Bill Penzey, a spice seller, has spent more than $700,000 on Facebook ads promoting impeachment.
But like many things, businesses’ approach to politics has changed in the Trump era: Corporate leaders increasingly speak out directly about the administration’s policies and the president’s statements. Perhaps no one personifies this shift better than Penzey.
His home is three miles from his main production facility; both are in Wauwatosa, a town of fewer than 50,000 people just outside Milwaukee that has voted increasingly Democratic in recent years. Penzey started the company in 1986, primarily as a catalog mail-order business. But his exposure to the spice world — and politics — started decades earlier. Penzey’s family lived in the suburbs but ran a spice store in a minority neighborhood in urban Milwaukee; as a 10-year-old, he worked in the shop on weekends to earn his allowance of $1 per week.
“Milwaukee had a socialist tradition here; even in the times of the Red Scare it was tough to vote them out,” Penzey said. He said that period taught him that “when government actually spends taxpayer dollars on things that benefit taxpayers, the buses run on time, the streets get plowed, the schools are good.”
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