Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - ICE Wants to Shut Down His Clothing Brand: What Happens When the Govt Hates Your Merch

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

BUY COLA CORP APPAREL: https://www.thecolacorporation.com  (None of this is sponsored, I just really want people to support him!!!!) Support my independent journalism:🙏 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/taylorlorenz     🗞️ Buy a paid subscription to my Substack: https://www.usermag.co    What happens when the government doesn't like your t-shirts? Joe, founder of Cola Corporation, has dealt with DMCA takedowns, letters from the LAPD, shipments seized by US Customs and Border Protection, and bans from advertising on virtually every major social platform including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and Etsy.In this episode of Free Speech Friday, I sit down with him to talk about what it's really like to run an independent political clothing brand that challenges power. We talk about fashion and clothing as tools of resistance and the high price of using fashion as a tool for political criticism. Clothing has long been a way to communicate political beliefs, from protest shirts to campaign merch. But in the era of social media platforms, algorithms, and online marketplaces, the boundaries of acceptable expression are constantly being tested.The designs mentioned in this episode:⁠ https://www.thecolacorporation.com/collections/taylor⁠THE FREE SPEECH 1A SWEATER:⁠ https://www.thecolacorporation.com/products/1a-sparks⁠  Topics discussed in this interview include:• The rise of political merchandise online • Social media censorship and advertising bans • Etsy and TikTok removing controversial designs • Police legal threats over a T-shirt slogan • Government seizure of political clothing • The Streisand effect and viral controversy • Free speech and political expression through fashionFollow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz        https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0       https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz   https://bsky.app/profile/taylorlorenz.bsky.social    https://twitter.com/taylorlorenz  

404 media wrote about the situation. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is tweeting about it. Hassan mentioned it. Jason from 404 media a couple weeks later is like, hey man, how's it going? And I said, well, my shop sold out. As more people become involved in protests across the country, many are wearing t-shirts with the phrases F-E-E-Ease or F-L-A-PD. T-shirts and slogans have always been a way to communicate political ideology.

And with the rise of e-commerce and social media, we saw an explosion in resistance merch from 2017 to 2020. There were Ruth Bader Ginsburg T-shirts, and nevertheless, she persisted hoodies. Kola is a Chicago-based clothing designer who started his clothing brand, Cola Corporation, during the first Trump presidency. Kola doesn't make

resistance merch, though. His clothing, which I'm a huge fan of, has always sharply criticized the police, power, capitalism, and ICE. He's developed a cult fandom, but as his t-shirts have become more popular, he's also suffered increased censorship. Last year, Customs and Border Protection,

seized a shipment of his t-shirts after he began selling clothing emblazoned with the slogan, Eliminate Ice. Among the other t-shirts seized was a design that featured a swarm of bees attacking a police officer. Today he's joining me to talk all about what it's like to run a clothing brand that pushes the boundaries of free expression, how he's navigated increased calls for censorship, and why it's so important to protect free speech in all forms, even on a t-shirt. Joe, welcome. My pleasure to be here, Taylor. Thanks for having me on. So to start off, when did Cola Corporation come into existence. I started the Cola Corporation in 2019, and it was kind of as a response to what I perceived

to be and what I still perceived to be a turn towards a certain kind of flamboyant stupidity in American politics. When I was really young, my mom let me stay up late with her to watch Saturday Night Live one night. Once a month, the show would be preempted by professional wrestling. And so the night that she's allowing me to stay up with her pro wrestling is on. And I was fascinated. And so from a young age, I was, like, used to seeing colleagues pretend to hate one another while working together towards a predetermined result.

And so politics always just seemed like a really boring version of pro wrestling, right? Like, there's no, like, macho man here, so I don't really care about this. It wasn't until 2016 that I registered to vote specifically so that I could vote for Bernie in the Illinois primary, which unfortunately didn't work out the way I. I had hopes. And I know this is kind of ridiculous based on the content of my stuff. I don't really consider COLA or myself to be political as much as moral because it seems like politics have just become a matter of like morality now. Right. So in any event, that was kind of the beginning. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting that the first time that you voted was for Bernie back in 2016. I was a reporter, somewhat younger reporter on the campaign trail that year. And the first

three months I was covering Bernie before he was, you know, the dancey basically pushed him out. And I heard that from so many people and so many people that were like independent, not that into politics, but they felt really mobilized to get into politics because of Bernie Sanders. And it was just really cool to see and like see a lot of these people, especially as a political reporter, like you kind of get the vibe of most of these like rallies and stuff. And I feel like he really got a lot of people into the political system. And then we know what happened and what the Democrat sort of establishment did to him. But it's interesting that that was sort of like your moment too.

