We’re approaching the two-month mark of the Bud Light boycott, which of course began when transgender social media, utilizing his–yes his–goofy 1950s-sitcom ditz schtick to recklessly promote Bud Light beer.
Immediately, I was confident that this boycott had staying power, despite the increasingly irrelevant mainstream media telling its dwindling audience it did not. As Da Tech Guy himself explained, Anheuser-Busch’s problem is that Bud Light is too easy to boycott. Coors Light, Miller Lite, which taste similar–assuming that light beers have a distinguishable taste–are usually available in the same liquor stores, supermarkets, bars, and restaurants. And they are all priced about the same.
American megabrewers are selling image and personality. Beer? Not so much. And in a few days, Bud Light, after partnering with Mulvaney, torched its macho brand-building work of four decades in just a few days. “Fratty” is the word used by the now-on-leave marketing head for Bud Light, Alissa Heinerscheid. Anheuser-Busch’s non-apology from its CEO only fanned the flames.
Bud Light’s slogan is, “Easy to drink, easy to enjoy.” And it’s easy to boycott.
Boss (John Cleese character): Now, let’s have a look at the sales chart (indicates a plummeting sales graph). When you took over this account, Frog (Eric Idle character), Conquistador was a brand leader. Here you introduced your first campaign, “Conquistador Coffee brings a new meaning to the word vomit.” Here you made your special introductory offer of a free dead dog with every jar, and this followed your second campaign “the tingling fresh coffee which brings you exciting new cholera, mange, dropsy, the clap, hard pad, and athlete’s head. From the House of Conquistador.”
Yeah, I know, Bud Light’s Mulvaney campaign hasn’t been, so far, as awful for Anheuser-Busch as it was for the fictional Monty Python coffee brand. But sales of the beer continue to slide. Last week, by way of a $15 mail-in rebate, A-B started giving the beer away, because, unlike wine and hard liquor, beer has a brief shelf-life.
So, yes, boycotts can be effective.
But we were told by the mainstream media that boycotts don’t work.
Around that same time, Patrick Coffee (no relation to Python’s Conquistador Coffee) of the Wall Street Journal, while citing other experts, opined that about the Bud Light boycott that “such campaigns often have failed to deliver a meaningful blow.” (Paid subscription might be required to access the link.)
So where are the finger-waving fact-checkers? Why haven’t these articles been revised?
Meanwhile, Target is facing a boycott over its prominent promotions of “tuck-friendly,” that is, male-genitilia-hiding, swimsuits, as well as arguably promoting the trans agenda to children. It has lost $10 billion in market valuation since a boycott began against Target.
A societal seismic shift, a black swan moment, occurred for the American elite, our “betters,” on April 1. Yep, April Fools Day, but the joke was on the elites. It was April 1 when on his–yes his–Instragram page, the transgendered influencer, Dylan Muvlaney, announced his sponsorhip deal with Bud Light, a beer brewed by Anheuser-Busch that is, or was, favored mainly by macho types.
The backlash was immediate. A boycott of the brew–with conservative celebrities leading the charge began–and Anheuser-Busch has since lost $5 billion in value.
Receiving the blame for this debacle is Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, who went on a leave of absence last week.
It’s likely that Bud Light triggered a tripwire, likely, to use Bill Maher’s words, Americans are angry because “they’ve had an agenda shoved down their throat.” Like the dimwitted sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, many elites, particularly in the media, believe transgendered women are women. Most Americans disagree.
And most Americans, unless they are woke, aren’t dopes. They know that males have an inherent physical advantage over women in most sports. If they decide to think about it–they know that the annual physical for Rachel Levine, the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health who is transgendered, consists of a prostate exam. They are aware that after “gender-affirming” surgeries, some trans people want to switch back.
And these same folks are fed up with being called a bigot or some sort of “phobe” when they raise their objections to the transgender ideological movement.
And they are sick of transgendered women appearing in clothing ads wearing garments designed for females.
As for the elites, many of whom like Heinerscheid have an Ivy League education, they’re the types of folks who don’t interact with smelly people who drink Bud Light. These smug know-it-alls are stupefied that the Mulvaney sponsorship has damaged the brand.
The elites live in their bubble, which makes them quite vulnerable to a black swan moment.
What has happened to Bud Light takes me back to 1979 and the Disco Demolition stunt that was part of a Chicago White Sox Teen Night promotion during a twi-night doubleheader with the Detroit Tigers. Oh, “Disco Sucks” wasn’t just a Chicago thing, I saw my first “Disco Sucks” T-shirt a year earlier on sale on the boardwalk at Ocean City, Maryland.
