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bud mulvaney

Sure, everything is political, because everything can be framed in terms of power. But some things are more political, because they exert more power, and some things are less. Dylan Mulvaney making a beer ad is less political than the reaction to it, which is more political. It's not "the most politicized speech it is possibly to make". It's a man, or a woman, in a dress, or a bubble bath, drinking a Bud Light. There are many many things far more political. The essence of politics is the control of the state and its exclusive claim to legitimate violence in the enforcement of the law and its sovereignty. Miss Mulvaney's bubble bath is not near to any of those things.

I'm kind of surprised at people who think Bud Light is some sort of exclusively Republican domain. It's Bud Light, not the NRA.

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This website is named for the motte and bailey fallacy, right? I believe that's relevant to this discussion, where you started by expressing anger that a beer company picked a trans woman for one commercial and expressing glee at the violent and angry responses from conservatives, and now are asking me to find a way for a political pundit to express gay and trans hatred at a pride parade to prove... something.

My original point stands. The bud light ad with Dylan Mulvaney and the response to it demonstrate to gay and trans people that conservatives require to be allowed to exclude them, with violence if possible. It's a smart way to demonstrate that conservatives don't care about women and children as much as they just hate gender nonconforming men and women. They have gone from seeking out gay and trans people to victimize, to creating silos in which they feel justified in victimizing any gay or trans people who dare to enter, but the urge to react to gay and trans people with violence is unchanged.

Conservatives were making headway with their concern for trans children and women's sports, but they took the bait and started shooting cases of beer because a trans woman drank a bud light.

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But does an ad targeted to a diffetent demographic do that, if said demo is already different?.

The people who would buy Bud light after seeing promoted by Mulvaney are presumably onboard with transness already no?

Society is not based on reason in the first place so I don't care what beliefs Bud light are exploiting or if they are true or not. Like i don't care if America truly is the greatest nation on earth in every third beer commercial or whatever. The truth doesn't matter. Its aimed at people who already believe it.

Identity is the perceived membership of particular in-groups and out-groups. It's a factor of human psycho-social dynamics, not biology. As we have seen here, conservatives seem to view their political alignment as an identity. They also seem to be eager to ascribe other people's political alignments as an identity, as you and the other two people replying to me have all eventually accused me of being on the side of liberals and making assumptions about my political affiliation. Liberals engage in that to a lesser degree, which is why there are so many different liberal factions that spend almost as much time fighting each other as they do conservatives. They couldn't even successfully elect Hillary Clinton because of ideological differences, which is an extreme weakness of the liberal movement.

Justin Trudeau wore brownface once as a high schooler. It is well within the ability of most liberals to understand the idea of doing something stupid and ignorant when in high school. Conservatives try to use that to weaken his political influence, and liberal don't let it work. It's too weak of a transgression, and he's too strong of a political force for liberalism otherwise.

There are obviously going to be counterexamples of these tendencies on both sides, but I'm talking about general trends and the behavior of the plurality, if not the majority. In a democratic system like ours, the tendencies of the plurality determine who is elected to political power.

This isn't about good or bad, or mean and virtuous, and I didn't use any of those words. Those are value statements you read into my opinions because apparently that's where you center your discourse. I might say the liberal tendency to eat their own is very bad, because it resulted in failing to elect Hillary Clinton. I might say the conservative ability to support each other in an identity based way is good because it enabled them to achieve political goals liberals thought were impossible, like repealing Roe v. Wade. Liberals frequently use ideological purity tests to be cruel to each other, and that probably leads to higher levels of anxiety in liberals. Conservatives will extend each other a great deal of kindness and community, which can lead to more prosocial behavior in conservative circles.

Generally though, I'd rather be a conservative at a pride parade than a trans woman in a men's locker room. Liberals are generally more tolerant of dissent and while a few might become aggressive, you have a distinct possibility of others defending the conservative's right to free speech. If one man in a locker room decides to be aggressive towards another for being gay or trans, the other men will not intervene, even if they disagree, because they will immediately be targeted as well.

Straight men absolutely do harass each other far more than any gay man harasses straight me. Straight men say crude and sexually demeaning things to each other all the time, especially in male only contexts. It is not reasonable to assume gay men are more likely to sexually harass straight men than that straight men are likely to sexually harass each other. I actually think the real disruption that gay men create in straight male dynamics is that straight men cannot safely sexually harass them, or just generally engage aggressively with them, the same way they feel safe engaging with other straight men. The same sexual jokes they can make with other straight men suddenly are recontextualized, and that makes them uncomfortable and uneasy. Gay men don't have a lot of choice but to learn to live with straight men to at least some degree, but many straight men, however, have trouble with the threat that a gay man can pose to the social dynamics of a straight male dominated context. If a straight man is too nice to the gay man, will the other men call him gay? If he's too mean, will the other men call him gay? If he imagines the gay man having sex with other men, does that mean he's gay? Straight men who exist in cultures with hostility towards gay men aren't worried about being harassed by gay men, and the idea that they are is laughable. They are worried about being harassed by other straight men regarding the way they choose to interact with the gay men. They don't know the rules.

