This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
In an earnings call, the Bud Light CEO has blamed the boycott on, what else? Why misinformation of course! https://twitter.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1654177439893815313
The second guy he brings on is somehow even worse than this. Talking about "leveraging teams" and "moving forward" and "supporting".
Not "we're sorry" not "no we don't support groomers" not "this was stupid and the person has been fired" not "no we dont' think you're all fratty out of touch people that we need to move past". Nothing.
Here are brands that AB INBEV owns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev?useskin=vector#Brands
Caving would get them absolutely slaughtered by Blues as well, and they fear that damage considerably more than the damage they're currently suffering.
That's cause they think they can ride out this current storm but being "transphobic" is forever.
We'll see. When this started there was an incredibly smug tone that the boycott wouldn't amount to anything (either cause cons had ADHD and couldn't commit or cause they would just buy other AB brands.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
This is silly.
'We're not releasing the political manifesto because it could be harmful'
Then
'There's no proof that it was political, the manifesto was never released'.
Also, look at the logic jumps anytime someone from a paler demographic does something. Consider the motivations put onto the marine who choked out that homeless guy on the subway.
More options
Context Copy link
That the manifesto has yet to be released, honestly. I expect it's being suppressed because it would reflect very badly on the trans community's mental state.
Has it ever taken this long before? I can't recall it having taken this long before.
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.
Usually, if the shooter has a manifesto, he'll post it himself, so it'll be available online immediately. I can't recall a case where the police found a shooter's stuff and published it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is why eyewitness testimonies are so unreliable. People are very bad at keeping track of details of events, and at best have a vague idea. It's a combination of laziness, confirmation bias, and mental heuristics.
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree on this point because I think it fundamentally misunderstands what was going on here. This wasn't "just" an ad or a joke that blew up, this was The Enemy planting a (defaced) rainbow flag in their territory and claiming it for themselves. The same way race-swapping characters in fiction works, the same way citing and misrepresenting obscure decades-old interviews to claim Samus Aran is Canonically Trans Now (and therefore OURS!) works, so too does this. Every corporation that bends the knee is a territory claimed. This is fundamentally how the culture war works, and misrepresenting it helps nobody understand anything.
It has never, ever, been about representation or, appealing to broader demographics, or anything like that. It has always been about claiming territory, and, more importantly, taking things away from your hated enemies. Example: "Why do they not make a new IP with a black actor as a lead?" Because it's more important to take away a cherished character from the whites. Even if this leads to financial downturn. Taking territory from the enemy is the only point.
More options
Context Copy link
This Mulvaney thing broke out in early April, according to Vox. From what I see, it appears to have not only led to a decline in sales, but has actually led the market to downgrade the value of AB InBev. If I were an stock investor in a given company, I wouldn’t care about company fundamentals like sales, but rather its stock returns.
AB InBev trades on NYSE with the ticker BUD, which may be surprising to those of us who would have thought “BUD” were some sort of marijuana ETF. I looked for beer/alcohol themed ETFs for comparison—but strangely, from my cursory search, there is no large-scale ETF focusing on just beer, or even alcohol (perhaps a business opportunity! TheMotte-managed Booze ETF when?).
However, there are relatively larger related ETFs with somewhat bigger scopes. BAD, which tracks Betting, Alcohol, and Drugs. PBJ, a “dynamic” food and beverage ETF. VICE “invests in the products and services that people find pleasure in regardless of economic conditions." VICE sounds potentially dangerously based as an ETF that invests in young women, but its holdings are merely in "alcohol, tobacco, gaming, food and beverage, restaurant and hospitality" (which actually—come to think of it—sound rather female-coded, sectors where female sexuality is heavily leveraged).
BUD has delivered a 3.5% loss since March month-end—whereas BAD gained 2.6%, PBJ 3.1%, and VICE 3.6%. Obviously, there could be substantial idiosyncratic volatility to individual stocks, but one could argue this transversy erased at least 6% of BUD shareholder value because a Marketing VP thought it’d be cute for BUD to be more “inclusive” and less “fratty.” BAD and VICE contain BUD, so a better comparison using BAD ex-BUD and VICE ex-BUD would only yield a greater difference.
