0:00

Michael. Peter. What do you know about the backlash

0:02

to corporate pride? All I know is that

0:04

it will be refreshing to have a pride month that is

0:07

exhausting, but not because of the gays.

0:22

You texted earlier this week and said

0:24

that you wanted to do a bonus episode

0:27

on the Target backlash and

0:29

the institution of corporate

0:31

pride in general. And my

0:33

initial gut instinct was,

0:35

I don't know if I trust Peter to talk

0:38

about corporate pride. I don't know if

0:40

I want, I don't know if I need the straights

0:43

weighing in. You handle the pride,

0:45

I'll handle the corporate.

0:46

And then I realized that this is how members

0:49

of other groups feel when we cover

0:52

issues. This is how women

0:54

feel when we talk about the love languages

0:57

on the show. They're like, I don't know about

0:59

Mike and Peter. Thank you for giving

1:01

me a window of empathy this week,

1:03

Peter. That's when you realized that

1:05

you were wrong. Because we can

1:07

speak for women. We can. And I can

1:09

speak for all LGBT people. Exactly.

1:12

Just summarize this debate for us, Peter.

1:14

I plan to just sit quietly

1:16

and let you talk and just wait for you to fuck up. Everybody

1:19

listen up. Yeah, exactly. A

1:21

straight man is talking.

1:24

So tell us about the genesis of

1:26

this episode, Peter. Why did you want to cover this? Well,

1:30

I was bearing witness to

1:33

some of the backlash against

1:35

Bud Light. Your truth. You were

1:38

living your truth. And it sort

1:40

of struck my brain

1:42

that it was more transparent

1:45

than what we've seen in the past. In

1:48

the sense that there was almost no

1:51

veneer of like a reasonable

1:53

position. Yeah. The

1:55

entire display

1:57

was the result of conservatives saying.

2:00

hey, we hate trans people.

2:03

And then corporations reacting

2:05

to that with something like

2:08

sympathy. I thought that

2:10

was unique. It felt like an evolution

2:14

of the sort of conservative backlash we've

2:16

seen. And I thought it was an evolution,

2:19

maybe worth talking about, given that

2:21

it is taking place in the context of

2:23

like a wave of anti-trans

2:26

legislation across the country, for example. And

2:28

also the way that this has spilled

2:30

over into the broader like LGB

2:33

community, right? Like it started out as like explicitly

2:36

anti-trans

2:36

and a lot of people were warning

2:39

about like, they're gonna come for same sex marriage next. They're

2:41

gonna come for like other groups, right? And

2:44

the response you got was like, I don't know. You know, there's

2:46

a real tricky debate about like youth

2:48

sports and these surgeries. They're doing on

2:50

kids, blah,

2:50

blah, blah. And then now this stuff, like

2:53

they're freaking out about like greeting cards for

2:55

same sex couples. And it's just like, oh,

2:57

okay, they're just freaking out about like the existence of gay people

2:59

now. Right, well, I also think that an element

3:01

of this is that part of

3:04

like the conservative

3:06

political strategy right now is

3:08

to just be deeply unpleasant

3:12

in public spaces, like school

3:14

board meetings, right? Yeah, that's wild. They

3:17

turn them into completely insane spectacle

3:20

that no one else wants to be a part of.

3:22

Everyone else leaves and they assume

3:25

positions of power within school boards.

3:27

This feels like a similar sort of thing. They

3:30

are making themselves so obnoxious

3:33

in public

3:34

that companies are put into

3:36

a weird position, right? Where it's like, well,

3:39

I don't wanna give in to these people necessarily,

3:41

but dealing with them is so bad that

3:44

maybe we should.

3:45

So why don't you walk us through the Bud

3:47

Light explosion? I feel like this was kind of the

3:49

beginning of it this year and then I'll talk us

3:51

through Target. Yeah, before

3:54

we talk about the incident

3:57

from April,

3:58

we need to get to know...

3:59

Dylan Mulvaney,

4:02

a 26-year-old trans influencer.

4:04

She used to be a Broadway performer. She

4:06

was in Book of Mormon for a bit. She

4:09

is huge on TikTok. Right

4:11

now, she has something like 10 million

4:13

followers on TikTok, over a million

4:16

on Instagram. I had no idea she was that famous.

