It turns out that the right-wing boycott of Bud Light in 2023 was helped along by funding from a conservative with a history of dark-money spending: Leonard Leo.
The Guardian obtained 2022 tax filings showing that a group linked to Leo, the Concord Fund, donated $350,000 to Consumers Defense, part of Consumers’ Research, shortly before the latter group played a big role in the beer boycott.
The boycott started over Bud Light’s use of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in an advertising campaign, resulting in threats to Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch, as well as a drop in profits. The company abandoned and eventually dropped Mulvaney.
Consumers’ Research, after having been dormant for decades, has surfaced in recent years as a right-wing organization dedicated to leading “the fight against ESG,” or environmental, social, and governance policies, by corporations in America. When companies put “progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers” in its view, Consumers’ Research releases “woke alerts.”
This wasn’t the first time a donor group connected to Leo helped out Consumers’ Research. In 2021 and 2022, it received $15 million from right-wing philanthropic organization Donors Trust, also linked to the billionaire Republican megadonor. Consumers’ Research is also a client of Leo’s for-profit firm CRC Advisors, according to The Guardian.
Leo is infamous for helping to engineer the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and the right-wing influx of judges into lower federal courts. Through those efforts, he has in effect become a power broker in conservative circles, throwing his money in unexpected places, such as blocking AIDS relief, in addition to funding brand boycotts. He’s dodged Democratic attempts to hold him accountable or even to have him just answer questions about his activities.
The Bud Light boycott Leo fueled might have caused an ethics violation by one of the justices he helped get on the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. During the height of the boycott, Alito dumped between $1,000 and $15,000 of Anheuser-Busch stock, possibly showing his own support of the boycott his patron helped to fund.
