Kid Rock compares Bud Light boycott to spanking a child in that there’s “nothing wrong” with it

Kid Rock says he’s more than happy to drink Bud Light again because parent company Anheuser-Busch “got the message” following an anti-trans boycott earlier this year.

Back in April, the singer infamously posted a video to social media showing him shooting up several cases of the beer with a machine gun after transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney announced a partnership with Bud Light. The partnership led to calls for a boycott of Anheuser-Busch from anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives, and Mulvaney was subjected to a torrent of harassment and transphobia, both online and in person.

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“I now realize that when I work with a brand, that they will forever be a part of my story.”

By August, however, Kid Rock was seemingly over his transphobic outrage. He was photographed drinking a Bud Light while watching country musician Colt Ford perform in Nashville, Tennessee.

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Over the weekend, the singer joined Tucker Carlson on the former Fox News personality’s new streaming network, Tucker Carlson Network (TCN), to discuss his current position on Bud Light.

Noting Anheuser-Busch’s “apology” for partnering with Mulvaney, Carlson said the Bud Light boycott seemed to have resulted in “a win” for anti-trans trolls.

“I think it could be,” Kid Rock said. “I think they got some work still to get some of that base that they lost, I think, to get them back.”

“At the end of the day, when you step back and look at it, like, yeah, they deserved a black eye, and they got one,” he continued. “They made a mistake.” 

The singer explained that the video of him shooting the Bud Light cases was “a little marketing” to his own fans. “It felt like a good excuse to get my machine gun out and have some fun, but also to make a statement.”

He went on to theorize that the partnership with Mulvaney was a result of Anheuser-Busch moving its corporate offices to New York and hiring “Ivy League, progressive people…who don’t know s**t about working-class people or middle America in this country.”

“Yes, it was a mistake. So, do I want to hold their head underwater and drown them because they made a mistake? No, I think they got the message,” he continued. “Hopefully, other companies get it too, but, at the end of the day, I don’t think the punishment that they’ve been getting at this point fits the crime.”

He then compared the Bud Light boycott to spanking a child. “There’s nothing wrong with giving a spanking, when a kid does something wrong,” he said. “But you don’t spank them for the rest of their life.”

In the wake of the boycott, Anheuser-Busch has been widely criticized for its response. The beer company effectively abandoned Mulvaney to the transphobic backlash, issuing what amounted to a tacit apology for the partnership. Its equivocation to anti-LGBTQ+ critics led the Human Rights Campaign to remove the company from its Corporate Equality Index in May, while some gay bars opted to stop serving Anheuser-Busch products.

While Anheuser-Busch had consistently marketed its products to the LGBTQ+ community, it also has a history of donating to anti-LGBTQ+ state-level politicians. New York’s iconic Stonewall Inn previously banned the company’s beers in 2021 in response to those contributions.