Chris Lieberman, FISM News
The beer company Anheuser-Busch is facing calls for boycotts from conservatives following a Bud Light advertising campaign with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney.
Mulvaney, a biological male who identifies as a woman, became popular on Tik-Tok last year for videos documenting his so-called transition to girlhood.
On Sunday, Mulvaney posted a video promoting Bud Light’s March Madness contest. In the video, Mulvaney revealed that the beer company sent him a can with his face on it to commemorate “365 Days of Girlhood,” a nod to the one-year anniversary of his transition that Mulvaney celebrated last month.
In response to the campaign, Anheuser-Busch said in a statement to several media outlets,
Anheuser-Busch works with hundreds of influencers across our brands as one of many ways to authentically connect with audiences across various demographics and passion points. From time to time, we produce unique commemorative cans for fans and for brand influencers, like Dylan Mulvaney. This commemorative can was a gift to celebrate a personal milestone and is not for sale to the general public.
But Anheuser-Busch is now facing backlash, including calls for boycotts, from conservatives, who accuse the beer company of going woke and supporting a political agenda that alienates a large core of their consumers.
“I will be deleting all Anheuser-Busch products from my tour hospitality rider. I know many other artists who are doing the same,” singer-songwriter Travis Tritt wrote on Twitter Wednesday. He then tweeted a list picturing all of Anheuser-Busch’s products.
Here they are. pic.twitter.com/dkGaNawNBa
— Travis Tritt (@Travistritt) April 6, 2023
Tritt went on to say, “In full disclosure, I was on a tour sponsored by Budweiser in the ’90s. That was when Anheuser-Busch was American owned. A great American company that later sold out to the Europeans and became unrecognizable to the American consumer. Such a shame.”
Another artist, Kid Rock, posted an Instagram video Tuesday of him shooting Bud Light cans with a rifle before saying, “F*** Bud Light and f*** Anheuser-Busch!” The video has over 1.5 million views and 27,000 comments as of Friday morning.
The Gateway Pundit, a conservative news site, also reports that some stores have canceled Bud Light orders in response to the new campaign.
WALSH CALLS FOR CHANGE IN CONSERVATIVE BOYCOTT TACTICS
In response to the Bud Light controversy, conservative commentator Matt Walsh noted that while conservatives have often called for boycotts of companies that promote a progressive agenda, such protests have often had little effect.
“‘Go woke go broke’ is the lamest right-wing cope of all time,” Walsh wrote in a Twitter thread.
It’s not even close to true. It should but it isn’t. By sheer numbers we have the power to inflict severe financial damage on companies that spit in our faces, but we don’t. The brands know that we don’t. We’re so behind in the culture war that nearly every company is woke now. We can’t boycott them all, which is a fact conservatives use as an excuse to do nothing. This attitude infects the Right.
Instead, Walsh encouraged a more targeted approach, saying,
Here’s what we should do: Pick a victim, gang up on it, and make an example of it. We can’t boycott every woke company or even most of them. But we can pick one, it hardly matters which, and target it with a ruthless boycott campaign. Claim one scalp then move onto the next.