Anheuser-Busch’s uber-boneheaded Bud Light “partnership” with “transgender activist” Dylan Mulvaney offers American companies a badly needed escape from the far Left’s Wokistani wonderland. CEOs should use this fiasco to tell the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and other gender extremists two words — and they’re not “Happy Spring!”
In a flash of brilliance, Alissa Heinerscheid — Bud Light’s vice president of marketing — decided that the brand she managed needed work.
“What I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity,” Heinerscheid told podcast host Kristin Twiford. “It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men.”
“We had this hangover,” Heinerscheid continued, uttering a rather inopportune word while discussing beer. “I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out of touch humor, and it was really important that we had another approach.”
Heinerscheid’s approach was to hire Dylan Mulvaney as a Bud Light brand ambassador. This included putting his face, in drag, on cans of Bud Light. This also commemorated his self-proclaimed “365 Days of Girlhood.”
Who, exactly, did Heinerscheid think would find any of this captivating? And did anyone at Anheuser-Busch offer adult supervision and challenge Heinerscheid’s decision?
Mulvaney is far more than some actor in a skirt, e.g., Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire, Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie, or Dan Aykroyd as the late, great French chef Julia Child, rapidly bleeding to death after cutting herself with a boning knife while making Poularde demi de sauce. These three performances were sufficiently tethered to earth to be funny. They also lasted only during several weeks of movie shoots and a four-minute Saturday Night Live sketch, not 365 days of playing with dolls — and apparently considering them real people.
Mulvaney took things multiple orders of magnitude beyond this —from comedy to creepiness. He claims to be a woman and a cartoon version of one, at that. Visualize Fauxdrey Hepburn suffering from hyperestrogenism.
“Day one of being a girl, and I have already cried three times,” he said in a TikTok video. “I wrote a scathing email that I did not send. I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then when someone asked me how I was, I said, ‘I’m fine,’ when I wasn’t fine. How’d I do, ladies? Good? Girl power!”
Way to go, Dylan! That’s it: Reinforce stereotypes of women as emotionally unstable, insincere, impulsive spendthrifts. Loosen your girdle. It’s cutting off the blood to your brain.
Mulvaney produced a video in which he dresses up as Eloise, age 6, from a children’s book series about a little girl who lives in Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. “Let dolls be dolls, please,” he repeatedly implores in another video.
This was a recent Tik Tok by Dylan Mulvaney. The whole thing is sick pic.twitter.com/JpEwitYm3L
— Just Mindy 🐊 (@just_mindy) March 29, 2023
“What exactly is it that’s wrong with Dylan Mulvaney?” Jennifer Van Laar askes in Red State. “What’s wrong is Mulvaney purporting to be a woman, assuming he can in any way truly experience womanhood, taking jobs from women through his endorsement deals, supporting/advocating for policies allowing children’s bodies to be maimed, and sexualizing children.”
Dylan has dragged effeminacy to brand-new lows. He makes Richard Simmons look like Steven Segal. Next to him, Liberace is Clint Eastwood.
Again, did Anheuser-Busch think that straight men would see Mulvaney prancing about and think, “I want a Bud Light!”?
Why would straight women be drawn to a caricature of a 1950s woman?
Gay guys? Why not target them with what gay guys like: handsome, fit, young MEN rather than a fake woman?
Lesbians probably didn’t find this funny.
As for transgender people, UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute estimates that they compose 0.5 percent of the U.S. adult population. Even if this demographic all transitioned to being Bud Light loyalists, why would such a mass-appeal product chase such a micro-niche market?
Of course, this all makes zero business sense. And the numbers prove it.
Bud Light’s blunder should stiffen the gelatinous spines of today’s CEOs.
Since this marketing catastrophe began, Bud Light’s sales revenues have slipped for five straight weeks. Through May 6, this metric was down 23.6 percent, year-on-year. Through late April, sales volume slid 27.3 percent. This mess has cost Anheuser-Busch dearly, as its market capitalization sagged by $5.25 billion.
