Dem
51
GOP
49
One more item on trans issues, which also speaks to the "venal opportunism" angle. Anti-trans stuff makes great ammunition for the culture wars, when the right opportunity presents itself. And while we are often reluctant to give oxygen to these things, there's been a culture wars battle going on for the last couple of weeks that is a near-obsession for some folks on the right. The enemy, in this case? Anheuser-Busch.
What, exactly, is the problem? Well, companies these days have decided (with good reason) that one of the most effective forms of advertising is to pay social media influencers to use and endorse your products. And so, Anheuser-Busch paid trans social media star Dylan Mulvaney to drink some Bud Light. Uh, oh.
This has led to an unbelievable amount of gnashing of teeth and rending of garments by many right-wingers. Fox, who never met a culture wars battle it couldn't turn into 20 "news" stories, 10 op-eds, and at least 12 hours of primetime programming, has reported gleefully about all the people who say they will never drink Bud Light again. Will these people still drink Budweiser? Or how about Corona, or Stella Artois, or Rolling Rock, or Michelob, which are also produced in the U.S. by Anheuser? We don't know (but keep reading).
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), who also never misses a culture wars battle, has also sworn off Bud Light. He said he doesn't want to enable "woke culture," although his decision likely has little in the way of practical consequences, since nobody would want to drink a beer with him anyhow. Musician and friend-of-Trump Kid Rock was so outraged that he posted this video to social media:
The Kid Rock stuff is only the first 33 seconds of that, though if you keep watching after that, it also has the Mulvaney footage that set all this off. Kid Rock, for his part, is one of the biggest phonies in the country. He pretends to have descended from hardscrabble, blue-collar, redneck roots when in fact he grew up in a mansion as the son of a successful car dealership owner. And the musician lives up to his reputation for phoniness in that clip; it's framed to make it look like he blasted the kegs of beer all by himself, but if you watch you can see the muzzle flash from a second gunman, helping to cover for Kid Rock's poor aim and terrible shooting posture. No word on whether or not the second gunman was shooting from a grassy knoll, however. (Note: Two postings in a row with a conspiracy theory! New staff writer Q is apparently having an influence.)
Anyhow, just as some companies have decided there is financial wisdom in working with trans people, there are others that have decided there's money in catering to anti-trans people. This next item was first brought to our attention by reader C.T.P. in Lancaster, PA, who opined that it's an excellent illustration of Poe's Law (it's hard to tell extremism from a parody of extremism), and who thinks (as we do) that it feels like a Saturday Night Live commercial:
Even with C.T.P.'s insistence that it's real in hand, we were skeptical. But we dug and dug, and it really is. Conservative Dad's ULTRA RIGHT 100% Woke-Free American Beer has a website and everything, and they are accepting orders and money. It's obviously possible to put up fake websites for fake products, but if you start taking people's money, you're breaking the law. So parody sites like that conveniently find a way to avoid taking orders. The fact that this one is not doing that was the final piece of evidence that this guy is serious. We'll bet the beer he produces is just top notch.
And it's not just pi**-poor (and, probably, pi**-flavored) beer. A new group, Consumers' Research, has just jumped into to the culture wars to help anti-trans and other anti-woke consumers figure out where to shop. People can sign up to get text alerts to warn them about dangerous woke companies. In addition to Anheuser-Busch, their website warns about Nike, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, BlackRock, Ticketmaster, Major League Baseball, Levis, American Express, State Farm Insurance, Uber and Jack Daniels, but of course there are many more.
If you were shopping for, say, peanut butter, and there were three brands on the shelf, it would be nice if you could type all three brands into their app and get their wokeness rating back. But that's not how it works. Instead, when you sign up, you give them your cell phone number and whenever their hardworking researchers discover another woke company—for example, because they saw a Black person or a trans person in a company ad—they send you a text message alerting you to the dangerous company.
Interestingly enough, the executive director, Will Hild, is close to Leonard Leo, the former vice president of the Federalist Society. The service is free, so what's the business model? Do they sell the e-mail addresses and phone numbers they collect? We don't know. We do know that they have rich donors who ponied up enough money to support an $8 million ad budget, used to advertise the service. Do you think it's all about grifting the rubes, as usual? Sounds like a business model to us.
We do not doubt, mind you, that the people who are signing up for anti-woke e-mail lists or who are voting for anti-trans politicians, are being motivated by some real feeling. That feeling may or may not be admirable, and it may or may not be misplaced, but it's definitely real. But these folks who are harnessing those feelings, and who are using them to attract votes or sell crappy beer or persuade you to hand over your e-mail address and phone number so they can do who knows what? Again, venal opportunism. (Z & V)