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Is it racist to drink Mountain Dew?

wtf?

Mountain Dew has been a Pepsi product 60 years, long before J.D. Vance was born. What the hell is he talking about?

I dunno. These guys can't help themselves. Then again, maybe this was a shoutout to an old ad campaign that was widely viewed as racist. It was about a goat who loved Mountain Dew, but the punch line involved a woman who was asked to pick the goat out of a lineup where everyone else was a Black man.

If that's that case, then congrats to Vance for being woke! If it's anything else, then congrats to Vance for being an asshole.

83 thoughts on “Is it racist to drink Mountain Dew?

  1. jeffreycmcmahon

    No, he's riffing on the "they're constantly calling us racist because that's all they've got in their arsenal" in order to intimidate Democrats from accurately referring to him and his party as racist.

    The goat thing is way too deep of a cut.

    1. kahner

      "The goat thing is way too deep of a cut."

      Probably, but the crazy shit that become prominent amoung the far right echo chamber nuts often surprises me. They're all about deep, in-group cuts that started out on 8chan or whatever the current incel platform is.

      1. lower-case

        yeah, and there's an endless supply of that shit, so lots of material for dominating the news cycle; sort of a media 'gish gallop'

    2. kkseattle

      The Ivy Leaguer who made his money as a San Francisco hedge funder and moved his family to a trendy neighborhood in Cincinnati across the street from a coffee shop that flies the rainbow flag (basically, the closest he could get to San Francisco in the shithole state his billionaire sugar daddy bought him a Senate seat in—he didn’t return to his dreadful hometown, of course, his posh wife certainly wouldn’t allow that, and I’m sure he himself was repelled by the idea of actually living in the place he claimed to represent).

      What a Complete. Fucking. Fraud.

      1. LactatingAlgore

        pretty sure senator from ohio james donald bowman is a virginia resident, much as senator from missouri josh "superbutch" hawley is a virginia resident.

  2. lower-case

    JD's talent is for code switching between ivy leaguers and white supremacist christian nationalists, depending on who he's talking to

    trump looked at JD and saw a kindred spirit; here was a man willing to say anything to anyone in order to gain the authority to imprison people he dislikes

    1. Altoid

      "JD's talent is for code switching between ivy leaguers and white supremacist christian nationalists, depending on who he's talking to"

      Good point-- and he's *so* proud of it.

    2. LactatingAlgore

      thank you for just saying jd & not using his fake last name.

      he's james donald bowman like it says on his birfcertificate.

        1. bouncing_b

          I dislike him as much as you do, but this is unfair. His father (Bowman) was a drunk who abused the family. His mother then married Hamel, who abandoned them. He was largely raised by his mother’s parents, named Vance. (Wikipedia; if this is wrong please correct it there).
          Under the circumstances, taking the name Vance seems a natural thing to do. If the above is correct, there’s nothing fake about it.

          1. treeeetop57

            Fair enough. Both name changes appear to be legal changes, not just adopting a new name. It’s just is bit unusual. Most men die with the name they were given at birth.

            1. kkseattle

              Yeah, no need to be shitty about this.

              As vicious as Ken Starr and his henchboy Kegs Kavanaugh were, they didn’t sneer that the President was born “William Jefferson Blythe III.”

              1. LactatingAlgore

                they should have referred to bill clintonby his godgiven birthname!

                plus, if the last name was the issue for jimmy b, with his dad being an abusive drunk & all, why change his middle name from donald to david some decades after?

                dude's at least as confused as he thinks dylan mulvaney & elliott page are.

  3. KJK

    Don't forget who where you came from and also don't forget that just last year, you supported using the Comstock Act to prosecute people who mail abortion pills.

  4. bw

    in addition to the above (that it's an attempt to preemptively deflect accurate charges of Republican racism) it's also that one of the cardinal missions of wingnuts is to code every possible product in the world with political valence. bud light is the trans/LGBT/woke beer. modelo is the alternative for right-thinking patriots. electric cars are for wokelib betacucks and manly men drive gas-guzzling huge coal-rollers.

    they're basically taking the popular stereotype of Mountain Dew as a drink disproportionately consumed by young working-class white guys and trying to harden that into a full-on politicized thing. "those BLM LOVERS think that the dumb soda you guys (our favorite voters) love is RACIST!" the idea is to reify these guys' sense of their own identity: that dumb beverage becomes a core part of their political self along with all the other things that they think make themselves distinct from the people around them whom they hate.

