Pick any week this summer, and you’d likely find a headline about a new front in America’s long-running partisan culture wars – perhaps “surprising” or suspect or both, and usually framed by rightwing pundits as a victory.
Maybe it was the backlash to an Anheuser-Busch marketing campaign featuring the transgender TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney that bumped Bud Light from the top of the beer market. Or the country singer Jason Aldean’s Try That In A Small Town, a song threatening violence to anti-police protesters; its streams increased 999% after backlash to its music video, which featured footage of Black Lives Matter protests and was filmed at a Tennessee courthouse where a Black man was lynched in 1927. Or the box office success of Sound of Freedom, an independent Christian film about child trafficking tied to QAnon, or the overnight appearance of Oliver Anthony’s welfare-denigrating song Rich Men North of Richmond on the Billboard Hot 100.