When I think of like merch that like or like clothing that kind of has like a political message, I feel like we really started to see the rise of it actually after 2016 from 2017, really to 2020 with the rise of like e-commerce, Shopify and like the resistance merch era with like Ruth Bader Ginsburg t-shirts and stuff. What were you doing throughout those years? So at that point I was still working on a project where I was basically, just traveling around writing about designers who I thought were interesting. And so I, it was sort of like, you know, die workwear plus Hunter S. Thompson or something like

that, right? And so I was just going around hanging out with designers and just kind of writing about why they were doing what they were doing. And so I did that from like 2015 to 2020. So even in the first year of cola, I was still doing that. But my background, I've worked in fashion or the apparel industry for 14 years. but it was always on like the brand side like specifically as a writer. So it's 2019 you're feeling a certain way about like our political ecosystem.

You have this background in fashion, you've been living. Where were you living at this point in Chicago? I was in Chicago. Got it. So you're in the Midwest and what made you start COLA and what was the first product that you offered? So I just remember feeling like this is ridiculous because you know Trump was obviously ascendant and I just. was sick of it and I felt like I needed to do something if for no other reason just to get rid of

my own frustration to like vent in a way right and so although I've worked in apparel for 14 years I had never produced anything before I never designed anything before I do not have a background in design so like everything that I've done I'm self-taught but really I was incredibly naive just about the apparel industry and how it works and so my first like little collection in 2019, I did three pieces, one of which I still really like. It's on the site right now. The graphic is just Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein from their meeting in 1983 because when I started Kola, my kind of motto or battle cry was kill American myths.

So I just feel that that image of those two men in that context really dispels a lot of a lot of mythology that America tells about itself, like making the world safer democracy, because the story behind that image is Reagan sent Rumsfeld to talk to Hussein, because the war with Iran was having really negative effects on our ability to get oil out of the region. So we knew at the time that Hussein was using illegal chemical weapons against the Iranian people. According to the National Archives, that did not come up during their discussion. Rumsfeld was there specifically to say, You're messing with our oil routes, and that's going to stop, and it's going to stop now. And so, 1983, Rumsfeld knows Hussein is illegally using illegal weapons against people, doesn't care.

Twenty years later, he knows he isn't, doesn't care, right? So that first design I love because it's kind of cola to me. And then I did a design that was a homage to Catherine Hamnet, who in the 80s she did these white t-shirts with big black, block, letters that said like choose life. So like George Michael in a video is wearing one of those. And she actually trolled Margaret Thatcher when she met Thatcher. She wore a t-shirt that said something like 56% don't want Pershing because Thatcher was about to close a deal to bring Pershing missiles from the U.S. And so I did a white tea that said delete alt-right control. And that t-shirts kind of come back around when you look at people like Stephen Miller, who's elevated office in our

government. And then I did a t-shirt called Flyover, which just showed jets, fly-es, over an NFL game and there's an NFL play with his fist raised. And then in the sky, I superimposed the image of a man in the Middle East holding his little girl and both of them of screaming after our bombs have reduced their home to rubble. So that was like the little, the first little capsule I started with. It's interesting because it's like you kind of entered into this like clothing market where I feel like people were because of Donald Trump like 1.0 increasingly looking for shirts. and like clothing with political messaging. Like we saw so many mainstream brands lean into that in that first Trump presidency. And as I mentioned, like all of these sort of smaller brands that were just cropping up to kind

of fill this need more for like the corny liberal resistance wine mom stuff. But your clothing has always had like this like very anti-imperialist like understreak. And I feel like it's critical as you mentioned of like really both political parties and the system as a whole. And I'm curious kind of how that evolved. So you started in 2019. How does your business evolve through 2020? And did it go well in 2020? Everyone thinks of like 2020 as peak resistance. So I'm like, how were the early days of your company?

Very lonely because I did not know what I was doing from a merchandising or marketing perspective. I don't know if I've ever told anybody this before, but the first year of COLA, I sold one thing to someone I did not know personally. Everything else that I sold was sold to like friends, family. So it did not go well at all. And it wasn't until I got on Twitter, like right around 2020. That's how people started to find out about my brand. And that was how I kind of learned just sort of like how to communicate what I was doing to other people.