    1. LactatingAlgore

      the white guys in my suburban high school 30 years ago were doing the dew.

      the same age cohort now is drinking monster.

      dew is some gen y/premillenial shit.

      1. cephalopod

        15 years ago my workplace was full of 20-somethings and the pop machines were full of diet mountain dew. Today the staff has aged, and it's all bubly.

    2. Crissa

      InBev, of course, holds the distribution rights to Bud Light and Modelo worldwide - except in the US, where InBev held joint ownership of Crown (Modelo's US distributor) until 2016.

      1. lower-case

        yeah, and after the big macrobrew distributors bought it, modelo went from being a cheap under-hopped light lager to an expensive under-hopped light lager

      1. bw

        i honestly do not understand why there's someone leaping to modelo especial's defense every time the subject comes up. it's like saying "hey man you got a 57 on that test but NEENER NEENER i got a **58**."

        both of them are pee-tasting garbage. bud light tastes like pee from someone trying to get 8 glasses of water in in a day, and the "nuance" in modelo's flavor is that it tastes like pee from someone with incipient kidney disease. negra modelo is a passable dark lager, but there is hardly any US market for mass-market dark lagers anymore - the kind of person who enjoyed dark lagers 25 years ago has moved on to actual craft beer, while fans of cheap piss-suds are still drinking 'em and won't ever switch to anything that isn't.

        1. kkseattle

          The entire purpose of Modelo is to provide safe hydration with a (very) small buzz. It basically serves the same purpose as tea in China: it’s mostly water, treated so that it won’t irritate your GI tract.

          1. Altoid

            Yeah, hot-climate beers tend to be like that (so they're good summer beers in most of North America, especially if you're working outside). Just don't bother with Red Stripe-- it takes the theme to the extreme.

  5. sonofthereturnofaptidude

    Coming across like an asshole is a valued part of conservative rhetoric these days. If you can't come right out and say FJB any more (and now that Harris is running, you can't really, can you?), conservatives have so debased political rhetoric that being insulting is de rigeur.

    1. lower-case

      and what's to be done with all those "let's go brandon" t-shirts languishing in the closet?

      guess we'll be seeing them in goodwill in pretty short order

      1. LactatingAlgore

        they'll be distributed in bolivia or equatorial guinea or some such, like losing team super bowl champions merch.

        thirty years from know, dark brandon will be the equivalent of the buffalo bills dynasty in nigeria

    2. RiChard

      ^^^ nailed it. And they will get to 'FKH' soon enough; they're just hoping someone else will go first (cause they're all actually kinda terrified); but then they'll all pile on, figuratively.

      1. LactatingAlgore

        she'll have her middle name emphasized, too, like the cincinnati am shockjock who introduced mc cain at a fall 2008 ohio rally by bellowing, "John SIDNEY mc cain, NOT barack HUSSEIN".

        going to be lots of "our country cannot let itself be infiltrated by kamala DEVI harris".

          1. Altoid

            Not specifically, as far as I know-- it just can sound a little "foreign" to white-bread ears. IIRC they tried this against Haley too, using her full given name. "Devi" just doesn't have any of the obvious resonances "Hussein" had, especially only a few years after the Iraq war when it automatically evoked Saddam.

            That probably won't stop them from trying it on Harris too, but it's a really dumb "attack" if you think about the names of stars and celebrities that JD's and trump's people cheer and follow all the time. And the kinds of names they're giving their *own kids.*

            Mocking people's names is just so lame these days.

  6. cld

    It's cuz he'z so fuckin' pathetic they gonna hate him jus for hatin' him, and jus' cuz hiz mammy an' his pappy drank Mountain Dew, and they loved it ,they weaned him on it, like it'z hiz mother's milk, people look down on him fer that, they look down on him fer hiz love. And wut can ya do about that?

  7. aldoushickman

    Maybe it's more of JD's confused and frustrated emotional baggage?

    https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/mountaindew/images/d/dc/745ca17579d531c8bb703bf4d5d1ddf5.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/230?cb=20190703014156

    Is he drinking mountain dew because it's the drink of rednecks (and SV)? Or is he resentful and lashing out because it's the drink that was marketed with cariacatures of hillbillies (years before he was born) and he hates himself for it?