I was a 17-year-old when Steve Dahl, a morning disc jockey for rock station WLUP-FM, began humorously “blowing up” disco records during his show. He’d play some crappy–aren’t they all?–disco tune for thirty-seconds or so, and then blow them up, not for real, but with sound effects. Dahl also took his act on the road, including a mock “takeover” of a suburban disco club, and the same thing happened at each event. Crowd control was an issue–too many people in too small of a space.
Surely, Mike Veeck, the son of White Sox owner Bill Veeck, thought that Comiskey Park, the home of the White Sox, could comfortably host Dahl and his minions, known as the Insane Coho Lips. The ballpark had a capacity of 45,000.
But the doubleheader sold out and there were an estimated thirty thousand others outside Comiskey Park clamoring to get in. Teens who deposited disco records at the turnstiles were admitted for 98 cents, which was dirt cheap even in 1979.
Dahl, in faux military garb, as you’ll see in the YouTube clip, exploded the records in spectacular fashion as the Insane Coho Lips chanted “disco sucks” following the conclusion of the first game of the doubleheader, a White Sox defeat. Immediately afterwards, about 7,000 of the rockers stormed the field and a riot broke out, one that included destroying the batting cage and igniting the crate from where the records were exploded. It was rock and roll’s first saturnalia. Police in riot gear promptly ended Disco Demolition 90 minutes later, and because the field was deemed by the umpires as unsafe for play, the second game was forfeited to the Tigers.
I watched the game at home on television with my parents and my brother. I hated disco and loved rock and roll, so I looked on with mixed emotions because I was also a Sox fan. I didn’t object when my brother pointed at me and said, “Hey, mom and dad, there are thousands of them on the TV, who are just like your son, tearing up the field.” Hey, don’t forget, I was 17 at the time.
Retro historians, often people who were born years after Disco Demolition, have tried to turn that night into a racist or anti-gay thing. Wrong. The people I knew who listened to disco were shallow and vapid–just like the music. It was love at first sight for them.
Here’s the disco black swan moment.
The Disco Demolition coverage from the media, particularly the national media, was one of shock. Even more so than now, the elite media was based in New York, and they were the people who hung out at disco’s hallowed temple, Studio 54 in Manhattan. They lived in their ’70s bubble, one that didn’t include people who loved rock music and wore “Disco Sucks” T-shirts.
Up until Steve Dahl blew up those records, disco was seemingly everywhere–on TV shows, in commercials, and in the movies, most notably, with John Travolta dancing in Saturday Night Fever. Rock acts, including the Rolling Stones, the Kinks (sadly, one of my favorite bands), and Rod Stewart, recorded songs with a disco beat.
But post-Disco Demolition Night, the media, as well as the advertising and marketing “experts,” realized, after the totality of the riot, that more people hated disco than liked it. Disco didn’t die that night–even a freight train experiencing engine problems can’t be stopped on a dime, but disco went into a fatal tailspin. A month after Disco Demolition, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, a disco album, was released. It enjoyed brisk sales and a lot of airplay. But Jacko’s next album, Thriller, was more of an R&B album, it even included the King of Pop’s only hard rock song, “Beat It,” which was graced by guitar work from Eddie Van Halen.
Rockers had stopped cutting disco tracks well before Thriller was released.
A couple of weeks before Off the Wall arrived in record stores, principal photography began on a movie starring the Village People, Discoland . . . Where the Music Never Stops. Sensing trouble because of the anti-disco backlash, the film’s producer, Allan Carr, changed the name of his project to Can’t Stop the Music. It’s remembered as a legendary Hollywood box office bomb.
As the saying goes, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” One of supporting actors in Can’t Stop the Music was Bruce Jenner, who now goes by Caitlyn.
By the early 1980s, the expression “As dead as disco” was common.
Transgenderism isn’t going away. Over my life I’ve known a few men who have gone thru procedures that allows them, sort of, to live as women. Fine, it’s their life. If, as an adult, men and women want to transform themselves into something different, well, no one should stop them. The same goes for people who want to obliterate their faces with tattoos.
On the other hand, don’t shove your choice down our throats and demand us to celebrate you.
In the advertising and marketing world, using transgendered spokespeople to promote mainstream products just might be as dead as disco.
No one wants to be the next Alissa Heinerscheid. Her job was to sell Bud Light, not to drive people to avoid it.
There was never a Can’t Stop the Music sequel.