4:18

Almost all of her current popularity

4:20

came within the last year or so.

4:23

She came out as a trans woman and posted

4:26

a tongue-in-cheek clip titled

4:28

Day One of Being a Girl.

4:29

It gets popular. She

4:32

expands it into a series that chronicles

4:35

her transition. A lot of jokes,

4:37

a lot of serious commentary.

4:40

And by the end of 2022, she is obscenely popular, just

4:45

sort of skyrockets to social media

4:47

fame. In October, there

4:49

is a presidential forum where various prominent

4:52

figures on social media talk

4:54

to Joe Biden. Dylan spoke with

4:56

him about trans rights for a few minutes. This

4:59

puts her

4:59

on the right-wing radar. Yeah, of course.

5:02

Right-wing pundits and politicians, including

5:05

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee,

5:08

respond with their standard round

5:10

of right-wing vitriol. Some of it

5:12

is directed at Biden's comments, which were

5:15

just accepting that trans people

5:17

are real, basically, and saying they deserve rights.

5:20

But then they start digging through Dylan's

5:22

TikToks and mocking them. There's a video

5:25

where Dylan talks about having a potentially

5:27

visible penis as a trans woman. Senator

5:29

Blackburn does a tweet saying,

5:32

left-wing lunatics want to make this absurdity

5:34

normal. Oh my God. Marjorie Taylor

5:36

Greene weighs in. Lots of vile

5:39

shit is being said. And then, you know, they get

5:41

distracted by the next shiny object and

5:43

move on. I love how, like, the right-wing panics

5:45

are

5:45

always about, like, some random sophomore

5:48

at Oberlin said something arguably

5:51

over the top about a sandwich. And this is, like, two

5:53

sitting congressmen.

5:55

Right. It's not just that. It's, like, the entire

5:57

fucking media apparatus, right? Oh, yeah. a

6:00

clear line between

6:03

like the lowest, most

6:05

vile right-wing

6:07

social media types and then Tucker Carlson

6:10

and Ted Cruz and whoever, right? Yeah, that's wild.

6:12

So as influencers are want to

6:14

do, Dylan is also doing like promotional

6:17

sponsorships with various brands. So

6:19

in March, she posts this

6:22

on Instagram Reels. I'll

6:24

send it to you. Since deleted, but

6:27

I managed to find what I think is not

6:29

a homophobic YouTube channel that has it.

6:31

Nice. I've

6:34

never actually seen it. Well, it is harrowing.

6:37

Race

6:37

yourself.

6:40

Hi, impressive carrying skills,

6:42

right? I got some Budlights for us.

6:45

So I kept hearing about this thing called

6:47

March Madness. And I thought we were

6:49

all just having a hectic month, but it

6:51

turns

6:51

out it has something to do with sports.

6:54

And I'm not sure exactly which sport,

6:56

but either way, it's a cause to celebrate.

6:59

This month, I celebrated my day 365 of

7:02

womanhood, and Budlights sent me possibly

7:04

the best gift ever, a can

7:06

with my face on it. Check out my Instagram

7:09

story to see how you can enjoy March Madness

7:11

with Budlight and maybe win some money

7:13

too. Love

7:14

ya. Now,

7:17

I imagine that you need a moment

7:19

to compose yourself after watching

7:22

this clear symbol of the downfall of

7:24

Western civilization. God, it's so bleak

7:27

how these like huge blowups

7:29

come from just the most boring

7:30

random shit.

7:33

It's like, I'm getting a dumb

7:35

hashtag sponsored deal. Right. There's

7:37

no reason to notice this kind of thing, unless

7:40

right wingers just decide to freak out about

7:42

it. So let's be clear before we

7:44

move on about what this is, because part

7:46

of what fueled the right wing reaction

7:48

was misinformation around

7:50

the situation. Yeah, of course. According

7:52

to Anheuser-Busch, the scope

7:54

of this partnership was exactly

7:56

one post. This was not a TV commercial.

7:59

Budlight was

7:59

was just paying to get Dylan to do some

8:02

quick promotion on social

8:04

media. She

8:06

receives this can with her face on

8:08

it that can's not for sale anywhere.