That was kind of how it started. It was very lonely for the first year. It's interesting that, you know, Twitter, which has always and was always a platform, for political speech played such a rise in your brand. Obviously, Elon Musk, it's gotten less free speech under Elon Musk, unfortunately. But I feel like there's a lot of like fashion type of discussion on there and also just a lot of political discussion.

And I mean, you mentioned that account die workwear and some others that like sort of, I think, merge a lot of like political commentary with fashion on Twitter. Yeah, I remember when he was taking over. I went to Complexcon, which is a streetwear convention in Long Beach. And that weekend, I remember, it was one of these like little wishful thinking scares of like, Twitter might not last till Monday, right?

Like everybody was like, I have insight sources that bra bra bra bra. So when that was happening, I was in Long Beach for that convention. I was walking around wearing this t-shirt that said F-the-L-A-P-D, and people would ask me about it. And I would be like, hey, I got your size, you know, right here in my bag. And so that's kind of like where I was at at that point in time. So again, like, I'm selling T-shirts like on the street to people hustling. So the brand at that time was still very much just kind of, you know, catch-us-catch can. When did you start to experience backlash for the content and the messages that were written on your clothing?

Immediately. I had a tweet back in the day. Matthew McCona, he was, I think, running for office. And so I tweeted something and I said, it turns out this whole time, Matthew McConaughey has been saying alt right, alt right, alt right, right, right, instead of all right, all right. And I got immediately dogpiled by everybody. So from the jump, MAGA and internet leftists have, you know, exorriated me for being a... Is it leftists or is it mostly like liberals?

Everybody. It's been everybody because to leftists, I'm a fake leftist. I'm a grifter. I'm a capitalist pig. And then, of course, you know, to MAGA, you know, it's the whole, the Matt Boren a cartoon of like, maybe we should improve society somewhat, yet you participate in society, right? And so I, I mean, I've caught flag from the jump for what I do. People have very specific opinions about clothing and politics.

And of course, I'm right at the intersection of the two, which hasn't always been, has not always been comfortable. So it seems like your tweets, as you mentioned, you got on Twitter a little after starting the brand and start to build this sort of persona that's getting backlash. When did people really start to kind of take that towards the actual imagery on your t-shirts like were they upset by specific clothing that you made that had specific messages i don't know if people have necessarily been that offended by the substance of the designs as much as just kind of the concept of somebody you know selling a good that references leftism or leftist causes

or whatever the one thing that does come to mind is i have a few pieces like i did a series called lucky wants that references the struggle of the IRA against British occupation. So people are saying that I support terrorism, that it's grotesque, it's disgusting, etc., to which I've always said, like, how many pieces of clothing out there have the union jack on it? And like, are you equally upset about that, right? But the stuff that depicts the struggle of Irish independence is probably the stuff that has gotten the most specific backlash in terms of, like, the content of the design.

I feel like you've gotten backlash for other clothing, too. As I remember you made a Luigi Mangione shirt sort of shortly after he was arrested. Yeah, I have a T where it is riffing off of a design I saw in the back of one of my dad's far right guns and ammo magazines or Soldier of Fortune, where it had a skull with a red beret and then wings. And the text said, kill them all, let God sort them out. So I just replaced the skull with the cartoon face of a certain fictional plumber. And so that was that. And then in addition to that, I riffed on sort of some Luigi ball caps as well. I mean, it's so funny because it almost pales in comparison to the Charlie Kirk sort of fake outrage.

But there was so much outrage. And I remember your t-shirt being an example of like, kind of like you said, people are more mad at like the concept of it. then it's like, I mean, I guess they're mad about the image itself and the slogan, but I mean, did you get like hate mail from that? Like, what was the response for, you know, putting that sort of message on a t-shirt? Well, for sure, there was like noise. There was static from people online. But maybe the most kind of confounding part of all this is that at that point, I had some of my stuff on Etsy. And so I put a ball cap on Etsy that had a white circle with a green L and Etsy took it down. And they told me the reason they took it down was because it glorified perpetrators of violence, right?

