Post

Brewery workers, bar owners, and union organizers in MSP are setting the mark on how to actually care for their community, rather than just invoke as a buzzword. At @vinepair.com, I reported how their work doubles as a playbook for colleagues nationwide whose homes may face MAGA sieges soon enough.

Tactics vary within the Twin Cities, and will certainly vary beyond it. But longtime craft-beverage industry organizer @derzquist.net summed up the consensus view of everyone I spoke with from MSP's scene this week: “Start thinking about what your plan is right now."

As I noted, this is virtually identical to the advice I relayed from folks whose breweries were threatened or outright attacked for holding drag shows just a few years ago. It's the same illness, with the same prescription: prepare now, not when the thugs are at the barroom door.

Craft breweries and bars are small businesses, and this is traditionally a shitty month for them even without masked thugs rampaging through the Twin Cities. @wesburdine.bsky.social of @blackhartstp.com was candid about the struggle of trying to keep a business afloat while living its values:

Contrast the fundraising, mutual aid, and organizing efforts on display from MSP's beer scene with the cowardice of MSP's Fortune 500 companies, who are dramatically more insulated from what @wesburdine.bsky.social called the "economic terrorism" of the street slaughter:

And SO MANY breweries/bars in MSP sprung into action. No strength in numbers for fear of MAGA wrath, no timid press releases about how fascism may be just a *smidge* bad for business. Just some social media posts that told ICE to eat shit, then quick pivots to whatever their neighborhoods needed:

Something remarkable is how bought-in everybody seems to be. Trump sent thousands of armed chuds to ethnically cleanse their neighbors and scare the shit out of them, and they responded by standing up mutual-aid versions of Instacart fueled by donated gas cards and unpaid overtime shifts: