DeSantis Wades Into Bud Light Boycott Debate with Ad, Says He Drinks Guinness (Another Woke Brand)

DeSantis
Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Hannah Knudsen

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s team waded into the Bud Light boycott debate with an ad targeting the woke left and its insistence on radically transforming the way society views a man or woman. However, he also expressed a personal preference for Guinness, which has its own set of woke issues.

The DeSantis team ad spoofs the left’s attempts to inject woke gender ideology into society — namely by allowing biological men who believe they are women to compete in women’s sports.

“Team DeSantis presents: Real men of women’s sports,” the ad begins, immediately showcasing clips of Lia Thomas, the transgender University of Pennsylvania swimmer who dominated headlines last year.

“Today we recognize the men who hacked the system,” the narrator said. “Once mediocre in the men’s division, now cream of the crop in the women’s.”

“You couldn’t cut it with the boys so you pushed women off the podium,” the narrator said as a singer added, “Real men steal first place.”

“Because without you, sports would be fair. Without you, women’s sports would be for, well, women,” the narrator added, as the commercial promoted the DeSantis team’s “Freedom Heavy” collection featuring a spoof on Bud Light, as alligators are depicted instead of Clydesdales pulling a wagon.

The DeSantis ad is reminiscent of Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” commercials popularized in the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The brand brought the series back a few years ago in the form of the updated “Internet Heroes of Genius.”

WATCH:

This is far from the first time DeSantis has jumped into the fray on the issue of transgender ideology being injected into society. Last year he signed into law the controversial Parental Rights in Education, which in part bars classroom discussions on gender identity and sexual orientation for children in kindergarten through third grade. His administration has also pushed back against drag shows targeting children.

In a recent interview with Benny Johnson, DeSantis made it sound as if Bud Light lost a customer. However, DeSantis expressed a liking for Guinness, which has its own set of woke issues.

“I think we have power as consumers to make our voice heard — and not on every company, because sometimes conservative consumers aren’t going to make a dent in some companies. This one is one– if you don’t have conservative beer drinkers, you’re gonna feel that,” the governor said, explaining that Bud Light’s move was “part of a larger thing where corporate America is trying to change our country, trying to change policy, trying to change culture.”

DeSantis went on to say that he and his wife Casey prefer Guinness.

“We actually like stout — the Guinness, that’s what we do. … Years ago we went to Dublin. We went to some other places. And we’ve always been a fan ever since,” he added.

Diageo North America, which includes the Guinness brand, actually has a perfect 100 score from the Human Rights Campaign, including a 40/40 score on “Supporting an Inclusive Culture & Corporate Social Responsibility.” That includes “Three LGBTQ Internal Training and Education Best Practices,” “LGBTQ Corporate Social Responsibility,” and “Three Distinct Efforts of Outreach or Engagement to Broader LGBTQ Community.” It also has a 30/30 score for inclusive benefits, which includes “equal health coverage for transgender individuals without exclusion for medically necessary care.” GOP strategist Arthur Schwartz pointed out that the makers of Guinness are “one of the most aggressive pushers of trans ideology in the world.”

In fact, J&B Whisky, owned by Diageo, released a three-minute commercial “She,” which tells the story of a grandfather helping his transgender grandson put makeup on.

As Breitbart News detailed:

At the end of the commercial, the viewer learns that the older man taught himself how to apply makeup so that he could put makeup on his grandson — a male who believes he is a female. When the grandfather’s family arrives at his home for Christmas dinner, he takes his dysphoric grandson into the bathroom and applies a full face of makeup on him before they both emerge and his grandson is met with a supportive embrace from his family.

https://twitter.com/ArthurSchwartz/status/1648133195148173316

Nonetheless, the DeSantis ad mocking Bud Light, sponsored by Friends of Ron DeSantis, follows recent backlash for Bud Light after the company partnered with Dylan Mulvaney, a former gay man who now claims to be a woman.

“This month I celebrated my day 365 of womanhood and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever — a can with my face on it,” Mulvaney said in a social media post, announcing the partnership in an April 1 post:

Backlash was swift, and mounting boycotts reportedly battered Anheuser-Busch. According to initial reports, Anheuser-Busch lost more than $6 billion in market value following its promotional campaign, eventually prompting CEO Brendan Whitworth to issue a mea culpa Friday, stating that the company “never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.”

“As the CEO of a company founded in America’s heartland more than 165 years ago, I am responsible for ensuring every consumer feels proud of the beer we brew,” Whitworth’s statement reads.

He continued:

We’re honored to be part of the fabric of this country. Anheuser-Busch employs more than 18,000 people and our independent distributors employ an additional 47,000 valued colleagues. We have thousands of partners, millions of fans and a proud history supporting our communities, military, first responders, sports fans, and hard-working Americans everywhere.

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people. We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer,” Whitworth wrote, later adding he “will continue to work tirelessly to bring great beers to consumers across our nation.”

That statement came weeks after March 23 Make Yourself at Home podcast interview with the vice president of marketing at Bud Light, Alissa Heinerscheid, who described a desire to “shift the tone” of the brand and make it “truly inclusive … lighter and brighter and different and [appealing] to women and to men.”

Several conservative personalities were perplexed by Anheuser-Busch’s move, given that it is tends to be a more conservative brand, even supporting conservative candidates such as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) in the last election cycle.

“In a woke corporate America, Anheuser-Busch supports Republicans’ last cycle. Their employees and their PAC gave about 60 percent to Republicans and 40 percent of Democrats,” Donald Trump Jr. remarked, pointing out that those percentages are “literally almost unheard of in corporate America, where it’s really easy to go woke, where they do so constantly.”

He also speculated that the move could have been “the act of one rogue woke lunatic in a marketing department filled with leftist staffers,” and according to various reports, “no one at a senior level” was aware of the partnership with Mulvaney.

Charlie Kirk made the same point, pointing to Anheuser-Busch’s right-wing contributions.

“We thought of this brand as something that was supposed to be safe, as something that was off-limits,” he said of Anheuser-Busch, noting the company donated “nearly a half-million dollars” to support Vance and spent hundreds of thousands to “try to fire Nancy Pelosi.”

“They just seem to want to be nonpolitical at every turn. That’s what made this concerning. Some of the evidence seems that this is a one-off screwup. I certainly hope it doesn’t happen again,” Kirk said.

Indeed, a peek into contributions shows Anheuser-Busch’s tendency to give to conservative causes, giving thousands to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, Conservative Louisiana, and more.

Donald Trump Jr. has since called for the boycotts of Bud Light to end.

“I’m not for destroying an American, an iconic company for something like this,” he said, adding that “the company itself doesn’t participate in the same leftist nonsense as the other big conglomerates.”

“Frankly, they don’t participate in the same woke garbage that other people in the beer [industry] actually do, who are significantly worse when I look into it,” he added.

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