And it's a ball cap with a white circle and an L. And so I looked around on Etsy and I appealed and I said, okay, so you are selling fezes, the hats, right? You're selling fezzes that have the fashis, the literal fashies decorated on it. And it's listed as a Mussolini hat. You're selling that. you're selling Jeffrey Dahmer cutting boards. You are selling, you know, Unabomber T's, Charles Manson T's, but a hat that has an L on it is glorifying violence, but none of this other stuff is.

Like, can you explain that to me? And of course, they couldn't. I mean, it's such a ridiculous and irrational and inconsistent stance to have. Well, I think it's pretty consistent in the sense that we constantly see speech like this policed when it's challenging power. Like with Luigi, it was the fact that he killed a multi-millionaire healthcare executive. And so, you know, glorifying violence against, you know, victims or glorifying a serial killer, et cetera, that's been sort of lionized by the media, has his own Netflix series. Like, that's always acceptable in society. But any sort of violence that challenges systems of power or

challenges powerful people, like, I think you see these arbitrary lines around hate speech or calls for violence are so like why that stuff is so dangerous. I'm constantly I feel like trying to fight with people online explaining to them why we don't want the government to make more like hate speech laws, especially under Trump, because it's just like you, you know, alluded to a negative action towards a millionaire or billionaire that is a call for violence or that is hate speech. And I mean, Etsy was taking down so many people's Etsy stores at this time. I reported on some of it. But there was a mass censorship campaign. And I felt the same way. I mean, I, I reported on this after the January 6th, which I'm sure people are not going to agree with me.

But there was a lot of merch, you know, being sold around there that I felt like shouldn't have been removed from Amazon. I mean, yes, it was an insurrection. But like some of the merch, kind of like you described, it was this like completely benign. Like you kind of knew what it was alluding to. But fundamentally, like that speech in my opinion should be protected because once you start to go down that like arbitrary road, like you said, it's like you're allowing this and not this. like there's no consistency because it's fundamentally subjective. Right. And you, I mean, you're exactly right that from that perspective, it has been remarkably consistent, right?

Like in my career with Cola, the consistency is that any speech that, you know, critiques power get suppressed, but stuff that it's suppressed for reasons like, again, glorifying violence, whereas all this other stuff, Dahmer, Mussolini, Manson, that glorifies violence is, is okay. It's over. As if, by the way, like, government ICE recruitment ads don't glorify violence. As if all of American societies and built on glorifying violence. Like, it's very silly. Yeah, it's very, it's very selective.

Can you tell me about some other experiences that you've had with kind of this type of censorship running your clothing brand? Sure. I mean, the best known instance of this kind of pushback came because of my t-shirt that says F-B-L-A-P-D. So what happened? There's an account on Twitter, filmed the police LA. And several years ago, that account, I don't remember what the situation was, but they tweeted something. And one of my followers responded in the thread and said, please tell me that this t-shirt will be a part of what you're doing.

And it was a link to my F-The L-L-A-PD t-shirt. Within a week, I was served with a DMC complaint letter from a lawyer representing the LAPS. the Los Angeles Police Foundation. And this lawyer, to the best of my understanding of this letter, was claiming that the LAPD owns the letters LAPD. So I knew this was ridiculous, right? And so I start looking for a lawyer. And I talked to several people.

And there was one lawyer, Mike Dunford, who I talked to him on video. And the video comes up, and Mike is sitting there. He has a goatee. He's wearing an aloha shirt. and on the shelf behind him is a stormtrooper mask from Star Wars. And I think, before he says anything, I think this is my guy. And so Mike says, I recommend that we send two letters. The first letter that we send in response to this DMCA copyright violation letter is the first letter will have two words.

LOL, no. And in the second letter, I will eviscerate this man and I will explain to him why he is a bad, lawyer and why he is a bad person and I said let's do it so Mike wrote the first letter sent it we posted it online it went viral 4-4 media wrote about the situation Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is tweeting about it Hassan mentioned it people were pinging me you're on hey you're mentioned on this on this podcast on that podcast and then Jason from 404 media a couple weeks later is like hey man how's it going and I said well my shop sold out and so then he

he writes about that. So both of Jason's article made it to the front page of Reddit and the LAPD's attempt to suppress that t-shirt completely blew up in their faces. They clearly don't understand the Streisand effect. And it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think that's so amazing because it shows how people can kind of like fight back against this stuff. And I love like a good positive story. But I feel like there's not always those happy endings. Like, I mean, you got media attention, which is so valuable for, you know, the censorship that you're endured. But so many people that deal with censorship don't get the attention. And I feel like you've also dealt with censorship that has not gone viral or like been written up and highlighted.

