bud mulvaney
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
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.
hydroacetylene
1yr ago
I think you hit the nail on the head but not in so many words about the bud light controversy.
Bud light is, well, not a beer that any reasonable person would associate with the sort of people who get into woke stuff. The advertising campaign featuring a z-list celebrity weirdo in a dress(and lets be real, that’s what Dylan mulvaney is- even by MTF standards he’s pretty deeply odd and he’s pure culture war fodder because he’s so weird and annoying) wasn’t served to me(beer ads seem to think of me as a right wing Hispanic beer snob) but it did uniquely offend me because, well, who did they think it was going to appeal to? I mean gay pride cans in June are obviously for sale to gay bars but does any bud light drinker have much sympathy for trans? And I’m so enthusiastic about not drinking any Budweiser product(of which there are many, and of which some are drinkable) because this feels like my demographic(blue collar males) exercising cultural power. This is the one time we get to hit back, and it feels good. Honestly that last bit probably makes all the difference in the world.
Anyways I’ll be drinking shiner after yard work.
FarNearEverywhere
11mo ago
I've drinking this beer since I was sixteen.
Which is why they think the brand is in decline. The older drinkers who've been drinking it for years are sticking with it, but they're not getting the new younger drinkers (for various reasons). That's why the influencer disaster. I've tried to find the demographics of Mulvaney's audience but that seems to be commercial information that isn't readily available. So I'm going to assume it's majorly women in the age range 18-30 (or so).
They want the 18 year girls to start drinking Bud Light, so by extension the association with "I'm a guy who has been drinking this since I was 16 and I'm 30/40/however old now" is unfavourable. Young drinkers are not going to be wooed by a dad beer, so this is why they tried to use Mulvaney to make it hip'n'happening.
Your friend may continue to drink it, but he's not the market they're trying to attract now. The (unfortunate) head of marketing for Bud Light in this interview, from around the 25th minute, about what she wanted to do. Evolve and Elevate. Representation. Inclusivity. The words that came back to haunt her:
"(And) we had this hangover. I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humour and it was really important that we had another approach".
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5mo ago
Representation does matter, but those making the decisions are so ideologically committed that they’re willing to hurt their own bottom line in order to “do the right thing.” They’re so committed to their ideals that they’re willing to depress their own effectiveness by more than 30%.
Except it's not this straightforward, for two reasons. First, try proving that these decisions are actually hurting the bottom line. As the old quote attributed to various famous businessmen goes: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." Advertising is anything but an exact science, and business outcomes are subject to many hard-to-disentangle factors. So how would one convince bosses or coworkers that this isn't the way to get more business?
Secondly, the interests and incentives of an institution are not the interests and incentives of the people within it. As I've seen it put elsewhere (particularly in discussions of the police, but also other fields), the first and highest job duty of any employee is not what it says on their job description, it's to make the boss happy. Of course, the usual way one does so is by performing the specific tasks for which one was hired, but those are ultimately just means to that end. If your boss insists on something being done a particular way, a particular way that's stupid and costs the business money, and instead you do it a different way that saves the business money, how do you suppose it will impact your continued employment if the boss finds out?
I've seen multiple people point out with respect to the whole Bud Light thing, that while going with Mulvaney may not have been a good choice for the business as a whole, it was probably the best choice for the advertising people who originally recommended that course with regards to their future employment opportunities elsewhere within the advertising industry, particularly as compared to the opposite strategy. "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM" and all that.
So nobody need actually go "I'm doing this no matter how much money it costs me!" They need only have uncertainty as to what will or won't cost the business more customers, combined with a solid understanding of what best suits their own personal, long-term job interests independent of a particular company's interests.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
11mo ago
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.
Exactly! If you're trying to reposition the brand as inclusive and evolving and what-not, then get a trans man to be the face of your promotion.
Not whatever Dylan Mulvaney is, I really don't believe he's a trans woman, I think he's a gay guy that started a performance art/drag act during lockdown and now it's blown up into this big thing that is too profitable (up till now) to drop:
Mulvaney came out as a trans woman during the COVID-19 pandemic, while living with her "very conservative family" at her childhood home in San Diego. She began to document her gender transition in a daily series of videos published on TikTok titled "Days of Girlhood" in March 2022, and her videos began to gain in popularity. She said in an interview:
When the pandemic hit, I was doing the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I found myself jobless and without the creative means to do what I loved. I downloaded TikTok, assuming it was a kids' app. Once I came out as a woman, I made this "day one of being a girl" comedic video. And it blew up. I really don't know another place online like TikTok that can make a creator grow at the rate that it does. Some of these other apps really celebrate perfection and over-editing and flawlessness. I think with TikTok specifically, people love the rawness. They love people just talking to the camera. I try to approach every video like a FaceTime with a friend.