    Either way, a freaking weird thing to speechify about. I'm increasingly convinced that conservatives get outraged about trivial nonsense like this because (a) they are basically pretty comfortable people and (b) they need something to feel something about.

  8. DFPaul

    I imagine the word is out from HQ to do some self-inoculation on “racism” before a big onslaught against Kamala.

    1. Martin Stett

      Couldn't wait until I was old enough to buy those manly magazines without the old lady behind the counter demanding a note from my mother.

      And when I was, they were gone.

    1. Gilgit

      Oh yeah. That article didn't go into it, but I remember reading how in very poor rural areas, people can't use food stamps for non-food items. So, at least at the time the article was written 5 to 10 years ago, people would buy Mountain Dew and use it as a type of currency to exchange things. So everyone always has some Mountain Dew around. I at least assume that is what the dipshit is referring to.

      I had assumed he was just doing the usual: a Republican is drinking Mountain Dew so Democrats will call Mountain Dew racist.

      But no. I guess, back when that vampire lived in Appalachia, poor people drank a lot of it. Oh course, no one who grew up outside of that area knows about that stereotype. But he hasn't lived among them in decades so he just went with what he knew.

  9. Anandakos

    Well, JD Vance is certainly no Donald Trump, at least in his ability to bond with an audience. That was the quietest political rally I've heard in a long time.

    A dork in redneck jeans.

  10. ruralhobo

    Some people laughed because they vaguely understood something about racism, then Vance doubled over with laughter at his own dogwhistle no dog had heard, then he pointed at the audience and said "I love you guys". And here I was, thinking he was an evil genius. In fact he's pathetic. The GOP managed to nominate two men who turn people off. I'm starting to be optimistic.

  11. n1cholas

    It's only racist to drink Mt. Dew if you use a plastic straw I think. Also, freedom fries. I'm not sure, the talking points haven't been issued yet.

  12. Heysus

    Asshole is far too kind a name for these fools. And there are lots more where Vance and his ilk crawled out from order a pine of guano. Oh, maybe the guano was t-Rump!

  13. QuakerInBasement

    Comstock Act might be getting a little too close to Justice Thomas' pasttimes. JD Vance, meet LD Silver.

    ETA: That's weird. This comment was supposed to be a reply to KJK at 2:17 pm, waaaay back up there.

  14. iamr4man

    Is there some significance to it being “diet” Mountain Dew? I would have thought a manly man like JD would be drinking the full surgar version.

    1. Altoid

      That he's a weenie, a phony hillbilly who doesn't have the guts to go full diabetes-mode like God intended? Is so precious that he thinks he should look out for his health or something effete like that?

      Such a preening poseur, I bet he's holding the can with his pinkie up in the air.

    2. cld

      Social conservatives like 'diet' sodas because the word 'die' is right in it, and you're going to die anyway, right, so what am I worried about?

      It's Death Eater virtue signalling.

  15. bbleh

    "I like X but THEY think it's racist cuz they think YOU'RE racist, right? Amirite?"

    "They say WE have cooties -- they say it! -- but it's cuz THEY have cooties! Amirite?"

    Can't fix stupid.

  16. Altoid

    I don't think it's anything specific, just Mountain Dew = hillbillies, generically. And who owns the "hillbilly" brand more than him, wink-wink? In fact there used to be a knock-off called Hillbilly Juice, and what a stroke of genius it would be if he bought the rights to it as a campaign stunt.

    Gotta say this, on the smug self-satisfaction scale, the guy is completely off the charts.

  17. Eastvillager

    Asshole is the failure mode of clever. This guy is just not as entertaining or sharp as he thinks he is.

  18. D_Ohrk_E1

    He's leaning into the 'white trash' association with Mountain Dew, partly b/c of Mama June and Honey Boo Boo. The name itself originated from a slang for whiskey (moonshine) and the drink originated from Tennessee.

    But everyone knows the best soda in the world is a blend of 50% Lingonberry juice and 50% 7-Up with Coke as a backup choice for 7-Up.

      1. LactatingAlgore

        yale is grand canyon university if gcu were to have been founded 400 years ago by spanish settlers in mexico's (well, new spain's) nw frontier.

        it's reputation is from that it's one of our first/oldest colleges & universities.

        it's a legacy act, like the rolling stones.

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