I mean, part of it is just being banned from advertising from basically every social platform, which for a business like mine where it's a one-man brand, kind of conventionally, that's how you grow the brand. by advertising online. And I knew a guy who had a t-shirt company that was very successful, and he was telling me about his Facebook funnel. And he had it down. It's an equation that people work is strictly numbers, has nothing to do with brand or anything. And I was like, well, that's great, man,

but I'm banned from advertising on Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest and TikTok and Etsy, as we mentioned. And with TikTok, again, is this thing of, you know, consistently inconsistent or however we want to think about the double standards where if you've ever set up a TikTok shop it is such a pain it is so Byzantine to do it and I managed to do it and then one by one all my designs start getting rejected and you know it's like in high school when you get points you know you're going to get suspended you're going to get an in school TikTok suspension if this keeps up and it was a t-shirt I had for instance of Eileen Warnos where she's just looking over her

shoulder in court smiling and the t-shirt says he said smile more that was it and that was rejected ilene warnos is a woman who she was a sex worker and depending on your point of view she is a serial murderer or a serial self-defender and she was on the shirt and t-tok deleted that but at that time there was a t-shirt on t-tick-tok that not only was was promoted, but it was promoted to the top of people's feeds that referred to Kamala Harris using a very derogatory word for a woman and a very misogynistic term. And TikTok was fine with that, but not something that says he said Smile More with the depiction of Eileen Warnas.

So like that stuff is, it's not glamorous. Nobody's going to write about it. It's everyday stuff, but it's very hard to build a brand when you don't have access to any of those avenues. Yeah, well, it's interesting. You know, the right has really built their own ecosystem. Like you mentioned the Kamala Harris T-shirt. And I've reported a lot on like sort of right-wing merch,

merchification of like that whole world and lives of TikTok. Like people were trying to get her sort of de-platformed, rightfully. So she was a hate monger, terrible person who like I think probably does violate a lot of these terms. But, you know, she wants to sell just a T-shirt with her logo. Like she should, I believe, have the right to do that on like an Amazon or whatever, like these big sort of open platforms that really claim to allow basically everything. But TikTok shops specifically, like they started especially in the past several years as they've been nervous about tech regulation and getting, you know, shut down or bought or whatever,

allow a lot more right wing speech and a lot more right wing merchandise. So there's a lot of offensive right wing merchandise. Again, some of which I support the right for these people to say these things. But like there is no equivalent of on the left. Like when one of those right wing sort of t-shirt accounts gets shut down or if that Kamala t-shirt, you know, got removed, there is this right-wing media ecosystem that will amplify it or it'll be on Fox News or it'll be on, like, right-wing podcast and there'll be an outrage machine. But there is no real outrage machine equivalent on the left. Like you said, sometimes it's like 404 media and it goes viral on Reddit. But there's also not an alternative

platform ecosystem that you can advertise on. Like the right has the right-wing version of Amazon. They have like right-wing equivalence to basically all the major. your tech and e-commerce platforms. And it seems like you're banned from advertising on social media, and it's increasingly harder for you to kind of get your name out there because we don't have any sort of like leftist e-commerce, like kind of behemoths. Right. And unfortunately, it's not just online stuff. Like recently, I was uninvited from a Valentine's Market at the Harold Washington Library. It was February 7th. And I had applied. to be a vendor at this market, and I was accepted.

And then I didn't hear back about, you know, purchasing my table, things like that. So I called the person who was in charge of the event. And when I introduced myself, they immediately get flustered and start talking in circles. And it was a very irritating conversation. And I got off the phone very confused. And then the person emails me to explain, you know, as I was saying, you missed the deadline. But I have the emails where they accept me. I have an email say, hey, do you want to be part of the market, et cetera, et cetera.

And then there's my email 12 minutes later accepting it. So I'm like, okay, I felt like I was being gaslit, you know. I was like, am I going insane? What is going on? And then I start poking around on their website. And then lo and behold, I find a flyer that says, you know, a Valentine's Day market presented by the Chicago Design Museum. sponsored by Buddy.

Buddy is a shop that is inside the Chicago Cultural Center that sells stuff made by Chicago artists. And I had been encouraged by someone involved in the Cultural Center to have my stuff in Buddy, to stop by and present my stuff to the manager, which I did. And the manager was very enthusiastic. This was in the summer of 2023. The manager said, I want you in here by the end of summer.