My uninformed view on this is that Mulvaney is a theatre kid turned performer who, like a lot of performers, needs attention and an audience like a plant needs sunshine. Being locked down at home with no job, they tried the online performance and it caught on, and the rest is history.
This seems to be the second controversy over "we're not officially partnered with Mulvaney", Snopes is debunking the story but it does seem that Mulvaney claimed Tampax sent them a box of tampons to share with women who need them (I can't even begin to untangle the logic behind that line of thinking):
Responding to comments on Twitter, Tampax denied the claim about the partnership with Mulvaney. "Thanks for getting in touch, the brand wrote in response. "We can confirm that we do not have a sponsorship agreement with Dylan Mulvaney or Jeffrey Marsh."
Although the TikTok star did not immediately respond to the claim about a partnership with Tampax, in a video of Dec. 7, 2022, Mulvaney denied working with the brand and getting any money from the company. The celebrity added that Tampax sent Mulvaney a box of tampons in April 2022 to give to women who needed them.
Why the hell would Tampax just out of the blue send this person a box of tampons for no reason except "share them round"? One box? Gentlemen, let me assure you that is not a lot of sharing around (though it does depend on the size of the box). And how exactly is Mulvaney meant to give them to women who need tampons? Approaching random women on the street and asking "Hey, honey, need a tampon?" Approaching random women in bathrooms? Yeah, that move is going to go over well.
Somebody is not telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And if the Budweiser marketing lady was copying this move with "hey, send a promotional can with Mulvaney's face on it to them", then the decision was even stupider than I thought.
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
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.
HalloweenSnarry
1yr ago
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.
07mk
1yr ago
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.
thegayrabbi
1yr ago
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.
I am curious to know if this will work. I haven't been following the fortunes of Bud Light recently, so it could be that the people who switched will stick with the new beer brands and not move back. They already tried a poorly-received 'going back to our roots' ad that only served to have everyone go "how dumb do they think we are?" so this may blow up in their faces the same way. Some opinion also seems to be that the brand tanked just because it's terrible beer that has been doing poorly for years (hence the ill-advised attempt to make it relevant and appeal to young drinkers):
CEO Brendan Whitworth’s June apology was widely panned as insincere. By that month, Bud Light’s parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev lost $27 billion in market value. In July, the company announced it would lay off 350 employees. Frustrated, Billy Busch, heir to the Busch Family offered to buy back the Bud Light brand from InBev. By August, Bud Light’s sales had declined 26.8 percent while rival Modelo’s sales grew 15.9 percent. On Oct. 9, Bud Light’s stock closed at its lowest since the April triggering event.
Research shows that advertising only helps brands with above-average quality. Advertising cannot compensate for mediocre or sub-par quality to build customer loyalty, as was the case with Bud Light.
Because of this perception of its quality, Bud Light’s outsized advertising only garnered higher awareness but not necessarily higher customer loyalty. In 2022, more customers were aware of Bud Light than Modelo (88 percent versus 78 percent). Yet, both brands had identical customer loyalty (78 percent) among users.
Bud Light’s management conflated high customer awareness with high customer loyalty. Yet, its below-average product provided no meaningful differentiation from competitors and eroded customer loyalty. Customers switched when Bud Light transgressed.
Because of the mediocre quality, it's easy to switch to another brand, and the lost customers might not be coaxed back:
In the four weeks to September 9, Bud Light sales declined by around 30 percent in both volume and dollar value, compared to the same period a year ago. The statistics were compiled by Bump Williams Consulting.
Speaking to Fox News Digital, Harry Schuhmacher, the Beer Business Daily publisher, said that the latest figures show that the decline in Bud Light sales has become "quasi permanent."
Schuhmacher added: "You see Bud Light still just stubbornly down around 30 percent in volume compared to last year, which is where it's been since May or June.
"That tells me that this is quasi-permanent, meaning those consumers are just lost forever," he said.
Nielson data released in August showed that Bud Light sales fell by 26.5 percent for the week ending August 5, compared to the previous year. This was a higher decline than the 25.9 percent year-on-year fall recorded in the week ending June 17.
