Anheuser-Busch Is Getting the Bigotry It Paid for With Bud Light’s UFC Deal
June is Pride Month, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the social media feeds or press releases of the country’s biggest beverage-alcohol companies. Less than two years into the second Trump administration, they’ve mostly abandoned their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, cut back on their donations to queer organizations, and re-embraced a homogenous vision of the American drinking public that’s as soothing to C-suiters as it is anachronistic to reality.
Even compared to the muted cowardice of its peers, though, Anheuser-Busch InBev’s silence in the face of a violently transphobic video posted in its name by a star affiliated with Ultimate Fighting Championship, its nine-figure media partner, still deafens.
Last week, Sean Strickland, a mixed-martial-arts middleweight known as much for his excellence within the Octagon as for his bigotry and general sh*theadedness outside of it, posted a disturbing video to his official Instagram account depicting himself beating a woman. The video was generated with artificial intelligence; the woman appears to be Dylan Mulvaney, the trans actress whose innocuous social media video in 2023 formed the pretense for a vile and coordinated right-wing outrage campaign that Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) bungled worse than the rollout of Bud Light Next.
Strickland being a bottom-feeding troglodyte in public for attention is neither the remit of this column, nor news per se. The guy is a bum even by the low standards set for the UFC by its head honcho, known wife-slapper and Trump hype man Dana White. But at the end of the fighter’s misogynistic assault fantasy rolled a brief ad touting Bud Light as “The Official Beer Sponsor of UFC,” and in his caption, he tagged the brand directly, writing: “Ive yet to see one rainbow flag. We’re back!!! 🇺🇸 🇺🇲 @budlight”.
More than three years after the Bud Light fiasco began, its dismal legacy of corporate incompetence and cultural capitulation lives on. The story of Strickland’s shameful post is really a story about how the country’s biggest brewer threw LGBTQ+ people to the wolves — then spent hundreds of millions of dollars pandering to the pack.
Neither ABI, UFC, nor Strickland’s manager responded to requests for comment.
In the history of American macrobrewing, there have been only a few genuinely pivotal catastrophes brought on by an executive’s poor judgment. The business is just too big, too complex, too systemic for an individual to tank a firm on his (or her, but, y’know… his) own. But it has happened: Look at poor Bob Uihlein greenlighting Schlitz’s ruinous reformulations in the ’70s, or egomaniac Bill Coors backing out of a Hail Mary merger with Stroh’s in 1989. On this ignominious timeline, ABI North American chief executive Brendan Whitworth’s decision in the spring of 2023 to allow right-wing operatives to whip up a transphobic furor over Mulvaney’s (brief, unremarkable) Bud Light video before addressing it with a mealy-mouthed statement seemingly designed in a lab to maximally enrage everyone involved looms very large indeed.
This is obvious in hindsight, considering ABI has spent the intervening three years clawing out of the ditch into which it steered Bud Light with a calamitously bad crisis-management strategy and a complete ignorance for the right’s Gamergate-style bad-faith influence playbook. But it was also obvious at the time! As I wrote just hours after that pathetic press release hit the wire on April 14, 2023:
As a clean-cut, good-looking former Marine, Whitworth might have had a shot at deflating this situation by getting out in front of it a week ago, and staying there. That profile might have won him a sympathetic ear with the Fox News crowd before this thing really got ripping. By hanging back and letting female employees take very public, very bigoted heat, he missed the moment — and ABI’s best chance to nip this thing in the bud.
I will spare you the recap of all the twists and turns that unfolded in the Bud Light fiasco from that point. (If you’re interested, I covered the saga extensively for Hop Take; see, here, here, and here.) But to understand why Strickland might consider Bud Light a willing costar in slop glamorizing violence against a trans woman to his 3 million Instagram followers, you have to understand the move ABI made about six months into the sh*tshow. After unsuccessfully rummaging through its advertising archives for inoffensive spots over the summer of 2023, the company announced its first big endorsement deal since the fracas started: a multiyear sponsorship of the UFC that made Bud Light the promotion’s official beer and the promotion itself more than $100 million. The tie-up, Whitworth proclaimed at the time in an October 2023 announcement, would allow ABI to “celebrate our passionate fans while always making a positive impact in communities across America.”