I love this stuff. and then she said, tonight just send me some design comps for what you want to do and send me your website. So I did that and I never heard back. So a week later, I email her from a different email address in case, you know, the first one went to spam, nothing. A week later, third email, third email address, nothing.

And I'm like, okay. And so eventually I meet her boss. I run into her boss and I press him on this whole thing because he had been the person telling me, I want you in the shop. I want you in the shop on my Instagram. And he immediately starts telling me, oh, you don't want to be in there.

You don't want to be in buddy. You wanted me to be in buddy. And you're the one who told me that I should be in there. And he goes on and on telling me, oh, the margins aren't good. It's kind of a mess in there. It's not well organized. And I just push it until he finally tells me,

I think that the manager looked at your website and look, we can't have anti-cop stuff in the shop. And I say, well, there wasn't any anti-cop stuff that I presented. And he's just like, well, we just can't have your stuff in the shop. And I'm like, okay. So I expect this from Instagram. I expect it from Facebook. I expect it from TikTok.

I expect it from all of these awful corporations that we just try to, like, get along with. Right. But when cultural institutions in the city start doing that. And these are people who really applaud themselves as being on the cutting edge of culture in Chicago being part of a cultural vanguard, promoting new voices, promoting independent artists until something comes up where at the Chicago Cultural Center, it could hurt funding, right? And so it's just really disappointing.

And I do want to say that I understand and appreciate that I do not expect anybody to feel sorry for me. I'm a cisgendered, straight, white guy. And there have been millions of people before me who were vastly more talented than I am, who had no chance at all because they weren't a cisgendered heterosexual white guy. So I just want to acknowledge that. I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me. I don't feel sorry for me.

At the same time, these things are kind of ridiculous, regardless of who they're happening to. I think also it's just like the lack of transparency. And I think so much sort of censorship and deplatforming happens behind closed doors or through lost opportunities. I mean, I've noticed this, like when I was dealing with this really. insane online smear campaign a couple years ago people were like running and setting up all this like bot network to like send traffic to weird websites that were like SEO spate it was weird but i was like losing out i was like i feel like i'm doing like fewer podcasts than i normally am or i feel like i haven't been on tv in like a couple months and i was talking to a producer like a booking friend and she was just like

yeah she's like well it's just like it's just really dicey right now so we can't have you do this right now you know and it's like so you see this stuff and it whatever it worked out fine and i'm a journalist there's always a reason to talk to me about something at some point. But like I think a lot of times censorship and sort of and all this stuff happens in the form of lost opportunities. And you actually got a little bit more clarity on maybe, you know, why you weren't included. But as you mentioned, so many other people never get that clarity. They'll never 100% know. And so it makes it really hard to know like what you did wrong. And so you start to self-censor. You start to make yourself more marketable or, you know, maybe tone down the rhetoric on

your t-shirts or whatever. Obviously, you're not. not doing that. But, you know, this is how a lot of people end up having to navigate in this world and these things. And I just think like with clothing, especially like clothing and clothing with slogans and all this stuff. Like it has such a like rich political history in our country. And it's a type of speech that is very censored because it's like, oh, well, no one's going to feel like a clothing designer didn't get into like a holiday shop or whatever. But it is like meaningful, you know? And it is like notable kind of like whose clothing is included. and what is acceptable to say on a T-shirt and what isn't.

Yeah. And, you know, the media angle that you mentioned is interesting because my other sort of big profile harassment situation was Customs and Border Protection opened one of my shipments at O'Hare. And there's a T-shirt that on the front, it shows a bee pollinating a flower. And then on the back of the T-shirt, there's a depiction of a swarm of bees attacking a Chicago police officer.

And they saw that, and they got their feelings hurt. and they commenced to harass me for six weeks. And in the middle of all this, who writes about it? Jason at 404 Media. I love Jason. He's the best. Jason and Mike Dunford, my lawyer, have been massive help to me because there's so many people who don't want to help.

Those two in particular have been fantastic. And in actual fact, Jason said, do you want to talk about this confiscation? So I did, and I shared with him emails between CBP, the customs broker, myself, and the courier. And, you know, I talked to Jason. I'm like, man, I got to do something with this, right? It's kind of like the same way for the folks who are listening or watch it. If you go to the Cola Corporation.com right now, click on the magnifying glass in the top right and search Taylor.

