Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Billy Beer vs. the Billion-Dollar Grift: A Tale of Fish-Eye Patriotism

There is a very special red-hat logic at work in America today, one best viewed through a malicious fish-eye lens—the kind that distorts reality until up is down, irony is treason, and a decades-old six-pack of mediocre beer somehow becomes the smoking gun for modern corruption.

Bring up the Trump family’s enthusiastic monetization of the presidency—hotels, trademarks, foreign governments renting entire floors, kids with security clearances selling influence like mall pretzels—and suddenly the crowd shouts: “What about Billy Carter?!”

Ah yes. Billy Beer. 1978. A novelty lager so bad it mostly harmed taste buds and aluminum recycling bins. The great scandal: the president’s brother endorsed a beer, it flopped, and America moved on. No foreign dignitaries booked out the brewery. No taxpayers footed the bill. No constitutional scholars had to invent new Latin phrases to describe it.

But in Red Hat World™, Billy Beer is treated like Watergate with foam.

Meanwhile, in the present day, we’re told not to believe our lying eyes as a president openly treats the White House like a family-run Etsy shop—everything for sale, nothing refundable, ethics sold separately. “Totally normal,” they insist, while wearing merch purchased from the same political brand they swear isn’t a cult.

And then there’s the inauguration story—one so breathtaking in its pettiness it almost feels fictional. Jimmy Carter, a man who actually served this country in uniform, lived modestly, and spent decades building houses for the poor, had the audacity to die near an inauguration. According to the fish-eye narrative, this was clearly a personal attack. Flags at half-staff weren’t a sign of respect; they were a sabotage operation. How dare a former president interrupt the pageantry by… dying?

So the demand was made: raise the flags. Optics first. Respect later. Or never.

This is where the “both sides” argument really earns its laugh track. On one side: a peanut farmer with an inconveniently honest family member who sold a bad beer. On the other: a gilded dynasty vacuuming up cash while chanting “America First” like it’s a discount code.

And yet, the red-hat chorus assures us it’s all the same. Everyone’s corrupt. Everyone does it. Which is funny, because if everyone really did it on this scale, they wouldn’t have to keep reaching back nearly fifty years to find a comparison involving a warm, terrible lager.

In the end, Billy Beer wasn’t a grift—it was a joke that expired naturally. The modern version? That joke keeps printing money, demanding applause, and insisting the real scandal is the foam ring from 1978.

Cheers to selective memory. 🍺