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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Culture war refresh. Many people are familiar with the Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney controversy. About a week afterwards people on this website noted there wasn’t a large impact on the stock price of InBev, Bud’s parent company,

Well, InBev is now down about 10% from when the whole Bud Light - Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship. Bud light revenue is still down materially. At the same time, other major alcohol companies appear flat or up materially. Therefore, it seems the boycott has had real negative impact on InBev.

Does this mark the start of the right finding it’s muscle or is this a dead cat bounce?

The boycott worked this time because Bud Light is completely interchangeable with other products and they attacked their core audience. For the same reasons, the Gillette boycott had a real impact.

Other companies, like Disney or Apple, can get away with woke signalling because their business has a moat.

I wonder about Disney. I have no idea how many people are like me, but all they've done is motivate me to stop watching TV and movies, period. They've motivated me to not let my kid watch TV, period. If they own all the media, I stop consuming all the media.

Instead I've been woodworking. My wife has been gardening. My daughter has been getting super creative with art supplies, crafts, playing pretend and running around outside. We're probably all better off with less consoomer media, regardless of the fact that Disney has been pushing an odious agenda. If anything I should thank Disney for becoming so awful it finally got me to touch grass more.

To be clear, the Disney boycott is also hurting them, they just haven’t acknowledged it.

Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.

This is a reasonable counterpoint, but it seems like they’d been making terrible products for years and only started suffering with the boycotts.

Or it takes a while to degrade a brand.

The MCU had a lot of good will to burn through post-Endgame. The Sequel Trilogy...not as much but even then it started at $2 billion with an incredibly unoriginal work and still ended up at $1 billion for an awful final installment in a cursed trilogy.

The MCU was legitimately great. The problem is that the main story ended with Endgame.

Problem? I'm thankful every day Endgame gave me a perfect place to get off the consoomer train I'd found myself trapped on since my early 20's when Robert Downy Jr swept us off our feet.