You're going to see something I put together for you. Similarly, when I was talking to Jason from 404 Media about the CBP confiscation, I was like, I got to do something here, right? I don't have anything to promote or whatever. And so I was like, well, I have photographs of models wearing samples of the T-shirt designs that were confiscated. So I just put them online and I sold, I marketed it as the confiscated collection. And Jason publishes his article about the CBP confiscating my stuff and I have back-to-back

record sales days off of that pre-order. So again, strays and effect. But one of the things that came out of that was other media. attention and I forget who she was a producer for but a woman who is like kind of a mainstream television producer was talking to me and she was like very eager like I want to do a segment on this with you and I'm like okay great and then as I kind of follow up with her the next couple days she was like I just need to talk to you know other people about this and I'm like okay yeah do whatever and then I don't

hear from her and as I follow up it's this again talking in circles very like oh well you know because of And look, a million things can happen where people wouldn't want to talk about little old me. And that's fine. I don't think that, you know, I'm that important that everybody should want to talk about me. But it was an interesting situation. And she went from being all fired up about it to just completely noncommittal. Well, I think, like, again, it's interesting because so many of your t-shirts and your merchandise,

like, it really does critique power in this way that I think can ruffle the feathers because you're sort of critiquing establishment power. capitalism and those are things that like establishment especially institutional news outlets like you cannot do that they exist to uphold capitalism and uphold establishment power and so it's kind of difficult i'm curious if you've ever had issues getting stuff printed i mean i know sometimes there's like censorship type issues of that one of my friends was trying to make some sort of ice protest shirt here in l.a and had to like go to a private screen printer because the other one wouldn't print it and i'm just interested if that's anything you've ever encountered oh yeah yeah so

So I used to drop ship, right, where I would contract with a factory in LA and I would do a sample garment. They would make a one off print of my artwork on a T-shirt. I'd look at it. Yeah, okay, great. Let's do with this. And then I would set up my website so that when people ordered the T-shirt, I didn't touch anything.

It was fulfilled through the factory. And I no longer do that. Nothing is drop-shipped. I literally handle everything that is shipped to my customers. But back when I was doing that, my Be the Change T-shirt, which depicts the assassination of the last fascist prime minister of Spain, Louis Carrero Blanco, a.k.a. the first Spanish astronaut. That has always been my bestseller. To this day. That is the E. Cola T-shirt. And it was doing really well. And so, you know, the factory is making money off of this. And then one day my account rep there is like, hey, man, we can no longer do this. T-shirt, we finally found out what it is. So he was, he was like, I was showing people your brand as an example of people who pushed the boundaries and nobody really knew what this is, but the artwork is of an explosion, right? And there's, there's lettering above that says be the change. So you don't

need to know the specifics to get the, the emotional gist of that. But somebody was like, oh my God, that's the assassination of this prime minister. And he was like, you know, This was via email. He said, it seems like you're promoting violence. And I said, yeah, I am a fascist, violence against fascist. He's like, yeah, but still, I'm like, dude, it's fascist. Like, what's the problem here? So there was that.

And there has been, you know, plenty of other things where now I just tell people up front because of the situation I told you about the cultural center and other things, before I get to end the weeds with prospective production partners or anyone else. I'm saying, here's my website. take a look and let me know if you would like to move forward because especially when you're doing stuff that is made in the USA. In my experience, let me give you an example, most union-made apparel in the United States comes from a factory in Los Angeles. And that stuff is, it used to be made by Teamsters. Now I think it's made by UAW.

The second place for Union-made apparel in the United States is a little family factory in, in Pennsylvania, in rural Pennsylvania. And I had to be very careful with, like, kind of talking to those folks about who I am and what I do. Because, you know, and maybe, hey, maybe I'm being unfairly prejudicial, but, like, on their website, they talk about how much they love the Lord, literally. And so I'm like, okay, like, I have to finesse this. So, I mean, there's been plenty of times where people have just not, again, once they see what I actually do, they do not want to work with me.

