Doritos faces their own Bud Light moment by hiring a transgender brand ambassador in Spain...

 

Doritos. Newsweek. 

Doritos is facing their own Bud Light moment by hiring a transgender brand ambassador in Spain with a disturbing social media history. Newsweek. Doritos hired Samantha Hudson, a male to female transgender YouTuber and social media star as a brand ambassador in Spain but it was discovered that they had made some disturbing social media posts involving a desire to molest a 12 year old girl. The tweet happened in 2015 and Hudson said it was a joke. Another tweet had Hudson denigrate female victims of sexual assault. The backlash against Hudson has begun on social media with Pepsi Cola, which owns Doritos, not commenting yet. 

This is who Doritos just partnered with to be their brand ambassador in Spain.

You know what to do.#BoycottDoritos.
Make it trend. pic.twitter.com/kXIlPS2fjB

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 4, 2024

My Comment:

Well, it's time to see if the Bud Light fiasco is a one off or if the right actually has the power to consistently punish woke companies that do bizarre things like this. The Bud Light boycott was stunningly successful and the brand is mostly destroyed. It cost them $1 billion and people still won't drink Bud Light. 

This case appears to be way worse than Dylan Mulvaney. Mulvaney was a bizarre and uncanny brand spokesperson for a brand that was a red state favorite. As bad as he was, he only looked like a pedophile. Hudson seems to be a lot more extreme. Unlike Mulvaney, who was disliked because of his bizarre appearance and actions, Hudson said some things that aren't appropriate at all. 

Samantha Hudson's x account is pretty disturbing alone, ignoring the comments he made. Indeed, the banner picture on it is pretty blatantly unsafe for work and borderline pornographic. The link is here but be aware, it's disturbing. 

But it's not Hudson's appearance or actions that are going to cause the backlash here. It's the comments he made about a 12 year old girl. He pretty explicitly said that he wanted to molest one. Was it a joke? Who knows? It's possible that it was just a tasteless joke but a joke like that isn't going to fly in today's environment. Especially coming from someone that looks as ridiculous as Hudson does. More disturbing is the possibility that it wasn't a joke. 

I think that if a boycott movement happens here it would be justified. I have no idea why Doritos would do this given that tweet. I mean, it would have been a bad idea to hire a transgender spokesperson after the Bud Light boycott, but did they not do a simple search on Hudson's account? And if they did, did they not think that this would create a backlash? 

My guess is that the Spanish branch went off the reservation and did this on their own without running it by anyone in the United States who would have told them that this was a bad idea. Indeed, they should have expected this to not remain only in Spain. The world is global now and you can't just run an add in one market and not expect it to go viral if it is controversial or notable. 

Will this incident take off like the Bud Light boycott? Perhaps. The problem today is that the news is dominated by the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Donald Trump's ballot access. Indeed, the only reason I wrote about this instead of that story is because it broke so early and everyone else had already written about it. That is going to draw away a lot of attention away from this compared to a normal day. 

On the other hand, the Dylan Mulvaney situation took a few days to percolate to the normies as well. Indeed, this story is already viral on X and now a generally mainstream outlet like Newsweek is covering it's possible that the story will reach a wider audience.

I also think that Doritos is as vulnerable to a boycott as Bud Light was. Bud Light was able to be boycotted because there wasn't a huge difference between it and other competing brands like Coors or Miller Light, or even Modelo. Doritos is similar, there are plenty of other chip brands out there. Most of them are owned by Pepsi itself, but even then, Doritos as a brand could be as dead as Bud Light is if people are outraged enough.