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I've been on the record in the past stating that most Right Wing consumer boycotts will not be effective, either due to lack of follow through on the part of conservative consumers or because many corporations lack a conservatively oriented base of talent to run their businesses. I was under the impression that the recent Bud Light trans kerfuffle would be similar. As one tweet put it, "Kid Rock makes music for people who know how to steal catalytic converters;" and the ad itself was so obscure that I never would have heard of it without the internet megaphone around it. (Despite being exposed to an unfortunate degree of Bud Light content through sports broadcasts etc) If the boycott ever got off the ground, no way it would have stamina. A couple suits would be fired, but six months from now people will still drink Bud Light.
Well so far, it looks like I was wrong, The WSJ reports. {Link may be paywalled, I read it in print, I can send you a scan of it if you need it} Major points:
-- Bud light's weekly sales have dropped 21% compared to last year since April 1, on a steady downward trajectory. Coors and Miller's light offerings have gained 20% during that time. This near perfect replacement (IDK how much other light beer brands matter here) indicates that one of the early criticisms of a potential boycott, that drinkers would replace bud light with another AB INbev corporate product, was wrong. Miller-Coors is a different company, even if it is another giant corporate brewer and not my preferred local choice of Yuengling. Other AB products are dropping sales as well, even those with very separate marketing like Michelob and Busch Light. 20% sales drop for Bud Light has a huge effect on the US beer market. Bud light accounted for as much as 17% of total unit sales of beer in America. If the "Right wing boycott" can bring down Bud Light, damn, these guys are loaded for bear. That is a pop culture, business, and media juggernaut, that is the best selling product of the biggest brewer. If touching trans issues in a mild way can bring sales down 20% in one go, for any brand, that will change the game.
-- What I thought was a weakness of the Bud Light Boycott (that essentially no one was going to see the ad organically), has turned out to be its strength. Similar dynamic to how very clearly bad police shootings cause less controversy than police shootings that really weren't that bad. The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it. Right wing influencers successfully made this into a much bigger deal than it was.
-- A major force pushing Bud to change course was the middlemen. Wholesalers and distributors are a key part of Bud Light sales, they move the beer from the brewery to grocery stores and bars etc. Because they are independent of AB Inbev, and often small family owned businesses, probably small c conservative local business owners, they aren't beholden to corporate woke hierarchies and need to protect their own businesses not their future corporate careers. Without those businesses Bud Light cannot function as a brand, and their anger forced corporate to do something. That gets back to the point I made in my prior post: Conservative here have found an industry that isn't beholden to woke talent the way media is, isn't beholden to woke capital the way public companies are, and targeted it. Good work.
-- AB Inbev is apparently promising distributors, in addition to various little trinkets like a free case of Bud Light for every distributor employee, that it will spend "multiples" of its original planned marketing budget on Bud Light. AB thinks they need to come out in force to push back, they clearly think their business in general is threatened. Lose Bud Light and the whole company will shrink.
-- I was wrong about this one. I thought this was a tempest in a teapot, it could have legs. It would be literally impossible for me to reduce my consumption of AB Inbev products, I don't know the last time I drank a Bud heavy or light. My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke. Go buy a case of Yuengling instead, their family ownership supported Trump and got shit for it. Bud Light Delenda Est.
You're forgetting important context, friend.
On March 27th, A transgender shooter killed children and teachers at a Christian School, with direct political motivations.
On April 1st, LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the Bud Light-Mulvaney partnership drops.
In effect all of the powers that be ignored the victims of the shooting, provided some cover to the shooter, and essentially turned the entire thing into an opportunity to advance transgender issues.
It was an EXTREME "insult to injury" moment. AB was inadvertently(???) sending the message "We do not give a shit that you, our main customer demographic, was just targeted for a politically motivated attack and we will in fact implicitly celebrate the shooter with this marketing campaign that basically claims your favored beer brand for the blue tribe."
At best, AB was being completely tone-deaf in the timing. At worst, this was a flex. "Not only do we not care that you got attacked, we can kick you when you're down without fearing retaliation."
So people were PISSED off to start, got increasingly riled up by the coverage of the aftermath and the shooter, and THEN Bud Light waltzed in with a marketing campaign that poked them right in the still-fresh wound. So the rest unfolded in a fairly logical fashion.
What evidence do you have that the shooting was politically motivated? One article says:
And you can tell this media outlet isn't particularly dedicated to pushing the trans agenda by the fact that they're not using the shooter's preferred pronouns. The obvious explanation is that this particular school was targeted because the shooter once attended it.
Are trans people collectively guilty for a shooting committed by one trans person? And if they are, how long do they have to wait after the shooting before they can go out in public again without this being a provocation? How long does everyone else have to wait before it becomes acceptable to associate with trans people again?