8:11

It's like a commemorative thing that they sent her. Yeah, it was

8:13

a thing that they sent her. They have sent it to other

8:15

sponsorship partners. They sent it to her

8:17

for being a partner. And because she was celebrating

8:20

one

8:20

year officially out as a woman.

8:23

This is like one level above

8:25

those people that'll have like soccer

8:27

mom tripped at Disney World 2017 like

8:30

printed

8:30

on t-shirts. Yeah, right. And they wear

8:32

the t-shirts, but the t-shirts are not being sold

8:34

anywhere. They screen printed her

8:36

image on a can and send it to her basically. These

8:39

companies just have like, I think they cast

8:41

the net very wide for these kind of

8:43

influencers sponsorships. There's like

8:45

everybody. Like they probably have Christian influencers. They

8:47

probably did this too. It's not particularly ideological

8:50

these things. No, no, no. Everybody with more than like 100,000

8:52

followers send them some free shit and

8:54

give them $1,000. Part of the initial

8:56

Bud Light response

8:59

was to be like we do

9:01

hundreds of these partnerships. So

9:04

some right winger somewhere presumably is

9:06

scrolling through her Insta and they

9:08

freak out. Ben Shapiro

9:11

says, quote, well, folks, our

9:13

culture has now decided

9:15

men are women and women are men. And

9:17

you must be forced to consume products. Let's say so.

9:20

Forced to consume products is

9:22

a fascinating phrase. That's right. It's

9:25

mandatory. $3 will

9:27

be removed from your paycheck every week and a

9:29

beer will be sent to your house. And then you get

9:32

waterboarded with trans Bud Light. Kid

9:35

Rock posts a video of him shooting

9:37

a case of Bud Light with an AR-15. Of

9:40

course. Right wing politicians and

9:42

celebrities and pundits all

9:45

get

9:45

in on it. Fox News is talking about

9:47

it. Budweiser factories are

9:49

receiving bomb threats. They

9:52

call for a boycott. Boycott commences.

9:54

Sales drop for Budweiser

9:57

and Bud Light in early April.

10:00

mid April the CEO of

10:02

Anheuser-Busch puts out a statement

10:04

titled our responsibility to

10:07

America. Jesus Christ.

10:09

It is maybe the worst statement I have

10:11

ever read. Hell yeah. Not

10:14

just because it is completely

10:16

morally and substantively hollow,

10:18

but because it might as well be designed

10:21

to just piss everyone off. Yeah, because

10:23

if you throw a trans person under the

10:25

bus, you then get the backlash from

10:28

progressives. So what they're trying to do is

10:30

thread the needle between, we don't

10:32

want to piss off the right wing psychos, but we

10:34

also don't want to piss off the 90% of the country

10:38

that really has no problem with this. Right.

10:40

It includes the choice line, quote,

10:43

we never intended to be part of a discussion

10:45

that divides people. Oh my God. We are in

10:47

the business of bringing people together over

10:49

a beer. The rest of the statement

10:52

is just like mealy-mouthed bullshit. At

10:54

one point, they referenced American

10:56

values, and they talk about freedom and hard

10:58

work. Yeah, just throw a bald eagle in there.

11:01

The bald eagle screech is like playing

11:03

in the background. I mean, the direct

11:05

parallel is just like, what if an ad had

11:07

a black person? Yeah, exactly. And then the right wing

11:10

freaked out, and Anheuser-Busch was like,

11:12

look, we don't want to be

11:13

part of a conversation that divides people. We're trying

11:15

to stay out of all these politics. From now on,

11:17

it's whites only. This is what we

11:19

talked about before we recorded, of

11:21

how difficult it is to talk about this, because it's

11:24

so just one-dimensionally bigoted,

11:26

like the actual backlash. Like

11:28

there's no laundered version

11:31

of this argument that is like, well,

11:33

if you look at it this way, it's actually like they raised some good

11:35

points. It's literally just like a trans

11:37

person was visible. The

11:40

only sort

11:40

of like angle here that they have

11:43

is that she has done some

11:45

activism, right? Like the

11:47

fact that she's talked to Joe Biden is sometimes

11:50

referenced, but like really, she's

11:52

just a trans influencer. Yeah, she's just a

11:54

famous trans person. Now, what's interesting

11:56

about this boycott is that usually

11:58

boycotts lose.

