Bud Light Was Never a True Ally, but Their Response to Backlash Was Still Disappointing

Listen, even if you don’t know me very well, one thing I’m very upfront with is that I’m not a huge stan of capitalism. I work for money because I have to (though I’m grateful to love what I do!) and I understand that huge, multi-billion dollar companies are not my friends looking to make my life better in any way, no matter what their marketing tactics may try to say.

So, with all that said, I always knew Bud Light and their parent company, Anheuser-Busch, weren’t real LGBTQ allies. Sure, they sponsored some merch at Pride and gave one trans influencer a brand deal, but they’re not really looking to make the world better for our community. Still, their recent statement addressing the absolute batshit backlash they received because of their work with Dylan Mulvaney is still disappointing.

In case you’ve been lucky enough to be offline for the last few weeks, Bud Light recently collaborated with Mulvaney, a trans actor/singer/lovely person, for a March Madness campaign after they sent her personalized cans of their product to celebrate her 365 Days of Womanhood. What should’ve been a cute little moment that passed under radar, because it truly wasn’t that big of a deal, has been blown out of proportion by conservatives who declared war on the brand itself.

They went out, bought the beer with their own money (???), and destroyed it in all sorts of outlandish ways to really stick it to Bud Light, I guess—a thing conservatives are weirdly prone to doing. One conservative even went so far in his grift to create his own “anti-woke” beer, which we can only imagine tastes like pure horse piss.

The backlash to a simple influencer collaboration was completely outrageous, but not out of the ordinary for conservatives as they love to act like the “snowflakes” they accuse the left of being, but their disdain for Mulvaney receiving a personalized can that isn’t even available in stores has truly grown out of control. Just like week, The Los Angeles police responded to a bomb threat made at Budweiser’s Van Nuys factory, per CBS News.com. There have been other bomb threats made against factories across the country, and even Budweiser’s employees have been threatened with harm over this collab—just a total chill and normal response to one trans influencer’s minor brand crossover.

Naturally, because violence was being leveraged against their company, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch made a statement addressing this absurd controversy, but his words were less than comforting in the wake of bigots trying to bomb factories over one can of beer. CEO Brendan Whitworth explained that he never wanted to “be part of a discussion that divides people” and wants to spend time “traveling across America, listening to and learning from [his] customers, distributors, and others”—whatever the hell that means—needlessly walking back a bit of marketing so innocuous that most people never would have known about it if not for conservatives blowing it out of proportion.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t think we should be giving equal time to a discussion where one side is trans people trying to live their lives in peace and the other side is a bunch of crybaby bigots who literally want to bomb trans people and their allies out of existence. This whole situation is a completely fabricated issue conservatives made up because they’ve made trans people their new boogeyman of the week.

As a company that decided to work with a trans person, Anheuser-Busch should have stood by Mulvaney and told these hateful monsters to stick it where the Sun doesn’t shine. But, once again, we have to watch a company profit using the LGBTQ community, then kowtow to a minority of hateful people who were going to purchase their product anyways.

Unsurprisingly, there were lots of responses to this statement, most of them being “Hey, um, what the F is this?” Below are some of my personal favorites:

At the end of the day, Bud Light tried to seem inclusive until the situation became too hard for them. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t take threats of violence seriously, but backing off when bigots come to your doorstep is such a fatal mistake. These conservatives will not have Anheuser-Busch’s back because they’re mindless drones who will get mad at anything Fox News tells them too. If you want to support a marginalized community, then do it with your whole chest. If you can’t manage that, then please keep your performative support to yourself, thank you very much.

(featured image: screenshot)