If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is your bartender, don’t try to order a Bud Light.
The 2024 presidential candidate jumped behind the bar for patrons at The Bunker at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Sparks, Nevada during a campaign stop on Friday but refused to serve one particular drink: Bud Light.
The beer brand faced backlash and a conservative boycott after its partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender activist. It’s since become a flashpoint in the right-wing’s ever-growing anti-LGBTQ movement.
“Just so you know, I’ll serve you anything except Bud Light. I just can’t do that,” DeSantis said.
A spokesperson for DeSantis posted a clip of the interaction on Saturday.
In an April interview with conservative commentator Benny Johnson, DeSantis said he would no longer drink Bud Light anymore because he didn’t want to support “woke companies” and their goals of “trying to change our country, trying to change policy, [and] trying to change [the] culture.”
“Why would you want to drink Bud Light? I mean like honestly, that’s like them rubbing our faces in it, and it’s like these companies that do this, if they never have any response, they are just gonna keep doing it,” DeSantis said.
But while DeSantis might not be kicking back with a bottle of Bud Light any time soon, he hasn’t moved to penalize Anheuser-Busch—which employs about 800 in the state—in any notable way, according to a report by HuffPost.
Anheuser-Busch operates both a brewery and a can factory in Jacksonville, and in 2015—pre-DeSantis’ governorship—Anheuser-Busch chose its Jacksonville can factory over two competing cities to increase its production of aluminum bottles. Over a two-year period, the company invested $170 million and created 75 new jobs to expand its factory to produce aluminum bottles. In doing so, it received $3 million in grants from Florida on top of $12 million in grants and other incentives from Jacksonville, according to HuffPost.
And while DeSantis and others may say the beer maker has gone “woke”—the money paints a different picture.
Last election cycle, nearly $400,000 (or 62%) of Anheuser-Busch’s contributions at a federal level went to Republicans, according to the nonpartisan watchdog site OpenSecrets. That figure doesn’t include state-level giving, such as the $47,080 the company has given the Republican Party of Florida since the beginning of this year.
Anheuser-Busch also gave the state party about $80,000 during the 2022 cycle, $50,000 of which came in August amid DeSantis’ reelection bid. The company also dropped a $50,000 contribution to DeSantis’ committee in February 2021, according to state campaign finance records.
Some prominent conservatives, including Donald Trump Jr., opposed the boycott because of the company’s long history of contributing to Republican causes.
But many DeSantis supporters have pointed to the Floridian’s pro-boycott stance as evidence that he’d make a better president than Donald Trump (the former president himself largely remained silent on the issue, before eventually remarking in May that the boycott is proof “money does talk”).
“Ron DeSantis will talk s*** about Bud Light for what they’ve done and Disney because he don’t care about the donations and the money,” one user tweeted. “But Donald Trump will coward down to these companies because of the money.”
“What’s impressive about DeSantis is he will not let donor demands sway him,” wrote another user on Sunday.
DeSantis’ press secretary linked to an article about Trump Jr.’s opposition to the boycott with a simple clown emoji response on Saturday, as the video of DeSantis gained traction.
The Daily Dot has reached out to DeSantis’ campaign for comment.