The Wikipedia article on the shooting says:
The president ordering that flags on all federal buildings be flown at half-staff is certainly not ignoring the victims. It seems that they reacted the same way they react to other school shootings. Every remotely notable left-wing figure that publicly reacted to the shooting condemned it and called for more gun control. No one decided that guns and school shootings are fine now because sometimes a member of the ingroup will be shooting at the outgroup.
There's generally a clue when the shooter leaves behind a 'manifesto', but until it is released it's hard to be certain.
These two options are not in contradiction and can easily both be true.
No.
But the entire message coming from the media in the wake of every other mass shooting is that white people/gun owners/right wingers are in some way responsible for the actions of one violent person.
So it's quite noticeable when the message differs from that.
Yes, because they want gun control. Which is a position that the right would not agree to and, likewise, is unlikely to solve the problem.
You see the problem here?
In the wake of a mass casualty event, if it is perpetrated by a white male, or anyone with possible right wing affiliation, then the message is "white males and/or right wingers are a dangerous threat that must be curbed, and we can do that by banning guns." They demonize outgroup, and demand gun control.
If it's perpetrated by a nonwhite person or someone who has lefty affiliations, it gets buried immediately, and then they demand gun control.
The message always demonizes one side, and the proffered solution is always a policy the right opposes fervently. There is no acknowledgement that the problem runs deeper than guns or that whites, males, and righties are not the main driving factors of violence in the U.S.
But they're made to bear all the stigma.
The right has noticed this for a long time. But in this event, it was a lefty shooting up a bunch of Christians.
And oh boy seems like we don't get to have any discussion on this issue because that would cloud the waters on who the bad guys and good guys are.
I don't know if you're really missing the context here but consider the following:
Biden didn't visit the town, he didn't talk to any of the victims' families, and as far as I know has not actually condemned the shooter.
Kamala Harris visited... but didn't meet the victims or their family, and instead met with the expelled legislators.
MEANWHILE, those same three Nashville legislators GOT INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.
Please, can you possibly explain the difference in messaging and treatment between the victims of the shooting and the legislators, other than the victims being red-tribe coded and the legislators blue-tribe coded?
The whole point here is that the Right has NOTICED THAT THEY ARE TREATED DIFFERENTLY, and are effectively treated as though their concerns barely matter.
Over and over and over again.
And they felt the need to lash out or otherwise make their displeasure known.
And Anheuser-Busch wandered in and made for a wonderful target with a terribly tone-deaf marketing push.
The shooter didn't call it a manifesto and some of the people who've read it have also objected to the term. It may well turn out to be an explicit call for violence against Christians in the name of trans rights, but it may also turn out to be the incoherent ramblings of a crazy person. Public statements from police officers who've read it imply that it's the latter.
My understanding is that the blame is not placed on gun owners as such, but on gun ownership as a phenomenon and, indirectly, on those who support it, who, yes, tend to be mostly gun owners and right wingers. The view of people advocating gun control is that reducing access to guns reduces mass shootings, hence those who support easy access to guns are actively preventing the prevention of mass shootings. It's not just a vague tribal association between them. In contrast, how does an ad featuring Dylan Mulvaney actively promote mass shootings by trans people?
So the disagreement is on whether gun control will reduce mass shootings. As I said above, the reasoning is "we want gun control" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "gun owners are bad", not, as you are suggesting, "gun owners are bad" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "we want gun control". This means that, if you could, theoretically, convince them to oppose gun control, they would no longer believe gun owners are bad. (The major assumption here is that politicians are sincerely trying to make the world a better place and aren't just playing tribal signalling games.)
The position of gun control advocates is consistent with the above. They're not trying to ban guns for their outgroup, they're trying to ban them for everyone, because removing access to guns prevents mass shootings, and then the discussion of who is to blame for mass shootings is moot because, even if the outgroup are violent neo-Nazis who want to massacre minorities, they can't access guns and are therefore unable to do so.
Do sitting presidents usually visit the site of a mass shooting and meet the victims' families? (Two randomly selected examples: in 2018 Trump visited the victims, in 2021 Biden didn't, even though the shooter was in the outgroup and apparently personally disliked Biden.) Do presidents usually explicitly condemn mass shooters, or is their belief that mass shootings are bad and the shooter is a bad person implicit in their order to fly flags at half-staff, their expressions of condolences, etc.?
Honestly, meeting the victims and their families seems like a pointless PR move. He'll say how sad he is, thoughts and prayers and all that, take a few photos, but will anything useful come out of the meeting? (This applies in general, not just in this particular incident.)
In contrast, from the Democrats' point of view (I'm trying to steelman here), the legislators are heroes who are trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening again and who are being persecuted for it. A meeting with them won't be used just to express condolences, it can be used to discuss political matters, to further their cause, to facilitate the enactment of policies that would prevent mass shootings. This is real, meaningful action, not just a PR stunt.
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