When country musician Travis Tritt called for a boycott of Bud Light beers because of its association with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, the official Twitter page of the Chicago Police Department liked the call. This has prompted an investigation by internal affairs.
The “official feed” of the Chicago Police Department, @Chicago_Police, liked Tritt’s now-famous tweet from Wednesday, in which he said he was “deleting all Anheuser-Busch products from my tour hospitality ride.”
Jeff Wittekiend, one of the people who shared the image, said it “seems incredibly irresponsible coming from an official police account.”
On Friday, after the tweet was seen by over 20 million people and liked by over 192,500 people, despite Tritt having only 363,000 followers, the department erased its “like.” The Bureau of Internal Affairs is looking into the allegations, a department official told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Wittekiend, who took a screenshot of the like and sent it to a “radical media and research collective,” assumed that the police officer who liked the post had mistaken the account for their own one. Not surprisingly, Wittekiend told the Sun-Times, there are people on the Chicago Police Department’s public relations team who share similar “anti-trans ideas.”
“If it had been liked on the official Twitter page on purpose, that would have been surprising.”
The transgender influencer’s “365 days of womanhood” were celebrated in a Bud Light can ad, and Tritt was just the latest high-profile figure to criticize the effort. Singer Kid Rock of “American Bad Ass” reportedly shot up cases of the beer, then flipped the bird and said, “F-k Bud Light, and f-k Anheuser-Busch.”
Amid the uproar, Mulvaney announced a new collaboration with Nike, prompting more calls for a boycott. Retired Olympic swimmer Sharron Davies, 60, said of her own Nike boycott, “The only way we can actually make these companies and make governments listen is to boycott with our wallets.”
