(LifeSiteNews) — The verdict is in: the social conservative backlash to Bud Light’s decision to use transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney as a brand ambassador constitutes one of the most successful boycotts in recent political history. From the New York Post:
Many Anheuser-Busch distributors say they are resigned to their painful Bud Light losses — and that they have given up on luring back disaffected customers following the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco, The Post has learned. After four months of hiring freezes and layoffs — with some beer truck drivers getting heckled and harassed even as Bud Light sales have dropped by more than 25% — Anheuser-Busch wholesalers have accepted that they have lost a chunk of their customers for good — and need to focus on a new crop of drinkers.
“Consumers have made a choice,” said an executive at a Texas-based beer distributor who did not want to be identified. “They have left [Bud Light] and that’s how it’s going to be. I don’t envision a big percentage of them coming back.”
In fact, industry insiders expect Bud Light sales to continue to decline, even after a few attempts at recovering a blue-collar image with more traditional advertising campaigns. Bud Light has become a symbol of woke over-reach, of corporate contempt for consumers, and of the relentless pushing of the LGBT agenda in nearly every aspect of society. Many people are fed up with it, and for once that frustration coalesced around a single brand. Disliking Bud Light has become as much a virtue-signal on the Right as promoting transgenderism is on the Left.
What makes the Bud Light boycott particularly interesting is that it was largely spontaneous. Yes, some conservative commentators called for beer drinkers to avoid Bud Light—the hosts at the Daily Wire did some heavily lifting and certainly contributed to the success. But an iconic American brand didn’t become synonymous with the LGBT agenda nearly overnight because a few conservative hosts suggested it. This was a huge consumer base that had transgenderism shoved down their throat one too many times and decided to shove back hard.
That’s why you had social media trends of men firing assault rifles at cases of Bud Light and viral videos of empty Bud Light beer stands at baseball games—because people wanted to send corporate America a message.
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The beer executives can hardly be blamed for being shocked by the backlash. After all, most major corporations have been doing some version of LGBT flag-waving for at least a half-decade. Why did Bud Light get hammered when so many other companies got away with it? One reason is probably that Bud Light was a blue-collar brand, and blue-collar beer buyers don’t like being preached at—and definitely don’t like being talked down to. Another is the massive escalation of corporations pushing the LGBT agenda: it meant that there was going to be a backlash at some point, and Bud Light managed to hand people the perfect opportunity to express their frustration. It’s pretty easy to switch to a different light beer, after all.
Most significantly, the successful Bud Light boycott has already had something of a chilling effect on other corporations. For some companies, pushing LGBT ideology won’t be so readily seen as an automatic win. The fact that consumers could cost a major corporation billions of dollars to send them a message also revealed, once again, that the silent majority is not on board with all of this stuff. Most people do not, in fact, think that Dylan Mulvaney is a woman. The Bud Light boycott reminded corporate executives in their airtight boardrooms with their DEI consultants that the World Out There is filled with normal people who don’t think like DEI consultants—and that to make money, you need to avoid treating them with contempt.
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