In some ways, I’m mirin that Marketing VP, who is far less good-looking than I had initially imagined. Get that bag and get those woke good-girl points. It's impressive she was able to have such an influence. She'll likely be able to quickly get a new, high-status role elsewhere, as a #BossBabe who was forced out only due to misogynistic, incel transphobes.
I don’t think there’s anything I could realistically do to tank my employer’s valuation by 6+ percent even if I wanted to, that doesn’t involve me intentionally cultivating massive wrong-doings to get myself sent to prison (or the shadow-realm) and then ghost-writing a tattletale “tell-all” autobiography with lawsuits to boot. Like a more corporate, coherent, litigious Tim Donaghy.
“Everything is securities fraud,” Matt Levine loves to remark. It’d be great if this latest kerfuffle inspired greater attention, investor activism, and lawfare toward the principal-agency problem in corporations, where employees use company resources to advance their personal political interests. Yet, I know better than to expect anything.
it is impossible to disentangle this boycott from short-term stock fluctuations. It's noise or like the investing equivalent of Sagan's pale blue dot. You have to squint to see it or someone would have to point it out to you.
the decline relative to the chart is a few pixels.
It's not like BUD is that highly correlated with the S&P 500 anyway
/images/16831665491780062.webp
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
While obviously the right-wing machinery has activated the response, I think it's a mistake to view it solely as right-wing. I may be optimistically overestimating my demographic, but there's a growing tranche of people whom the left has left, who would gladly take an opportunity to picket against the cultural hegemony of the woke liberal left.
Also, the trans issue is not just another culture war issue. It's a strange and dark turn towards Orwellianism. Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions, including education of their children. While other excesses are also concerning, you can't get much more fundamental than 'queering' the truth that sex is binary. Beyond this just lies nihilism and complete post-capitalist decay.
The same is true for affirmative action. Which is how we got into this mess.
Yes, I'd agree.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about
ethics in games journalismthe ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.In the spirit of the thread…isn’t this kind of bad?
Compare the usual examples of cancel culture. An entertainer gets banished to the sixth circle of hell for a comment made in 1995. A guest speaker gets his gigs canceled because he was too charitable to the outgroup. Judging the exact deserts takes a distant back seat to defending the narrative.
Here the narrative is “Budweiser is a puppet of the woke.” The evidence for: a personalized can and cringey social media video. Oh, and a general sense that big corporations are the enemy. Which one of those points is doing all the work?
I don’t see much reason to be proud of people hitting all five of our “examples of waging the Culture War.” Of course, they weren’t really interested in convincing me. The fact that I don’t already parrot their lines means that I’m on the wrong team.
N.B.: I don’t exactly have skin in this game. Yuengling is the best of its bunch, but I’m more a Modelo guy. Please consider my sentiments on the subject to be as lukewarm as the average Bud.
Do people forget that mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped, the Culture War issue du jour was a Trans shooter killing kids at a Christian School?
Tempers were already burning extremely high on the Trans issue when Bud Light waltzed in. The response was not merely driven by Mulvaney, but by the rage felt over the incident in which the entire Cathedral functionally sided with the shooter.
Is this one of those "two screens" things? I don't recall seeing coverage siding with the shooter. Even in the more trans-centric spaces I visit, the most positive thing anyone had to say was nothing.
I predicted that it would be non-toxoplasma specifically because it was obviously awful and no one wants to back up a loser.
"The right exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-trans rhetoric"
(Try to imagine a headline that said "The Left exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-gun rhetoric" and whether that would make sense as a story lead.)
"Trans people already fighting for rights in Tennessee have a new fear in the wake of a tragedy"
Does it make sense, after a Trans shooter targets a Christian school, to emphasize that trans people should be more afraid?
Advocates fear an escalation of hate toward trans community after Nashville shooting
"Trans people face rhetoric, disinformation after shooting"
THAT one's a real interesting one for using the passive voice in such a creative manner.
