Brownstone Institute
What the Bud Light Fiasco Reveals about the Ruling Class
From the Brownstone Institute
What were they thinking? How did someone believe that making “trans woman” Dylan Mulvaney the icon of a Bud Light ad campaign, complete with a beer can with Mulvaney’s image on it, would be good for sales? With an ad featuring this person vamping around in the most preposterously possible way?
Dylan, who had previously been interviewed on trans issues by President Biden himself, was celebrating “365 Days of Girlhood” with a grotesquely misogynistic caricature that would disgust just about the whole market for this beer. Indeed, this person’s cosplay might as well be designed to discredit the entire political agenda of gender dysphoriacs.
Sure enough, because we don’t have mandates on what beers you must buy, sales of the beer plummeted.
The parent company Anheuser-Busch’s stock lost $5 billion or 4 percent in value since the ad campaign rollout. Sales have fallen 50-70 percent. Now there is worry within the company of a widening boycott to all their brands. A local Missouri distributor of the product canceled an appearance by Budweiser Clydesdale horses due to public anger.
Ads are supposed to sell products, not prompt a massive public backlash that results in billions in losses. This mistake could be for the ages, marking a distinct departure from corporate deference to wackadoodle ideas from the academy and a push for more connection to on-the-ground realities.
The person who made the miscalculation is Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Vice President in charge of marketing for Bud Light. She explained that her intention was to make the beer King of ‘Woke’ Beers. She wanted to shift away from the “out of touch” frat party image to one of “inclusivity.” By all accounts, she actually believed this. More likely, she was rationalizing actions that would earn her bragging rights within her social circle.
Digging through her personal biography, we find all the predictable signs of tremendous detachment from regular life: elite boarding school (Groton, $65K a year), Harvard, Wharton School, coveted internship at General Foods, and straight to top VP at the biggest beverage company in the world.
Somehow through all that, nothing entered her brain apart from elite opinion on how the world should work with theories never actually tested by real-world marketing demands. Would that she had worked at Chick-Fil-A at some point in her teen years, perhaps even preserving some friend relationships ever since. It might have protected her from this disastrous error.
She is a perfect symbol of a problem that afflicts high-end corporate and government culture: a shocking blindness toward the mainstream of American life, including working classes and other people less privileged. They are invisible to this crowd. And her type is pervasive in corporate America with its huge layers of management developed over 20 years of loose credit and push for token representation at the highest levels.
We’ve seen this manifest over three years and ruling-class types imposed lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates on the whole population without regard to the consequences and with full expectation that the food will continue to be delivered to their doorsteps no matter how many days, months, or years they stay at home and stay safe.
The working classes, meanwhile, were shoved out in front of the pathogen to make their assigned contribution to herd immunity so that the rich and privileged could preserve their clean state of being, making TikTok videos and issuing edicts from their safe spaces for two or even three years.
In the late 19th century, the blindness of class detachment was a problem that so consumed Karl Marx that he became possessed with the desire to overthrow class distinctions between labor and capital. He kicked off a new age of the classless society under the leadership of the vanguard of the proletarian classes. In every country where his dreams became a reality, however, a protected elite took over and secured themselves from the consequences of their deluded dreams.
The people who in recent decades have drunk so deeply from the well of the Marxian tradition seem to be repeating that experience with complete disinterest in the lower classes, while pushing a deepening chasm that only became worse in the lockdown years in which they have controlled the levers of power.
It was startling to watch, and I could hardly believe what was happening. Then one day the incredibly obvious dawned on me. All official opinion in this country and even the whole world – government, media, corporations, technology – emanated from the same upper echelons of the class structure. It was people with elite educations and who had the time to shape public opinion. They are the ones on Twitter, in the newsrooms, fussing with the codes, and enjoying the laptop life of a permanent bureaucrat.
Their social circles were the same. They knew no one who cut trees, butchered cows, drove trucks, fixed cars, and met payroll in a small restaurant. The “workers and peasants” are people the elites so otherized that they became nothing more than non-playing characters who make stuff work but are not worthy of their attention or time.
The result was a massive transfer of wealth upwards in the social ladder as digital brands, technology, and Peloton thrived, while everyone else faced a barrage of ill health, debt, and inflation. As classes have grown more stratified – and, yes, there is a reason to worry about the gap between the rich and the poor when malleability is restricted – the intellectual producers of policy and opinion have constructed their own bubble to protect themselves from by being soiled by contrary points of view.
They want the whole world to be their own safe space regardless of the victims.
Would lockdowns have happened in any other kind of world? Not likely. And it would not have happened if the overlords did not have the technology to carry on their lives as normal while pretending that no one was really suffering from their scheme.
The Bud Light case is especially startling because the advent of commercial society in the high Middle Ages and through the Industrial Revolution was supposed to mitigate against this sort of myopic stratification. And this has always been the most compelling critique of Marx: he was raging against a system that was gradually winnowing away the very demarcations in classes that he decried.
