Boycott Starbucks — Drink Red Bull

Of the hundreds of large companies that truckle to racial orthodoxy, Starbucks might be the worst one. Some highlights of its Leftist corporate activism:

• In 1998, when Washington State had a ballot initiative to strike down racial preferences, Starbucks funded the campaign for preferences.
• In 2012, the company filed an amicus brief in support of University of Texas (UT) in the Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas, in which a white girl (Abigail Fisher) sued UT for rejecting her while admitting less-qualified non-whites.
• In 2015, Starbucks decided Americans do not talk about race enough (echoing Attorney General Eric Holder’s “nation of cowards” comment), and launched its “race together” project; baristas wrote “race together” on coffee cups to encourage customers to chat about race. Apparently, Starbucks also held open forums to recycle liberal mush about race.
• Later that year, Starbucks announced it was “teaming up with more than a dozen companies in a commitment to increase hiring of young, minority workers [specifically, 100,000 of them] over the next three years.”
• During the Christmas season, Starbucks snubs Christians by using secular “holiday” cups — usually just red.

“Happy Holidays” (Credit Image: BrillLyle via Wikimedia)

• In the early days of the Trump presidency, Starbucks announced it would hire 10,000 refugees to protest the President’s proposed travel bans.
• In 2018, two black men who were not customers of a Starbucks in Philadelphia were not allowed to use the store’s bathroom. They started a fuss and were asked to leave. When they did  not, the police were called. The blacks said this was racism. In penance, the CEO of Starbucks, Kevin Johnson, met with the two black guys and then closed 8,000 stores so 175,000 of employees could take “racial-bias training.”
• In June 2020, Starbucks announced that its employees would be allowed to wear clothing and accessories that express support for Black Lives Matter. This is the second exception to their dress code they have allowed, which bans anything that “advocate[s] a political, religious or personal issue.” The first was for pins that support LGBTQ rights.

There is probably more.

Don’t drink Starbucks coffee.

A better source of caffeine is Red Bull, the Austrian energy drink.

The man behind Red Bull, Dietrich Mateschitz, is a nationalist who admires Donald Trump. He supports the Austrian Peoples Party. In an interview last year, Mr. Mateschitz criticized the decision to let in “migrants” and deplored the European Union’s grip on the continent. Mr. Mateschitz is putting together a German news outlet that many say will be akin to America’s Breitbart.

Dietrich Mateschitz (Credit Image: © Imago via ZUMA Press)

This year, the company fired three employees who pushed for the company to be more “vocal” about Black Lives Matter — making it perhaps the only major company to not fall over itself to bend the knee to BLM.

Some dissidents have already made the switch to Red Bull: the late Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and Identity Evropa founder Nathan Damigo . Leftists, meanwhile, take a dim view of energy drinks, and sometimes condemn them: “Science Confirms That Guys Who Like Energy Drinks Are Terrible,” by Erin Schumaker, Huffington Post, November 12, 2015.

The claim that energy drinks are pricey is overstated. Red Bull is normally between $2-$2.50 a can, which is more expensive than soda, but less expensive than most of what Starbucks sells. If you a worried about sugar, buy the sugar-free kind.

Some of the many different flavors Red Bull comes in. (Credit Image: eBay)

Switching drinks for political reasons is an American tradition. Americans started drinking coffee instead of tea to avoid paying the tea tax. Today, some of  America’s worst enemies are domestic corporations.

This is a revised and updated version of an essay that first appeared on VDARE on September 18, 2018.