11:59

energy very quickly. Yeah. You know,

12:02

remember like the Carig

12:03

boycott from a few years ago, or like the

12:05

Goya boycott of 2020? Barely.

12:08

Yeah. These things come and go. There is

12:11

research showing that boycotts just tend

12:13

not to work. The boycotters lose

12:15

energy and focus. Often the

12:18

publicity creates brand awareness that

12:20

like counteracts any decline in sales.

12:22

Yeah. This one appears to be

12:25

different. For nearly two months now,

12:27

Bud Light and Budweiser sales have fallen

12:29

relative to the previous year's sales. And

12:32

the decline has mostly

12:33

increased over time.

12:36

Now hovering around 25% for

12:39

Bud Light in particular, which is a massive

12:41

decrease obviously. Yeah. I don't

12:43

think we really know why

12:45

this boycott has been

12:47

much more effective than the usual boycott.

12:50

I would imagine that you can chalk it up to

12:52

a couple of things.

12:53

First of all, Bud Light is essentially

12:56

a commodity. It is cheap swill,

12:58

meaning it's very easily replaced

13:00

by competitors like Miller and Coors.

13:03

And in fact, some preliminary sales data

13:05

seems to show that that's where the sales went,

13:08

right? For the 25% decrease in

13:10

Bud Light, there was a corresponding

13:12

increase across the other two brands. Yeah, they're

13:14

in the rack next to each other. You're like, fuck it. I've been

13:16

hearing that Bud Light is woke. I'm just going to pick the

13:18

other beer. Right. It's the easiest boycott

13:20

in the world to stick with. And then also

13:22

there was like a very

13:23

intentional campaign by prominent

13:26

right-wingers to sustain the outrage.

13:29

With the conscious knowledge

13:32

that the right

13:33

is generally outnumbered, but

13:36

they could get what they want in the market by sort

13:38

of aggressively targeting individual companies.

13:41

Yeah. This is something that Matt Walsh has talked

13:43

about for a while. They don't always admit

13:45

that they are sort of in the minority, right? Because

13:47

the whole silent majority concept

13:49

has been part of their psyche for so long. But

13:52

essentially conceding, look, we

13:54

are not the majority in this country,

13:57

but we are large enough that if

13:59

we just... coordinate and focus

14:01

our effort,

14:02

we can bully the marketplace.

14:05

By being the more obnoxious

14:07

side, by being the more organized side.

14:09

Yeah, I highlighted that quote too, where he said, we can't

14:12

boycott every woke company,

14:14

but we can highlight one and

14:16

make a big example out of them. Right.

14:20

And they've essentially, by zeroing in on this one company,

14:22

every other consumer brand is looking

14:24

at this being like, oh fuck, we don't want to be next. Right.

14:27

Which puts two marketing executives

14:30

responsible for the promotion on leave.

14:32

One of them is Alyssa Heinershied,

14:35

who was hired, I think in 2022, just

14:37

to freshen up the

14:39

brand. Right-wingers locate a

14:42

podcast interview with her from March

14:44

where she said she was hired with a mandate to

14:46

evolve the brand and that she wanted to

14:48

bring an

14:49

image of inclusivity

14:51

to what she called a traditionally

14:54

fratty and kind of out of

14:56

touch brand. Oh no, this poor woman.

14:59

Now I want to talk about the sort of like business

15:01

angle here. Bud Light and its

15:03

peers are a shrinking portion

15:06

of the alcohol market. Right. For

15:08

the past like 20 years, we've seen the

15:11

rise of like craft beer.

15:13

Last few years, we've seen hard seltzer take

15:15

a massive share of the market. So

15:18

if you're sitting on

15:20

Bud Light,

15:21

a brand pivot is a very natural

15:23

move, right? It makes total sense.

15:26

You need to sort of redirect your energy because

15:29

you are shrinking. On the

15:31

other hand, the plurality of

15:33

your customers are probably

15:35

white, male, middle-aged.