The situation is so grave that HSBC downgraded the company’s stock from “buy” to “hold.” Analyst Carlos Laboy wondered, “If Budweiser and Bud Light are iconic American ideas that have long brought consumers together, why did these marketers fail to invite new consumers without alienating the core base of the firm’s largest brand?”
All of this would explain why Heinerscheid and Daniel Blake, her boss, are on “leaves of absence.” One suspects that their building passes already have been neutralized.
Anheuser-Busch’s strategy makes sense only if it intended to transition America’s No. 1 light lager for 2022 into a boutique offering.
Anheuser-Busch apparently did this to satisfy the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) demands of HRC and other left-wing groups, and at least three leftist financial houses: BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard. These big three — in possible violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act — jointly push “stakeholder capitalism.” These corporate bullies do so while subverting their fiduciary duties under ERISA and other laws: to silo their prejudices and, instead, maximize shareholder value and return on investment.
HRC and its comrades issue numerical scores to companies based on how devoutly they pray at the Wokistani altar and support such left-wing causes as transgenderism, racial divisionism, and “global-warming” alarmism.
The Big Three Colluders and similar, culturally Marxist investment houses then buy or sell stocks based on companies’ ratings by HRC and other ideological commissars.
Anheuser-Busch genuflected long before the Mulvaney debacle.
“In 2020, it launched a Global Diversity and Inclusion Council,” former Anheuser-Busch executive Anson Frericks writes in the Wall Street Journal. “In 2021 it trained about 9,800 workers in ‘bias breaking,’ and over 2,000 in ‘psychological safety.’ It subjected all senior executive[s] to individualized ‘D&I’ — diversity and inclusion —dashboards, tracking the demographic composition of their teams.”
Frericks notes that the reaction of Anheuser-Busch’s CEO to this disaster didn’t help. Brendan Whitworth’s anodyne statement cited Bud Light’s “proud history supporting our communities, military, first responders, sports fans and hard-working Americans.”
Whitworth skirted around Dylan Mulvaney, thus “angering both conservatives who wanted an apology and liberals who wanted a defense,” Frericks notes. “When stakeholder capitalism demands you be everything to everyone, you become nothing to anyone.”
Wandering into politics repeatedly steers successful companies into ditches, as Coca-Cola and Major League Baseball learned last year, when they raged against Georgia’s election integrity law.
Disney also blew it by helping the Left hammer Florida’s parental rights bill, deviously dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. It famously never said “gay” — pro or con — not even once.
Country singer John Rich told Fox News that he stopped serving Bud Light in his Redneck Riviera bar in Nashville.
“You know, the American public. We’re never left alone anymore,” Rich said. “We literally can’t go anywhere without something divisive or political being thrown into our face. And I think when they went after the beer can, you know, something that people have loved for decades. You know, Bud Light, Coors Light, that’s kind of like Ford and Chevy.”
Bud Light’s blunder should stiffen the gelatinous spines of today’s CEOs. En masse, they should tell the Big Three Colluders, HRC, and other left-wing activists:
“Thanks, but no thanks.
“We see what you did to Anheuser-Busch. We’ll make you a deal: We’ll leave the protests and outrage to you, and you leave the consumer brand management to us.
“Now get out of our offices and leave us alone, so we can return to producing beer and other products and services that consumers actually want.
“And don’t let the mahogany door hit you on the way out.”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor.
If your old campaign was so out of touch then why are you loosing billions now?
Filthy queer perverts aren’t satisfied with just being filthy queer perverts themselves. They won’t be happy until everyone in the world is just as much of a filthy queer pervert as they are.
This guy is a drag queen. he dresses like a woman and pretends he is a woman. You have not heard one word from him transitioning anywhere. He got all of these companies to go woke, pay him millions and he is laughing all the way to the bank.