Beege Welborn

For those of you unfamiliar with Bill Penzey, the namesake owner of that spice store chain, he's a hateful, barking mad, foaming-at-the-mouth progressive asterisk.

A week after Donald Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the United States, Bill Penzey sent an e-mail to a few thousand people. “The open embrace of racism by the Republican Party in this election is now unleashing a wave of ugliness unseen in this country for decades,” he wrote. “The American people are taking notice. Let’s commit to giving the people a better choice.” The recipients weren’t friends or colleagues or the fellow-members of an activist group. They were customers—subscribers to the mailing list of Penzey’s Wisconsin-based company, Penzeys Spices, which, with an online store and sixty-five retail locations, is America’s largest independent spice retailer. At the end of the message, he mentioned the company’s Thanksgiving specials, including a gift box of four mini-jars of spices for ten dollars.

Penzey, a bespectacled, rosy-cheeked man in his middle years, founded his namesake company in the late eighties as a mail-order business. Almost from the start, he used the brand’s official communiques as a megaphone, devoting the first and last pages of his catalog to personal notes and op-eds. Over the years, Penzey expressed his dismay at, among other things, urban white flight, low teacher pay, and the use of Native American iconography in sports. With the advent of social media, he expanded his platform to include the e-mail newsletter and a company Facebook page. And with the election of Trump, he found an issue that nearly everyone took personally.

Penzey’s post-election statements—including a follow-up e-mail telling Trump supporters, “You just voted for an openly racist candidate for the presidency of the United States of America”—went viral, earning coverage everywhere from USA Today to Fox News. It won praise from Web sites like DailyKos and Upworthy, and intense derision from members of the right-wing news media. The pundit Michelle Malkin tweeted the American Conservative’s take, with a caption claiming that Penzey had gone “full moonbat,” while David Clarke, who was at the time the Milwaukee County sheriff, tweeted his opinion that Penzey was a “typical hate-filled white elitist lefty.” A conservative food blogger declared his intent to boycott the company, going so far as to mock up a satirical jar of “Socialist Sea Salt.” Almost overnight, the bleeding-heart spice magnate became a bannerman of the #resistance and an icon of activist capitalism.

Kamala probably felt right at home, contributing to far-left causes.

We had already stopped ordering from them years before because of previous rants.