You can see this right now with Bud Light. According to them, a gay man, Dylan Mulvaney, is drinking Bud Light, and has entered their social context. No one is worried about Dylan Mulvaney's harassment or reaction to them choosing to continue drinking Bud Light or not. All of these conservative men are performing for each other, lest they be harassed themselves for an improper reaction to this gay male encroachment on their beer. Some feel the need to make a video shooting bud light. Some make videos of themselves throwing away bud light. I'd bet a lot of conservative men don't care about it, but are worried about buying bud light in front of their friends in case their friends use that to harass them.

Straight men are not afraid of gay men, they are afraid of other straight men.

My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke.

Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:

The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it.

Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?

Budweiser have made an error here it seems, but there are plenty of past cases of entering into the culture war delivering higher sales, and given that the business of business is business there is no reason why they shouldn't try to exploit those cases.

While that is true, there are ways to switch to the progressive support angle. Every company pretty much swathes itself in rainbows for Pride Month, to the extent that LGBT activists are cynical about woke capitalism.

Dumping your core demographic before you have the new client base in place was a bad idea. I saw one Twitter or Instagram or wherever video where a woman was going on about "do the rednecks not know that thousands of dollars of marketing research went into this, do they really think their little tantrum is going to achieve anything, don't they understand that a huge business like this wouldn't do anything without a plan in place?"

Well, looks like none of that was true. I think it was a test run by the marketing VP to try and get limited exposure using a popular influencer to start switching to the younger, liberal audience, and seeing by the results how this would go (would they all indeed go over to the March Madness Bud website and enter?) but it went badly wrong.

And all the "we never partnered with Mulvaney" isn't much cop, seeing as how Mulvaney's Instagram still has the video up with the hashtag #budlightpartner, oh dear:

Happy March Madness!! Just found out this had to do with sports and not just saying it’s a crazy month! In celebration of this sports thing @budlight is giving you the chance to win $15,000! Share a video with #EasyCarryContest for a chance to win!! Good luck! #budlightpartner

I think the big mistake was the promotional can with Mulvaney's face on it; sure, it might only be one can (or several, how many they sent out was unclear) that were never going to hit the shelves in stores, but there have been so many promotional cans that did hit the shelves, it's easy to see why people assumed this was the same thing.

On March 27th, A transgender shooter killed children and teachers at a Christian School, with direct political motivations.

What evidence do you have that the shooting was politically motivated? One article says:

Authorities have yet to release what was written publicly. But TBI director David Rausch did talk candidly about the contents of the manifesto at a Tennessee Sheriffs' Association meeting. Rausch said what police found isn't so much a manifesto spelling out a target but a series of rambling writings indicating no clear motive.

Investigators searched the Nashville home of the Covenant School shooter leaving with among other things — a number or handwritten journals, some videos and computer hard drives. Rausch told sheriffs that the review so far of the material finds that the killer did not write about specific political, religious or social issues. In fact, a primary focus in the journals is on idolizing those who committed prior school shootings.

She appears to have followed their lead planning for months and acted alone.

And you can tell this media outlet isn't particularly dedicated to pushing the trans agenda by the fact that they're not using the shooter's preferred pronouns. The obvious explanation is that this particular school was targeted because the shooter once attended it.

On April 1st, LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the Bud Light-Mulvaney partnership drops. (...) It was an EXTREME "insult to injury" moment. AB was inadvertently(???) sending the message "We do not give a shit that you, our main customer demographic, was just targeted for a politically motivated attack and we will in fact implicitly celebrate the shooter with this marketing campaign that basically claims your favored beer brand for the blue tribe."

Are trans people collectively guilty for a shooting committed by one trans person? And if they are, how long do they have to wait after the shooting before they can go out in public again without this being a provocation? How long does everyone else have to wait before it becomes acceptable to associate with trans people again?

In effect all of the powers that be ignored the victims of the shooting, provided some cover to the shooter, and essentially turned the entire thing into an opportunity to advance transgender issues.

