Don Surber
You can’t win if you don’t fight
APR 24, 2023
The firing of the elitist woman marketer behind the Dylan Mulvaney can of Bud Light came on Friday night, a week too late to save the brand. Bud then fired the fellow who hired her.
Get woke, go broke struck again.
Rasmussen Reports found 54% of Americans support the Beer Barrel Boycott. That includes the 40% of beer drinkers who won’t buy Bud Light again.
The departure of the marketer comes after a week of liberals assuring us that those silly conservatives won’t hurt Bud Light.
New York magazine assured its readers, “Bud Light Is Going to Be Just Fine.”
Its Sarah Jones said, “Anheuser-Busch may suffer due to the quality of Bud Light, but a boycott is unlikely to harm it. If history is any guide, the right simply lacks the power to bend major American corporations to its will. Its tactics aren’t exactly helpful to its cause. It’s weird to shoot cases of Bud Light! It’s weird to go on TV and insist the company apologize to you. These are strange, angry people who have little in common with the average American consumer. Anheuser-Busch — and Disney — aren’t truly ‘woke.’ They’re interested in profits. At present, they believe they need young consumers, who are typically at odds with the right over LGBTQ+ rights. Conservatives can count on a martyr narrative to sell the occasional successful grift, but they’re too unpopular to do much else. The free market they love has spoken.”
A week later, the woman who went woke and the man who hired her are gone. The free market spoke and it did not say what the magazine said it would say.
The Delish, which covers food and beverages said, “Experts Say The Bud Light Boycott Is Unlikely To Cause Long-Term Damage.”
The story said, “Many have argued that Bud Light’s partnership with Mulvaney has caused the company to suffer, citing a 30% drop in sales that sources like Newsweek have pointed out are likely not tied to the campaign. The truth is, Bud Light will likely come out on the other side of the boycott doing just fine. In fact, according to experts, they might even be better for it.”
The 30% drop had nothing to do with the boycott? That’s like saying the bucket of water had nothing to do with the Wicked Witch of the West’s meltdown.
But experts say.
Experts also told us the vaccine would stop the spread of covid. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky told Congress last week the vaccines don’t stop the transmission of covid.
Say, I’m beginning to believe everything in Washington is not on the up-and-up.
Speaking of Washington, the Jeff Bezos Post ran a column by Brian Broome — who is black and gay — titled “The Bud Light controversy reminds us how toxic masculinity can be.”
You would think that a gay man would like masculinity. Not Broome.
He wrote, “A note to those folks who are upset that Anheuser-Busch relied on a trans woman as a quasi-spokesperson: Whether you like it or not, queer people have been drinking ‘your beer’ for decades. In fact, as long as there’s been beer, queer people have been drinking it.
“Mulvaney’s celebration for some reason threatened the very existence of a whole bunch of guys who aren’t ready for that reality. This will surprise no one who has ever been a small boy. Every boy knows the sting of being called a sissy. Boys are raised to believe that so-called feminine traits represent a danger they must avoid. Boys learn early that they can expect to be punished if they stray in any way into risky, weakening feminine behaviors. These lessons take root deep in our psyches as youngsters, and they stay there forever.”
Wait a second. Mulvaney says he is a girl, not a boy. His choice. I am sorry someone called Broome a sissy back in the day but Mulvaney sees being called a sissy as a compliment. That’s the whole point of his transformation into a girl.
That and snagging millions of bucks in corporate sponsorships.
The title of Broome’s column recalled another corporate wokeness — Gillette’s toxic masculinity ads that tried to blame men for all the evils of the world.
Gillette sales fell from $8.4 billion in 2020 to $6.9 billion two years later.
Going woke cost the razor company $1.5 billion a year in sales.
Then there was the candy formerly known as M&M’s. It went woke and fell from the No. 1 candy for Halloween 2021 down to No. 5 the next year. The brand had to change its name to Ma&Ya’s as it blew 81 years of marketing on some LGBT whim. The name change may be temporary, but what a waste of money.
Libs defend injecting politics into marketing as just promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. Conservatives know it is all a word salad tossed to obfuscate the socialist push to divide and conquer America.
Via Red State, here is the diversity, equity and inclusion team that did marketing for Bud Light.
As white as a snowstorm.
