Why The Hate Towards Bud Light? Social media is full of conservative figures, including music stars and even elected officials, expressing extreme anger at the popular beer brand, or even shooting guns at cans of it. And all because of a minor endorsement deal with a trans influencer. A look at a sponsorship drove a lot of the right insane.
— KidRock (@KidRock) April 4, 2023
What We Know
Have you ever shot a gun at a case of beer and posted a video of said shooting on your social media channels?
Most people in the world, I would imagine, have not. But musician Kid Rock did just that last week.
Why would this Michigan-born man of ostentatious Southern affectations do such a thing?
It appears that the man who once sang of his desire to “start an escort service for all the right reasons” had a moral objection to that brand getting into business with a transgender influencer named Dylan Mulvaney. (He also, as pointed out by comedian Patton Oswalt, managed to miss two whole cases of the stuff, despite shooting at it with a machine gun at close range.)
Kid Rock isn’t alone. Country music singer Travis Tritt announced that he was dropping Bud Light products from his tour rider. Former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake announced that her “office” would be dropping Budweiser products, although since Lake holds no office, it’s unclear what that means. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) declared on Twitter that “I would have bought the king of beers, but it changed it’s gender to the queen of beers,” over a newly purchased 24-pack of Coors Light (more on Coors below.)
One Missouri-based beer distributor canceled an appearance by the famed Budweiser Clydesdales, citing “safety concerns for their employees.”
Beyond celebrities, the sort of online conservative characters who post about transgenderism, and little else, appear to have been driven into paroxysms of rage by an endorsement deal with a social media figure with whom they would seemingly have little to no reason ever to interact.
About Dylan
Dylan Mulvaney is a 26-year-old California native who came out as a transgender woman in 2022. Mulvaney has nearly 11 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million on Instagram. Mulvaney has done an extensive amount of stage acting and interviewed President Biden last year at the White House.
Mulvaney has been documenting the first year of her transition on social media. On April 1, she posted a video of herself with several cans of Bud Light, and also revealed a commemorative can marking her “ 365th Day of Girlhood.”
An underrated part of the Mulvaney “controversy” has been that it’s pretty clear most of the people critical of the deal are not the sorts of people who spend a great deal of time on Instagram or TikTok. These people appear to either know very little of the world of influencers and social-media-first celebrities or hold it in self-evident contempt. Such influencers very frequently reach collaboration or sponsorship deals with brands, while leveraging their large followings. This is far from a rare thing, but many people, especially those who are, say, over 35, are likely entirely unfamiliar with that world.
That said, Dylan Mulvaney has not been made the “face” of Bud Light. She has not been featured in a Super Bowl commercial or any national television advertising. The can that features her face is not being sold in stores. Mulvaney’s deal has not displaced a deal previously held by anyone else. This isn’t like one of those controversies about a trans woman participating in a women’s athletic competition – there’s no argument to be made that anyone has been hurt, in any way, by Mulvaney and Bud Light making this deal.
As for that canceled Clydesdales event, I’d say Mulvaney is less to blame for that than the sort of people who might see fit to disrupt a promotional event featuring a bunch of horses.
In other words, those who don’t follow Mulvaney on Instagram or TikTok likely would not have even heard about this sponsorship at all, had there not been such a freakout about it.
Two flavors
There appear to be two different things at play in the objections to what Bud Light did, depending on who’s making the argument.
There are those arguing, mostly from a place of prejudice and cruelty, that being transgender is wrong in and of itself and that in partnering with Mulvaney, Bud Light is allied with the forces of immortality or worse. There have been attempts to lay the recent Nashville massacre at Mulvaney’s feet because it was carried out by a different trans person.
Thanks to the algorithmic disaster that is Elon Musk’s “For You” page, I see such sentiment pretty much every time I log onto Twitter. Say what you will about TikTok, but I rarely see any type of ugly prejudice when I go on there.
More frequently, the argument has been made that partnering with Mulvaney is a bad business decision on the part of Bud Light and its parent company. The idea is that Bud Light is clearly a beer for blue-collar, conservative Americans, the sort of people likely to be turned off by the presence in the company’s marketing of a transgender person. There’s even been an effort to isolate the specific executive thought to be responsible for the Mulvaney decision (more likely, someone just found a picture of a woman who works there on LinkedIn and extrapolated from that.) The New York Post wrote about that particular executive, but did not establish that she was responsible for this particular sponsorship.
Bud Light, like a lot of major brands, likely does a great deal of market research, and appears to have reached a conclusion: It pays to market towards younger drinkers, the sort of people who use TikTok and Instagram, and also to those who are either LGBTQ-identifying themselves or allied with those who are. In 2023, there’s pretty clearly more money in that demographic than there is in the sort of people who recoil in horror at trans people.
There’s a strong belief on the political right in the doctrine of “go woke, go broke” – that if a company embraces what’s seen as a “woke” agenda, they’re likely to suffer business-wise. Making this argument often requires an impressive cherry-picking of data, whether it’s a drop in a company’s stock over a matter of days, or Netflix or Disney losing streaming subscribers in one particular quarter as if that was due to more “wokeness” that quarter than the ones where they gained them. This is, needless to say, an exceptionally ignorant and tunnel-visioned way of analyzing business or the stock market, as many, many things go into changes in the stock price of any international corporation.
In this case, that doesn’t apply because Bud Light’s parent company, InBev, had a recent 10-day streak of stock market gains, even as the controversy was raging, The Street reported. Of course, InBev is an international company that owns many brands, and reaction to one advertising campaign is unlikely to be the main factor in its stock price.
Bud and Coors
There’s a history here, one that goes back further than most people might be familiar with.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, that newly minted Coors customer, might be interested to know that Coors is also vocally supportive of the LGBTQ community.
It hasn’t always been that way, and in the 1970s, Coors was notorious for anti-gay practices, including requiring employees to take polygraph tests asking if they were gay. All the way back in 1977 — in the sort of thing that would be denounced as “woke cancel culture” if it happened today — the famed activist Harvey Milk teamed up with local unions to boycott Coors, including the removal of its beer taps from San Francisco’s gay bars.
Many years later, Coors changed their tune, and at one point they employed Mary Cheney, the openly gay daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, as a liaison to the LGBTQ community. Today, Coors is a sponsor of Denver’s Pride Parade and Denver PrideFest. Even so, Bud Light has been described as “the default cheap beer at gay bars since 1977.”
Matt Walsh and company, especially with their focus on schools, and using the slogan “Save Our Children” for anti-gay sentiment, are merely re-enacting the politics of Anita Bryant, John Briggs, and other figures who Harvey Milk was fighting against in the late 1970s. The difference is that regarding LGBTQ equality, things have changed a great deal about public attitudes in the ensuing decades. And that also goes for the corporate response to those changes.
You might not care much about what goes on on TikTok or Instagram, and that’s okay. Mulvaney’s social media persona may not be your cup of tea, and that’s okay, too. But what’s not okay is the hateful overreaction driving prominent people to vicious slurs, boycotts of one LGBTQ-inclusive beverage brand in favor of another, or taking up arms against Bud Light.
Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
