Is Bud Light The Battle Of Midway In The Culture War?

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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 Donald Trump 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 a tide-turning victory? We’ve already had some recent victories in The Culure 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.

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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 Gllette 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 every day 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 has 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.

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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 r@pe and calling for mutilating our children. The Bud Light fiasco was the perfect storm of exactly the wrong idea at the wrong time 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 victorythat 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.

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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 a 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 Ofyssey”. 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 evulotuionary 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.”

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