The Wikipedia article on the shooting says:

In response to the shooting, U.S. President Joe Biden said, "We have to do more to stop gun violence. It's ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation, ripping at the very soul of the nation... we have to do more to protect our schools, so they aren't turned into prisons."[7] He ordered flags on all federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.[21][57] Tennessee state representative Bob Freeman, a Democrat from Nashville, called for gun reforms in the wake of the shooting.[58]

On March 30, thousands of protestors gathered at the Tennessee State Capitol to call for stricter gun control laws.[59][60] Some children held signs saying "I'm nine" in reference to the age of the children shot.[61] Within the chamber of the capitol, three state representatives, Justin Jones, Justin Pearson, and Gloria Johnson led the public gallery in chants of "no more silence", "we have to do better", and "gun reform now", demanding that lawmakers strengthen gun laws. This protest delayed a hearing on a bill which would expand gun access.[62][58] The next day the state legislature passed a law allowing private schools to hire school resource officers from police departments to help prevent shootings, effective immediately.[63]

The president ordering that flags on all federal buildings be flown at half-staff is certainly not ignoring the victims. It seems that they reacted the same way they react to other school shootings. Every remotely notable left-wing figure that publicly reacted to the shooting condemned it and called for more gun control. No one decided that guns and school shootings are fine now because sometimes a member of the ingroup will be shooting at the outgroup.

New Coke was legitimately a worse product. No one would have known or cared about Dylan Mulvaney's Bud Light deal if it wasn't for social media outrage. It wouldn't have affected the product at all.

Fresh WSJ Bud Light Delenda Est Update on the front page this morning.

Bud Light sales losses continue, though they have slowed, holding steady around -28%. Coors and Miller's Lite offerings are showing more modest gains of around +16%, two weeks ago it was Bud down 15% and Coors and Miller both up 15%. I don't know what the proportion of sales is between the three light beers, but the change does indicate that some sales have been fully lost from the generic mass light beers to craft offerings or to other brewers (Yuengling! America's Oldest Brewery!) or to other alcohol categories entirely.

AB Inbev is offering hazard pay bonuses of $500 to wholesaler employees and delivery drivers who faced customer abuse for driving a Bud Light branded truck.

AB intends to triple Ad Spend for the rest of the year, a cost of millions, to try to unring the bell.

Numerous ad execs have been axed or shuffled, the whole marketing department is now under sharper observation and approval from the C Suite.

Congress is launching a (kinda bad faith) investigation into whether the Mulvaney ad violated rules about marketing to minors. Which could keep the issue alive for much longer, and lead to fines.

In yet another episode of NEVER EVER APOLOGIZE, AB now faces significant backlash to their efforts to fold to the boycott, with the LGBTQWERTY+ community they originally tried to target feeling abandoned when AB pulled back. It's better to never get involved, but if you do, never ever apologize, ride it out. No one likes a coward.

On balance the boycott seems to have significant teeth, with AB suffering major losses as a result of the boycott, and planning major spending to counter it. How big a loss do we need to see before other corporations start treating the issue as toxic? What's your over/under?

Bud Light Delenda Est, drink Yuengling or local.

I'm going to join the (small) chorus saying that I genuinely don't think the Nashville shooting was on anyone's mind when Mulvaneygate started, the Bud Light controversy was definitely its own vein of outrage and wasn't tapping that prior thing. Maybe for some, it was indeed another straw on the herniated camel's back, but I will say that it definitely feels like its own thing.

I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about ethics in games journalism the ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.

Do people forget that mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped, the Culture War issue du jour was a Trans shooter killing kids at a Christian School?

Tempers were already burning extremely high on the Trans issue when Bud Light waltzed in. The response was not merely driven by Mulvaney, but by the rage felt over the incident in which the entire Cathedral functionally sided with the shooter.

-- What I thought was a weakness of the Bud Light Boycott (that essentially no one was going to see the ad organically), has turned out to be its strength. Similar dynamic to how very clearly bad police shootings cause less controversy than police shootings that really weren't that bad. The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it. Right wing influencers successfully made this into a much bigger deal than it was.

This is why eyewitness testimonies are so unreliable. People are very bad at keeping track of details of events, and at best have a vague idea. It's a combination of laziness, confirmation bias, and mental heuristics.

Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?

They didn't just screw up the messaging, the HORRIBLY botched the timing.

Remember this, mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting

Conservatives were ALREADY up in arms over being apparently targeted for death by a trans shooter, and found that the media mostly ignored the victims, AND THEN Bud Light comes in to poke them in the still-bleeding wound.

