The parent company of Bud Light, which recently partnered with transgender activist and social media star Dylan Mulvaney for a brand deal, has a history of responding to pressure from LGBTQ activism and pursuing stellar ESG scores.
Mulvaney, a man who identifies as a woman, acquired millions of followers on social media over the past several months while documenting a purported transition into girlhood. The campaign has generated a number of brand deals for Mulvaney over the past year, with a collaboration between the influencer and Bud Light drawing a heightened degree of backlash this week since many beer consumers have no apparent interest in promoting radical gender theory.
Researcher and author James Lindsay recently noted on social media that Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, has responded to criticism from LGBTQ activists by seeking to bolster its ESG scores, under which nonprofits and other entities rank firms with respect to their leftist environmental, social, and corporate governance endeavors. Skeptics of the ESG movement contend that the philosophy mixes political causes, such as decreasing carbon emissions or diversifying company leadership, in a manner that distracts from profitability.
Lindsay observed that activists hosted a demonstration two years ago outside of the Stonewall Inn, widely regarded as the birthplace of the modern LGBTQ political movement, in which they poured beverages distributed by Anheuser-Busch into a nearby gutter. The protests were meant to criticize donations Anheuser-Busch provided to lawmakers who sought to limit the spread of radical gender theory among young people.
“You can’t say that you support the LGBT community in one breath and then donate to people who are against us in the other breath,” one of the activists said at the time in an interview with local news. “It’s not right, and we at the Stonewall Inn had to take a stand on behalf of our community.”
Anheuser-Busch responded to the criticism by noting that the company boasts a longstanding partnership with LGBTQ organization GLAAD and has “received a perfect 100% score from the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index for LGBTQ Equality.” Companies are incentivized to demonstrate at least “three efforts of public commitment to the LGBTQ community” and implement practices to “support organizational LGBTQ diversity competency” in order to improve their ranking.
Human Rights Campaign President Chad Griffin has said that the organization considers “whether a company is speaking out in the public square to advocate for LGBT equality here in this country and around the world.” He stated that Anheuser-Busch “not only meets these standards, it goes above and beyond the call of duty, making a commitment to equality a fundamental aspect of its corporate values.”
Lindsay compared the demonstrations from activists and the subsequent attempts from Anheuser-Busch to protect the reputation of the firm’s brands as a case of “extortion.”
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“There truly is very little mystery to this, which makes it frustrating to see so many prominent people who think they know how this stuff works completely clueless to it. They’re under the threat of a mafia, like every major corporation in the ESG economy,” Lindsay commented on social media. “Boycotting Bud Light, or Anheuser-Busch more generally, won’t accomplish much because they aren’t allowed to be interested in an economy of production and consumption.”