Yeah, I think it's so interesting. And I think a lot of your work reveals the hypocrisy, especially the like calls for violence because there are so many examples of people on the right producing violent merchandise. I mean, again, it goes back to the January 6th stuff, although the stuff that I was talking about was actually completely not violent and not. It was more like the L, you know, with a circle around. It's like it doesn't sort of allude to anything compared to like an explosion on a T-shirt. But I think these have always just been age-old questions about speech and the internet. I'm not. sure if you're familiar with the pretty famous court case related to section 230 called Xeran v. AOL, but it was about this guy. It was actually like the first instance of online harassment that ever happened back in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing. There was like a guy that was making fake t-shirt advertisements saying like, visit Oklahoma, it's a blast. And attributing to this guy who actually wasn't selling the t-shirts, the guy that wasn't selling the teachers was like, hey, like, you know, I'm not selling these t-shirts, like stop calling my house. But people were so mad at like the fact that somebody would make like essentially like political commentary t-shirts that were offensive.

Don't get me wrong about the Oklahoma subsidy bombing. And now that we see like the merchification of everything, it's like I just assume any world event like the Donald Trump shooting or whatever. Like any shooting, the Charlie Kirk stuff is going to be immediately turned into merch. Like it's kind of dystopian in that way. And I don't love that. I think it's probably not good for the world that that is how. it is. But I do think we have to protect people's speech rights. And it's just so interesting that, like, even from the earliest days of the internet, these conversations around like merch and t-shirts

have kind of been part of discussions of free speech and free speech precedence. Yeah. And even in England, like in the 70s with the sex shop that Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren ran. And, you know, depending on your perspective, the sex pistols might have been a boy band that they, that the two of those people used to promote their, their clothing. And I mean, I think that's kind of my perspective. But the stuff that they were running was like very legitimately transgressive. Like they were putting stuff on T-shirts that was not cool, right? But they were doing they were doing their thing. They were pushing boundaries.

To be completely honest with you, I think that my stuff is pretty tame. Well, that's what's so funny. I will say, like, I think what's so funny and revealing about your stuff is that saying F the LAPD or like F ICE or like having a swarm of bees on a cop. Like, it's not like some gruesome violent thing, like, especially when you look at some of the stuff that the right has produced on leftists and the George Floyd merchandise and all of this stuff. Like, what you're making is actually like also critical of like mostly institutions and like the police and capitalism. But I think it just reveals how quickly these people will censor leftist speech because you make these t-shirts and they're like, we have to like seize it. We have to

shut it down, you know, no, no, no, no. We can't have it, you know, any t-shirts criticizing ICE. Like, we've got to, you know, revoke that immediately. Yeah, it is a very sensorial and reflexive response. And it's just getting, from my point of view, it's just getting worse, where I was actually just talking to my mother about this today because we had a dust up last week on the phone just around politics. And I was just kind of expressing to her my growing frustration with these double standards that you and I have been talking about.

And we, it's kind of like this. Like a good example of this is we all know at this point that it is pointless to argue with MAGA about politics, right? At least that's my, that's my opinion. Like the marketplace of ideas is closed. Right? I don't know if I agree with that, but I understand your sentiment. It continues to irk me when things like this happen where we see, for instance, this is a, you know, with Alex Preddy in Minnesota, immediately the story was, well, he had a gun. And the ICE agent Bovino, Bovino, I believe, said, like, he was coming to commit a massacre, right?

And this is a guy who just had his sidearm holstered and was taken away from him before he was shot. But I didn't hear peep when armed far-right militias took over the Michigan Capitol. They took over the state house. And I didn't hear anybody say, well, they came to murder people. You know, like going all the way back 13 years to 2013 when Amman Bundy had his standoff with BLM as in Bureau of Land Management agents. And all of his followers who accosted those agents were all armed to the teeth. Well, Joe, I just appreciate the work that you're doing. so much to kind of, you know, challenge these systems and also just expose the hypocrisy on free

speech as it comes to, like, you know, clothing and merchandise especially. I think it's, you're just doing amazing work and your designs are so cool. So I really encourage everybody to go check them out on Cola Corporation. And thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Taylor. It's a pleasure. All right. That's it for this week's episode of Free Speech Friday. If you like the show, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my substack newsletter. Again, linked below. at usermag.co. That's usermag.com. I am 100% self-funded. This series is not sponsored by any advertisers right now. So I really rely on your support to keep it going. Every single dollar

makes such a difference. On my Patreon, I do bonus episodes, a monthly Q&A live stream, and more. On Substack, I do a bi-weekly newsletter of everything that I'm reading and seeing online. You can also get my newsletter on Patreon. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday. See you then.