The 'over'reaction was based on the fact that the exact group Bug Light angered was ALREADY seething mad over their treatment in the wake of that tragedy.

The marketing VP is on leave of absence and has been replaced. I think there will be some quiet opportunity to leave of her own accord and move on to better and greater things offered. I don't think they have solid grounds to fire her and it would be a messy lawsuit to fight it out, so just letting it all settle down under the radar (with maybe a fat severance package) is the way to go.

You're forgetting important context, friend.

On March 27th, A transgender shooter killed children and teachers at a Christian School, with direct political motivations.

On April 1st, LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, the Bud Light-Mulvaney partnership drops.

In effect all of the powers that be ignored the victims of the shooting, provided some cover to the shooter, and essentially turned the entire thing into an opportunity to advance transgender issues.

It was an EXTREME "insult to injury" moment. AB was inadvertently(???) sending the message "We do not give a shit that you, our main customer demographic, was just targeted for a politically motivated attack and we will in fact implicitly celebrate the shooter with this marketing campaign that basically claims your favored beer brand for the blue tribe."

At best, AB was being completely tone-deaf in the timing. At worst, this was a flex. "Not only do we not care that you got attacked, we can kick you when you're down without fearing retaliation."

So people were PISSED off to start, got increasingly riled up by the coverage of the aftermath and the shooter, and THEN Bud Light waltzed in with a marketing campaign that poked them right in the still-fresh wound. So the rest unfolded in a fairly logical fashion.

No, I actually think this is right on the money for how a boycott should go.

Bud Light tries a marketing tactic and immediately sees its sales crater: even if the sales are going to its other Anheuser-Busch brands there are real costs in having to drop large amounts of production on one brand and move it to another.

Plenty of people work for Bud Light but not AB, and if they have to cut, say, a quarter of production those people are at least having their lives disrupted and possibly being laid off and replaced. Even if AB's sales stay completely level, that will be a significant event.

Meanwhile, they paid for that privilege: that was a marketing campaign that was intended to raise sales. And the people at the top of AB who are at least going to casually glance at new marketing campaigns are the same ones who had to reorganize after this Bud Light stuff. If AB goes under the company that replaces it is determined by market demands plus luck, with no guarantee they won't be more ideologically opposed to our Bud Light boycotters.

Instead, AB sticks around and learns the lesson "don't waste money on the trans stuff" which is what the boycotters wanted in the first place. Not only is it the most direct goal, it's much more attainable than trying to take out the largest brewery in the US.

In addition to this, cancel culture is an ethereal and poorly defined thing, but this all feels a lot more pure to me than it could be. Brand does advertising, consumers change their purchasing behavior of the brand as a result. No major agitating for collateral damage, not even really that much of a push to get people fired*, just "we're not going to buy this anymore because of what you did with it, you figure out what happens next".

*I'm sure people on Twitter were loudly calling for both, but it seems like the impact on a consumer level was much bigger. I would ideally just have people change their purchasing behavior and make a relatively-quiet confirmation of "yes this is about the Mulvaney thing", and this feels like a step in that direction if not in any way perfect.

I 1st saw him in this clip of the guy on Price is Right a couple weeks ago, on Twitter by, I think Sarah Haider (president of Ex-Muslims of North America) who was commenting on the person clearly being someone with an unhealthy need for attention. Even despite the fact that Haider isn't the type to shitpost, I genuinely wasn't sure if this wasn't some SNL-style parody of someone. After seeing the clip, I just moved on but kept seeing his name come up here and there on Twitter, but it was only when this Bud Light thing happened that it just seemed to be everywhere. But never through running into actual primary sources; it was only through culture war discussions on Twitter or Reddit. From everything I've seen, it does seem like Mulvaney either has a great talent for grabbing attention or an unhealthy compulsion for it, and perhaps we're playing exactly into his hands here. There's definitely something about him that makes it hard to look away when I do encounter him, but I don't feel the desire to seek him out and do wish I ran into him less often.

I'll actually admit I don't quite know what they should be apologizing for. Anheuser-Busch tried to make a targeted ad that advertised to a Dylan Mulvaney-adjacent segment of the market, and didn't think other parts of their market would ever see it, let alone care about it. They were wrong.

It was the partnership which triggered the red tribe's "satanic panic" reflexes in conjunction with someone unearthing an interview with the VP of marketing in which she describes her plan to replace the brand's "fratty" image with "inclusivity".

It seems like the red tribe is finally able to smell woke entryism. Took them long enough. And given that bud light is apparently a cornerstone of country culture, this was rightly seen as a broadside in the culture war.