15:39

The brand has always been marketed to them. And

15:41

so this becomes sort of like an affirmation of everything

15:43

they feared when they saw the Dylan Mulvaney

15:46

promo, right? The culture

15:48

is slipping out of their hands. And these are

15:50

people that are still very upset by the black

15:53

elves that they had to move through

15:55

on their television screens. Very difficult for these

15:57

folks. Heinershied received some

15:59

weird.

15:59

targeted harassment, of course. Of course. People

16:02

dig up photos of her from her college

16:04

days where she's at parties.

16:07

And they're like, oh, so now you don't like

16:09

frat parties, huh? Jesus Christ.

16:12

That was on Fox News, dude. Yeah, the anti-fandom.

16:15

I was like, yeah, you got her. Yeah, wow. She's

16:17

now 39, by the way. So like, we're

16:19

doing this is like 20-year-old

16:21

fucking huge hypocrisy.

16:24

She attended frat parties

16:25

and then made an offhand comment about

16:28

fratiness 20 years later. I don't even know that

16:30

we know that they were frat parties, but I would have

16:32

met like, yeah, of course you went to frat parties. Yeah, I went to frat parties.

16:34

Frats are fucking stupid, but I also went to frat parties in

16:36

college. Because that's where the parties

16:38

are. Yeah, exactly. So

16:41

Dylan, for her part, drops off

16:43

of social media for a bit. She comes

16:45

back in late April with a quick

16:48

message where she says things like,

16:50

quote, what I'm struggling to understand is

16:52

the need to dehumanize and to be cruel.

16:55

I just don't think that's right, which is very

16:57

nice. And also sort of like borderline naive

16:59

in a nice way, like a pure soul. Yeah.

17:03

Dehumanizing is the whole point, Dylan. Yeah, it's

17:05

always so bleak when people just make

17:07

these like basic statements of humanity

17:10

of just like,

17:10

please don't try to murder me. I

17:14

don't know. There's a real debate to be had here. Yeah,

17:17

there's such a purity in the response where it was like,

17:20

I don't think everyone should be trying to kill me. I

17:22

don't know that I need to die. And the media is like, the

17:24

controversy swirls. Now,

17:27

again, the boycott has sort of continued. In

17:33

May, Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn

17:35

called for a probe into the sponsorship,

17:38

claiming that Dylan's audience

17:40

skews young. So they are like arguing

17:42

that this might be tantamount to marketing

17:45

alcohol to children. Oh my god.

17:47

They managed to like work in like a weird grooming

17:50

angle, right? And in general,

17:52

like

17:53

the right wing response at the ground level

17:55

has just been wild, like just

17:57

naked transphobia. A lot of people.

17:59

people commenting about Dylan's

18:02

affect, saying that she acts young

18:05

girlish and that's mocking women.

18:07

Oh my God. Which A, only

18:09

exists as a critique if you reject

18:11

the concept that she is a woman, but B

18:14

is misunderstanding what's happening here.

18:16

Dylan's annoying girlish

18:18

affect is because she's a theater kid. Yeah,

18:21

yeah, yeah, exactly. They don't get it. I mean, look, I

18:23

have been around theater kids for long enough that I immediately

18:26

clocked this. And then people were like, she's mocking

18:28

women. I was like, no, you don't get it. You

18:31

don't get it. And you're going to have to watch a lot

18:33

of productions before you do. There's so much

18:35

to say about the stuff, about like the hypocrisy of quote

18:38

unquote, free market conservatives

18:40

losing their minds because

18:42

like the free market is working as intended,

18:44

right? Like companies are trying to appeal to new audiences

18:46

or the hypocrisy of like the people

18:49

that melted down about cancel culture for

18:51

fucking years and are now like very

18:53

obviously engaging in an effort

18:56

to cancel a person and a company.

