Beer giant ‘Bud Light’ has faced backlash as the stock price of Anheuser-Busch, maker of the beer fell from US$66.57 on April 3, 2023 when Kid Rock put out his video shooting cases of Bud Light to protest the Mulvaney hiring – to US$63.40 on April 12, 2023.
Conservative advocate Matt Couch tweeted Wednesday: “Anheuser-Busch (Parent Company to Bud Light) Loses $4 Billion in Market Capitol Since March 31 -Go Woke Go Broke”.
Anheuser-Busch (Parent Company to Bud Light) Loses $4 Billion in Market Capitol Since March 31 -Go Woke Go Broke https://t.co/d4c7voo7nJ
— Matt Couch (@RealMattCouch) April 12, 2023
Fox News ran this headline on Wednesday, April 12, 2023: “Anheuser-Busch sheds nearly US$5 billion in value since Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney pact sparked outrage”. In the story, Beer Business Daily editor and publisher Harry Schuhmacher is quoted as reporting Anheuser-Busch distributors in rural areas are “spooked” over the Bud Light backlash.
“This is probably the biggest controversy we’ve seen in a long time”, Schuhmacher told Fox News Digital.
Critics of the anti-Bud Light campaign, including not a few snarky Twitter users on the left, stressed that many conservative boycotts in the past ultimately failed to achieve their goal of changing corporate behaviors.
Apparently, Anheuser-Busch relied on the advice of Harvard and Wharton grad Alissa Heinerscheid, when it chose to celebrate biological male transgender activist TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney completing his “365 Days of Girlhood” by making him a brand ambassador for Bud Light.
In a March 23, 2023 interview with the “Make Yourself at Home” podcast, Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s VP Marketing, described the Mulvaney campaign as part of her effort to “evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand”, and “[shift] the tone” through “inclusivity”. The video excerpt tweeted below was widely viewed on Twitter and in social media:
The Harvard womyn who killed Bud Light pic.twitter.com/MHScWaVyMX
— Gerry Callahan (@GerryCallahan) April 10, 2023
Here is the interview excerpt transcribed (emphasis added):
“I’m a businesswoman. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was: this brand is in decline. It’s been in decline a really long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will no future for Bud Light. So I had this super clear mandate: … we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And …what I brought to that was a belief in … OK, what does ‘evolve and elevate’ mean? It means inclusivity. 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. And representation is at sort of the heart of evolution. You’ve got to see people who reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover. I mean, Bud Light had been a brand of this fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor. And it was really important that we had another approach”.
Showing the wisdom behind the modern warning that anything you publish on social media can come back to haunt you, Heinerscheid was exposed as a hypocrite when her own 2005 Facebook posts of her and her Ivy League friends “blowing up condoms and chugging bottles of lager” at a Harvard party resurfaced in news stories and on social media.
Daily Caller tweeted out its own story on Heinerscheid’s college antics, commenting: “These photos seem pretty ‘fratty’ to us”.
These photos seem pretty 'fratty' to us https://t.co/ZZqlhC0Dfb
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 12, 2023
Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly predicts Heinerscheid will be fired over her catastrophically out-of-touch marketing campaign featuring a trans activist who offers up a grotesque caricature of femininity and womanhood as his “identity”.
But there is another type of worker that will be affected by A-B’s descent into LGBT “wokeness”: plant workers, beer distributors and hard-working, mostly blue-collar employees of various A-B-associated companies who could lose their jobs if the rapidly spreading boycott of Bud Light and A-B brands continues to grow. Country music star Travis Tritt tweeted out the A-B brands in announcing that he was joining the boycott:
Somebody needs to post the list of all related Bud products. It’s amazing and surprising.
— M*B 🇺🇸👍🏼🐱💙(📯⬇️) (@TexBet21) April 6, 2023
One video that circulated on Twitter (1.7 million views at press time) showed a merchandiser for a company whose sole account is Anheuser-Busch. The man films himself walking in the beer aisle of a grocery store, with ample, unbought cases of Bud Light and other A-B products filling a visible refrigerator shelf.
The man says, “I mean, I’ve never seen such little sales in [these] past few days on these products”.
“And it’s sad because when people don’t buy this beer, I don’t make money and I can’t feed my family,” he continued. “So it’s kind of heartbreaking, I guess, that Anheuser-Busch did what they did. They don’t know their clientele…Thanks, Anheuser-Busch: I may not be able to feed my family coming up here soon”.
Anheuser-Busch Official Beer Sponsor Of Sodom and Gomorrah. pic.twitter.com/1yx46McAX9
— 🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 (@Real_RobN) April 7, 2023
Kelly got in the Bud Light boycott fray on her web broadcast Tuesday when, in a rant that began with an obscenity, she ridiculed Nike for sponsoring a man, Dylan Mulvaney, to market its sports bra: “The three ladies on this program right now have six boobs between us, and we actually know what it’s like to wear a bra and no one would be inspired to buy one based on non-breasted Dylan Mulvaney prancing around in a Nike sports bra”.
Warning: expletive in video:
"The three ladies on this program right now have six boobs between us, and we actually know what it's like to wear a bra and no one would be inspired to buy one based on non-breasted Dylan Mulvaney prancing around in a Nike sports bra."
Watch NOW: https://t.co/uECsxOuuZa pic.twitter.com/tMNwSzNAzK
— The Megyn Kelly Show (@MegynKellyShow) April 11, 2023