What the flailing exec didn’t say is that White’s notoriously shady MMA league was and is extremely popular with the right-wing men who were then swearing off Bud Light as the preferred light lager of Big Woke. Whether ABI was already in talks with UFC when Kid Rock staged a video of himself shooting up a bunch of cases of the company’s flagship beer, or it scrambled to ink one as the reactionary outrage boiled over from social media to real life (assisted, The Guardian would later uncover, by a propaganda campaign funded with $15 million dollars funneled into astroturfing orgs by Republican Supreme Court kingmaker Leonard Leo), the timing was so conspicuous that even D-list conservative pundits clocked it. White himself saw fit to sit for an interview with Fox News’ top demagogue Sean Hannity to defend the deal. Writing for Fingers a couple days after ABI announced the arrangement (then the biggest in UFC history), I broke down the angles:
Even for a firm that was glad to ignore a litany of Qatari human-rights abuses to access those sweet, sweet World Cup eyeballs, this deal isn’t a great look. It looks much worse in the context of ABI’s ongoing struggle to get Bud Light’s groove back after getting rolled by reactionary rubes. ABI is touting “the 700 million fans in 170 countries, as well as an estimated 900 million TV households” that the UFC serves up. I don’t doubt that those metrics helped convince global chief marketing officer Marcel Marcondes to sign on the dotted line. Still, the world’s largest brewer has no problem finding big global audiences. With its stylized veneration of warrior masculinity, and White’s own anti-woke, “might-makes-right” piggishness, the UFC offers entrée with the specific American audience Marcondes et al. apparently wants Bud Light to reconnect with: the baying right-wing bigots who pantsed the brand in the first place.
Nearly three years later, it is clear that ABI has recovered from its self-inflicted swoon. In its latest earnings report, it posted organic volume growth of 0.8 percent, making the quarter its first with that metric in the black since the Bud Light fiasco began. By other measures, it has performed decently well compared to its own record, and decidedly well compared to its competitors, throughout. The U.S. boycott was never a meaningful threat to the bottom line of this globally diversified firm; it just acted like it was.
Still, it’s also clear that Bud Light will not recover. The brand, which had been in decline for about 15 years when 2023 rolled around, has lost nearly 40 percent of its volume since. I’m less persuaded by the “go woke, go broke” explanation advanced by right-wing commentators (though there’s no doubt ABI’s ineptitude in the face of backlash accelerated its decline) and more persuaded by the historic demand shift away from mass-market light lagers generally. According to data presented by Beer Marketer’s Insights at its spring conference last week, the U.S. beer industry overall has shed 15 percent of its volume — 32 million barrels! — in the decade from 2015 to 2025. It’s rough out there for the aging veterans of the Light Beer Wars. But if the UFC partnership was meant to reverse Bud Light’s slide with America’s podcast-addled sweatpants men, well, there’s little evidence that it has.
With this context in mind, return your attention to Strickland’s violent AI slop. ABI’s UFC deal is not directly with the bigoted fighter, and despite the Bud Light mentions in the video and caption, it strikes me as very unlikely the post is a part of an endorsement. (That’s one of the unanswered questions I asked all three parties.) But that only underscores the banality of the evil ABI got itself into bed with.
Strickland’s puerile views may be his own, but as the UFC’s two-time middleweight champ and one of its most prominent frontmen, they were hardly unknown when the brewer, desperate to burnish its bona fides with America’s gutter bigots, signed on the dotted line. It defies credulity that mighty ABI has no recourse (with the promotion, or White himself) to get the fighter to take down the video, or at least remove Bud Light’s logo and handle from it. At publication, it remains online.
Of course, nothing is stopping ABI from disavowing the obscene content Strickland posted in Bud Light’s name. I can think of only two reasons it hasn’t: negligence or malice. Either it didn’t realize what it was buying when it spent $100 million on the UFC deal, and is now too terrified — of White, of the right-wing media, of Trump himself — to speak out against it. Or it knew exactly what it was buying the whole time, even if Strickland’s video is a smidge on-the-nose.
Regardless, ABI has nothing to be proud of.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
For years, journalists on the beer beat have relied on annual volume data published by the Brewers Association’s house organ, The New Brewer, to benchmark the health of the craft-beer industry. Some (including your humble Hop Take columnist) have been rethinking that reliance since significant errors appeared in the magazine’s recap of 2025 production volumes. The trade org ultimately issued a correction last week, revising the segment’s overall volume decline from 5 percent to 4 percent. In other words, the group tasked with promoting the trade made its performance look 20 percent worse than it actually was last year. Ah!
📈 Ups…
There’s a family-to-family changing of the guard in Washington as the founding family of Icicle Brewing hands the operation off to a local hop-farming couple to carry on… Boston Beer Company has filed its long-signaled appeal of the $175 million judgement Ardagh won against it last month… Sounds like the former owner of San Francisco’s iconic Toronado is at peace with his decision to sell the beloved beer bar, which is nice…
📉 …and downs
Coors Light’s gimmick for the World Cup, the Coooors Light Tallerboy, isn’t even a cartoonishly oversized can of beer — it’s just a sleeve to put cans of beer in… Per the Beer Institute’s latest tax-paids analysis, the category’s two-month streak of year-over-year growth ended in April with a decline of 0.04 percent… The good news is that inflation on beer is trailing the overall Consumer Price Index in the feds’ latest reading, but the bad news is it’s leading bev-alc, and overall inflation hit a three-year high…
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