Joseph Schumpeter in 1919 wrote an essay on this topic in his book Imperialism and Social Classes. He highlighted how the commercial ethos dramatically changed the class system.
“The warlord was automatically the leader of his people in virtually every respect,” he wrote. “The modern industrialist is anything but such a leader. And this explains a great deal about the stability of the former’s position and the instability of the latter’s.”
But what happens when the corporate elites, working together with government, themselves become the warlords? The foundations of market capitalism begin to erode. The workers become ever more alienated from final consumption of the product they have made possible.
It’s been typical of people like me – pro-market libertarians – to ignore the issue of class and its impact on social and political structures. We inherited the view of Frederic Bastiat that the good society is about cooperation between everyone and not class conflict, much less class war. We’ve been suspicious of people who rage against wealth inequality and social stratification.
And yet we do not live in such market conditions. The social and economic systems of the West are increasingly bureaucratized, hobbled by credentialism, and regulated, and this has severely impacted class mobility. Indeed, for many of these structures, exclusion of the unwashed is the whole point.
And the ruling class themselves have ever more the mindset as described by Thorstein Veblen: only the ignorable do actual work while the truly successful indulge in leisure and conspicuous consumption as much as their means allow. One supposes that this doesn’t hurt anyone…until it does.
And this certainly happened in very recent history as the conspicuous consumers harnessed the power of states all over the world to serve their interests exclusively. The result was calamity for rights and liberties won over a thousand years of struggle.
The emergent fissures between the classes – and the diffusions of our ruling class into many sectors public and private – suggest an urgency for a new consciousness of the real meaning of the common good, which is inseparable from liberty. The marketing director of Bud Light talked a good line about “inclusivity” but she plotted to impose everything but that. Her plan was designed for the one percent and to the exclusion of all the people who actually consume the product, to say nothing for the workers who actually make and deliver the product she was charged with promoting.
That the markets have so brutally punished the brand and company for this profound error points the way to the future. People should have the right to their own choices about the kind of life they want to live and the products and services they want to consume. The dystopia of lockdowns and woke hegemony of public opinion – complete with censorship – have become the policy to overturn if the workers are ever to throw off the chains that bind them.
The boycotts of Bud Light are but a beginning.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The House report on HHS Covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden administration spent almost $1 billion to push falsehoods about Covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
HHS engaged a PR firm, the Fors Marsh Group (FMG), for the propaganda campaign. The main goal was to increase Covid vax uptake. The strategy: 1. Exaggerate Covid mortality risk 2. Downplay the fact that there was no good evidence that the Covid vax stops transmission.
The propaganda campaign extended beyond vax uptake and included exaggerating mask efficacy and pushing for social distancing and school closures.
Ultimately, since the messaging did not match reality, the campaign collapsed public trust in public health.
The PR firm (FMG) drew most of its faulty science from the CDC’s “guidance,” which ignored the FDA’s findings on the vaccine’s limitations, as well as scientific findings from other countries that contradicted CDC groupthink.
The report details the CDC’s mask flip-flopping through the years. It’s especially infuriating to recall the CDC’s weird, anti-scientific, anti-human focus on masking toddlers with cloth masks into 2022.
President Biden’s Covid advisor Ashish K. Jha waited until Dec. 2022 (right after leaving government service) to tell the country that “[t]here is no study in the world that shows that masks work that well.” What took him so long?
In 2021, former CDC director, Rochelle Walensky rewrote CDC guidance on social distancing at the behest of the national teachers’ union, guaranteeing that schools would remain closed to in-person learning for many months.
During this period, the PR firm FMG put out ads telling parents that schools would close unless kids masked up, stayed away from friends, and got Covid-vaccinated.
In March 2021, even as the CDC told the American people that the vaxxed did not need to mask, the PR firm ran ads saying that masks were still needed, even for the vaxxed. “It’s not time to ease up” we were told, in the absence of evidence any of that did any good.
In 2021, to support the Biden/Harris administration’s push for vax mandates, the PR firm pushed the false idea that the vax stopped Covid transmission. When people started getting “breakthrough” infections, public trust in public health collapsed.
Later, when the FDA approved the vax for 12 to 15-year-old kids, the PR firm told parents that schools could open in fall 2021 only if they got their kids vaccinated. These ads never mentioned side effects like myocarditis due to the vax.
HHS has scrubbed the propaganda ads from this era from its web pages. It’s easy to see why. They are embarrassing. They tell kids, in effect, that they should treat other kids like biohazards unless they are vaccinated.
When the Delta variant arrived, the PR firm doubled down on fear-mongering, masking, and social distancing.
In September 2021, CDC director Walensky overruled the agency’s external experts to recommend the booster to all adults rather than just the elderly. The director’s action was “highly unusual” and went beyond the FDA’s approval of the booster for only the elderly.
