It’s bigger than the beer.
“Bud Light’s business has collapsed since April,” explains sports commentator Clay Travis in a recent column for Fox News, “plummeting 30% in consumption, the result of the company putting a trans influencer on a can to celebrate the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.”
Travis calls it “the most crushing boycott of a large consumer product brand in modern history,” adding that Bud Light “might be finished as a popular beer.”
However, Travis also rebutted “many in the media” for “proclaiming Bud Light as a unicorn, the first of its kind conservative boycott that has obliterated decades of goodwill for a company.”
Not true, he argues: “The most consequential consumer boycott of the 21st century didn’t come from drinkers’ rejection of a beer, it came from sports, in particular the NBA, which has destroyed its brand with a large percentage of the American sporting public by embracing woke, political, far-left-wing messaging in its games.”
Travis informs that, since the 1998 NBA Finals, when superstar Michael Jordan sank a late jumper to win, there has been a 75 percent drop in viewership of the National Basketball Association’s championship. “Indeed,” he offers, “four of the five lowest-rated NBA Finals of the past 30 years have occurred in the past four years.”
Count me as one data point: I watched that great 1998 NBA Final and yet, today, I do not tune in. Why? I disagree with the NBA’s political bent and its repellent propaganda.
“More people were interested in watching” the Women’s NCAA Basketball Championship “in 2023,” reports Travis, “than the NBA Finals in 2020 and 2021.” (I saw that women’s championship game and declined both NBA Finals.)
But . . . why has the NBA’s nosedive in popularity not been news until now?
Mr. Travis says it’s because “the media loves the NBA embracing woke politics” and, therefore, “refused to share the data right in front of their eyes.”
Another case of so-called journalists deciding they like their readers and viewers less informed.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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6 replies on “The Bigger Boycott Before Bud Light”
Properly, we do not use “boycott” for the choice not to buy a product based upon what are perceived to be its defining characteristics. I am not, for example, boycotting unripe peppers; I loathe their taste. But I have in the past boycotted products that I otherwise would have bought, because I wanted the producers to change practices without changing the products. For example, I wanted Chick-fil-A to stop funding opposition to legalization of same-sex marriage, so I sadly stopped buying their sandwiches.
Beer has long been about image. For example, double-blind tests show that few beer drinkers can distinguish ostensibly premium beer from other beer. Buying Bud Light was not simply about taste and texture.
InBev Anheuser-Busch changed the product in the eyes of consumers. In those eyes, Bud Light is now a queer beer, rather than the light version of America’s best known premium pilsner. Even those former customers who don’t feel any actual animosity to Dylan Mulvaney are simply not themselves in the market for queer beer.
Bud Light might be changed again by InBev Anheuser-Busch or by someone else, but no one knows how to return to producing what the customers will regard to be the original product.
Professional sports has similarly been about image. Teams are able to insinuate themselves into senses of community identity. In America, Leagues insinuated themselves into the sense of national identity. We’ve heard or read of the military having paid for a lot of post-Viet-Nam flag-waving at these events, but think back to the old war movies in which the True American is confirmed or the Nazi Impostor is revealed based upon knowing about who did what in the 1937 World Series. (I would have been shot-down like a dog.)
I don’t think that most of the viewers who have left are trying to get the various corporations of major-league sports to mend their ways. I don’t think that the former consumers are boycotting. The alienated viewers simply don’t want the new product. They don’t want the new flag, the new chants, the new image.
I doubt that major-league sports can return to producing what once it did; I’m still more sure that it won’t.
As for me, I’m a teetotaler, and I’ve only abstract interest in sports as such.
Well said, Daniel. I would like the National Basketball Association (as well as the NFL and MLB, both of whom have been infected with this woke PR gambit, though not as badly) to stop their pushing of politics. If it does stop, I will go back to watching. Unless in the interim, I’ve found too many other pleasurable activities to occupy my free time.
I agree about the NBA. I watched about 5 minutes of the finals to see how good Novak Djokic really was, and he is amazing. And that’s all I needed. I didn’t care for their product much anyway, but when the face of the NBA LeBron James portrays himself as a victim – that’s too much.
First I will say I have not had a taste of a bland beer in so long I do not remember when. But I would have dropped bud like a hot rock.
I have also not watched an nba game for 10 years++. I tired of their “thugness”. I can only dream of the good old days of the old NBA. Now with their embracing of the ccp they are totally dead to me.
Movies are the same now as we very carefully chose what we watch. We DO NOT go to R movies and too many lower rated movies are having tasteless dialog/subjects. Too many are just plain bad/stupid.
I generally vote with my wallet. I dropped AT&T when they outsourced American tech jobs to India. I was once an occasional consumer of Starbucks and I dropped them for the same reason. No protests. No letters. There is nothing either company can do to make me buy their products again.
Smithsonian and Nature Conservancy lost my support because of their woke agenda. I let both know why I withdrew my support. That was that.
I’m not ‘boycotting’ Bud Light for one reason: I’ve never had it and never will. Dylan Mulvaney had nothing to do with it. I can’t stand beer.
On the one hand, I agree with my friend Jim Lark, who once told me “Budweiser is what beer drinkers drink when we’re not drinking beer.” And Bud Light is even worse, leading me to believe that when they started making it they positioned the brewing vats directly below the Clydesdales’ urinal drains. These days, if I have a beer, it’s a quality beer — almost always a craft brew, quite often a local one, usually an IPA.
But if I DID drink the swill Anheuser-Busch makes, I wouldn’t stop drinking it just because they gave a pretty can of it to a woman I don’t like, then publicly virtue signal about it in the dumbest ways possible, such as bragging about how I’ve switched to another beer made by the same company.