“The Bud Light Treatment”
Conservatives and Right Wing Media Target Eventbrite
By Kevin Howley, November 6, 2023
Another week, another pitched battle in the culture war over women’s rights. No, I’m not talking about Ohio’s Issue 1 referendum that would enshrine reproductive rights in the Buckeye State. I’m referring to the right wing media firestorm over Eventbrite’s decision to remove “Protecting Women’s Sports with Riley Gaines” from the website.
For the uninitiated, Riley Gaines, the former NCAA women’s champion swimmer, who, according to American Thinker, “has become well known for defending women’s sports from trans-males” took to social media late last month decrying Eventbrite’s move. Gaines rallied fellow culture warriors to give the event management site “the Bud Light treatment” – a clear reference to the right wing boycott of Anheuser–Busch for its “woke” advertising campaign featuring trans-influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
The Outrage Machine
With Israel laying waste to Gaza, global tensions rising by the minute, and extremism raging in the halls of Congress, you’d think conservative news outlets would have more important things to do. Think again.
The outrage machine never misses a chance to distract and deflect attention away from the Republican party’s authoritarian turn. And before you could say, “Make American Great Again,” GOP “leaders” hopped on the boycott bandwagon, crying foul against Eventbrite, cancel culture, and woke ideology in a bid to wield gender nonconformity as a wedge issue and further polarize the electorate ahead of the 2024 election.
False Equivalences
The conservative echo chamber’s collective response to Eventbrite pulling the plug on Gaines reveals a time-tested strategy of demagoguery. For example, under the banner “Campus Insanity” The Federalist offers this bit of red meat to readers: “Eventbrite Nuked ‘Protecting Women’s Sports’ Event While Platforming Pro-Hamas Rallies.”
The false equivalence between voicing solidarity and support for Palestinians and “platforming” Hamas apologists is an undercurrent that’s hard to miss in the Eventbrite tumult. Case in point: Townhall’s headline, “Eventbrite Prohibits Riley Gaines’ Event Promotions, Allows Pro-Hamas Listings.”
Fox News weighed in this way: “Although the event featuring Gaines was removed, several other controversial events appear to remain active on the platform’s ticketing marketplace. One was from a group called ‘Tempest NYC,’ which posted a ‘Stop the Genocide! Free Palestine!’ event that is scheduled to take place next week.”
Unsurprisingly, given the right’s success with Bud Light, Target, and Disney earlier this year, the chilling effect of threatening boycotts is working. With a note of triumph, PJ Media claims: “Eventbrite came under fire for citing its hateful content policy to remove pro-woman events like Gaines’s speech, while listings of pro-Hamas rallies remained on the site – though they were eventually removed after [the conservative sports site] Outkick’s initial report.”
Canceling Chloe
Headlined, “Has Eventbrite Earned the Bud Lite Treatment?,” American Thinker answers its own question with a boisterous: “Hell Yeah!” Columnist James Stansbury writes, “Chloe Cole is a young woman with the same level of courage as world-class swimmer Riley Gaines … Both of these young women have been stung more than once by the gender cancel culture.” Cole is a 19-year-old activist who detransitioned after undergoing double mastectomy at age 15.
Stansbury relates Cole’s opposition to gender affirming care for minors and a recent episode, first reported by Daily Wire, when organizers from the Palmetto Family Council used Eventbrite to promote her upcoming speaking engagement at First Baptist North Spartanburg. The online ticketing service then “unexpectedly determined that the scheduled event is not permitted on their platform,” citing violations of its Community Guidelines and Terms of Service conditions.
“It is now quite obvious,” Stansbury concludes, “that Eventbrite’s woke management doesn’t want kids or parents to know there are thousands of detransitioners like Chloe who were also subtly manipulated by social media, schoolteachers, medical professionals, etc. to take hormones and undergo painful, irreversible life-altering transgender surgery.”
Such hyperbolic hysteria might be funny if wasn’t so dangerous; to date, 19 states have banned gender affirming care for transgender youth, leaving more than 100,000 trans kids across the country without such care.
Distraction, Deflection, Projection
It’s not just right wing pundits pushing the false equivalencies and championing women in all things but reproductive rights. Headlined, “Sen. Schmitt Sounds Alarm Over Eventbrite’s ‘Liberal-Progressive Agenda’ After Pulling Riley Gaines Event,” Fox News writes: “Eventbrite’s hypocrisy and woke political extremism were recently put on full display after the company prohibited Outkick’s Riley Gaines from promoting her speaking event about protecting women’s sports at the University of California-Davis on Nov. 3. While the company claimed that Gaines’ event violated its terms of service, Eventbrite was allowing listings for pro-Hamas events.”
According to Fox, Schmitt, the junior senator from Missouri, doubled down on misleading and disingenuous comparisons in a letter to Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz: “It is worth noting that while this type of content is being removed from your platform, other events featuring individuals who have expressed antisemitic views comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and others who are prominent supporters of the BDS movement against Israel are allowed to host or speak at events listed on Eventbrite.”
Meanwhile, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin wasted no time joining calls to boycott Eventbrite. According to RedState, “Youngkin has directed his team to pull all Youngkin events from the website on grounds that it was insane that they would toss a Riley Gaines gathering from their platform but keep up ones that promoted support for Hamas in the aftermath of their terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians.”
RedState adds that Younkin elaborated his position on the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton program, urging “listeners to ‘fire’ Eventbrite by not responding to nor RSVPing to any Eventbrite event in order to send a message.”
For David Strom at Hot Air, the chickens have come home to roost. Headlined, “Suddenly ‘Cancel Culture’ Is Terrible,” Strom concludes: “We still live in a world where Riley Gaines can be denied access to Eventbrite, but Hamas supporters of actual genocide are supported by the company.”
Distraction, deflection, and projection are powerful tools for Republican ideologues and their lackeys in conservative media. But if the conservative assault on dissent isn’t enough to keep your head spinning, dear reader, rest assured that you needn’t subscribe to Daily Caller’s “Culture Wars Newsletter” to keep up with the extreme right’s obsession over gender identity and sexual orientation: leave that to TheRighting.
Kevin Howley is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Social Movement Studies, and Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture. He is the author and editor of several books, including Media Interventions and Drones: Media Discourse and the Public Imagination.
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EventBrite made the wrong type of splash when the company removed an event featuring swimmer Riley Gaines (above), a vocal advocate defending women’s sports from biological males who identify as women. (Image: Flickr)
