The controversy over an Anheuser-Busch promotion sporting the image of Dylan Mulvaney on a can of Bud Light beer is now old news. In fact, it’s been far eclipsed by the controversy of Target selling tranny apparel for toddlers. That train wreck ultimately deserves the greatest attention, but there’s still unfinished business for Anheuser-Busch. It’s time to propose an end game for the original watershed moment over Bud Light. I understand some people may want them to die forever over their transgression, but carving out a road to redemption is just as important as punishing them to begin with. I’ll propose such a path. I doubt they’ll like it and they’re very unlikely to take it, but this kind of proposal should be stated as a pattern for other wayward corporations that fall into the same trap. There are a lot of other woke boardrooms out there, and just from a consumer perspective, there are only so many boycotts that can be reasonably sustained before they all lose their power, so let’s make a way and see if any follow it.
In all the news stories proffered over the Dylan Mulvaney blunder, I’ve not seen a single one that spelled out a deconstructed explanation of why it was an outrage. Of course, it’s on everyone’s mind so it would be helpful to articulate it, to contextualize the proper path for Anheuser-Busch to make a correction. Here it goes: Dylan Mulvaney is gay trans. He**, via his personal social media campaign, made a choice to position himself within the militant aggressive identity constituency. It is this latter fact that makes all the difference. As much as the left wants you to believe that gays are persecuted by straight society, the truth is that they are and have been assimilated. To claim otherwise doesn’t wash in the dimly lit dive bars across the United States. Liberals know better because the straight and the gay spectrum clientele live in the same towns, work at the same places and to some extent, drink in the same bars, at least once you get outside of big cities. There isn’t a market niche for gay bars in Bo-hunk, Anywhere USA, so they drink together. We all have gay friends. When they show up at family gatherings, church, work socials, or even dive bars, their proclivities are not an issue, they’re treated with respect and decency. But if they go militant, the equation is changed; they become the aggressor, they have made war. Once you have Dylan Mulvaney shoving his sexuality in your face, the contract is broken with whomever perpetrated it.
Budweiser is now the gay beer. Anheuser-Busch consciously and forcefully made it a gay beer and made a specific effort to promote that association. They came, the saw, they acted. They previously had a demographic that encompassed most cheap beer drinkers, all cheap beer drinkers, straight and gay. They chose to redirect the brand to identify only with the <7%. Now their traditional male base cannot publicly drink their beer without identifying as or sympathizing with the militant gay. What happens to straight men who demonstrate an affinity for symbolism associated with homosexuality? They become identified as homosexual. The automatic societal consequence for that is to be excluded from heterosexual companionship. It doesn’t matter if they only intended to identify with gays in some sort of abstract liberal supportive solidarity, they have just signaled to most heterosexual women that their heterosexuality is in question and can no longer be trusted. There are isolated, defined enclaves of progressive women who might claim to like such a man, but rarely if ever are they drinking Bud Lite.
So how might Anheuser-Busch fix this? They’ve flirted with insipid faux-apologies, and as per market share, those efforts were insincere and stupendous failures. It will take more than an apology. They must un-gay their brand unless their true objective is to hitch their wagon to that demographic. Just the same as they made a conscious decision to gay-ify it to begin with, they must now reverse that branding. They must re-hetero the Budweiser brand. You don’t un-gay a brand by trotting out a clip of Clydesdale horses and imagery of a flag at sunset. The multinational executive suite suits that probably got bonuses for their CEI score or kissing the DEI ring will have to reverse course but probably won’t. They will intone with overwrought and insincere indignation that they cannot take part in caving to ‘hate’ or ‘intolerance’ – which is nothing but well-worn woke rhetoric that they parrot. By taking that stand, they fail to see the hate and intolerance that they demonstrated to their core customers. What clueless brand executives would expect their customer base to essentially renounce their heterosexuality and social mating potential to embrace what is represented by a perverse uber-neurotic boy-waif, Dylan Mulvaney? Only the executives at Anheuser-Busch and their multi-national corporate overlords.
Fixing this is simple. Don’t just say ‘I’m sorry.’ Say, ‘we were wrong, unequivocally wrong’. ‘We abandoned you and expected you to become something that you are not and never will be’. ‘We will not ask you to change anymore, we will change our brand to identify with the people who we want to have buy our beer. We pledge to identify with our true and original customer base’. If the Budweiser brand executives cannot explicitly say they were wrong, the brand will go down hard to the dustbin of history. RIP
** Gendering is as per his original and present chromosomal makeup.
If you’d like to comment on this post, feel free to do so on Twitter. Follow me: @leestanNEreader