L&T Publisher Earl Watt
I don’t drink beer, but if I did I wouldn’t drink Bud Light. It’s not because of Dylan Mulvaney. It’s because of the marketing department at the company who decided to insult a group of people who were the customer base of their product.
They can highlight anyone they want, including a man who believes he is a woman.
The problem was something that has become a problem around the nation when the concept of DEI was introduced.
The company decided to hire a woman named Alissa Heinerscheid to become the vice president of marketing, the first female VP for the company in 40 years.
The fact that she was a woman was not the issue. The fact that they made a hire based on the person being a woman was.
“Bud Light had […] a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor,” she said.
Her solution — as is the common problem among those who get DEI positions, push the DEI agenda as cornerstone to the marketing.
While Mulvaney used social media to push how his face while masquerading as a woman was now imprinted on beer cans, and the woman who made that possible was touting the company’s move to “inclusion,” the message to their core customer base was loud and clear — we aren’t wanted.
And so they did what any self-respecting beer lover would do — they found a different beer.
Bud Light sales plummeted.
Recently, Walt Disney has had two DEI bombs, “The Acolyte” and “Snow White.”
The Star Wars faithful found a girl power series in The Acolyte which included lesbian witches, something never conceived or discussed in any Star Wars anything.
But Kathleen Kennedy, the president of Lucasfilm, and producer Leslye Headland, had an agenda when creating the show, and it was all about pushing more DEI concepts into these fictional stories.
“... people have told me that it’s the gayest Star Wars, and I’m frankly, into it,” Headland said.
The show was canceled after just one season.
“Snow White” was remade with a Black woman playing the character literally named for being snow white. But that alone didn’t tank the show at the box office. And it did tanked at the box office. Big time.
What caused it was the terrible story.
Rachel Zegler was a bad move, for sure, but rewriting a classic love story into a story about a power-hungry girl who gets into fights against much stronger men, and wins, and turning the seven dwarfs into CGI characters so as to not offend short people, which it did, was far more worse than having the person playing Snow White literally hate the original Disney telling of Snow White.
She didn’t need a prince, and so Charming was written out of the “live remake.”
And the phrase “Who’s the fairest of them all?” which according to a 2014 NPR article referred to either beauty or being light colored.
But not the DEI remake of the word. The fairest “could mean a lot of things,” Zegler said.
That seems to be the very point of modern liberalism. “Words mean what we want them to mean. Everyone can from their own definition.”
At a recent Charlie Kirk campus visit, when Kirk asked a student to define what a woman was, the answer was, “It’s just a social construct.”
And how did the public who disagreed with this beer company and Disney on these clearly politically motivated movies respond?
They stopped buying the beer or watching those movies.
Bud Light lost $1.4 billion in 2023, and the company dropped in value by $27 billion according to forbes.com (https://www.forbes.com/sites/aliciapark/2024/07/18/bud-light-boycott-effects-endure-brand-drops-to-third/).
The Acolyte was dropped after a season at a cost of $320.1 million (https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinereid/2024/09/26/disney-reveals-star-wars-show-the-acolyte-was-over-budget-at-230-million/#:~:text=Disney%20has%20revealed%20that%20its,the%20way%20through%20post%20production.).
The jury is still out on Snow White, but the cost of $250 million plus has only netted $52.5 million domestically in the first two weeks in theaters, and with a hot new film “A Minecraft Movie” coming this weekend, Snow White may see little more revenue over the coming weeks.
Here’s what didn’t happen: No Bud Light trucks were vandalized or torched. No Disney Plus employees were harassed and jeered for going to work. No theater was firebombed for playing Snow White.
But the left is upset about Elon Musk cutting waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. Did they stop using Musk satellite systems or internet services or stop buying Teslas?
No. They burned Teslas, dented Teslas, graffitied Teslas, and harassed the people who drive Teslas.
The disrupted traffic, caused millions in property damage and lectured owners of cars because they don’t like a man who has 10 percent ownership in the company.
Do you see the difference in response here? Can you understand why one side of the political aisle can not be taken seriously right now?
Even Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom told Bill Maher that the Democratic brand is “toxic” right now.
Burning cars and harassing electric car salesmen and women won’t help.
But this is the response by those who believe themselves to be morally superior. Rewriting Snow White was morally superior. Insulting the core Bud Light customer was morally superior. Flooding Star Wars with lesbians and witches was morally superior.
But buying an electric car from Tesla was not only sacrilege in their faith of wokeness, anyone else who made that choice was an enemy of the state.
We may disagree on a marketing campaign, or injecting woke concepts into movies, or even on how to cut waste, fraud and abuse in government.
But there is no denying the reactions speak volumes.