The PR campaign and the CDC persistently overestimated the mortality risk of Covid infection in kids to scare parents into vaccinating their children with the Covid vax.
In Aug. 2021, the military imposed its Covid vax mandate, leading to 8,300 servicemen being discharged. Since 2023, the DOD has been trying to get the discharged servicemen to reenlist. What harm has been done to American national security by the vax mandate?
The Biden/Harris administration imposed the OSHA, CMS, and military vax mandates, even though the CDC knew that the Delta variant evaded vaccine immunity. The PR campaign studiously avoided informing Americans about waning vaccine efficacy in the face of variants.
The propaganda campaign hired celebrities and influencers to “persuade” children to get the Covid vax.
I think if a celebrity is paid to advertise a faulty product, that celebrity should be partially liable if the product harms some people.
In the absence of evidence, the propaganda campaign ran ads telling parents that the vaccine would prevent their kids from getting Long Covid.
With the collapse in public trust in the CDC, parents have begun to question all CDC advice. Predictably, the HHS propaganda campaign has led to a decline in the uptake of routine childhood vaccines.
The report makes several recommendations, including formally defining the CDC’s core mission to focus on disease prevention, forcing HHS propaganda to abide by the FDA’s product labeling rules, and revamping the process of evaluating vaccine safety.
Probably the most important recommendation: HHS should never again adopt a policy of silencing dissenting scientists in an attempt to create an illusion of consensus in favor of CDC groupthink.
You can find a copy of the full House report here. The HHS must take its findings seriously if there is any hope for public health to regain public.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages.
People are out and about, smiling at each other. It’s been true since the morning after the election, the results of which defied every prediction. Who doesn’t like to see the smug elites who have ruled the world for five awful years taken down a peg?
More than that, there are hints of a return to sanity. Mainstream advertisers are suddenly returning to X, putting their economic interest above their tribalist loyalties. The editor of pro-lockdowns Scientific American, which had long blessed totalitarian measures as true science, has resigned.
The attempt to pillage InfoWars and give it to The Onion has been reversed by a federal judge. That might be a fluke or might not be: maybe the lawfare is dialing back too. The cabinet of the incoming administration is being filled by voices that were fully censored for years. Employees are reportedly packing their bags at the FDA and other agencies.
Mainstream news commentators are sputtering around with less bravado than they have shown in years. CNN is firing major personalities.
Trump is talking about abolishing the income tax and granting $10K in tax credits per homeschooled child, not to mention blowing up college accreditation systems, among other sweeping changes.
The American Bastille day is coming, not only freeing the political prisoners of January 6 but also many of the unjustly persecuted including Ross Ulbricht, Roger Ver, and Ian Freeman, among so many others. That will be a day of rejoicing.
Oh, and peace seems to have broken out in some contentious areas of the world, for now.
What is happening? This is not the usual transfer of the resident of the White House. This is starting to look like an actual transfer of power, not just from Biden to Trump but from the permanent government – ensconced in many sectors – that has been long in hiding to an entirely new form of government responsive to actual voters.
As it turns out, there was no late surge for Kamala Harris. All the polls were wrong, and the rest was media blather. What was correct were the betting odds on Polymarket, and only days later, the FBI raided the 26-year-old founder’s home and confiscated his phone and laptop.
There are still many millions of missing voters, people who supposedly showed up for Biden in 2020 but stayed home this time. Meanwhile, there has been a historic shift in all races, ethnicities, and regions, with even the possibility of flipping California from blue to red in the future.
After decades of academic slicing and dicing of the population according to ever more eccentric identity buckets involving race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual interest, along with countless thousands of studies documenting deep complexity over intersectionality, the driving force of the election was simple: class, and the few intellectuals and some wealthy entrepreneurs who understand that.
The division was not really left vs right. It was workers vs laptoppers, wage earners vs six-figure stay-at-homers, bottom half vs top 5 percent, people with actual skills vs weaponized resume wielders, and those with affection for old-world values vs those whose educations have beaten it out of them for purposes of career advancement.
The silent majority has never been so suddenly loud. It just so happened that the heavily privileged had come to inhabit easily identifiable sectors of American society and, in the end, had no choice but hitch the whole of the overclass wagon to the fortunes of a candidate like themselves (Kamala) but who was unable to pull off a compelling masquerade. Not even a parade of well-paid celebrity endorsements could save her from total rebuke at the polls.
Sylvester Stallone called Trump a second George Washington but another reference point might be Andrew Jackson. The overwhelming victory for Trump is on a scale not seen since 1828 when, four years after the presidency was stolen from Jackson, Old Hickory came back in a wild landslide and cleaned up Washington. Trump arrives in Washington with a mandate for the same, with 81% of the public demanding that the government shrink in size and power.
