Florida’s Governor is tapping into a new argument against a brewery gone bad.
During an interview with Megyn Kelly, Ron DeSantis claimed Bud Light “injured” Floridians through briefly engaging transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney as a product endorser.
“I have people in Florida that were injured by the company’s decline as a result of that, you know, these are people that rely on the pension,” DeSantis said.
During a Fox News hit earlier this month, DeSantis noted Florida’s pension fund had roughly $50 million in exposure to the pension fund, as the state “overweighted” Bud Light parent company InBev.
Remarkably, the state held the position even as DeSantis encouraged people to boycott the brew, though Kelly didn’t ask DeSantis why the state didn’t simply liquidate its InBev positions.
DeSantis was asked, however, about his call to boycott the beer. He claims that stopped short of weaponizing the power of the state against a commodity the state owns.
“That’s just as a personal thing,” DeSantis said. “We didn’t have, like, the state government, you know, necessarily, you know, putting power about it. But as an American, I said, ‘I’m not doing Anheuser. I’m not doing Bud Light.’”
DeSantis then claimed so-called “wokeness” was to blame and not his personal endorsement of the boycott.
“We’re defending the people that are beneficiaries of the pension,” DeSantis said. “When they’re trying to throw an agenda down your throat, you don’t like it, but it does have an impact on the economy. It has an impact on people who hold stocks — and that’s not just rich people. That’s those people. So with InBev, they departed from their fiduciary duty and so we’re investigating.”
DeSantis has worked Bud Light bashing into his campaign speeches, recently telling South Carolina supporters the company is trying to push “transgenderism.”
Previously, on “The Benny Show” podcast video, the Governor vowed never to drink the domestic light beer again, saying a boycott of the brew was “righteous.”
“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’re just going to keep doing it. So, if you as a consumer are like … ‘Yeah, they’re doing that, but I’m just going to keep drinking anyways,’ well, then they’re going to keep doing it,” DeSantis said, before eventually revealing he liked Guinness better anyway.
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