I also wonder how poor, poor Dylan is doing; they were so traumatised that they couldn't even step outside their front door (apart from that trip to Peru because they needed to feel safe. So they went to Peru. Yeah, I believe that was the exact reason and not trying to scrape last crumb of publicity out of it). So, so scared to leave the house that they had to fly three thousand miles away and record every step on TikTok. Such is the horror of the transphobic backlash! Such horror that a trip to France immediately afterwards was necessary. And onwards to the UK. And then back to New York for fashion week. And then popping off to London to receive a Woman Of The Year award.
It really is awful how this poor person has been terrorised into being unable to leave the safety of their own home!
Quantumfreakonomics
1yr ago
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.
FarNearEverywhere
1yr ago
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.
This Mulvaney thing broke out in early April, according to Vox. From what I see, it appears to have not only led to a decline in sales, but has actually led the market to downgrade the value of AB InBev. If I were an stock investor in a given company, I wouldn’t care about company fundamentals like sales, but rather its stock returns.
AB InBev trades on NYSE with the ticker BUD, which may be surprising to those of us who would have thought “BUD” were some sort of marijuana ETF. I looked for beer/alcohol themed ETFs for comparison—but strangely, from my cursory search, there is no large-scale ETF focusing on just beer, or even alcohol (perhaps a business opportunity! TheMotte-managed Booze ETF when?).
However, there are relatively larger related ETFs with somewhat bigger scopes. BAD, which tracks Betting, Alcohol, and Drugs. PBJ, a “dynamic” food and beverage ETF. VICE “invests in the products and services that people find pleasure in regardless of economic conditions." VICE sounds potentially dangerously based as an ETF that invests in young women, but its holdings are merely in "alcohol, tobacco, gaming, food and beverage, restaurant and hospitality" (which actually—come to think of it—sound rather female-coded, sectors where female sexuality is heavily leveraged).
BUD has delivered a 3.5% loss since March month-end—whereas BAD gained 2.6%, PBJ 3.1%, and VICE 3.6%. Obviously, there could be substantial idiosyncratic volatility to individual stocks, but one could argue this transversy erased at least 6% of BUD shareholder value because a Marketing VP thought it’d be cute for BUD to be more “inclusive” and less “fratty.” BAD and VICE contain BUD, so a better comparison using BAD ex-BUD and VICE ex-BUD would only yield a greater difference.
In some ways, I’m mirin that Marketing VP, who is far less good-looking than I had initially imagined. Get that bag and get those woke good-girl points. It's impressive she was able to have such an influence. She'll likely be able to quickly get a new, high-status role elsewhere, as a #BossBabe who was forced out only due to misogynistic, incel transphobes.
I don’t think there’s anything I could realistically do to tank my employer’s valuation by 6+ percent even if I wanted to, that doesn’t involve me intentionally cultivating massive wrong-doings to get myself sent to prison (or the shadow-realm) and then ghost-writing a tattletale “tell-all” autobiography with lawsuits to boot. Like a more corporate, coherent, litigious Tim Donaghy.
“Everything is securities fraud,” Matt Levine loves to remark. It’d be great if this latest kerfuffle inspired greater attention, investor activism, and lawfare toward the principal-agency problem in corporations, where employees use company resources to advance their personal political interests. Yet, I know better than to expect anything.
the violent and angry responses from conservatives
....? They're not buying beer. One guy shot a case of Bud Light and posted it on social media. It was not a case with Mulvaney on it, just a blue box.
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.
Your core argument is that your side is morally superior because conservatives are welcome in gay spaces if they're not "political", but gay people are not welcome in conservative spaces, regardless. This is not some pedantic nit I'm picking. Please demonstrate that a legible conservative can enter a gay pride space and not get a hostile reception. I've tried to demonstrate it's possible for legibly gay people to enter a conservative space in the same way.
The way a free market works is that consumers get to choose, for whatever bespoke reasons they so desire, which products they will purchase and consume. Producers would much prefer that they themselves got to choose which products consumers had to purchase. Corporate PR gets a lot of flak for being simple and predictable, but it is glaringly apparent when these simple predictable rules are violated. The fact that companies wish that their customers were pigs who they could shovel slop to every day and come home with an easy profit should be apparent from first economic principles, but consumers understandably take offense to that. Imagine if the CEO of InBev posted a tweet publicly asking Elon Musk to shut down all Dylan Mulvaney/Bud Light trending topics and ban Kid Rock. I’m sure that’s exactly what they wanted, but InBev has enough sense and tact to understand how condescending and contemptuous that would come off as.
hydroacetylene
7mo ago
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).
I guarantee (especially given that the Budweiser part of InBev is in the midwestern largely Catholic city of St. Louis) that someone in that room knew the Mulvaney cans were a terrible idea that would cause backlash.
