By Thomas Lifson
Knocking 6 billion dollars off the market value of one’s employer normally would result in heads rolling. The inevitable has just happened at the Anheuser-Busch subsidiary of InBev, the global brewing giant. AdAge has reported in a paywalled article that Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s VP of marketing has “taken a leave of absence.” The UK Daily Mail has a lengthy article on the subject with no paywall.
To be sure, this is not quite the same as being fired and carrying your personal belongings out of the office in a box, but I have a hard time imagining that Ms. Heinerscheid will ever again be entrusted with guiding a major beer to its customers. As the very first female to head marketing for what is claimed to be the world’s biggest beer brand, certain niceties must be observed by Anheuser-Busch in her defenestration.
No visible cruelty; in fact, quite the opposite. When she leaves for another job, perhaps a brand that is marketed predominantly to upscale women (a market segment she obviously understands better than beer drinkers), I have little doubt that her vision, courage, and fortitude (or similar vague positive qualities) will be mentioned. Nobody gains by piling on a cancer survivor mother of 3 who made one mistake.
The exact nature of that mistake is what makes this incident so fascinating and meaningful. I believe that the political ramifications are profound.
The first point to make is that nobody at Bud Light or A-B had a clue that many of their customers would take exception to transsexual “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney getting his picture on cans of Bud Light and serving as a marketing agent. The company points out that only a few cans were produced and sent as a gift to Mulvaney, but as soon as pictures were available online of Delaney with his visage reproduced on a product that males place in their mouths and swallow, a homosexual connotation became attached to the product in the minds of many males who drink beer.
It is not at all clear who signed-up Mulvaney. It might have been VP Heinerscheid, but given that the company says it has “hundreds” of influencers, it is possible that one of her staff came up with the concept, in which case she probably signed off on the idea, perhaps without giving much thought to any adverse consequences.
Marketing is a discipline that uses a lot of research, normally, which makes the failure to understand the psychology of large numbers of Bud Light drinkers so curious. I can only assume that in her daily life she associates with her peers: highly educated, affluent professionals, many of them from Ivy League schools, none of whom would ever dream of saying anything negative about transsexuality. No blinking red light appeared in her mind to caution that not everyone approves of the trans movement, and that the trans extremists who bully and physically attack campus speakers like Riley Gaines, who insist on biological males showering with teenage girl athletes, and who have caused mass shootings, might have caused a powerful counterreaction.
The reality is that the ruling class in the United States is so full of contempt for what they regard as the lower orders of society that they feel no moral imperative to try to understand them. The proper reaction is to “transphobia” is contempt, because, after all, such retrograde views are “on the wrong side of history” and soon will be extinguished, just as resistance to homosexual marriage has vanished from the public sphere.
Ivy League marketing gurus are not the only ones carrying this view. Most of the Democrat party shares it, or at least will not speak up in opposition to it out of fear of the trans lobby. This is, I believe, the Achilles Heel of the Democrats going into the 2024 election. A large plurality if not an outright majority of voters are increasingly uncomfortable with the demands of the trans movement. They don’t want their daughters pushed out of athletics and forced to share bathrooms with biological males. The see a Supreme Court Justice who stated in her confirmation hearing that she can’t define what a woman is. And they see the stridency, bullying, and outright violence being used to force changes on everyone else, they get angry.
There are a few signs that some Dems are starting to catch on. John Hinderaker of Powerline recounted yesterday how Minnesota State Legislators took pains to keep their enthusdiastic support hidden from voters when they passed a radical bill authorizing the state to allow sexual mutilation of minors from other states without their parents’ knowledge, and how the state’s corrupt media cooperated by blacking out news of the measure:
In the Senate earlier today, Democrats were warned that cheering and emotional demonstrations would be out of order as the “carve ’em up” bill was being voted on. So they waited until the tally was done before breaking into shouts and cheers of joy at the prospect of out-of-state children being mutilated in Minnesota, contrary to the wishes of their parents. But the Senate’s official feed went dark, so that the disgusting display was invisible to whatever handful of viewers had tuned in to the proceedings.
Trans issues have the potential to bring many new voters to the GOP in 2024. This includes the highly prized suburban soccer mom demographic, as well as males who had not previously bothered registering to vote, but who resent being forced to accept a mental illness as perfectly normal and treat people as if they were the opposite of their natural sex.