By Andrea Widburg
I finally caught up with Bud Light’s latest commercial. I think it was meant to be a light-hearted look at the fact that people make mistakes but, hey, we’re all in this together, and everyone should just lighten up. That’s my theory. But of course, the reality is that the commercial is one of the most insulting things Bud Light could ever have done. It’s useful, though, as a reminder that corporate America doesn’t like and, especially, doesn’t respect the people who buy its products.
So, to recap, Bud Light decided to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, the pedophile’s delight (a grown man who pretends to be a sexualized little girl), by making beer cans with his images. The obvious intention was that he’d promote Bud Light on his popular social media outlets. What happened, instead, was that actual Bud Light drinkers were disgusted and began to view the brand with revulsion instead of merely seeing it as the acceptable beer equivalent of elevator music.
At this point, all that the company needed to do was apologize and promise never to drag transgenderism into its beer’s image again. Instead, it attempted to sidestep the issue:
To stem the hemorrhage, Bud gave its Vice President of Marketing, Alissa Heinerscheid, a “leave of absence.” Then, Budweiser made a fawningly pro-American ad that failed to impress Americans.
Brendan Whitworth, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev issued a statement, saying, “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people.” Americans recognize a non-apology apology when they see one and, again, were unimpressed.
Anheuser-Busch’s CEO tried next: “We will need to continue to clarify the facts—that this was one can, one post, not a formal campaign or ad.” Hey, guys! It’s another non-apology apology. And we’re not going anywhere without a real apology.
Next, it apparently funded a drag show:
Despite tumbling sales and negative press coverage as a result of its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Bud Light is reportedly co-sponsoring an “all-ages Pride event” in Flagstaff, Arizona, according to the Flagstaff Pride website.
The party, which is called “Pride in the Pines” and includes drag queens and other performers, listed Bud Light as one of the companies sponsoring the June 17 event. (Bud Light was initially mentioned prominently in one of the posters.) The event is listed as a “family festival event” and a family-friendly, “safe space” for all visitors.
The implication was obvious: Bud was telling boycotting customers that they are fundamentally wrong.
So, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the latest Bud ad shows its ordinary, straight, mostly white customers as…stupid and inept:
Yes, you can view the ad to say, “We all make mistakes, but can’t we all get along?” However, I think most Bud drinkers would say that, without an apology, no, they can’t get along. More importantly, though, the ad aligns with the general attitude many in corporate America have toward their customers in “flyover country.”
We tend to view the corporate world’s excessive wokedom as (a) an expression of management values and (b) an effort to inculcate those values in the rest of us. Both of those are true, but there’s actually something in between (a) and (b); call it (a)1, if you will.
That intermediate point is that those who do not embrace management values are stupid. It’s not just our values that are wrong. We’re wrong. And the only way to fix us is to prod us relentlessly with Pride and DEI and BLM and all the other garbage. It’s not just to change our values; it’s to try to make us less stupid.
Then, as with the Bud commercial, corporate types periodically figure, “What the heck. Let’s just use their stupidity to our advantage. Those dumb hicks will surely forgive us now that we lovingly show them rising above their foibles and being brought together by our product.”
I tend to the opposite view: Give me common sense and good values any day. What’s coming out of academia and infecting corporate America is credentialism layered over ideological fantasies untethered to either facts or wisdom. Now that corporate America is revealing itself, these people deserve our disdain, and the best way to display that disdain is to leave their products to rot on the shelves or, as with Target, to avoid their outlets entirely.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/bud_light_apparently_hates_its_customers.html