"A Trans Day Of Vengeance Protest Was Canceled After Organizers Received A Threat Of Gun Violence Fueled By Right-Wing Anti-Trans Rhetoric"
I picked a cross-section of completely mainstream sources, I didn't even dig into the twitter content that was flying around at the time.
This was the media environment in the days after the shooting. You tell me, what screen were you watching?
Tell me, if you were only exposed to the aforementioned headlines, NONE of which tell you any information about the shooter's identity...
What group would you guess was victimized in the actual event?
Would it surprise you that the deaths of bunch of Christian children would result in an outpouring of support for the Trans community?
And here's the view from the other side:
"CBS News reportedly barring staff from using term 'transgender' to reference Nashville shooter"
"Transgender pastor compares treatment of 'marginalized' Nashville shooter to Jesus being crucified".
Thanks. I stand corrected. These headlines look like the ones from the Pulse shooting.
I will note that the Fox article has a link to exactly that:
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The response is switching between fundamentally interchangeable products. While people will claim that they love the taste or freshness or how cold it is the reality is that the American light adjunct lager sector of beer is a bunch of entirely fungible products differentiated primarily by branding. If a brand elects to move in the direction of being the brand that isn't for frat boys or is for trans people, I think it's proportionate and reasonable for some of their current redneck customer base to say, "I guess I'll have a Miller Lite then". The Kid Rock style "FUCK BUD LIGHT" response seems disproportionate to me, someone stating that they'll never have another Bud product seems disproportionate to me, but simply electing to grab the case of PBR instead of Bud doesn't really seem like some wild overreaction.
More broadly, I'd love for the norm to be "just make your beer and shut the fuck up about politics". I don't want my favored beverage makers to tell me how they support my 2A rights, or abortion, or back the blue, or that black lives matter, I just want them to ferment some grains, hop them appropriately, and put them in kegs and cans for me to enjoy.
See, this I can get on board with. Switching products for politics is a low, low bar. Grillpilling is a perfectly fine reason.
The performative outrage, the part where "people assumed it was so much bigger," that's what feels like a failure.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I guess I see it the way certain people see riots: it's not a good use of time and a total waste of legitimate grievance, but there's a reason it's gotten to this point.
The boycott is the language of the "not unheard but definitely feel like certain people want them to be".
Yes, it's waging the culture war. And people do bad things in war. Usually because losing is considered so much worse.
More options
Context Copy link
I must confess that I am baffled by the sentiment I see being expressed by yourself @Tarnstellung @Folamh3 and others that the response is somehow "disproportionate".
The Bud Light's VP of Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid had previously described Budweiser as "a brand in decline" and had stated that she wanted to distance the brand from its perceived "frat-boy" and "older working class white male" customer base to pursue a younger, hipper, "more inclusive" audience. From the looks of things her efforts were massively successful so why is she being placed on administrative leave instead of receiving a well-deserved round of high-fives, and a 6-figure bonus?
To my eyes answer seems simple, as much as upper-class urban professional types like to talk about elite theory, shareholder capitalism, and how culture is downstream of politics, the bottom-line is one of those things you can ignore right up to the moment you can't, and you can't piss off your core customer base without effecting your bottom line. The beer business is not like the banking business or the venture capital business the cost of switching from the perspective of individual customers is low and the industry itself is heavily dependent on local bottlers/distributors, if even a small fraction of them decide to cut ties or raise rates in responses this can have a significant downstream effect on a brand's profitability.
This is not Anheuser Busch making "a mistake", or conservatives pouncing on some naive interns' minor screw-up/faux pas, this is a senior executive executing a stupid self-destructive plan with competence, elan, and complete success, only to be surprised to discover that shooting yourself in the foot results in a bloody mess. Even if you're broadly sympathetic to the LBGTQ+ cause this is absolutely 100% the sort of fuck up that an executive should get fired for.
The part that raises it to true malfeasance was that they chose to do it mere days after a Trans mass shooter had killed a bunch of kids at a Christian school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Basically, most companies know way, way better than to come anywhere near a controversial matter in the wake of a serious tragedy. In almost any other case, this ad campaign would have been shelved for a month or more to avoid a politically contentious blowback. Or possibly cancelled altogether as it might seem to be bad taste.
