By Andrea Widburg
Word broke the other day that Anheuser-Busch, the parent company of Bud Light, has inked a valuable deal with the UFC to make Bud Light the UFC’s official beer. Clearly, Bud Light is trying to win back the customers it lost over the Dylan Mulvaney debacle. They shouldn’t—and the UFC should be slapped down for allying itself with a company that has been unrepentant about its disastrous decision.
I’ve liked the UFC’s Dana White. He’s an open Trump supporter and a good conservative, as are many of the UFC fighters. I also like to see a sport that’s not owned by large leftist conglomerates and one in which the fighters have a glorious amateur quality last seen and admired during what I consider the golden years of the Olympics (before the 21st century). No wonder the UFC is hugely successful.
And then it does something like this:
The UFC has signed a new partnership with Anheuser-Busch that makes Bud Light once again the official beer of the promotion, officials told ESPN on Tuesday. Sources told ESPN that it’s the biggest sponsorship deal in UFC history. Terms were not disclosed.
The multiyear contract, which begins Jan. 1, 2024, comes on the heels of the UFC merging with WWE under parent company Endeavor to form the new publicly traded company TKO last month. UFC and Anheuser-Busch had been partners for many years until 2017, when the UFC signed with Modelo.
“Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light were UFC’s original beer sponsors more than fifteen years ago,” UFC CEO Dana White said in a statement. “I’m proud to announce we are back in business together. There are many reasons why I chose to go with Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light, most importantly because I feel we are very aligned when it comes to our core values and what the UFC brand stands for. I’m looking forward to all of the incredible things we will do in the years ahead.” (Emphasis mine.)
I can understand why Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light would want to bathe in the light of the UFC. The UFC, as noted above, is one of the most successful sports franchises in the world. Meanwhile, Bud Light lost a massive amount of market share after it decided that Dylan Mulvaney would be a great match for its product. Ordinary Americans believe in the gender binary and eye askance men who, whether from mental illness or being opportunistic, pretend to be women. That’s why, unlike Bud Light’s marketing department, they did not think it was a great match.
Viewed that way, Bud Light’s decision to realign itself with manly men and strong but womanly women makes perfect sense.
What I can’t understand is why Dana White did this. In his interview with Charly Arnolt, White said, “You can’t torture someone forever.”
On the one hand, White is right about the virtue of forgiveness. On the other hand, he’s missed two important steps in forgiveness and redemption: Remorse and repentance.
Neither Anheuser-Busch nor Bud Light has apologized for that massive marketing miscalculation. The corporations figure that the American public will just forget and forgive. Well, the American public shouldn’t. That attitude is part of why leftism has made such inroads into and been so destructive of America: Being a leftist means never having to say you’re sorry while always getting a pass.
The sad thing is that I bet that Anheuser-Busch and Bud Light will have figured correctly that the American public will happily ignore their lack of remorse. That’s partly because what they just managed to do with the UFC isn’t a big thing, like writing Black Lives Matter on stadiums and playing fields or taking a knee when the National Anthem plays. Instead, this is a non-headline-making deal about the kind of product advertisements that Americans are used to seeing.
Thus, No one will say, “I just can’t make myself watch the UFC anymore because I get sickened every time I see one of those Bud Light ads and know that the companies involved never apologized.” Instead, for UFC fans, it’ll be business as usual, and the leftists will get another pass.