One of the first and biggest voices denouncing Bud Light over its Dylan Mulvaney campaign is willing to let bygones be bygones.
In an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity, Kid Rock said he doesn’t want to hurt Anheuser-Busch workers or be seen as engaging in cancel culture.
“I can let the thing go,” he said in the context of recent moves by Bud Light to distance itself from transgender debates and appeal to a more traditionally masculine image.
“As a conservative — more importantly a patriot — I don’t want to be in the party of cancel cultures and boycotts that ultimately hurt working class people that have no dogs especially in this fight,” he said.
Mr. Hannity agreed about the impact on Anheuser-Busch’s workers and franchisees from the huge decline — around 25% by most measures — in Bud Light sales.
“I want the drivers back to work; I want the warehouse workers back to work; [I want] the guys loading the trucks back to work, because they didn’t do this,” the Fox News host said.
Kid Rock played a role in turning the anti-Mulvaney backlash into something more than a few people grousing on the Internet, as he sicced a rifle on several cases of Bud Light in a video that went viral and spawned imitators.
But in Wednesday night’s segment, he noted a theological justification for ending the boycott.
“As a God-fearing man, as a Christian, I gotta believe in forgiveness. They made a mistake. All right. You wanna hold their head under water and drown them and kill people’s jobs?” he asked.
Some of the Anheuser-Busch people who’ve lost jobs over the past several months are senior marketing people such as Alissa Heinerscheid, had said the brand “is in decline” and needed to update its image from “a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.”
So Kid Rock has some marketing advice, because he needs Bud Light “to show me something to get me back as a consumer, as a drinker.”
“I want them to double down and do something triple as fratty, I want them to be five times as fratty as they’ve ever been,” he suggested. “Make light of the situation. Show everyone it’s safe to go back in the water.”
Among the marketing moves Bud Light has made in recent months to recover its status has included ad purchases on such masculine venues as football and MMA contests, and hiring such NFL stars as Travis Kelce and Dak Prescott as spokesmen.
Mr. Hannity and Kid Rock even began the segment by noting that UFC President Dana White, whom they each praised as a no-nonsense person, had just last month signed a $105 million annual sponsorship deal with Bud Light for his fight promotion.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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