But nope, they decided to poke the wound while it was fresh.
I'm going to join the (small) chorus saying that I genuinely don't think the Nashville shooting was on anyone's mind when Mulvaneygate started, the Bud Light controversy was definitely its own vein of outrage and wasn't tapping that prior thing. Maybe for some, it was indeed another straw on the herniated camel's back, but I will say that it definitely feels like its own thing.
It was certainly on people's minds, it had had been the single biggest news story of that week until Trump's indictment was handed down.
So I'm suggesting there's a connection even if it spun off to become its own thing.
Likewise, the three expelled legislators and their plight became it's own thing, although it also spun off the event.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The Budweiser campaign came from the marketing department. They acted as though because it wasn't aimed at a particular audience it was private and separate from the things the company said to other audiences, but that's not actually true. And to the extent the campaign succeeded, it succeeded because people who were otherwise their customers refused to purchase their product.
In other words, it isn't cancellation for exactly the same reason that the Dixie Chicks wasn't cancellation. I doubt that your guest speaker got his gigs cancelled because offended audience members refused to pay to attend his speech.
More options
Context Copy link
Replying to both you and @Tarnstellung here.
I'm not particularly anti-trans, but I am very anti-Bud Light, and very pro people exercising their power.
Bud Light is a piss-colored metaphor for the kind of corporate slop culture that I hate in all its forms. I hate that they put flags on the cans and advertise as America's beer while being owned by the Belgians. I hate the "out of touch bro" advertising themes they used for my childhood the way they glorify a male ideal of lazy stupidity, I hate the obligatory lukewarm "current thing" woke fakery even more. I hate the beer itself, it factually isn't very good, Yuengling and Lion's Head are both better, or very cheap, Lion's Head is modestly cheaper at my local beer distributor and has games under the bottle cap, its best attribute is that it is available. I hate the corporation slicing and dicing consumer groups to create market segments to convince that their piss-beer is a necessary accoutrement to their newly invented lifestyle. I hate that anyone cares enough about Bud fucking Light that they feel that their marketing is "claiming territory" in their identity.
I think the world would be a better place if people, rather than choking down the slop that ubiquitous and milquetoast corporations like AB Inbev serves, choose to actually try to get things they want. If the local brewery a mile from my house did pro LGBTQERTY_>?+} cans because the owner has a trans friend, I'd probably buy them if they made a porter. That's a real person expressing a real feeling. Bud Light marketing to trans fans is trying to redefine a lifestyle segment of the marketplace on a spreadsheet. Fuck em. I'd rather see the people stick it to the corporation.
In general, I don't think "Cancel Culture" as a concept can be applied unless you already had a legitimate claim on fame. Influencers, for example, have no claim on being canceled because they have no talent beyond people liking them. If your talent is people liking you, and people stop liking you, well sounds like you're shit out of luck, like a baseball player with the yips. Cancel Culture is more about someone like Woody Allen, where people will often say they love his work but hate him. Or people who want Kaepernick run out of the NFL, or people who want Deshaun Watson run out of the NFL. Being canceled means having talent and being banned from exercising that talent, not merely being disliked.
Bud Light has no legitimate claim on the being the best selling beer in the country. Its dominance is based purely on marketing and branding. Well, fuck up your marketing, fuck up your branding, fuck em. A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world.
Bud Light Delenda Est.
More options
Context Copy link
No. What you advocate would be tantamount to sitting back and letting your enemy seize your territories because fighting back makes you just as bad.
Bud Light and its customers were a Red Tribe icon, and then a defaced rainbow flag was planted in that to take it away from the Red Tribe. If a neighbouring country just stuck a flag in your province and crowed about how it was theirs now, would you not fight back? What about when they did it again in a different province? And again? And again? What sort of incentives would you be creating by refusing to react?
Add in the context of the even that happened mere days before the Bud Light ad dropped, which also targeted conservatives and ALSO stoked the trans issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Awhile back, Scott expressed cautious optimism that, were cancellation (although he didn't use that term) to become a bipartisan, symmetric weapon, it might lead to a sort of stalemate, wherein both sides agree to lay down their arms for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet.
