We opened our doors to the general public December 3, 2016, halfway between the election and inauguration of our first openly fascistic president. We’ve now endured three well-broadcast referendums on whether to officially adopt fascism. In 2020, when we first made it explicit that we do not serve fascists, there was naturally some pushback by fascists in defense of fascism, with some asserting that this was not in fact fascism. Since Trump’s own chiefs of staff and vice president have admitted it, and since the fascism continually grows louder and more concretized, no one can any longer express any such doubt.

We have endeavored to create a space that celebrates humanity. To do so within a broader geography that celebrates inhumanity, we need to make choices. For those who chose to have millions of their neighbors forcibly deported by any means necessary (and you will not know until it is too late whether it has become fiscally and/or politically expedient for any of the countries involved to “disappear” or enslave such human beings, and it is a certainty that some will be subjected to the American carceral state’s usual rape and abuse of those in their custody), you are not welcome here with us.

It is egregious that the American voter was given the choice: fund genocide abroad vs. help to conduct that same genocide even more full-throatedly while also promoting an ethnic cleansing campaign at home. This is not, and has never been, a defense of the Democratic party in its contemporary iteration (other than that it has been undeniably the lesser of two evils). Unfortunately, since the purchase of the all-too corruptible and entirely undemocratic Supreme Court, it is unlikely we’ll enjoy free & fair elections in the near future. But until we’re exiled or shot in the street, we can organize our future towards ending the grotesque inequality between billionaires and the people, and demanding universal healthcare—the single most popular policy that our two-party corporate oligarchy has refused us. (There’s too much profit to be made in the business of bankrupting middle-class families in times of illness and letting the poor die.)

BEING WELCOMING (Zero Tolerance for Intolerance)

The late great Os Cruz, friend to so many in the brewing world, said: “I sometimes/often wonder if my white friends think I’m joking or perhaps being difficult when I question if I should visit certain places due to my race.” Too much neutrality or equivocation or “sticking to beer” can result in hopefully-unintentionally prioritizing the lily-white status quo of craft brewing.

It is precisely because our neighbors are, on average (though barely, with ~50.4% of adults in our township voting Trump), fascists that requires us to avow our antifascism, lest assumptions to the contrary prevail.

Americans have no longer any claim to the benefit of the doubt. In order for us to feel good and welcoming, ready to offer real hospitality to whomever walks through our door, we need to be able to operate on the assumption that they are not enormous pieces of shit quick to lick the boot of the first would-be dictator who offers them the lie of the persecuted majority and the promise of the persecution of minorities.

We have proudly been part of the Kutztown All-Inclusive Establishment campaign since opening here in 2022. Hopefully voting for people who admitted to “creating stories” about Haitian migrants in Ohio stealing and eating white families’ pets—in the most Hitlerian example of pogrom-stoking we’ve seen in modernity—does not constitute an “identity factor” worth protecting. These are instead hateful, ignorant ideologies that can be cast aside at any time, once one chooses to divest oneself from Murdochian (and worse) xenophobic propaganda and reconsider one’s humanity.

A hit dog’ll holler, and oh how they holler. Below is our best and only attempt at making fascists feel heard. Tl;dr (and it is painfully apparent that so many of you truly do not read): the commonest of the hollers is “how intolerant!” at which point we refer them to Popper’s paradox, which they do not read, or somehow manage to misread. In sum, there is this statement from the publisher Melville House: “WE ARE NOT GOING TO STAND ON TWO ENDS OF A STAGE & DEBATE THE RELATIVE MERITS OF FASCISM; FASCISM IS A FIRE THAT WANTS TO DEVOUR THAT STAGE”. And as a helpful reminder for the easily confused: we are not the government; your rights are not being trampled by us. You’ve just become consumed by a fundamentally hateful ideology and are experiencing a social sanction as a result of your callous disregard for human life and liberty.

Q&A

Mark Nazikowski (names altered to protect their identity): Don’t you ban Trump voters?

A: As you well know! We very proudly do not serve fascists. It disturbs us to no end how rabidly racist and xenophobic y'all have proven to be. Thankfully you hateful ignorant bootlicking dipshits remain a statistical minority. (FN. We are not quite so thankful for even this statistical minority of ~27% of voting age Americans, seeing as this consitutes a win in our current system.)

