Why Woke Companies Deliberately Alienate Their Consumers

I swore I’d never write a column about Dylan Mulvaney.

However, after noticing the recent battle around my third-favorite whiskey (Jack Daniel’s) being heavily advertised in my market by drag queens, I can’t help seeing him as part of a broader phenomenon. Many large American companies, especially the “manly” ones, currently seem almost intent on alienating their primary consumer bases.

Obviously, St. Louis’s Anheuser-Busch recently attracted global attention after making Mulvaney — an adult male TikTok influencer, whose schtick is dressing and presenting as a hormonal teenage girl — one of its top few dozen faces of the brand. Mulvaney appeared on a tall boy Budweiser can, filmed a commercial short (albeit on social media) drinking a beer in a sudsy tub, and so on. The reaction was fairly predictable: Conservative gadfly Matt Walsh announced a national boycott of Bud, legendary rap-rocker Kid Rock filmed himself shooting up a few cases of Anheuser piss-water with an AR-15, and country singers began changing the lyrics of party songs referencing “cold Bud and Bud Light” at concerts.

Fair enough, I suppose, re: the wind and the whirlwind. But the oddest thing about all of this is that five minutes of research shows the Anheuser-Busch situation not to be a unique or even unusual example of extreme “social justice” marketing. As noted above, Jack Daniel’s recently filmed an entire series of video-length, movie-quality promotional ads for Tennessee corn whiskey using the most flamboyant drag queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race. The National Basketball Association (NBA) only recently abandoned its George Floyd–era practice of literally painting “Black Lives Matter” on the hoops court and letting players wear explicitly political messages on game jerseys — making it possible to see “Racial Justice” just level “Equity” during a hard drive to the basket.

Over in football, the NFL did very much the same sort of thing, and apparently has never enforced an already tepid policy against players kneeling in protest, out on the field, during the national anthem. Nike — which equips both leagues, and whose legendary spokesman Michael Jordan once famously reminded a left-slanting reporter that “Republicans buy sneakers too” — has behaved similarly in recent years. The shoe giant not only gave a nine-figure-deal to most-famous kneeler Colin Kaepernick (is his signature sneaker designed for riding the bench? Marching in protest?) but also hired the unmistakably male Mulvaney to model women’s sportswear, such as sports bras. Finally, in perhaps the most notable example of a purely socially or politically driven decision by a business, Dick’s Sporting Goods opted in 2018 to stop selling almost all guns — despite the fact that there “was no upside in our economic analysis.”

The results of almost all these logically bizarre decisions were . . . pretty much what one would expect. In 2020, one debatably scientific but very large-n poll, which made it into the Daily Caller, found that nearly 90 percent of football fans would be less likely to watch an NFL where players visibly knelt before games. And, in fact, television ratings for the football league did drop more than 10 percent during the kneeling era (although the NFL has tried frantically to blame this on any other imaginable cause).

The NBA has faced similar if smaller-scale issues, with even famous coach Phil Jackson — of my old Chicago Bulls — recently saying that he no longer watches many games because they are too annoyingly “political.” More empirically, Dick’s move flatly lost millions: In the first year after having given up firearms sales, the company lost $250,000,000 in revenue. And Bud? She lost billions — with a “b” — at least temporarily. Although causal proof here is difficult, plunges in the overall Anheuser-Busch stock price in the initial stretch of the beer boycott translated to a loss-against-cap of $5–6 billion in real money.

So, now, we get to a very obvious question: Why were these decisions ever made in the first place? While on the center-right politically, I am not particularly prudish or naïve, and I have no real problem with drag queens in gay bars or noisy civil-rights protesters on the campus of Wellesley. But even Stevie Wonder could see that these are not the best marketers for selling corn liquor to working people. How could anyone with a triple-digit IQ make such a long and consistently insane series of calls?

As is so often the case, the great Thomas Sowell provides a murky path with some illumination. In an entertaining and now-classic book, The Vision of the Anointed, Sowell makes the point that many members of the Western ruling class — including professors, media figures, politicians, and senior business executives — no longer like or understand the people that they are expected to lead. Almost universally, such would-be lairds are upper-middle or upper class in background, from the two coasts or at least one of the megacities around the Great Lakes, educated at elite Ivy-on-down universities, and well-versed in trendy social theory (“My preferred pronouns are . . .”).

Sowell claims, using a great deal of empirical data, that these folx tend to think of other Americans not as peers and countrymen so much as “the benighted” — and other more modern synonyms come easily to mind: “deplorables,” “bitter clingers” from “flyover land.” In Anointed/Benighted discourse, the goal of the Anointed isn’t an honest exchange of views so much as teaching the Benighted what the new truth is: changing and broadening their provincial little minds. It’s hard not to see a great deal of this dynamic specifically in the Dylan Mulvaney case — the executive responsible for that hire was the first female SVP ever to run the Bud Light brand, and she brutally condemned it as “fratty” and in need of some seasoning in a now-viral podcast interview.

So, how should regular citizens interact with brands that seem to hate or despise them? A short answer might be: Don’t, at least long enough for C-level executives to recognize that you notice what’s going on. After the stock-price plunge of Anheuser-Busch, the Mulvaney advertising campaign was withdrawn, and the VP responsible for it was placed on what one suspects will be a lengthy leave of absence. That took two weeks.

Even for the longer term, should you care this much about the politics of consumer goods, there are plenty of alternative versions of pretty much every product (the NFL might admittedly be an exception) in a capitalist marketplace such as America’s. Some are conservative: The Daily Wire created the now-booming Jeremy’s Razors brand in response to the surprising “wokeness” of companies such as Harry’s Razors and even Gillette — the latter of which recently ran an ad depicting a father teaching his biological daughter how to shave a beard. Others aren’t political at all: There are plenty of brewmasters in Mexico and Germany and dirty hipster warehouses in your own city that really just want to sell beer. All are out there. Take advantage!

That said, here’s one final note for the businesspeople who may be reading this (some perhaps even working at Anheuser): If you really want to make some money, put Riley Gaines on a beer can.