That was in 2015. Hindsight is 20/20 so there's no sense in pointing out that his optimism was misplaced.
Nonetheless, whenever the right succeeds in pushing back against woke nonsense (even when the reaction is totally disproportionate to the perceived offense, as it probably is here), I can't help but feel a little glimmer of hope. Not because I want the right to win handily, but because I want Scott's prediction to come belatedly true. If the right can demonstrate that they are just as capable of overreacting to perceived slights as the woke left are, maybe that will result in a lowering of temperature across the board. But they have to actually demonstrate it: they have to put their money where their mouths are, it can't just be empty talk.
Or maybe this boycott will be a one-off, next quarter every McDonald's Happy Meal will include a copy of The Anti-Racist Unicorn, Tucker Carlson will grumble about it from his den, but McDonald's stock index won't budge. Who knows.
More options
Context Copy link
Charitably, one could see the disproportionate response as a reaction to woke encroachment into every facet of life. Making it costly for corporations to push their politics down their consumers throats might deter some of the worst excesses. In this sense, it is not about proportionality. That it's disproportionate is the point. Pour encourager les autres.
Realistically, I have absolutely no illusions that the right absolutely does want to do what the progs are doing. Their objections to cancel culture are mainly that they're not the ones doing the cancelling.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
They didn't just screw up the messaging, the HORRIBLY botched the timing.
Remember this, mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
Conservatives were ALREADY up in arms over being apparently targeted for death by a trans shooter, and found that the media mostly ignored the victims, AND THEN Bud Light comes in to poke them in the still-bleeding wound.
The 'over'reaction was based on the fact that the exact group Bug Light angered was ALREADY seething mad over their treatment in the wake of that tragedy.
More options
Context Copy link
It wasn't a minor screw up, it was a major screw up that they had hoped would be a major win. Remember, the point of the endorsement was for it to go viral, in a positive manner. Have all the tic toks and youtubers basically doing the ice bucket challenge, but with Trans-light. That it went viral was intentional. That it was negative was the mess up.
They also have not really apologized. Unless their statements have gotten far less milktoast than the initial set.
More options
Context Copy link
A screw-up that costs you multiple percentage points of total market share in a business as high volume and distribution heavy as beer is not "minor". That is a 100+ million-dollar mistake that will see senior executives getting called in to meetings with the board/stock-holders to explain what they were thinking, and what they plan to do to ensure that such a mistake is not made again.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't recall an apology.
He's probably referring to the milquetoast statement about respecting all Americans that accompanied the drop of their new TV Spot.
Speaking of which...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The right wing sees trans people as essentially equal to child molesters at this point.
If Bud Light had gone out of its way to create a special can for a child molester who was making tik tok videos espousing how fun it is to molest children, that would also not be looked at as "a minor screw up".
It's also not just the can, it's the marketing lady's followup video about how bud light wants to distance itself from the very people who buy it. She called them "fratty" and implied that this was "problematic".
Well, she got what she wanted!
But Light went out of their way to put a Trans influencer on the can mere days after a Trans mass shooter killed a bunch of kids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
So in that context... yeah.
It usually takes more than a few days to set up a marketing campaign, they probably started before the shooting. Should they have delayed it to not look bad?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Relevant note - that comment was not in a follow-up, it was an interview given about a month earlier and does not directly reference the Mulvaney placement. While it's reasonable to infer that Mulvaney was a part of this attempt at branding, it was not a post hoc justification.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I would not, and the above quote strikes me as about as obvious a case of squid-ink as it's possible to have. Mulvaney's video ad was a video ad, bought and paid for as part of the new marketing strategy by AB. Why would it be relevant whether it was on TV or on social media? They chose to put this person's face on their merchandise as part of that marketing strategy. major marketing pushes are not "jokes".
They designed and implemented an edgy mass-market social media campaign. They don't get to do that, and then claim that people reacting poorly to their message is due to "the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplifying it". They are the ones who fed a specific message into the biggest amplifier there is, with the specific intent to get it seen as widely as possible. People aren't worried that they're going to get a beer-can with a picture of a trans person on it, they don't want to buy beer from a company that thought it a good idea to advertise by teaming up with what they perceive to be a weird sex cultist.
