What could possibly be so problematic about tortilla chips that people feel the need to boycott them? Well it all boils down to Doritos hiring a new brand ambassador, some very bad taste tweets, and a splash of good old fashioned bigotry.
The drama started on Monday, March 4th, when Doritos Spain announced influencer and pop star Samatha Hudson as the brand ambassador for the company. Hudson also identifies as non-binary and trans, and with that, the final piece to this puzzling mystery falls into place. Of course, a promotion from a brand that involves someone identifying as trans always causes controversy amongst a certain group of people for some reason.
Just under a year ago the exact same thing happened when Bud Light launched a promotion with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney. There was a huge backlash from the alt-right community, one particularly memorable response came from Kid Rock who decided to buy a case of Bud Light just to record himself shooting the cans with a gun. It’s all pretty childish; and these people have the nerve to go around calling everyone else “snowflakes.”
The Samantha Hudson controversy
Although, there is more to this story than what first meets the eye. People started digging into past posts from the Spanish artist, and found some horrific tweets. According to Newsweek, where you can read some of the translated tweets, Hudson wrote: “I want to do thuggish things [to] a 12-year-old girl,” other tweets have resurfaced which say some hurtful things about victims of rape.
Hudson was 15 at the time of writing most of these, and whilst you could try to partially excuse some of these statements behind a teenager just trying to be edgy, these should still be addressed publicly. We’ve all said stupid things in the past, but that doesn’t make it alright, and the content of these tweets makes the public outcry seem a bit more understandable.
That being said, let’s not pretend that Samantha Hudson wouldn’t be receiving hate from the alt-right whether she’d made those tweets or not. Those tweets are bad, but looking at what’s being said online, it’s clear that many are using the artist’s past as an excuse to express anti-trans rhetoric that doesn’t relate to the content of her original statements whatsoever. The conversation has been hijacked, and the focal point is now about Hudson being trans, and not about making her answer for what she said.
Will the boycott against Doritos have any effect? It’s hard to tell, the Bud Light backlash certainly caused noticeable damage to the company’s stocks. Although this might not get as much traction considering it’s happening all the way over in Spain. At the end of the day, this whole controversy has just made everyone involved look like bad people.