I believe there is fairly good evidence demonstrating T participation in the military is well above T population representation. Speculation for the cause was some combination of dysphoria causing some Ts to reach to the extremes of their current gender expression before about facing and turning to the extreme of another along with a jobs program that was viewed as relatively safe for an extreme minority. Now that dysphoria as a necessity for representation has fallen out of favor and the job protection extends to most white collar professions I would say neither currently apply but there's an established historical precedence similar to IBM's black jobs programs and Universities preparing for a post-Affirmative Action world where there is a small slice of pie available to be eaten for a motivated sect.

Of course, Ts and drag queens are not the same thing but in the current cultural moment they've been bundled together. The cause of this campaign is no different from any other T-catering cultural campaign of the past few years - they are exceptionally good at entryism and influence peddling with decision makers. Why did Bud Light hire Dylan Mulvaney? Because the people in charge of Bud Light's Marketing Department are the type of people who would hire Dylan Mulvaney. The military is no different

I think it’s because they’re useful in several ways to the regime.

As symbols, they can serve as useful tools of the elite trying to convince other people to join the Atlantic Empire. After all, if we can tolerate transpeople, accepting Muslims, Buddhists and so on isn’t an issue. You can be free to do anything, and we aren’t going to stop you. Hell, we’ll force it including forcing companies to hire you and cater to you.

As a bloc, they are fanatic defenders of the elite, because the elite are allowing them to punch far above their weight. If the Atlantic Empire falls, they’re toast, as no other potential elites (MAGA, BRIC, Islamic, or Christian National) will give them the same deal. In fact, absent a strong champion, they probably can’t gain enough power to defend themselves, and aren’t good workers in most situations.

As a distraction, they allow the regime to do as it pleases in other spheres of control. As long as we’re talking about trans people reading books to kids, Dylan Mulvaney, and pro-trans propaganda in schools, the ability for the government to quietly sneak in and change other things, to take control over privacy and so on is high.

Lawsuits from disgruntled employees are only one prong of the assault. If they came out and said “Dylan Mulvaney is a man” in a way that would satisfy Matt Walsh, an Alex Jones level cancellation would be on the table. What if the NFL told InBev to take their ad money and shove it? What if any channel that shows Bud Light commercials gets the Tucker Carlson treatment? What if every company that sells Bud Light has angry mid-level management angry that they have to sell “hate beer”?

If any of these sound unrealistic, you’re right. It would never happen. Corporate leadership would chicken out before any of these things took place.

It’s also something you order at restaurants and bars where you have a choice and the choice is publicly known. If I’m in a bar in Mississippi and I’m ordering a beer with my buddies, there’s an element of peer pressure. The controversy over Mulvaney means that especially in conservative circles, ordering a Bud Light is going to be something people pay attention to. It’s the tranny beer. You don’t support that do you?

And I think this is why a lot of boycotts fail. If you can privately cross the line, then a lot of people do. All the people who are concerned about Amazon abusing workers still order from them because the social pressure of potentially being seen ordering from Amazon isn’t there.

As stark as 20% drop within a month is, I don't think you can declare a loss in your prediction yet; we've still got a long ways to go before the 6-month mark. I admit, I predicted similarly to you, and I too am surprised, and I could see the boycott having legs for 6 months and beyond, if regular consumers switch over to Coors Lite or Miller Lite or whatever and make it their habit. 6 months is more than enough time to develop a new habit that one sticks with. I personally don't drink much light beer at all, so I can't say if these products are sufficiently interchangeable that Bud Lite drinkers could stick with the change long-term; the beer snob in me would say obviously they're fungible, but that's obviously not accurate. So maybe the people who are angry/hyped enough to switch over for a month could only handle forcing down Coors Lite for so long before they have to switch back to their favored Bud Lite.

On the boycott itself, though, has any organization come out and called for people to boycott Bud Lite/ABI? I feel like I've seen a lot of people talking about not buying them in reaction to the Mulvaney marketing, but I haven't seen any widespread calls for solidarity coming from big names/organizations. Then again, I'm not much in the target audience for something like that, and I also don't remember much of that during the recent boycott against Hogwarts Legacy, so maybe I shouldn't expect to see something like that.

If I were in charge of bud light’s marketing, I would sponsor Screenings of What is a woman at rented out theaters which came with a free bud light at admission, and make sure to get fined by the state of California for facilitating underaged drinking or some other alcohol related charge to plug into the conservative persecution complex. Or issue trump cans.

As is, there’s really no way out. The only way they can even hold on to current market share is with massive rebates supported by heavy Spanish-language advertising(Mexicans don’t know about Dylan mulvaney).