Conservative Tantrum Over Bud Light, Mulvaney Stretches into Second Week

Why do conservatives care so much about their piss beer?

by Evan Urquhart

It’s been 10 days and conservatives are still upset that Dylan Mulvaney’s face was on a beer can. The temper tantrum over Bud Light’s partnership with the trans TikTok star has shown rare staying power in a right wing media environment whose usual mode is an unceasing hunt for newer, fresher sources of outrage. Major news outlets have covered the drama. According to Newsweek, even celebrities have weighed in on whether or not it’s a big deal for a touchstone brand for white American manhood to partner with a trans woman. It’s not just Kid Rock, either. There are actual celebrities weighing in on this like… Paris Hilton… and … Jersey Shore’s Sammi Sweetheart?

Joe Rogan, who reportedly does have an audience, weighed in as well. Rogan threw back a cold Bud Light and scoffed at the idea that people would care whether trans women also drink it.

screenshot from the New York Post

There are multiple reports that the conservative push to boycott the brand has had at least some impact. Cowboy State Daily (which was founded by a Republican operative), seems to have done some half-decent reporting, surveying bars in Wyoming and finding large towns haven’t seen a dip in sales, but about half of the small-town bars reported fewer sales of Bud Light recently. According to the 2020 US census, about 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas.

There are also absurd claims circulating on social media, which we are including an example of here mainly because it struck us funny.

screenshot from Twitter

Headlines on the right have proclaimed that partnering with Mulvaney has been a disaster for Bud Light’s parent company, InBev. Fox News ran a story headlined “Anheuser Busch sheds roughly $5 billion in value since Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney pact sparked outrage.” The story helpfully included a stock tracker that allowed the reader to look at the value of the publicly traded company over different time periods. This showed the stock is up today, down over the past five days, up over the past month, up over the past year, and down over the past five years.

Mainstream publications, in contrast, have stressed two points. The first is that, given the size of InBev’s business, a $5bn loss is nothing serious. The second is that Bud Light’s trajectory has been going downward as American beer drinkers diversified their tastes and moved to their competitors, and finding new markets is imperative if the brand wants to reverse that. (For mainstream business reporter-y analysis, read this Vox piece. It’s excellent.)

Queer news outlets have thoroughly, and often brilliantly mocked the right wing hysterics, which many people who have watched similar right wing boycott cycles predict won’t last much longer or have much of an impact. But it seems worth asking why this been such a relatively major and long-lasting story? The core of it is the place Bud Light has occupied in the American psyche. It’s not just an American beer, it’s the American beer, or at least it has been. In the 80s it was ubiquitous in primetime TV ads, but Americans these days use streaming services. It’s got rural cred, but most Americans now live in cities. It was a beer primarily for white men, straight men, working class men, but those men aren’t the only people drinking beer these days.

Bud Light’s loss of dominance has coincided with a loss of cultural dominance among a certain group of people, and they’re pitching a fit about it.