Marketing people must not be good at math. One percent of the population identifies as transgendered. Which means of course means 99 percent doesn’t.
Vito Perrone was looking forward to returning to Easthamption.
He was a school principal there, he had coached football there. He was even willing to take a $14,000 a year pay cut to return to the city as school superintendent and was offered the job.
Apparently when he sent them an email concerning the position he referred to the women he addressed his letter to as “Ladies” and they had a conniption fit claiming a “microagression”.
Kwiecinski responded to Perrone saying that his use of “ladies” was “hostile and derogatory,” and that “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem.” She also added that the term “ladies” was a “microaggression.”
And just like that the job offer was gone and he remains where he is.
Talk about catching a break! Could you imagine being stuck in that school system for three years with clowns like that as your bosses?
My congratulations to Mr. Perrone and my deepest sympathies to the parents of the Easthamption school district who voted for this school committee and whose kids are apparently getting the education they voted for.
This week Air, an Amazon Studios film, opens in movie theaters nationwide. It tells the story of Nike’s development of the Air Jordan line of sneakers in the mid-1980s. The shoes were the expensive footwear of Chicago Bulls great Michael Jordan, who still appears in Nike ads.
What you won’t see in Air is the failed boycott of Operation PUSH in 1990 of Nike. Chicago-based PUSH, now Rainbow/PUSH, was, depending on who you talk to, either a major civil rights power of the late 20th century, or a shakedown operation. I belong to the latter camp.
PUSH was founded in the early 1970s by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, but he departed PUSH to be serve as a shadow senator for Washington DC–what does that entail?– and to lead a new group, the National Rainbow Coalition, which merged with PUSH in 1996. Leading PUSH during the Jackson-less interregnum was the Reverend Tyrone Crider.
Jackson’s gameplan for PUSH followed this pattern: He’d smear a corporation as racist, call for a boycott, then demand that these corporations hire more Blacks and other minorities–as well as more minority contractors–and then declare victory. But often those hired were cronies and relatives of Jackson. Coca-Cola, some CBS television affiliates, and Anheuser-Busch were prior targets of PUSH.
Shortly after taking the helm of PUSH in 1990, Crider picked a new villain, Nike. Unlike past targets/victims whose founders were either retired or long dead, Nike’s founders, scrappy entrepreneurs Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman, were still with the corporation in 1990. Knight was the chairman of Nike at the time, he was only a quarter-century removed from when he was selling running shoes at track meets from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant.
When PUSH declared its boycott of Nike–sorry, I can’t resist–the sneaker giant pushed back. Nike quickly announced it would appoint a Black board member and a Black vice president, and hire some Black department heads, but a Nike spokesperson said that those moves were already planned prior to the PUSH attack.
Next came a nothing-but-net three-pointer by Nike from midcourt. In an open letter, Nike turned the tables on PUSH, requesting that it turn over “the membership of PUSH by geographical location, age, sex and race.” It gets better. Nike asked in that same letter, “Has PUSH been the subject of review or investigation by any federal or state agency? If so, state the name of the agency involved, the nature of the investigation and the findings or conclusions of the investigation.” Guess what? PUSH had been the target of a federal probe.
PUSH demanded proprietary financial information from Nike, at the same time Reebok, a top competitor of Nike, purchased a full-page ad in the Operation PUSH magazine. That same open letter, according to a Chicago Tribune article, also called on “PUSH to supply details in 21 categories relating to how the organization made its decision to single out the athletic-wear industry.”
None of the celebrity endorsers of the time for Nike, whose ranks included Spike Lee, Bo Jackson, and His Airness, Michael Jordan, participated in the boycott. Georgetown men’s basketball coach John Thompson, a consultant for Nike who later served as a board member, also remained loyal.
And what about Nike sales? “The boycott has had little apparent effect on Nike,” the Washington Post reported at the time, “whose earnings soared 58 percent last September, October and November over the corresponding period in 1989.”
Nothing but net.
Of course, now Nike is completely woke, Knight is retired and Bowerman died in 1999. Colin Kaepernick, a Nike endorser beginning in 2011, was featured in a series of Nike ads after he was handed his last NFL snap. In his last season as a professional football player, Kaepernick took a knee when the National Anthem was played before games. Kaepernick regularly speaks out in favor of various far-left causes, such as abolishing prisons and police departments.
For a time, Nike was gutsy. And the lesson for corporations today is clear. You can fight back against leftist threats and win.
Just do it.
When you stand up to bullies, they usually back down.
John Ruberry, who wore his first pair of Nike Waffle Trainer running shoes in 1977, regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
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