I honestly think the Mulvaney promotional can was the genius idea of the marketing lady - or rather the ad/marketing agency she hired - who had been put in charge of revitalising the brand, and that there wasn't much oversight. I don't know who her immediate boss was/is, but she was given the task "get the brand selling again" and that means "get young people drinking it" and she thought "where are the kids today hanging out? oh yeah TikTok and Instagram" and she went for "who's the big influencer name?" and here we go.
If there had been "people in the room" I do hope somebody would have gone "but what about our existing client base?" but I don't think there was even a room. She was going on in the interview about how she had been handed the task and I do think it was her and a couple others and she had the last say on what they'd do:
At work, Alissa Heinerscheid is the Vice President of Bud Light, tasked with evolving and elevating an iconic brand that was in decline — and she’s the first woman to lead Bud Light in the brand’s 40 year history.
FarNearEverywhere
11mo ago
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.
RococoBasilica
Actually a Quality Retribution
1yr ago
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.
"Bud Light is throwing their weight behind the idea that a natural born man can transition into a woman - an idea that is harmful in its consequences, disrespectful to reality, and is quite possibly the most ridiculous development in our political arena in ways I could have never foreseen."
If you believe the above, I think this is a decent enough reason to boycott? This isn't an argument over some sprawling, poorly-understood topic like the pros/cons of taxes or immigration policy. This is more like a company telling you that the color green is no different from red, without a trace of winking, Millenial irony attached, except worse given the subject matter.
Some hack writer burning a Trump effigy in his show is dumb, but mostly just eyeroll-inducing. The psychology behind such a person and their behavior is completely legible to me, even if it's idiotic. But for trans issues, it does feel like many on the left are downloading their views from a heretofore undiscovered alien planet. I can break bread with or let bygones be bygones to some extent with somebody who really likes socialism. It is increasingly difficult to do so with people who are being absurd on an even more fundamental level - if not the most.
The Bud/Mulvaney controversy was likely sprung from a critical mass of people already predisposed towards being unfavorable having an "Oh, come the fuck on" moment, particularly attenuated by having this come from Bud Light of all brands.
faceh
1yr ago
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.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
It's also not just the can, it's the marketing lady's followup video about how bud light wants to distance itself from the very people who buy it. She called them "fratty" and implied that this was "problematic".
Relevant note - that comment was not in a follow-up, it was an interview given about a month earlier and does not directly reference the Mulvaney placement. While it's reasonable to infer that Mulvaney was a part of this attempt at branding, it was not a post hoc justification.
Lost
1yr ago
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
Speaking for myself: you have, like many decent folks on the trans activist side, buried a lot of very salient details in reasonable-sounding language.
As a general rule, yes, I will use someone's preferred pronouns. But what if I earnestly believe someone is a fraud, a bad actor, someone whose "transition" is at best highly suspect, and at worst, a cynical grift? Someone like Jessica Yaniv, or Dylan Mulvaney, or a convicted rapist who discovered during his trial that he is actually a woman? I would like to reserve the right to say "No, I don't think you are claiming a trans identity in good faith and I refuse to respect it." A lot of trans activists would tell me that I need to use whatever pronouns someone tells me to, period.
"Need" is a bit of a question mark, though. But again, if you are an adult of sound mind, sure, do whatever you want to your body, I guess. But trans inmates who demand that the prison system foot the bill for their transition, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars from an already overstretched prison budget that barely accommodates the very real medical needs of other prisoners? To say nothing of minors who say they "need" to make permanent alterations to their body at the age of 14? Phrasing it as "the right to the healthcare they need" sounds like opponents want to deny them medical treatment in general, and ignores the actual issues.
Again, if it was just trans women saying "I'm a woman, please call me a woman," I think most people would accept that, with varying degrees of grudgingness. One of the thiings that's made it such a flashpoint, though, is trans people demanding that references to "women" (when talking about, e.g,, pregnancy, menstruation, etc.) be changed to awkward if not offensive circumlocutions like "pregnant people" or "uterus-havers." There are many examples of even more egregious howlers. These are things being pushed by the same folks who say they just want us to accept their "reasonable," flexible, and constantly changing definition of "woman."
It is unfortunate that so much of the debate is driven by bad actors, and not by reasonable people like (I assume) yourself who just want to live your lives and be left in peace. But the fact that even the reasonable people will generally refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of bad actors means that when you get the "trans woman" who makes a point of strutting around a women's locker room naked, waving "her" erect penis at a captive audience, it discredits all the other trans women who say "No, really, I just to want to use the locker room and change in peace."
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