In fighting back, conservatives are simply reacting to corporate appeasement of whatever cause the liberals have taken on today.
Liberals meanwhile are aggressive. They have demanded such things as ditching Aunt Jemima and removing the Indian maiden from the Land O Lakes butter logo. A smart aleck said the butter people removed the Indian but kept the land.
Conservatives passed on making a big stink about it but I do the shopping now and neither product is high on my list. Syrup is syrup. Butter is butter. And we always have preferred Hungry Jack’s Belgian waffle mix to the point where we get it on Amazon.
What corporate marketers have forgotten — or more likely, abandoned — is that their job is to sell the product, not the politics.
Over the years, though, black nationalists and the gay mafia in Hollywood have pushed companies to accept their agenda, or else! Plus, business schools have become woke as well.
Republicans scold conservatives for not conceding the culture to leftists. Republicans just want to cut taxes (not spending because liberals might call them deplorable). OK, Republicans also start wars to keep defense contractors happy.
I smile and ignore Republican pleas. I laughed when Donald Trump Jr. begged us not to boycott Bud because Bud gives Republicans money. He needs to get a spine. Maybe Barron has some extra he can lend him. He’s 6’8.
Of all people, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said best what Trump Jr.’s old man is all about.
RFK Jr. said, “Donald Trump has this capacity to talk to Americans who are desperate and make them feel like they’re being heard. Some of that is by just having a really good sense for all for all the kind of alchemies of demagoguery . . .
“I’m working now on the Norfolk Southern train wreck in East Palestine. And you go to these communities and the desperation there, it’s like what I used to see in developing nations when I was a kid. I mean, our country has really changed in ways that I think Washington is out of touch with. And I think that they don’t feel that they’re representative anymore . . .
“People in this country feel they’re being lied to by the media, by the government, by all the institutions that they trusted, and they’re disgusted with them, and they’re done. And when a guy comes along like Donald Trump who says, I’m willing to break things, that appeals to people who feel like this whole system is just rigged against them. And they’re right. It is rigged against them. It’s completely rigged against if you’re poor in this country, you have no participation in the political process.”
Get with the program.
Fight The Man.
Andrew Breitbart died too young but he said something we never should forget: “Politics is downstream from culture.”
If you want to know why Nixon won by a landslide in 1972 and Reagan won by landslides in 1980 and 1984, it is cultural. They were unabashedly and unapologetically American.
If you want to know why the first Bush went from a 40-state win in 1988 to a 32-state loss in 1992, it was because he lied (“Read my lips, no new taxes”) and abandoned Reaganism. H. Ross Perot would have stayed on the sidelines if Bush had done his job right.
The media said the war on drugs was lost. Nancy Reagan said, “Just say no,” and cocaine demand plummeted.
Now Democrats look the other way as Red China ships enough fentanyl each year to kill every American 10 times.
Lives are at stake in the tranny wars. Revolver reported, “Homeless Man With a 5 O’Clock Shadow and a Mullet Sexually Assaults Woman in Women’s Shelter — Fox News Calls Him ‘Her’ and a ‘Trans Woman.’”
Fight back.
Two years ago, Catholic writer Austin Ruse wrote, “The problem with ‘politics is downstream from culture’ is that it may instill a kind of stasis in people: Well, I am raising my kids, and after all, we have that reading group that meets every month. Isn’t this how we change the culture? Isn’t this how we change politics way down the river? And all the while, right down the street, they are teaching sodomy to children.
“Sure, learn swing dancing. Go to your reading group. But also, pound on the door of the local school board. Politics cannot wait for culture. Andrew Breitbart would agree.”
Ruse was prescient. His column pre-dated by three months the Loudon County BOE having deputies arrest a father who complained about a boy in a skirt raping his daughter in the girls room.
The downstream from that was the election of a Republican governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general in the same election for the first time in Virginia’s history.
Boycotting Bud Light, Gillette and M&M’s were not small things because if they were, libs would not have bothered pressing these companies to become woke.
Remember make love, not war? The boycotts should send a message to Corporate America to make money not politics. It likely won’t. Elitists are stubborn. Well, we can always boycott what comes next.
And we will because we know if we don’t fight, we cannot win. And winning matters in politics because no one hangs out with losers. This week’s biggest losers were the woman behind the trans spokeswoman and the man who hired her.