William Warren: I know a good bankruptcy lawyer…. After trashing half of the population of the United States by calling them fascists, and clearly having the math skills of a toddler by supposing 50% and likely greater is a minority. I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t need a bankruptcy lawyer.

A: Again, roughly 27% of Americans 18+ cast a ballot for Trump (a man who, incidentally, has filed for bankruptcy at least four times, which would be neither here nor there except that it only takes a few bankruptcies to make you too risky a borrower for every American bank, but with his fascistic compulsion to spend and build he sank deeply into debt with Russian oligarchs, and after failing at every business and borrowing against overvalued properties and the overvaluation of his own name the only way out was the demagogery required to recruit enough of the ignorant masses to put him into this position of extreme power so he could take bribes, scrap whole federal departments for cash, and sell classified documents abroad), but yes, we seem to agree: fascists are trash.

Kyle: your a business run by idiots who know nothing about fascism

A: you’re*

Kyle: wow you are so special. I bet you think my one spelling mistake renders all this screeching somehow intelligent.

A: We’re a business run chiefly by one person, myself, James Priest. I’m mostly to thank and blame for the beer we put out, and I’m entirely to thank and blame for our Zero Tolerance for Intolerance policy. I admittedly have a hard time gauging my own intelligence, but I’m suspecting you’re not the person I ought to trust with such assessments. At any rate, I borrow freely from those whose ideas I find most compelling, citing sources whenever I can. Works that have informed my conception of fascism that I have read include:

The correspondence of Ezra Pound (Pound/Joyce, Random Essays by James Laughlin, William Carlos Williams and James Laughlin: Selected Letters), Ezra Pound and History, and EP’s own Cantos, Personae, ABC of Reading, Guide to Kulchur
Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life - Theodor Adorno
The Authoritarian Personality - Theodor Adorno et al
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
On Populist Reason - Ernesto Laclau
Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator - Norbert Guterman and Leo Lowenthal
The Coming Victory of Democracy - Thomas Mann
Manual of Painting and Calligraphy - Jose Saramago
Tarrying with the Negative, The Sublime Object of Ideology - Slavoj Zizek
The Neighbor - Eric Santner, Kenneth Reinhard, Slavoj Zizek
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
The Differend – Jean-Francois Lyotard
Becoming Abolitionists - Derecka Purnell
Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics - Jacques Ranciere
Toward Freedom: The Case against Race Reductionism - Toure F. Reed
The Dehumanization of Art - Jose Ortega y Gasset
Capital in the Twenty-First Century - Thomas Piketty
Popper Selections - Karl Popper
Mother Night - Kurt Vonnegut
My Last Sigh - Luis Bunuel
The Force of Nonviolence - Judith Butler
Problems of Knowledge and Freedom - Noam Chomsky
The Ethics of Ambiguity - Simone de Beauvoir
The Politics of Friendship - Jacques Derrida
Our History is the Future - Nick Estes
Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics – Jurgen Habermas
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Myths of Liberal Zionism - Yitzhak Laor
Poems 1968-1972 - Denise Levertov
A Letter Concerning Toleration - John Locke
Playing in the Dark - Toni Morrison
The Social Contract and Discourses - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
On Freedom - Maggie Nelson
Man's Nature and His Communities - Reinhold Niebuhr
Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Galileo, The Jewish Wife, Selected Poems - Bertolt Brecht
The Topeka School - Ben Lerner
Histrionics - Thomas Bernhard
The Writing of the Disaster, Political Writings, 1953-1993 - Maurice Blanchot
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life - Giorgio Agamben
Citizen, Just Us – Claudia Rankine
U.S.A. (trilogy) - John Dos Passos
Hold Everything Dear - John Berger
Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities - Etienne Balibar & Immanuel Wallerstein
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (plus Foucault’s preface)
The Destruction of Reason – Georg Lukacs
The Prospects of Industrial Civilization – Bertrand Russell with Dora Russell
New Hopes for a Changing World - Bertrand Russell
The Republic - Plato
The New Testament
Reason, Faith, and Revolution - Terry Eagleton
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, In Praise of Love, In Praise of Politics, Polemics, The Century - Alain Badiou
The Ogre - Michel Tournier
Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, The Life of the Mind - Hannah Arendt
If They Come in the Morning - Angela Davis (ed.)
Freedom Is A Constant Struggle - Angela Davis
(also, with Pound above, many writers with fascistic inclinations, or whose writings fascists found particularly useful: Heidegger, Nietzsche, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Rudolf Steiner)

