the size of the operation.
The mixes are powdered craft cocktail packets that go from packet to glass in about eleven seconds. One packet, four ounces of water, an ounce of whatever liquor is around. Skip the liquor and it’s a mocktail. He takes them on planes, to the beach with his family, and camping, which is the honest version of a product pitch: the guy who makes it actually carries it around.
Ask him what he’s for and he doesn’t hedge. Climate action. Environmental justice. Racial equity. LGBTQ+ equality. Healthcare reform. Gun control. Quality affordable education for everyone. Pressed to pick, he lands on climate, healthcare, and guns, and says it’s about building a better world for his kids and for everyone else’s, because everyone deserves the same shot at a full life.
That’s a small business owner putting it in writing, knowing it would be published.
Ask him what the brand is about and the answer isn’t a mission statement. It’s being with his wife and kids, hanging out with friends and family, and the fact that life is mostly those moments together. That’s what started it.
NOW HERE’S THE PUNCHLINE
Then came the test, and the big houses failed it in public.
August 2024: Brown-Forman, which owns Jack Daniel’s, dropped its diversity targets, untied executive pay from any of it, and walked out of the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. The pressure came from a single anti-DEI operative named Robby Starbuck. The Human Rights Campaign said the company bowed to a fringe-right activist with no business experience, and named the people applying the pressure for what they are: MAGA bullies.
Three weeks later, September 2024, Molson Coors got the same treatment and folded faster. Starbuck sent word that he intended to expose them. He hadn’t posted anything yet. He just made it known. Inside a week they were out of the same index, where they’d held a perfect score, done sponsoring Pride, supplier diversity goals killed, DEI training ended. Starbuck bragged publicly that billion-dollar companies were changing policy out of pure fear before he even had to write a post.
The dynasty that spent a half century and a fortune building the conservative movement now runs a company that surrendered to a guy with a phone in six days. It didn’t even take a boycott. The threat of one did it.
Meanwhile, a guy in a small shop wrote his politics on a vendor form knowing it would be published, and nobody had to threaten him to find out where he stands.
https://minocquabrewingcompanytimes.substack.com/p/the-booze-money-that-built-project
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