With some pretty serious stories in the news right now, you might be wondering why I continue to obsess over a swill beer. Simply put, it is because the Bud Light fiasco is a far more significant piece than most people realize. When this story first broke I asked why Why Did Bud Light Choose to Follow the Hershey Highway to Hell? I followed up with the helpful suggestion that Budweiser Has a Path to Redemption – Will they Take It? In that post I also pointed out where a few of our generally reliable Normals got it wrong, between Chris Plante suggesting it was stupid to boycott all Anheuser Busch (AB) beers to Don Jr. suggesting that fact that AB execs mostly donate to Republicans we should accept the payoff and move along. Even The Donald has blown this opportunity, appearing to let his stock holdings to dictate silence on an issue that should be a slam dunk with the MAGA base. For that matter, what’s up with Trump siding with Disney right now? But I digress.
I have no problem boycotting every one of AB’s beers. But I’m not going to drink beers I don’t like, either. However brilliant Pabst Blue Ribbon’s ad campaign with Wade Boggs is, I was never a fan. And while MIller-Coors (MC) has been enjoying a surge at AB’s expense, I’ll be curious to see what happens in a few weeks when MC celebrates Pride Month. So how does a boycott of a crappy beer equate to a tide-turning victory? We’ve already had some recent victories in The Culture War (TCW) lately. Even if somewhat short-lived, Gamers took down a hedge fund that tried to vulture Game Stop. But outside of some political/gaming/financial circles, this story was mostly unkonwn to the public. I don’t need to chronicle Gov. DeSantis’ fight against Disney. But to paraphrase a sentiment I’ve read at Ace a number of times, have we really reached the point that we’re high-fiving Republicans for fighting fights that they should be anyway? Which brings us to Bud Light, where the game changed.
I’ve never had a problem walking away from businesses that make it clear that they hate me. Whether it’s dropping decades of NFL fandom, never again buying Gilette Razors, or swearing off Nike, personal boycotts have mostly been ineffectual. Gillette is more of a case of what Tim Pool calls, “Not get woke go broke, but went broke got woke”, meaning that a declining product decides to nuke a significant portion of a rapidly eroding customer base to carve a niche and stake out that smaller claim (See: ESPN, Victoria’s Secret, etc). Nike saw a 3% drop in value after embracing Colon Kaepernick as its marketing face. Since then they’re back and prospering – apparently, Nike’s deals with college and pro franchises dwarf their consumer market. And the NFL is doing well, although there is distant thunder on the horizon. And contrary to what I saw that some Lefty trolls suggested, I neither went out and bought said products to destroy them nor did I trash whatever I owned among them. Right before Gilette’s anti-man ad campaign happened, I’d just made a BJ’s run that included a sizable Gillette razor purchase. I’m near the end of their usage, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to trash something I’s paid good money for. Likewise, the bottles of AB beer in my basement I’d gotten on sale weren’t getting dumped down the drain. And as for all of my Philadelphia Eagles gear I’d accumulated over the years, they’re in deep storage for the day that Roger Goodell departs. But Bud Light is different.
Beer is a far more substitutable good. It is consumed at a rate far greater than razor blades, does not have an institutional market massive enough to ignore everyday consumers, nor is any brand a cartel in the way our major sports leagues are. AB has become ironically, what will be a case study in marketing disasters in Harvard Business Review that were initiated by a graduate of Harvard and Wharton. Yes, Alissa Heinerscheid (Side note – of all of the juvenile humor that this mess has generated, my favorite was a comment directed at Alissa – “Aw, I think she’s kind of cute. I’d love to offer her a salt lick or feed her a sugar cube”), along with her boss, been placed on “administrative leave”. Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge documents the rot in corporate America that got us here. The problem goes far deeper than some shallow, narcissist becoming the face of bad beer. And that’s where the tide is turning.
Let’s face it, we Normals have been getting destroyed in the culture wars for decades, particularly in the last 20 years. Whether it was getting bullied with the “All we want to do is get married is the new Civil Rights Movement” or how Jon Stewart brilliantly (if nowhere as funny as The Radical Left thought he was) skewered us Normals to push his radical agenda, or Hollywood slowly but surely telling a generation that everything that made America the greatest country to ever exist is somehow the worst country ever, The Radical Left has been winning. No more.
We Normals have been an incredibly tolerant lot. And yet somehow The Radical Left was genuinely surprised when the Normals objected to them normalizing child rape and calling for mutilating our children. The Bud Light fiasco was the perfect storm of exactly the wrong idea at the wrong time and pushed exactly the wrong people. Sort of how like roughly 70 years ago an evil empire had been whupping the good guys, and a perfect storm of preparation, guts, and a lot of luck gave the US the significant naval victory that turned the tide of war. Bud Light has shown that we Normals no longer have to accept the degradation of our culture by a bunch of Marxist degenerates. We can hit back, and we will. We’re already slowly turning back the tide on a number of fronts, most notably pushing back on woke indoctrination in the schools. And yes, while there are bigger high-level issues facing America right now, while The Radical Left is winning at those levels, we Normals are winning at the level where The Radical Left first started to infiltrate and rot our culture.
As this post is getting published, I hear that tonight is the start of the NFL draft, sponsored by… Bud Light. Public displays of the boycott could hurt two woke birds with one stone. I’m personally rooting for Roger Goodell to slam a can of Bud Light when he first hits the podium. On another front, the Marxists have launched a coordinated attack with a number of large corporations to wage war on motherhood. And the counter has already started here as well, with Charlie Kirk wondering aloud if we can opt out of Pride Month. More of this.
