Conservatives Heartbroken That Kid Rock Gave Up Bud Light Boycott

It seems like only yesterday that Kid Rock was firing an assault rifle at cases of Bud Light in protest of their brand partnership with trans entertainer Dylan Mulvaney. But time flies, and it’s already been eight months since that week in April when Rock helped kick off a right-wing boycott of the beverage — one that caused a drop in brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev’s stock price and enshrined the culture war slogan “get woke, go broke.”

A lot has happened since then. In October, AB InBev struck a deal worth more than $100 million to make Bud Light the exclusive beer sponsor of Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts franchise that counts Kid Rock as one of its celebrity fans. Weeks later, Rock gave an interview to Sean Hannity of Fox News, claiming he had never called for a boycott of the beer (indeed, he continued to drink it in public and serve it at his Nashville bar) and that he and Donald Trump had enjoyed a “great conversation” with Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth at a UFC event about why the Mulvaney promotion had set them off.

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By the time December rolled around, both Rock and Dana White, president and CEO of UFC, were chatting with Tucker Carlson about how Bud Light is good, actually. “If you consider yourself a patriot, you should be drinking gallons of Bud Light,” White said, explaining that Anheuser-Busch — one of “multiple bidders” for the lucrative sponsorship — was “more aligned” with American values than other beer companies. Rock, in a separate interview, exhorted protesters to “move on,” telling Carlson that the brewer “got the message.”

“Hopefully, other companies get it too, but you know, at the end of the day, I don’t think the punishment that they’ve been getting at this point fits the crime,” Rock said. “I would like to see people get us back on board and become bigger because that’s the America that I want to live in.” As for any lingering grudge against the brand, he said: “They screwed up, they made a mistake. I’m over it.”

While Rock and White sounded eager to return to a world in which beer is apolitical, their comments caused confusion and dismay among those conservatives holding fast to the belief that Bud Light is a woke product and remains anathema to the right. One irate viewer called the White interview an “ad” for the brand. Another asked, “Are we supposed to just forget that they went full-woke and pushed the trans agenda down our throat simply because they gave the @ufc a bunch of money?” Responding to the Rock interview, an X (formerly Twitter) user called Bud Light’s endorsement deal with Mulvaney “Psychological Warfare” and said that Rock “needs to stop being obtuse.”

Rock’s critics included more prominent voices in the right-wing media ecosystem. On the conservative podcast Ruthless, Megyn Kelly lamented what she saw as the crumbling of “the only successful boycott that Republicans have ever engaged in” because “Kid Rock and Dana White want to give it up.” She stressed that she was still “offended” by Anheuser-Busch doing business with Mulvaney (whom she misgendered) and raged that the company still hadn’t apologized to transphobes boycotting the beer.

Anti-LGBTQ activist Matt Walsh tweeted similar talking points the day after Carlson ran his interviews with Rock and White. “If we back away from this victory now it will show that we’ve learned nothing and don’t want to win,” he warned. Walsh also criticized Rock by name on his Daily Wire show, along with other right-wingers he thinks are too forgiving of a company that “spat in the face of its own customers.”

A columnist for the conservative blog RedState was just as adamant about not letting up the pressure on Anheuser-Busch. “It would negate the one successful boycott in right-wing history and show companies that if they just wait conservatives out, they’ll fold,” they wrote. Blaze Media took the same position in a piece that noted, “If buying Dana White and Kid Rock is all it takes to end the most effective conservative boycott in history, then conservatives deserve to lose.” (Despite speculation that Rock has received some kind of payment to change his tune, there is no evidence of such a transaction.)

However this infighting shakes out, it looks as if Bud Light is ending 2023 on a high note after a roller coaster year: it’s now the beer of the world’s largest promoter of a fast-growing sport (one closely associated with right-leaning politics, up to and including Trump). Anheuser-Busch has also recovered from the plunge in share price that accompanied the initial calls for the company’s financial ruin: it’s up more than four percent since January, at a steady baseline around $60.

Even so, what counts as a “successful” boycott on the right is a matter of vibes rather than numbers — and opinions of this whole saga depend on what messaging or agenda will resonate with a given influencer’s audience. As Rock himself said in the Carlson interview, the Bud Light shoot-em-up stunt was more about appealing to his own audience than inciting a revolt. “I know who my consumers are,” he said. “I was doing a little marketing to my folks. That was spot-on for me, but also a fun excuse to get my machine gun out and have some fun, but also to make a statement, like, ‘Hey, a lot of us aren’t cool with this.'”

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