The WSJ is spinning like a tornado in service of its tribal interests, not engaging in honest analysis of the facts at hand. As for AB, talk is cheap. The only reason they're apologizing is because they've actually taken a significant hit. If consumers actually object to AB's behavior, the only way to demonstrate that objection that AB and its peers will understand is to make the error hurt as badly as possible. To the extent they do not do this, their preferences will be deliberately minimized and ignored. AB volunteered to be a cautionary example, and is getting their wish.
Was it major though? Isn't this the exact sort of low-effort campaign influencers do all the time? It's one step above having a random "Instathot" pose with a bottle of Bang. It wasn't like he was the face of Bud Light on billboards.
I mean, it's still an ad and they're still responsible - would handing a can to a "racist" Instagram influencer get a pass? - and it was deeply unwise but I also see how this didn't even seem like a potential brand/career ender.
The reaction seems like the perfect storm of building resentment and an easy target for a boycott. Hard to predict.
I think you're missing some important context by just throwing "random" out there. In this particular case the random Instathot would have been just coming out of their meeting with the President and signing promotion deals with a raft of other big companies. Mulvaney is just not equivalent to some random woman on the internet.
More options
Context Copy link
The whole idea with "influencer" campaigns is that they cost next to nothing, and sometimes go viral getting you ridiculous bang for your buck.
So when one goes viral in a negative way, "don't hurt me bro, it was just supposed to be a shitty little influencer campaign" is probably not the excuse that will save your job.
More options
Context Copy link
A fair question, and I guess one must ask "compared to what?" AB's entire advertising budget for 2023? Do we have numbers? I doubt this pitch was more than a drop in the bucket, honestly, so it's easy to argue that this is an insignificant thing. Only, we have AB's VP of marketing bragging on the record about how they're trying to transform Bud Light's brand, attract a new, more youthful consumer base because their existing customer base is in decline. It doesn't seem arguable that the Mulvany ad was a straightforward part of this strategy. Large-scale brand strategies run by the VP of marketing are, in fact, a central example of a major marketing push, and this ad was a central example of that push's aim. It's not peripheral, it's not irrelevant, it's a perfect example of what they intentionally set out to do.
This isn't a case of bad execution of a good idea, but rather good execution of a bad idea. The problem isn't that they picked the wrong trans woman to be their face. The problem isn't that they wrote the script wrong, or posted the video at the wrong time or in the wrong place. The problem certainly isn't that Conservatives Pounced. You make an ad because you want people to see it; congratulations, people saw it. If it were a good ad, if this strategy were a good idea, the virality would be a massive windfall. It isn't, so it isn't. The problem is that the Trans issue is quite possibly the very hottest spot in our rapidly accelerating culture war, and they tried to use it for a brand-pivot that actively insulted their core customer base.
Sure, that's true. I'm not going to pretend that I knew the boycott would be this effective. But I'm pretty sure I could have told you or in fact AB that ditching your core customers to chase a population that considers you a punchline, via inserting yourself into the most contentious topic in American politics, was likely to be more than a little risky.
Yeah, I suppose it's hard to say if Mulvaney would really have just been more of a one-off thing or the prototype for a new marketing campaign.
The VP of marketing said a fair bit about her plans for a new marketing campaign. How do you interpret her statements?
When you phrase it that way, it sounds like a slam-dunk, but I think there's probably enough wiggle room between what we did get and the unrealized plan. A larger campaign might be comparatively more sanitized for the American public.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think they were harmed by the Marketing VP's comments which have a "woke' flavor:
...
The focus on "inclusivity", the criticism of the old (successful) brand as "fratty" and "out of touch", the claim that anything that caters to the old crowd is out of date and moribund...all of it pattern matches to "woke" (and yes, that includes her being a woman). If you're a conservative you've seen this play out more than a few times so, when they tell you they want to take away what you feel is yours, you believe them
IMO the choice of Mulvaney also screams "woke". Mulvaney is running around claiming to be not just a girl but the most obviously misogynist and appropriative vision of "girlhood" around. If anyone wrote him as a female character it'd rightly be seen as sexist.