18:58

But it's like, it's just so

18:59

fucking obvious. It's so obvious to make

19:01

these points that it's like, it's boring to listen to. Yeah,

19:04

what we were talking about earlier is sort of my takeaway, the

19:06

fact that like there is really nothing more

19:08

to the outrage than the fact that

19:11

Dylan is trans, right? There's no nuance beyond

19:13

that. The right just wants the takeaway

19:15

to be, don't do business with

19:18

trans people. And it's so nakedly

19:21

built upon unfiltered discrimination

19:24

that it feels like surreal to witness

19:26

the media coverage because

19:28

the media keeps referring to like

19:31

a controversy without really

19:33

spelling out that the entire

19:35

controversy is that Bud Light partnered

19:38

with a trans person and these people

19:40

hate trans people. Especially true

19:42

by the way, because a lot of the coverage comes from

19:44

financial media because this is like a business

19:47

story to a degree. So like

19:49

just to give you the tiniest slice,

19:51

Yahoo Finance's latest story

19:54

said quote, driven by backlash

19:56

from an advertising campaign with transgender

19:58

influencer, Dylan Mulvaney. Bud

20:00

Light sales have now declined for six

20:02

weeks. Now, if you are in

20:04

the business media, that is presumably

20:07

the full story, right? There's a

20:09

New York Times article about one of these meta

20:11

articles about like what's going on at Target and Bud Light

20:13

and stuff.

20:14

And the headline is, Brands

20:16

Embracing Pride Month Confront a Volatile

20:18

Political Climate. Jesus. It's

20:21

not a climate. It's

20:21

almost like if you're a journalist covering this, you

20:24

have two choices. One is you just like use

20:26

this neutral terminology, or two

20:29

is like you really dig in. Yeah, yeah,

20:31

yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of them are

20:33

probably just like, oof, I'm not gonna deal

20:35

with this, right? I'm not gonna try to write

20:38

the article that explains what's happening

20:40

here because it's too much. And that

20:42

sort of like

20:43

willingness to go along

20:46

with it is a huge

20:48

problem in a society

20:51

where fascists are ascendant. Again,

20:53

if this were just the right being like,

20:56

hey, let's get mad they did a partnership

20:58

with a black person.

21:00

I would think that people within the

21:02

media would be a little more

21:05

primed to call it what it

21:07

is. Maybe that's me being naive,

21:10

but it feels like the

21:13

media's response to this and their willingness

21:15

to describe it in neutral terms

21:18

is an indicator that they

21:20

are not ready to defend

21:23

trans rights, period.

21:26

I think the problem is that the

21:28

reality, if you describe

21:30

it in sober terms, sounds partisan.

21:33

Sounds correct. Yeah. If you describe

21:35

like we are now in like year three of

21:37

a wave of essentially terrorist

21:40

actions and like local agitating against

21:43

progressive change, right? This, I think it really

21:45

started with the anti-vaxxers, but we've had

21:47

people taking over school boards.

21:50

I mean, we had a fucking anti-queer

21:52

fucking mass shooting. We

21:54

had the Buffalo shooting, white

21:57

supremacists. We've had other mass shootings

21:59

that were like...

21:59

explicitly white supremacists.

22:02

We've had all kinds of other threats against

22:04

black colleges. We've had these children's

22:07

gender clinics being shut down sometimes

22:09

for days on end because the threats are so overwhelming.

22:12

If you describe this as part of, like,

22:14

oh, yeah, right wing violence

22:17

and threats and intimidation are really

22:19

ascendant in this country, and this is a major

22:22

thuddingly obvious trend.

22:24

It sounds bad, but it's just

22:26

objectively the majority.

22:29

I read an ADL report that

22:32

pointed out that every extremist

22:34

act of murder in 2022 was

22:36

right wing terror.

22:38

There's various other reports,

22:41

like there's one from the New America Foundation that tracks

22:43

every single incident of terrorist

22:45

violence since 9-11, and

22:48

one death is attributed to the far left, and 150

22:50

deaths are attributed to far right violence.

22:53

I mentioned their

22:56

strategy of being

22:58

intolerable to be around. Part

23:01

of that, though, is that sort of

23:03

implication that

23:05

there is a willingness

23:08

to engage in extreme

23:10

violence among a decent

23:13

chunk of these people. When they go and start

23:15

knocking over pride displays

23:17

at Target, the Target worker

23:20

doesn't know whether they're dealing

23:22

with the 99 percent of them that

23:25

are just ready to knock over a pride display

23:27

or the 1 percent that's ready to pull out a gun and shoot

23:29

you if you try to stop them. Totally.

23:31

Should we talk about Target? I did

23:33

a lot of social media

23:35

slew things. Let's talk about Target.