Watching Amarcord, I Served the King of England, Schindler’s List, Ainadamar, It Can’t Happen Here, Casablanca, The Great Dictator, and that movie they showed us in 7th grade where a teacher divides the class into in-group and out-groups and stirs them into a tribal faux-siegheiling frenzy until revealing to them that they’ve been very faithful little nazi dupes, all also certainly contribute to my feelings on and understanding of fascism.
New and newish books from Sarah Kendzior, Jason Stanley, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are all on deck…but most of all I wish that we lived in a free and open society that wasn’t violently repressing the poorest among us, so that I could feel fine about reading frivolously. There is so much to learn, and so much action to take. “Act as men of thought, think as men of action,” said Henri Bergson.

Plantation Jon (Nov. 2020): It is unfortunate that you attribute the worst intentions possible (“preference for open fascism, racism, white supremacy”) to half of your fellow Americans who have differing political philosophy than yourself. It is even more troubling that breweries feel so cavalier in posting outright intolerance like this as if they are righteous. You are not righteous. You foment the same hatred, intolerance, and division you accuse your perceived enemy of. How can you champion tolerance and inclusion whilst simultaneously calling half the country (and undoubtedly some of your customers) accomplices to fascism, racism, and white supremacy?
A: What are the best intentions possible that could possibly outweigh Trump’s rhetoric & atrocities? Read the Mann quote, then read Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance, then probably read Angela Davis, Adorno, Arendt before wasting our time with your tepid defense of authoritarianism.
Plantation Jon: I am no fan of Postmodernism and Critical Theory. I have read enough to determine that, thank you.
Popper’s Paradox laid out the preference for the rational argument to counter intolerant ideas and warned against suppression through force.
In a “free” society, we use our right to freedom of speech to engage in rational argument where we can exercise free thought without fear of sociopolitical repercussion.
Your decision to suppress the free thought and speech of customers, and fellow Americans, by threatening to discriminate against and deny service to them is reprehensible and is a microcosm of authoritarianism seen in only the most repressive regimes history has to offer.
I feel badly for your customers who love your beer but do not share your politics that will now have to conceal their ideologies for fear of being denied service. I wish them luck as they attempt to navigate those McCarthyist waters.
A: We’re a business, run by people who care about people. We’re not the government. Stop conflating the two. If you curate a taproom full of racists & sexists, you create an unsafe place for the full array of humanity. We’re looking to combat that. Your passively hateful ideology will not. It will allow racism & sexism to flourish. That’s your choice. We don’t work as hard as we do to invite hateful people to come drink what little beer we make while deterring all others. Read what challenges you, or don’t, but don’t pretend you have anything to offer us with your broken sense of who exactly is oppressed at present.

Plantation Jon: How do you plan to enforce that? Litmus test? Will you be asking your customers how they voted?
Or are these threats of denying service just empty platitudes?
If you define Trump voters as “fascist”, I assure you that you have served, and will continue to serve, many “fascists” in your taproom. That is a statistical reality unless, moving forward, you enforce the threat to deny service. So, do you plan to put teeth to this operating principle? If not, how will your patrons be assured of a safe place?
A: It is a symptom of authoritarianism to see the entire world through a lens of policing. “What happens when one violates a moral order is rather that one experiences a social sanction,” wrote Ernst Tugendhat. Trump supporters and other fascist apologists have found themselves estranged from family and friends as they’ve drifted deeper into the immoral morass of xenophobia, transphobia, racism, and misogyny, and some, somehow, are left bewildered by this (or, blame the “woke mind virus,” a.k.a. the acquisition of knowledge & humanitarian principles).

Discussion

Welcome All Who Welcome All (or, Why We Do Not Serve Fascists)

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