Demand for Bud Light has significantly declined in recent weeks in the midst of a boycott against the company for producing a can with a transgender influencer’s face on it, according to a mobile bartending company founder.
“There has been a ‘significant shift’ in consumer preferences,” Catarina Tucker, the founder of Barnastics, told Fox News. “Bud Light, once a popular option, is no longer capturing the attention or enthusiasm of event organizers and attendees.”
Barnastics, according to Tucker, allows customers to build a custom proposal, allowing them to see the demand for certain beverages. And, the data shows that demand for Bud Light “has plummeted completely,” she said, adding that “no one wants it at their event anymore.”
“There are a couple clients that have expressed to me their feelings behind it, and it’s no longer popular,” she remarked to the network.
About six weeks ago, transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney revealed on social media that Bud Light produced a Mulvaney-themed commemorative Bud Light can, while Mulvaney claimed to be in a partnership with the light beer company. Boycott threats immediately followed, fueled by conservative commentators on Twitter.
Last month, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch, Michel Doukeris, said that just “one can” was produced with Mulvaney’s face and suggested that social media-driven “misinformation” and “confusion” was to blame.
The backlash has produced real consequences. In the month ending May 13, Bud Light’s U.S. sales were down 23 percent, according to Bump Williams Consulting. Target’s shares have plunged 20 percent since mid-May, wiping away $15 billion in market value, although that’s partly due to investor concerns about inflation’s impact on shoppers.
A report, citing industry data, found that a Bud Light competitor Modelo Especial is now the No. 1 selling beer. Within the United States, Modelo is owned by Constellation Brands. Outside the country, it is owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev, which also makes Bud Light.
Bill Newlands, the chief executive officer of Constellation Brands, told Newsweek that the four-week spike in sales had happened “quicker than we had anticipated.” “We thought that would take a little longer,” he continued to say. “We’ve been very fortunate that that’s gone a little quicker than we had anticipated. But what a great position to be in on the beer side.”
Other Boycotts?
Restaurant chain Cracker Barrel now faces calls for a boycott after the company made social media posts celebrating “Pride Month” and promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.
“We are excited to celebrate Pride Month with our employees and guests. Everyone is always welcome at our table (and our rainbow rocker). Happy Pride!” the company wrote in a post. It included a photo of chairs with an LGBT rainbow flag-like design.
The Texas Family Project, a political advocacy organization, posted photos of the restaurant’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts that critics say are an attempt to force left-wing propaganda into the corporate world. Some, like authors Christopher Rufo and James Lindsay, assert that DEI is merely a Marxist-inspired attempt to implement “left-wing racialist ideology and partisan political activism.”
“We take no pleasure in reporting that @CrackerBarrel has fallen,” the Texas Family Project wrote on social media. “A once family friendly establishment has caved to the mob.”
Cracker Barrel, like many other major corporations, has a DEI section on its website that says “discrimination, overt or through unconscious bias, has no place” at the restaurant.
After critical posts were made against the restaurant chain, the company’s Twitter account responded that its employees take “pride in creating a welcoming, safe atmosphere.”
The criticism and calls for boycotts targeting Cracker Barrel come in the midst of ongoing backlash against Bud Light, Target, and several other major brands. Target last month confirmed that it removed some pro-LGBT merchandise from its shelves after people noted that the company is selling “pride” clothing and items for small children, including infants.
For June, a number of large corporations have attempted to cash in on so-called Pride Month by offering related merchandise to shoppers. Government agencies, too, have adopted the LGBT flag color scheme, while President Joe Biden on Saturday promoted a Pride Month event at the White House as some critics noted that the White House placed the updated LGBT flag—including the transgender colors—in the center of two American flags.
A large number of negative social media posts about Pride this year are attacking companies for sliding to the political left and accusing them of sexualizing or grooming children, according to RILA Global Consulting, which tracks more than 100 million websites and social media pages per day.
That’s an abrupt change from last year, when a majority of negative social media posts were focused on brands being “inauthentic” and not truly supporting the LGBT population even as they expanded their offerings, the consulting group claimed. In May and June of 2022, there were fewer than 400 posts calling for Pride-related boycotts, RILA said. This year, in May alone there were more than 15,000.
The Epoch Times has contacted Anhueser-Busch for comment.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times. Image by Mike Mozart via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Thank you for informing us of the corporations that are discriminating against Americans by promoting Satanic abominations like sexual deviancy. I learned in this article that a restaurant I occasionally visited when better options were not availble (Cracker Barrel) has been infected. I also learned that Modelo is affiliated with Anheiser -Busch’s parent company. I do not drink beer or shop at Targay, but now I know to avoid Crackpot Barrel as well. Keep up the good work.
I have read that only Modelo sold in non-US areas(EU) is made/distributed by AB. And that the Modelo sold in the US has retained it’s non-AB ownership. So I think Modelo might be OK within the US borders.
BUT, Yuengling is owned by a Trump supporter. So my next beer purchase will be Yuengling.
It’s sad that the workers, who had nothing to do with this crap, are the ones who will suffer because some jackass CEO thought it was a good idea.
My exclusive Visa card of the last six years has been my TJ Maxx/Marshalls/Home Goods card. I use it for everything, then pay it off monthly to avoid interest charges and get the credits for their stores. Yesterday I clicked their link to receive my “points” and a huge LGBT rainbow popped up.
Today I will be cutting up their card. I will use their certificates on some merch and then I will stop shopping there entirely, at least for as long as possible. I would rather pay more for my clothing than support companies that are trying to change the world my soon to be born grandchild will be living in. Sorry, not acceptable here. They cannot bully me and they cannot persuade me that it’s OK to be crazy and mutilate children on a whim.
Twenty-five years ago, when I saw corporate America promoting the Satanic-based ritual called Halloween, it was obvious to me that the dark descent we are witnessing now would soon be upon us.
Same thing when the big-box booksellers dedicated shelving to homosexual materials.
This conquest of Satanic forces has been many years in the making.
It’s not just what BudLight did. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The feminists hating men started in the 70’s. It is huge now. They hate the family. They hate women who choose to stay at home to raise the children. They hate marriage and pushed to redefine what it meant by creating homo-sexual marriage. And have openly admitted so at some events that had poor media coverage but it was on CSPAN. And now the trans thing. It seems to us hetero’s (also derogatorily known as “breeders” in the gay community) that gay and trans are now considered supreme and we are at the bottom and must kow-tow to them. When a company hit’s hard times and needs to lay off workers, white male hetero’s are the first out the door. Gays last. We’ve been living that reality for the last 20 years.