It has all happened so quickly. We are barely ten days into the realization of what just transpired and the entire lay of the land seems different, like a tectonic shift in politics, culture, mood, and possibilities. We are even seeing blunt and open talk about the horrendous Covid response that so utterly demoralized the country and the world, after years of silence on the topic. We have promised hearings coming, and court cases galore now on fast track.
The sudden coming together of three great sectors of anti-establishment fury – MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE – in the last two months of the election of 2024 is one for the ages. It provides the beginnings of an answer to the great question on our minds for decades: how precisely does an authentic revolution take root in an industrialized Western democracy? Are elections capable of delivering real results?
For now, the answer seems to be yes. That should thrill any responsible observer of social, cultural, economic, and political affairs. It means that the early architects of the American system were not wrong. The intolerable costs of political upheaval of ages past can be mitigated by planting power firmly in the hands of the people through the plebiscite. This was their view and their gamble. All the evidence of our time points to the wisdom of the idea.
In the darkest days of the last year of the first Trump presidency, the bureaucracy was riding high, in full revenge mode against an elected government it hated and sought to overthrow. The agencies were passing strange edicts that felt like laws but no one knew for sure. You are essential, you are not. You must stay home, unless you have an emergency. Your elective surgery needs to wait. The kids cannot go to school. That European vacation cannot happen. You can eat at a restaurant but only if you are six feet away from other patrons and you must put this China-made cloth on your mouth if you get up to go to the restroom.
The flurry of edicts was mind-boggling. It felt like martial law, because it was some form of exactly that. The best research points to the astonishing reality that this was never really a public-health response but a scheme by security and intelligence sectors to enact some kind of global color revolution, which is why the policies were so similar the world over. It was indeed an awesome display of power, one that invaded all our communities, homes, and families.
No one knows this better than Team Trump, even if there has been near silence on the topic for all these years. They have had time to put the pieces together and figure out what happened and why. And they carefully, and in seclusion worthy of a Cistercian monastery, plotted their return, leaving nothing to chance.
Meanwhile, the past two years have had the Covid insurrectionists quietly stepping away from the spotlight, while leaving as much of their newfound power in place: the censorship, the technology, the mandates, and the propaganda that all of this shock-and-awe was nothing more than “common sense health measures.” It was never tenable, and vast numbers have come to realize that something went very wrong, like a kind of evil settled over the world and burrowed itself within all institutions.
In an instant, the whole scheme seems to be crumbling. The incredible result is that the administration under which this calamity occurred is now coming back, which is probably the strangest irony of our times.
And yet, even though no one has yet been open about precisely what happened in the White House in March 2020 to cause Trump to greenlight the lockdowns, there is a widespread belief that it was never really his choice. It was some kind of coup – egged on even by his closest advisors and the VP – that he either could not stop or lacked the personnel to marshal effective resistance. Regardless, he has been forgiven because, implausibly, the next administration not only owned the worst of it but added even more on top of that, including the wicked combination of mask mandates, forced injections, and continued school closures.
The result has been a continuing economic crisis, one far worse than agencies admit, in addition to a health, education, and cultural crisis. Meanwhile, all those involved in causing this from behind the scenes have been rewarded with professorships, loving interviews in the mainstream media, and lavish security provisions to protect them from legions of what they suppose are angry workers and peasants.
Therefore, among many of the ruling class, the results of this election are certainly not welcome, and nor are many of the early appointments. They represent the coming together of MAGA, MAHA, and DOGE, the fulfillment of decades of cultivation of disparate groups of dissidents who had not previously realized their common interests and common enemies. It was the Covid era and the imposition of top-down rule that brought them all together.
It was like three groups wandering around in a giant maze who suddenly confront each other and then, realizing that they all shared the same predicament, figure the way out together. These new alliances have not only shattered right and left, as traditionally understood, but reshaped the structural basis of political activism for the duration. It turns out that medical freedom, food freedom, free speech, political freedom, and peace all go together. Who knew?
The incumbent world of academia, think tanks, and most media simply finds itself unprepared to deal with the new realities. They had hoped everyone would forget about the last five years as if it was just a thing that happened but is now over; everyone just needs to grapple with the great reset and learn to love our new lives of surveillance, propaganda, censorship, perpetual war, poison food, unaffordable everything, and endless injections of potions for our own health and well-being.
Well, times have changed. How much? Early signs point to a dramatic unfolding of revolutionary change over the coming months. Is believing this the triumph of hope over experience? Absolutely. Then again, no one believed five years ago that most people in the world would be locked in their homes and communities, stuck drinking and streaming movies until biotech could come up with a cure for a respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. Then it did not work and made people more sick than ever.
That was nuts but it happened.
If that could happen, with predictable results, the response could be equally implausible and more much thrilling. What’s man made can be unmade by man, and something new built in its place.
Author
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