This brutal assessment of why our bourbon industry has been screwed by MAGA comes from William A. Finnegan at Substack:

I’m not a fan of Beam. Never have been.

That said, I hope the good people of Tennessee and Kentucky—who spent the last few years calling the rest of us cucks, sheep, and “woke degenerates”—are enjoying the fruits of their labor. Especially those in the liquor industry.

Your asses are getting hammered because your Orange God told Canada to go fuck itself.

Guess who buys a lot of your bourbon, you half-wits.

While you were busy strutting around in MAGA hats, giggling about the “51st state,” and congratulating yourselves for owning the libs, you managed to kneecap your own livelihoods. A masterclass in self-immolation.

Let’s talk structure, not vibes.

Those states are disproportionately dependent on three employment pillars:

1. Healthcare — already strained and politically kneecapped.
2. Manufacturing — especially automotive and components, under serious pressure thanks to tariffs and immigration policies.
3. Food and liquor — the last reliable export bright spot.

Bravo. You took the one sector that still worked and fed it into the woodchipper.

Now Jim Beam and others are trying to posture this as a “temporary pause.” Routine maintenance. A breather. Maybe they’ll scrub the wort pots, rotate inventory, hum a tune, and everything will be fine next year.

That’s optimistic bordering on delusional.

What has happened is worse in a different way:

• Canadian distributors and retailers have sharply reduced orders, in some cases pulling U.S. spirits from shelves entirely as a political signal.
• New orders are down dramatically, inventories are being worked down, and replacement contracts are being delayed or redirected.
• Export growth has stalled or reversed, especially in premium American whiskey, which depends heavily on foreign markets for margin, not volume.

Globally, growth in the consumption of U.S. spirits is down, and significantly so. In this industry, stalled growth is a five-alarm fire. Liquor doesn’t need to collapse to kill jobs; it just needs to stop expanding.

And here’s the part that should terrify anyone with a functioning frontal lobe.

Liquor is not some fragile luxury good.

It is:

• The fourth most addictive substances on earth. (Cocaine, amphetamines, opioids, then booze.)
• High-margin, easy to store, easy to ship.
• Consumed everywhere, across cultures, income levels, and political systems.
• One of the very few products that maintained or increased demand during the Great Depression. Booze, historically, is up in good times, and typically “really up” in bad times.

Global average consumption of pure alcohol is roughly 6 liters per adult per year. Normalize that into wine or beer and the numbers become comical. This is not a discretionary market. It’s one of the most durable demand curves in human history.

So when liquor CEOs start muttering, “This is a challenging year,” understand what that actually means.

If US booze is having a “challenging year,” something is deeply wrong.

Not cyclical. Not seasonal. Political. Structural.

Self-inflicted.

You didn’t own the libs. You owned yourselves.

You poked your largest, most reliable export customer in the eye for a culture-war dopamine hit—and now you’re surprised the orders stopped coming.

Sure taught everyone a lesson.

This states the obvious, but it’s stating the obvious to the oblivious. MAGAts will take gallons of gasoline and pour it through their homes, then ask if anyone has any matches because … FREEDOM!!!