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The sad reason companies like Disney or Budweiser don't care if you boycott them. But you can still win
Your beer hates you. So does your phone. And your car, your food, your sports team and most businesses you deal with in a given day. Ask Budweiser. Or Disney.
American companies have embraced every crazy leftist agenda item imaginable – the latest being the trans insanity sweeping the nation. Call it Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) or their Corporate Equality Index (CEI). No matter how you spell it, it comes out the same.
They. Hate. You.
Bud Light was just the reminder du jour. Anheuser-Busch, which owns Budweiser, placed two marketing executives on leave because they deliberately attacked the core audience of the beer. Think of it as a tiny victory in a landscape of losses.
Tiny and temporary.
They weren’t fired because they hate you. They were put on leave. Top Budweiser executives are betting it all blows over. And these two come back to their jobs or similar ones. Then it all starts over.
FORMER BUD LIGHT DRINKERS SAY ‘TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE’ AFTER BRAND TRIES TO MAKE AMENDS
So let’s recap, shall we? Bud Light didn’t just try to expand its business model by reaching out to the LGBTQ community. It openly declared war on its customers. The brand cut a deal with strange trans activist and social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
Before you could say "transbeer" Mulvaney was proudly showing off Bud Light cans with the activist’s face plastered all over them. It was part of Mulvaney’s bizarre "365 Days of Girlhood" series describing the transgender life on TikTok.
This wasn’t an accident. Bud Light's vice president of marketing Alissa Heinerscheid said she had a "mandate" to fix the brand because of the horrible people who drank the beer.
"We had this hangover, I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach," she said.
She emphasized the word "inclusivity," but what she meant is everybody but the people who already drank the beer. Everybody but you. This is the barley, rice, hops and water equivalent of how the media treat conservatives. You don’t matter and if you say anything, they call you a bigot.
This isn’t a New Coke mistake. This is a deliberate corporate move to give the finger to its customers. The only reason Heinerscheid is on leave is she was so stupidly obvious about it. As they say online, she said the quiet part out loud.
All across the U.S., companies are doing the exact same thing. They just don’t go public and bash their "fratty" customers. The New York Post reports Mulvaney’s act has generated a million dollars from brands like Ulta Beauty, Haus Labs, Crest, InstaCart and CeraVe. One million dollars that you paid them.
So let’s boycott those brands, too, you say. Good luck. You can’t even boycott Budweiser.
I don’t fault people for trying – whether it’s a quiet boycott or a Kid Rockian protest. It’s just doomed. Drop Bud Light and you have to boycott Budweiser, Busch, Michelob, Stella Artois, and many others. The company also has at least 20 craft beer "partners" and produces five products it considers "Beyond Beer." You can get beyond beer, but just not beyond Budweiser.
And, even if miraculously you manage, many of its competitors are just as bad. If you boycott one, the new company executives will laugh at you, too. They’ll just be savvier about it and do it quietly.
It was the same with the NFL, Major League Baseball, and Disney. They all know they dominate the marketplace so thoroughly that you have no choice.
Sure, a boycott can generate some change. Look at football. The fans stood up to the woke protests and the players quit kneeling and stood up, too. The league threw some money at activism and the far-left sportscasters stopped whining about social justice and focused more on the game. The sport went from celebrating wokeness to giving us that old time religion.
Conservatives didn’t so much win as get somewhat of a return to the status quo.
In short, it’s rare to muster enough anger to effectively boycott a brand and make it change behavior. I’m not saying don’t try. It just can’t be your only strategy.
The way to teach businesses a lesson is by first voting with your wallet. Find businesses and individuals you like enough and support them. If there’s a conservative singer you like, don’t just listen on a streaming service. Buy the album. Same goes for authors, brewers, bakers, and more.
If the product is good enough, do more than just buy it. Promote it – in the real world as well as online. Tell your friends, family, coworkers and the people at church to do the same.
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New York Times best-selling author Larry Correia was attacked on Goodreads with a one-star review before his upcoming book was even written. Correia, who recently wrote a great pro-gun book called "In Defense of the Second Amendment," got stonewalled by Goodreads. Instead of whining, he told his readers. The next thing he knew, the one-star was swamped by 113 five-star reviews.
His readers had his back.
Liberals call something like this a "buycott." Only what I am suggesting is much more. We can’t create an entirely separate universe filled with conservative banks, social media, cars and stores, unless you have a few trillion dollars in your pocket. (If you do, please call me.) But when conservatives do produce good products – from movies to beer – we need to buy it, promote it and defend it.
That’s how we win.
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