It takes a lot of in-group loyalty imo to not see the issue with this guy and to choose to use them , even a bit, as a mascot for your brand aimed at a totally different market, instead of any other conceivable trans figure.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Switching costs = low.
This isn’t like boycotted Disney or Nike. Both of which have essentially monopolies on a lot of product and are differentiated. I would think sporting goods would have more flexibility but there are a lot of things Nike makes like even basketball shoes they have 80-90% shelf space. Swapping bud light for Miller light isn’t any noticeable different.
More options
Context Copy link
Which reminds me, is there any reliable data on the effect of the Gillette boycott?
It's tough to say because P&G bought Gillette just as cheap Chinese razors were beginning to be early adopted (I bought enough razors from a reseller in 2012 for less than a single Gillette refill pack that I still have many blades after more than a decade) and beards took off as a trend. The Gillette acquisition has resulted in numerous write downs (accounting reflections that the price was far too high), but it's quite hard to attribute any of them to a single cause (aside from the merger).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One criticism I've seen of right-wing boycotts are that they don't actually know how to do them. It's argued that the people in question just destroy those things publicly and then need to go buy new ones, meaning it doesn't actually cause any financial harm. Would you say that this is an accurate criticism? It seems like in this case, the people in question understood that only financial incentives would work.
I think that's a more general critique of right-wing protest efforts.
It helps that beer is a high volume consumer good with high replaceability. If 20% of Keurig owners swear of Keurig, Keurig might not feel much sting for years, since you don't replace them very often. If 20% of Bud drinkers swear off Bud, you're going to notice immediately.
More options
Context Copy link
I've seen this thrown around more as low-effort jabs on Twitter than a serious argument, and in multiple directions, e.g. pointing out people burning Harry Potter books or replacing the covers with Rowling's name removed, to protest Rowling's anti-trans-activist stance. The low-effort jabs tend to be responses to similarly low-effort posts where someone shows a video of themselves shooting the product in their backyard or whatever, which I don't think were meant as serious demonstrations of boycott, but rather as virtue signalling.
More options
Context Copy link
My criticism has been moreso that, especially in the case of media, there is no Red-Tribe workforce that can produce a top-tier product. You just can't make a Marvel blockbuster without Blue Tribe workers. Ditto Tech, Finance, etc. Corporations will always pick satisfying their workforce over satisfying a portion of their customer base, without Blue Tribe creatives Disney is nothing, without hard Red Tribe customers Disney might lose 20% of sales.
I'm not aware of what boycotts you are discussing where Red Tribers destroyed items publicly that then needed to be rebought. Can you give me an example?
I know I’ve seen examples of shooting/burning merchandise from the Kaepernick days. Presumably some of those were followed by getting different 49ers jerseys for the next season, and per the usual culture war rules of engagement, those were the ones getting blasted on Twitter.
I would be skeptical that it was ever a general trend.
More options
Context Copy link
HBomberGuy has a video in which he documents a case where people who watch Sean Hannity demonstrated their anger with Keurig's decision to back out of showing ads during his show. This was in response to Hannity supposedly defending Roy Moore. He shows videos that were posted of people destroying their coffee machines.
Or is this a case where there was no intention to ever boycott, just a few people getting angry?
More options
Context Copy link
That's true. Buit on the other hand, there are works that are more woke and less woke, and it is possible for reds to exert pressure in the direction of less wokeness even if it's impossible to find works that have absolutely no woke content at all. (Edit: Except in anime, actually.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As stark as 20% drop within a month is, I don't think you can declare a loss in your prediction yet; we've still got a long ways to go before the 6-month mark. I admit, I predicted similarly to you, and I too am surprised, and I could see the boycott having legs for 6 months and beyond, if regular consumers switch over to Coors Lite or Miller Lite or whatever and make it their habit. 6 months is more than enough time to develop a new habit that one sticks with. I personally don't drink much light beer at all, so I can't say if these products are sufficiently interchangeable that Bud Lite drinkers could stick with the change long-term; the beer snob in me would say obviously they're fungible, but that's obviously not accurate. So maybe the people who are angry/hyped enough to switch over for a month could only handle forcing down Coors Lite for so long before they have to switch back to their favored Bud Lite.
