At least one preliminary report from industry experts suggests Bud Light’s decision to partner with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney has resulted in financial losses for the company. Multiple bar owners across the country — including one in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan — confirmed that Bud Light sales dropped significantly over the Easter weekend. "They've already done enough damage in one week to disrupt yearlong sales projections," a beer sales representative who works with retailers such as Costco told Fox Business.

The question, then, is why Bud Light would risk such a financial backlash in the first place. Why would the company risk ostracizing its customer base by endorsing such a controversial and divisive ideology at all?

The answer is simple: Companies no longer have the option to be culturally neutral. They are being forced to pick a side on cultural debates by rabid leftist activists, who will not hesitate to frame silence on any given subject as complicity.

Remember the Black Lives Matter craze on social media in 2020, when those who declined to post black squares on their profiles were smeared as racists for being insufficiently “anti-racist"? That same cultural pressure is at work in corporate boardrooms across the country, in which executives are being told that there is no in-between — they can either be pro-Mulvaney or transphobic bigots who want to see transgender people dead.

The Corporate Equality Index is just one way the Left applies this pressure. Run by the Human Rights Campaign, the CEI is a publicly available “report card” that rates companies based on certain "woke" criteria, according to the New York Post. These criteria include: workforce protections; inclusive benefits, such as healthcare for same-sex couples; an inclusive culture, such as gender-neutral dress codes; corporate social responsibility, which could include marketing campaigns directed toward LGBT customers; and responsible citizenship, otherwise known as public advocacy for LGBT causes.

Major shareholders such as BlackRock and Vanguard have bought into the CEI as part of a larger environmental, social, and corporate governance push, and they have made it clear that the publicly traded corporations in which they have a stake — including Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light’s parent company — will suffer consequences if they do not fall in line. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink put it this way in 2018: If a company refuses to “engage with the community,” “it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”

So not only are companies being threatened with accusations of bigotry, hatred, genocide, and the like, but leftists are putting their very financial stability at stake. So they have every incentive to go "woke" and almost no incentive not to.

Is it any wonder Bud Light rushed to send a few cans Mulvaney’s way?

The only solution is to make "wokeism" so financially burdensome that companies choose to run the risk of leftist backlash instead. Unfortunately, conservatives aren’t very good at this. But perhaps Bud Light’s recent sales drop is an indication that consumers are finally ready to push back.