A new, high-risk, two-stage business strategy has fully emerged.
The first stage consists of a series of production and marketing tactics intended to assault the values of a large contingent of brand customers in a most brazen manner. The second stage consists of a series of activities, conducted by a significant portion of the customer base to retaliate to this assault, boycotting the brand. This results in a serious loss of revenue and market capitalisation. The stage two activities may be purely organic, but are likely hybrid, with some level of centralised or distributed coordination.
Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewing company was the first company to successfully execute this new business strategy.
It can be argued that others have attempted this in various ways over the past few decades (most recently, Disney), but none had ever truly tasted success – until now. The beer: Bud Light has scaled the summit to receive the ultimate accolade – naming rights.
On April 1 2023, Anheuser-Busch produced a limited run of Bud Light beer cans with the face of Dylan Mulvaney, a Transgender biological male and a Tik Tok influencer.
This campaign was intended to celebrate Dylan’s first anniversary of transitioning to “womanhood.”
Bud Light customers were enraged by the company’s “in-your-face” cultural / political statement and punished the brand severely by refusing to buy it. Coming up to the big US Memorial Day holiday, Anheuser-Busch struggled to give the beer away. They had lost $26 B in market Cap since April 1 2023 (data as of May 31 2023). That’s 20 % in two months.
Interestingly, several other brands have decided to follow in the footsteps of Anheuser-Busch. Ford re-released a 2022 video of their rainbow-coloured Raptor pick-up truck , North Face used a Drag Queen to launch a range of outdoor gear and Target offered a range of Transgender merchandise for children, all to celebrate Pride Month. Customer backlash is expected against all of these.
However, Target in particular was severely punished, with the company’s stage one tactics having been described by legacy media as “Bud Lighting” while the stage two outcome is already being referred to in the past tense of having been “Bud Lighted.”
Target’s CEO, Brian Cornell is attempting to hedge his bets by adjusting or moving displays while vowing continued LGBTQ support. There is likely more financial pain to come for Target from both the left and right, as occurred for A-B.
This Daily Mail UK article notes that Target has lost $9B or 10% in Market Capitalisation in one week. Fox Business notes that their share price is the lowest it’s been since 2020, have now lost $12.4 B since the Trans display story broke. Data as of May 30 2023.
Comedian JP Sears ads some humour to this disturbing turn of events regarding the Bud Lighting of Target in this video when he says (of Target’s Executives):
“Hold my Beer. I’ll see your Trans and raise you a Satan.” (3:00 min mark)
The Washington Post ran an article about Erik Carnell, the Transgender designer whose company’s Abprullen merchandise was included as part of the Target Pride Month collection. It stated that Target cancelled Erik after conservative social media backlash regarding Satanic merchandise available in the Abprullen web store. Here are some of the items available there.
It must be noted that the merch with statements: “Satan Respects Pronouns,” “Homophobe Headrest” and “We Bash Back” were not available for sale as part of Target’s Pride collection. According to this Gateway Pundit article, “Target is selling Abprallen ‘We Belong Everywhere’ messenger bags, ‘Too Queer For Here’ messenger bags, and ‘Cure Transphobia, Not Trans People’ sweatshirts. Target credits the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) for helping place these items on their shelves.”
Several conservative pundits have speculated as to why this is happening at so many businesses at the same time.
Oli London, former Transgender male helped to answer that question with a twitter post.
GLSEN encourages teachers to hide the gender identities of trans and non-binary students from their parents.
A Trans activist Brand Manager was involved In both recent Bud Light and Target campaigns. However, Dr. James Lindsay does not believe this is the prime reason for this recent Trans marketing blitz. I consider James Lindsay to be the preeminent expert on this topic and I am currently deferring to his opinion on all things woke.
I’d strongly suggest you listen to the nine minutes (21:50 – 30:35) of this conversation between James Lindsay and Charlie Kirk (founder of Turning Point USA).
Although it is obvious that any Bud Lighting campaign is the brain-child of a woke Marketing Exec, it may also be at the behest of a corrupted or extorted Board Member.
Lindsay believes that all of these companies are Bud Lighting their customer base on purpose. These are not co-incidents, but deliberate attempts to indoctrinate the population (including children) into a radical woke agenda. Lindsay argues that the true origin of Bud Lighting is the market-manipulating ESG score. The “S” score is determined using contributing indices such as the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI) and the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Index.
This WEF article describes the evolution of these indices (CEI, CSR) from being self-regulated to being integrated within the ESG framework.
“S” is now being wielded like a sword against corporations, threatening their access to Capital financing, favourable insurance, markets etc.
With so many global elites and acolytes dutifully engaging at their annual Davos confabs and soirees, it’s no wonder that the Bud Lighting strategy has now been deployed in earnest.
Lindsay believes that what we are seeing in company boards is akin to a mob shakedown.
But instead of extorting the company for money, they are forcing Board members to trade their souls instead. Woke is a religious cult, after all and ESG is its most sinister form of evangelism.
JL: “Their ESG Score is so important to them that they will alienate their customer base for it.” (24:30)
CK: “So, they’ve created this extra-constitutional corporate ‘sword of Damocles’ that is constantly hanging over your company, and then you have these beta-male, soon to be retired, 59-year-old white men that are running the company that want the second house in Barbados and they’re like ‘I don’t want the problem.’” (26:20)
JL: “They get bonuses if they do it and lose bonuses if they don’t.” (26:48)
Lindsay agrees that conservatives need to continue to punish woke companies severely.
However, he also advocates for off-ramps for repentant board members and senior executives. He advises customers to reward corporations who are truly repentant and are willing to throw the ESG score under the bus. Lindsay argues that with enough customer / financial pressure, some executives will cave and become whistle-blowers, unveiling the cravenness of ESG manipulation.
“Senator Cruz, for example has already said that he wants to haul the Execs of Anheuser-Busch in front of the Senate and have them explain why in the world are you doing this? Why is this happening? “(27:12)
“The cartel has to get exposed. … You have to give the people inside of it an off-ramp. You talk, we give you a deal.“ (27:22)
This is just a glimpse of the long-running war between the globalist elites and everyday consumers. Now that their agenda has become overt and toxic to values, will the average consumer have the persistence and energy to continue boycotting? Will the globalists consider totally Bud lighted businesses as simply collateral damage; causalities of war? Will they continue to roll out other brands to sustain their woke indoctrination process? Time will tell.
I don’t know how this particular battle will end, but we must continue to pray and to act – for the sake of our children and the future of our nation. With God’s help, legislators and judges will indict and try these cases using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act or similar. This will take down the globalist elites who are hell-bent on re-shaping the corporate landscape into their own soul-less, woke image and ejecting the values and ethos of the Judaeo-Christian West.
I’ll write more about ESG and how some are standing against this mechanism in future articles.