On the boycott itself, though, has any organization come out and called for people to boycott Bud Lite/ABI? I feel like I've seen a lot of people talking about not buying them in reaction to the Mulvaney marketing, but I haven't seen any widespread calls for solidarity coming from big names/organizations. Then again, I'm not much in the target audience for something like that, and I also don't remember much of that during the recent boycott against Hogwarts Legacy, so maybe I shouldn't expect to see something like that.
Are you sure? I think the only sense in which they're not fungible is the branding. As a fellow beer snob, I say that not as a sneer at the quality of any of the products, which are what they are and all do it reasonably well. It's certainly not my favorite style, but American light adjunct lagers aren't unpleasant products and they're all enjoyable with a slice of pizza or on a hot day at the beach - I'm not turning one down if it's what's there and I didn't bring my own. They really are all pretty similar, I think I could distinguish them in a blind taste test, but it doesn't make sense to me that people would really have that strong of a preference between them that they wouldn't be willing to drop one for another if the branding switched from appealing to them to pissing them off.
To take styles that I think are much more varied and that I care about quite a bit more, I would have no trouble electing to boycott an IPA or barrel-aged stout from a brewery that pissed me off. As much as I love Central Waters stouts, I can just buy Founders KBS, 3 Sheeps Wolf, Sierra Nevada Narwhal, or dozens of other options. They're not exactly interchangeable, but they're all good products, and there's no need to buy from someone that tells you to go fuck yourself with their ads.
The main way that I could be wrong is if I'm overestimating the palate of people that prefer light beers and many of them only like one specific narrow taste, like a child that insists on Kraft mac and cheese only.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the more interesting point at which I'd call it a loss isn't really a sales target, though I'd love to see Bud Light go belly up as a brand!, as it is that AB has already backtracked hard and is planning a rumored-nine-figure marketing blitz to get Bud Light back on track. If AB has to spend $100,000,000 to get Bud Light sales back to normal by NFL kickoff, is that a win or a loss? Other companies will look at that and not touch trans stuff.
My prediction wasn't so much that sales would not be impacted X% over Y time frame, it was more that the whole "boycott" would be a nothingburger, some internuts would rant about it but most people wouldn't notice. That this was even reported in the Journal already pushes it past my prediction! If AB spends $100,000,000 on ads featuring white guys in backwards baseball caps crushing brewskis by the lake, that definitely pushes it past my prediction.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Disney and Hollywood are not doing great lately.
Lots of other reasons we can point to.
Overwhelming share of the reasons can be traced to woke monoculture and cringe peddling.
There is a silent uncoordinated boycott - people just don't engage with the products instead of decrying them. The discontent between critics and audience on rotten tomatoes seems to increase.
What's the proof for this? I can maybe accept "cringe peddling" as the Hollywood Machine keeps churning out Generic Extruded Cinematic Product, but I think you need to bring evidence that the "woke monoculture" is succumbing to an intellectual banana blight.
Well - the wokier and girlbossier something gets the more it underperforms lately. Rings of power, wheel of time, she hulk, last season of Witcher, Mandalorian
More options
Context Copy link
What sort of proof would you accept?
I suppose I'm not entirely sure, so I'll leave it as an open challenge/prompt. The sustained dissonance between audience and critic ratings on RottenTomatoes might not exactly tell you if wokeness is eroding the final product, I suspect, but I'm open to someone arguing for a semi-reliable heuristic based on some logical factors. Maybe asking for proof that a vibe shift really is taking place is too hard an ask for anyone, but I'd still like to make sure that "latest thing bombed, Hollywood is doomed" is something more than social media amplifying whispers into thunderclaps.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It was definitely in the conversation on themotte, about how ABInbev disguises their connection to many beers, such that even seemingly local craft breweries are often purchased by AB and run as though they are still indies.
No, there is a reported drop in Michelob Ultra and other AB Inbev brands as well:
Link
I can't find the numbers for Michelob, maybe it's a small drop. Hard to say.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link