3. In combination with social media, it ventilates psychic steam. People are unusually angry about politics these days. With a Twitter account and a ball-peen hammer, a nobody from Nowhere, U.S.A., can feel like he’s being heard. In fact, he is being heard. Big businesses are reflexively inclined to tamp down political flare-ups. The CEO of Keurig apologized to Sean Hannity, and the Fox News Channel host subsequently told his viewers they were free to no longer hate the company, blaming the episode on the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America for fostering a misunderstanding.

4. It’s good for people to be able to pick their niche. In the immediate wake of the Keurig contretemps, both Hannity and the oleaginous Donald Trump Jr. endorsed the pro-Trump Black Rifle Coffee Company, which was founded by a conservative veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When Starbucks announced in February that it would hire 10,000 refugees by 2022 in response to the Trump administration’s travel ban, Black Rifle countered that it would hire 10,000 veterans. A company blogger posted: “Hipsterbucks brews burnt, bulls— coffee and they add a bunch of sugar, foam, cream and sprinkle a side of other bulls— on the top to mask the taste of S—”