The Bud Light Boycott is Somehow Still a News Story

Three months in and everyone, especially the right wing press, continued to be fascinated with the power of a transphobic tantrum over Bud Light’s partnership with a blameless trans woman.

by Evan Urquhart

This is a Bud Light story, and on Assigned Media that means we start with this: Dylan Mulvaney never did anything wrong, she just existed as a trans woman. If you’ve just woken from a coma, Bud Light sponsored a 30 second Instagram spot with Mulvaney, who the far-right had hated ever since she asked Joe Biden about gender-affirming care bans, and gave her a custom can of watered-down beer with her face on it. The meltdown that followed kicked off with Kid Rock shooting cases of Bud Light to curry favor with extremists express his displeasure with trans women doing brand sponsorships. Conservatives threatened to boycott the brand, which at first was shrugged at because boycotts are usually unsuccessful. Here in month three, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems that Bud Light was completely dependent on unhinged transphobic alcoholics; Anheuser-Busch stock plunged, and the brand has recently been displaced by Modelo as the top selling beer in America.

The weakness of Bud Light’s sales, and stocks, can be contrasted with a continuing bull market in stories about Bud Light’s woes in conservative media. Just this week we’ve scrolled past a story about a new Bud Light ad being mocked on social media, Costco putting an asterisk on its in-store signage indicating they will not continue to stock the brand, a story about an “ultra right” beer brand attempting to capitalize on the attention for marketing, and a poll by the Daily Mail that found Mulvaney’s personal popularity and cultural relevance are undamaged by being at the center of a hate campaign. Mainstream media also continues to cover the drama, with CNN doing an expose of Kid Rock’s bar, which apparently still carries Bud Light, perhaps for target practice.

Meanwhile, other transphobic boycott attempts don’t seem to have had the impact, or the staying power. While Target became a, well, target outrage over their Pride collection faded quickly. And do you remember the big Kohl’s boycott? I didn’t think so.

screenshot from the Independent

So what do we make of all this, three months later? First off, it’s likely that Bud Light’s position was uniquely precarious in a way that no one really understood at the beginning of the hubbub. The brand’s Vice President of Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, described a brand that had been in decline when she took over, with her mission being to diversify the customer base to halt the damage. Heinerscheid, who was placed on a leave of absence as the brand sought to mollify transphobes, doesn’t seem to have realized the decline was so severe the tiniest disruption might cause the bottom to fall out with the aging demographic of rural white men who had been the core customer base for decades. The brand probably didn’t help itself by failing to stand up for the principle that trans women don’t deserve to be harassed out of the country over an Instagram spot, either. Any possible goodwill the brand could have garnered to make up for angering the far-right was squandered, and the far-right seems to have delighted in rubbing that in over and over.

However, the unique vulnerability of Bud Light, or the fact that the beer itself is terrible and no one should care if it disappears from the earth entirely, are not the only important considerations. By terrorizing a huge company into closing bottling plants and placing executives on leave, anti-trans extremists have sent a powerful cultural message that the smallest support for a trans person is controversial and potentially risky. That sort of thing has knock on effects, even if no other company targeted was in as delicate a position as Bud Light was. Mainstream media has failed to make it clear that Mulvaney was blameless or that the people fueling and delighting in the boycott are far-right extremists who hate trans people for no reason. The existence of trans people was successfully made a source of controversy, with two sides that are often presented as equally valid, such as in a CNN spot just yesterday, which featured a woman claiming that Bud Light partnering with a trans woman was somehow a danger to her grandchildren.

The process of mainstreaming extremism in the press did not start with the Bud Light boycott, and it seems likely it would have continued to snowball regardless of this or any other specific incident. It is not, however, good. Not for trans people, and not for a country that continues to play footsie with fascism.