Bud Light, like Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst Blue Ribbon before it, lost its crown as the king of beers. The deposing came as a result of the hitherto ruler of beer sales allowing a drag queen under a tiara to sit alongside on the throne.

The peasants, as peasants sometimes do, revolted, as the revolted often do.

This space predicted as recently as last month this seismic shift at the top of the industry possibly occurring in 2024. But Bud Light repelling drinkers by violating the Constitution’s separation of beer and politics clause — it’s in the penumbra — accelerated the transfer of power in a way few anticipated. (READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: You Might Not Like What Comes After Bud Light)

For the week ending June 3, Bud Light’s retail sales in the United States shrank by 24 percent vis-à-vis a year earlier. This helped send Modelo Especial, a beer that first aired commercials on U.S. television in English in 2015, to the top spot with 8.4 percent of retail sales; Bud Light, amounting to 7.3 percent of retail sales, slipped to second.

In the media, where journalists often confuse wishes for reality, the sustainability of the boycott shocks. “How big of a deal is this for Bud Light?” Emily Stewart asked at Vox a month ago. “The answer will ultimately probably be not very, though the controversy has dragged out, and Bud Light’s sales have taken at least a temporary hit.” She characterized product boycotts as not very effective and imagined uproar as soon blowing over.

But losing a quarter of retail sales in the home market — and dropping from the top spot occupied since sometime around 9/11 — constitutes a big deal. One can Kevin Bacon it. But all is not clearly not well.

Bud Light’s Fall From Grace

The continuing disbelief misunderstands three fundamental truths explaining Bud Light’s precipitous decline.

First, this isn’t really an organized boycott so much as it is spontaneous disgust permanentized. It’s not a disciplined movement kept in line by bullhorns and sandwich boards that explains a quarter of customers turning away but instead disgust at association with normalized mental illness that dictates that society indulge men cosplaying as women to such a degree as to push genital mutilation and alterations to body chemistry upon children. Marketing geniuses know beloved figures such as Shaquille O’Neal and Matthew McConaughey can sell a brand. It follows then that grotesque figures may push the public away from a product.

Second, a myopic view of the controversy holds that the stubbornness of the consumer will eventually yield to the status quo ante. What about the stubbornness of Bud Light? Why did not the company revert to a time when it sold beer rather than divisive political crusades? The Associated Press this week reported, “Bud Light … continues to be a high-profile sponsor of LGBTQ+ Pride events.” These include events in San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago, and Charlotte, and one assumes some of these celebrations amount to big parties for gay people and, as such, represent a marketing opportunity like a baseball game or a concert. But a Flagstaff, Arizona, Pride event that included an all-ages drag show listed Bud Light as a sponsor, which the company feverishly denied until its name disappeared from promotional materials. Whatever the truth in that particular case, the general strategy of picking a side in the culture war — why must a beer company take a side? — is akin not to advertising on the Dodgers–Giants broadcast but instead to sponsoring the Giants exclusively and aggressively, a move with expected consequences for sales in the Los Angeles market.

Third, people bought Bud Light because it inebriated the consumer at a relatively inexpensive price without offending taste buds. In this way, it differed from Coors Light, Miller Lite, Modelo Especial, and many other beers only in its inheritance of a tradition that influenced consumer habit and its enjoyment of a larger advertising budget. Its drinkers then could switch brands rather painlessly once Bud Light imploded that tradition. They did just that, and just as the custom of customers once aided their profits, it now harms it as their former drinkers become habituated to some other beer.

The people who hired the people who decided to hire Mulvaney as an endorser, the way light beer companies once hired Rodney Dangerfield and Mickey Spillane, do not allow themselves to see all this. They also do not strike as possessing that intrinsically conservative mindset that change does not necessarily mean better but can often result in worse.

“Like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand,” Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s former vice president for marketing, said immediately prior to the Mulvaney disaster. “And what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and appeals to women and to men. And representation is sort of at the heart of evolution.”

Evolve, elevate, inclusivity, shifting the tone, representation, etc. — it seemed like an awful lot of words to say we need to show castrated men drinking our beer. And like the irreversibility of that drastic act undertaken by some undergoing so-called transitioning, once a company opens up that can, putting all the beer back into it seems near impossible.