Welcome to the United States of dystopia. Population: 330m.
The CEO of a billion-dollar sports enterprise did an interview on Fox News. He was caught on video slapping his wife in a bar just a few months back but that didn’t come up.
Instead, he fielded softballs from a right-wing bloviator who has previously spoken about how mixed martial arts training will help him in a mass shooting situation.
The topic of conversation between these two enlightened charmers was the businessman’s new commercial relationship with Bud Light, a beleaguered brewery desperately trying to win back customers, many of them viewers of this very channel and show, who’ve boycotted the beer and lately filmed themselves shooting at cases of the stuff.
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For nearly seven minutes, Dana White, chief carnival barker of UFC, delivered a well-rehearsed spiel to Sean Hannity, the television presenter formerly known as Donald Trump’s unofficial White House chief of staff.
Perhaps as polished a charlatan as any sport has ever spawned, White explained he just made Bud Light the official beer of his mixed martial arts empire for several reasons, all of which appeared very obviously designed to appeal to the faux-patriotic, guns-on-sleeves Fox News demographic.
He harped on about how Anheuser-Busch (parent company of the brand) employs thousands of military veterans, does so much for first responder charities, and is saving the livelihoods of put-upon American farmers. And Hannity dutifully nodded.
“I’m going to focus on the good that they do,” said White. “We are very aligned in many different areas and that’s why they’re going to be my partner for the next six years. When you do sponsorships, you definitely do sponsorships for the money too. Money is definitely a part of it, but money was not the decision-making factor . . . There are many other things that are important to me other than just the money.”
All of which means it was, of course, about the money. But there is more to the story.
Neither White nor Hannity ever mentioned the real reason Bud Light has just inked the largest contract in UFC history, throwing $100m at the man who most recently foisted competitive Slapfighting, sport’s very own embossed carbuncle, upon the world.
The nearest the duo came to addressing the elephant in the room was the host gently chiding the beer company for making a big mistake by getting involved in something he called “woke cultural wars” earlier this year.
That’s one way of describing Bud Light, desperate to attract young people to their product, sending Dylan Mulvaney, a TikTok influencer with 10m plus followers, a case of beer with her face on every tin. A promotional gift to mark a landmark date in her transition from male to female, and an opportunity for her to run a competition among loyal fans to win some booze. So far, so good. How brands operate today.
The brewery was merely the latest in a long line of corporations – Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade and Crest – among others, to try to tap into Mulvaney’s popularity and undoubted talent for online shilling.
None of those suffered the fallout endured by Bud Light for daring to do a commercial deal with a transgender woman.
The demented response from conservative beer drinkers, whipped into a predictable frenzy by Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media’s outrage industrial complex, was maybe best captured by Kid Rock. Remember him?
Within days, the scarcely believable rapper turned mediocre country singer turned risible Trump rocker filmed himself standing out by a lake, declaring war on defenceless cases of Bud Light. They never stood a chance.
“Let me say something to all of you and be as clear and concise as possible,” Rock declared, before training his semi-automatic rifle on the beers and unleashing fresh hell.
Hops exploded, cans pulverised, damage done, he turned to the camera and said, with all the excess defiance of a pubescent who just let the air out of the principal’s tyres, “F**k Bud Light and F**k Anheuser-Busch”.
The clip has been watched over 53 million times on YouTube and there are enough Kid Rock fellow travellers that Bud Light lost an estimated $400m in sales and had a couple of billion shaved off the Anheuser-Busch stock price. Since April.
Having alienated many in the trans community for its supine handling of the subsequent negative reaction, the company is now making an obvious play to win back right-wingers by sponsoring their favourite combat sport and, consequently, getting Dana White, the mountebank who once convinced gullible Americans that Conor McGregor was the Irish Muhammad Ali, to become their mouthpiece.
That White got an armchair ride on Fox News last week, where Hannity has previously portrayed McGregor as some sort of rascally philanthropist, was an inevitable part of the corporate calculation. It may even be enough to persuade some of those so easily triggered by Mulvaney’s face on a tin to drink the beer again.
Except the moment the deal was announced UFC fans went kind of berserk, slamming the move (even though the brewery was one of the sport’s first mainstream sponsors back in the day), threatening to cancel subscriptions, and to boycott fights.
Their anger more pronounced because they’ve always worshipped White as their very own “anti-woke” warrior, they didn’t grasp that Bud Light gave their hero 100m reasons to suffer the backlash to the backlash. In the United States of Dystopia, money always speaks louder than words.
