The Self-Cannibalizing Madness of the Right's Anti-Woke Crusade
One of my most vivid memories of my time aboard the 2011 Kid Rock Chillin’ the Most Cruise is of the MASSIVE quantities of Bud Light consumed onboard. I’d gone on the Jam Cruise with my future wife earlier and was struck that nobody drank beer and everyone drank cocktails.
That led to absolutely staggering bar bills, as mixed drinks are expensive, especially if made from top-shelf booze. The opposite was true on the Kid Rock Chillin’ the Most Cruise. Seemingly no one drank fancy-pants cocktails favored by Frenchmen and fancy lads. Instead everyone imbibed from big old buckets of Bud Light that seemingly adorned every table and open surface on the ship.
Why wouldn’t cruisers who were chilling the most consume Bud Light? It was a moderately priced domestic beer from a Conservative family.
That was then. This is now. Love has transformed into hate on multiple levels. In a highly controversial attempt to keep up with the times Bud Light aligned with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a deal that made the right-leaning corporation public enemy number one of the anti-woke squad.
Kid Rock was so triggered by the idea that a trans woman might appear on a beer can that, in what can only be deemed a gesture of exquisite understatement, fired a machine gun at the beer that hurt his feelings and challenged his exceedingly fragile masculinity.
I grew up thinking of Budweiser as a Conservative company led by a conservative family so it was jarring and bewildering to see Conservatives treat Anheiser-Busch as their hated enemy and not a longtime friend and supporter.
Then again, I also grew up seeing professional sports, Disney and major corporations as hyper-capitalist bastions of All-American Conservatism.
Disney was lazy shorthand for a vision of history and the present that was hopelessly white-washed in a manner that ignored its sins and its transgressions while romanticizing and exaggerating our positive qualities. They were, after all, the folks who brought Uncle Remus and Song of the South to the big screen, to their eventual regret.
“The Disney Version” consequently has multiple meanings. There’s the literal version, referring to pop culture that has been adapted by the Disney corporation. In a more metaphorical sense “The Disney Version” is one that has been softened and made more sentimental, consumer and family-friendly.
Now Disney is seen as "woke” extremists committing to undermining everything it previously extolled.
I understandably grew up looking professional sports, a realm where millionaires play other millionaires for the benefit of billionaires while being watched by fans wealthy enough to buy prohibitively expensive tickets to game, as an explicitly macho, capitalist, conservative and Christian endeavor.
Now, however, Conservatives act as if professional sports is one big Marxist commune committed to white genocide, Black Lives Matter and making everyone trans.
Why? Because of a few performative gestures that ring utterly hollow and empty to people on the left like myself but are utterly enraging and unforgivable for folks who ironically like to spend their time accusing the other side of being petty, thin-skinned and obsessed with nonsense.
As the great font of wisdom that is Eve6’s Twitter feed reminds us, corporations don’t do activism, they do branding.
Anheiser-Busch is not deeply committed to challenging retrograde notions of gender and sexuality. They just want to sell beer. They are betting, not without cause, that people like Dylan Mulvaney are the future while Kid Rock and Travis Tritt represent a hokey, reactionary, extremely brittle past.
They’re probably right and that should scare folks on the wrong side of history like Rock and Tripp a whole lot more than a divisive flibbertigibbet appearing on a beer can.
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