Since Anheuser-Busch ran a social media campaign in April with 26-year-old transgender actress, comedian, and TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light’s sales and overall market share have dropped considerably.
All of this resulted from a right-wing boycott of the product for using a transgender person as a spokesperson.
Bud Light’s share of retail sales has dropped about three percentage points since the boycott began, and the brand has been dethroned as America’s most popular beer.
In addition to the boycott, singer Kid Rock filmed himself shooting several Bud Light cases with a submachine gun in a protest video. Several Budweiser factories also received bomb threats in response.
Senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn wrote a letter to the Beer Institute, a national trade association that represents major American brewers in governmental matters, asking them to “open an investigation” to review Anheuser-Busch’s “marketing partnership” with Dylan Mulvaney. They expressed concern that this single post TikTok campaign amounts to marketing to underage people because her audience “skews younger,” even though Mulvaney is 26 years old.
So some high-quality people were obviously upset by Budwiesers’s decision to employ a transgender person as a spokesperson.
I consume very little alcohol, and it’s been more than 30 years since I’ve consumed beer, so I don’t have a dog in this beverage fight except to say this:
Apparently, a large number of Bud Light drinkers were ignorant bigots.
Like homophobic, I avoid using the word “transphobic” because fear has nothing to do with this boycott. It’s hateful bigotry.
Nothing more.
Dylan Mulvaney is a college-educated, highly successful, exceptionally popular, grown-ass adult. She has worked with Fortune 500 brands like Ulta Beauty, Instacart, and Kate Spade. She has performed onstage in national tours of Broadway shows.
She also happens to be transgender.
This was apparently too much for the easily triggered bigots who seem to melt like snowflakes at the thought that a transgender person might be drinking their preferred beverage or making money endorsing it.
Machine guns, bomb threats, and Congressional interference seem like a bit of an overreaction to a single TikTok video.
But when a large number of your customers are apparently bigots, I guess this was bound to happen.