To close out this post, I’ll paraphrase my favorite line from any book, Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Forget that boring and pretentious Kubrick movie, the book always stuck with me a great line that he would use when the ape Moon Child made his evolutionary leap, and again at the end for Star Child:
“We Normals did not know what we would do next. But we would think of something.”
— Mostly Peaceful Memes (@MostlyPeacefull) April 14, 2023
— ❌Snooterville❌ 🇺🇸 (@snooterville) April 14, 2023
So this just happened…
Cheers @budlight we got ‘em.
O’Keefe Media Group meme challenge. Let’s see what the OMG citizen journalists come up with.
Subscribe now at https://t.co/36Pr9ozWFb#OMGMemeChallenge#MillionDollarBaby pic.twitter.com/YziYepILM8
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) April 14, 2023
— PammyWho 🇺🇸 (@Pammywho) April 14, 2023
— The National Roast (@Meme_Sorcery) April 14, 2023
Brother Bob is no longer on Facebook (although you can see his archives there), and is back on Twitter again, but is ramping up on Minds and Gab, as well as Parler and GETTR, and has his biggest presence on MeWe.
ross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
You can shave with your Gillette blades in your own bathroom without anyone noticing. You can wear your Nike shoes and probably no one will notice what brand they are (they are so dirty). But when you are in a group of buddies and you toss back a cold one, you can’t hide what brand it is. Even a coozy ain’t going to cover it up. That’s Bud’s problem.
I view this like the school indoctrination issue. As you say, we normals are pretty tolerant and resilient, but when the indoctrination curriculum was exposed at many schools, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. All the pent-up frustrations of those who are shit on day in and day out by leftist demagogues finally stood up and struck back. Even in the face of FBI intimidation, they haven’t backed down. Even with leftists lies like “Don’t Say Gay” and “book bans”, they haven’t backed down. That ain’t being put back into the box.
I think this is the same. We are sick and f**king tired of having all this LGBTQXYZ%#@+ bullshit shoved down our throats. We are sick of people who believe that based on a recent, most likely culture-driven decision or succumbing to a mental illness, they suddenly have a whole new set of “rights” bestowed upon themselves complaining that some event that didn’t go 100% their way to their satisfaction is a violation of one of their new “rights”. Enough. There are no “trans rights” and there is no existential threat to these mentally ill snowflakes to worry about. If a brand is going to jack the cost of their product up to patronize such stupidity, they don’t want me as a customer.
This, too, has pushed us too far. Keep it up, fascists.
While I shouldn’t have been surprised, I was disappointed during the 2021 Virginia Governors’ race how MacAuliffe’s staff responded to my texts. For whatever reason both sides had my cell number and text bombed me. Whenever I got one from one of T-mac’s staffers I asked when the former Gov was going to condemn the girls getting raped in their Loudon County school bathrooms by a “trans” boy wearing a dress. All I got in response were deflections and BS.
I’m old enough to remember when condemning girls getting raped in school bathrooms would have enjoyed bipartisan support, but this is today’s Democrats. If they feel so emboldened that they can now publicly show the ugly side of their ideology… let’s hand them a damned megaphone.
Yeah, there was a time when people didn’t worry about offending someone by denouncing the rape of a young girl. Kind of like being afraid to define what a woman is for fear of offending some demented person with some off-the-wall idea of what a woman is.
I notice no one worries about offending me and I can live with that. I expect others to, as well.
Yeah, we’ve reached the stage where the urban poet Micahel Muir succinctly summarized how we Normals feel about offending The Radical Left
Once again a big time major company sticks its foot into its mouth
Good take, Bob…as always.
Looking forward to what the fed trolls post as their usual hate against you.
Tolerance was wrong, after.
We never should have tolerated any of this.
Thanks, Nathan. The tolerance was wrong, but we got frog boiled over the last two decades. The Dems got slowly but very surely radicalized, and with it everyone and everything downstream of their politicians. I actually remember when the Dems were principled opposition, but at least we all agreed on love for the country. Us defending a squish like Dubya over the bungling of Iraq had us on our heels, and while we were off balance the Radicals slipped in Obama. And while we were again on our heels of being careful to criticize our first black president, Barry O took full advantage and took everything to a nastier level.
We finally woke up in 2016. Maybe too late, but at least we finally know what we’re up against
Too many American companies have appointed a “Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Officer” or an “Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Vice President.”
It would be one thing if these were just useless place-setting job positions for placating and employing a minority or two, but the commies put in these jobs have pushed their agenda.
These people are why American businesses send big checks to fake charities like BLM.
These people are how a Dylan M. gets to become the “face” of their company.
These are the people who drive the woke agenda and cause their own boss to go broke, like Bed Bath and Beyond (banned My Pillow).
When companies give power to capitalism-haters, what do they expect?
Dylan M. is just how they do it, he’s not all they can do to destroy American business.
Nan AB is not American. Bud was assimilated.
Anheuser-Busch InBev is controlled by Belgian families Vandamme, de Mévius and de Spoelberch, who as of 2015 owned a combined 28.6% of the company, and Brazilian investors Jorge Paulo Lemann, Carlos Alberto Sicupira and Marcel Telles, who owned 22.7% through their private investment firm 3G Capital. [57] [58] Brands
At the end of the day, AB traded sales for Blackrock & Vanguard’s investments. See how long those investments last after a few quarters of underperformance. I sincerely hope they follow my suggestion from my last post, and that InBev sells AB to some based American investors. The opportunity is there.
As long as no one thinks there is some dude in MO sitting around making these painfully ignorant marketing decisions, its painfully ignorant Belgians, who are obviously jealous of Clydesdales.