OPINION
Douglas Andrews
Douglas Andrews began part-time editing for The Patriot Post more than two decades ago, working primarily with Mark Alexander. He joined our editorial team full-time as a writer and analyst in 2020. As a former Marine with 30 years of research and writing experience, he long ago proved himself as an outstanding news and policy analyst.
Reprinted from PA Pundits – International
Faced with a disastrous boycott of its bestselling light beer, Anheuser-Busch’s CEO went with a half-measure instead of the real thing.
All that’s missing is an apology: a simple, straightforward, unequivocal apology. At this stage, though, one wonders whether even that will be enough.
In case you’ve just emerged from cryonic suspension, Anheuser-Busch is in a tough spot, and it’s entirely of its own doing.
Having enlisted a creepy, cultish, fingernails-on-the-chalkboard trans activist to be a company spokesman, A-B’s decision was met with unprecedented blowback. How much has the company lost — $7 billion in value? And now the company is crawling back, trying to stop the arterial bleeding with adhesive bandages.
What’s needed is a tourniquet.
As the New York Post reports, the company’s CEO issued a mealy-mouthed non-apology:
Anheuser-Busch’s top executive on Friday offered an apology flatter than a day-old Bud Light as the beer giant reels from the backlash over its sponsorship deal with controversial transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. “We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” Anheuser-Busch InBev CEO Brendan Whitworth said in a press release titled “Our Responsibility To America.” “We are in the business of bringing people together over a beer.”
Begging Whitworth’s pardon, but Anheuser-Busch’s responsibility to America and his beer-drinking, salary-paying customers is to make beer and shut the hell up about politics.
“I simply don’t understand why they hired the person who was doing the marketing,” said Oxygen Financial CEO Ted Jenkin to Fox News. “I mean, if your target customer is Kid Rock, and then all of a sudden you decide to go to RuPaul, that just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
Nor does it make sense that the NRCC, the National Republican Congressional Committee, would quietly delete a fundraising page that took aim at one of its largest donors, Anheuser-Busch. Nor that Donald Trump Jr. is urging Bud Light drinkers to end their boycott in the wake of this fiasco.
Bud Light also slunk back onto social media Friday after having gone cold mic for more than a week. “TGIF,” the company tweeted.
Nope, not exactly. “No gender fluid for me, thanks,” came one reply. “I don’t drink transbeer,” came another. And on and on and on.
Will a partial apology from the CEO and a new pro-America ad the company released Friday be enough to return Anheuser-Busch to the good graces of its erstwhile drinkership?
We don’t know. And we can’t know. But Anheuser-Busch customers who care about the future of this country should swear off those products until that unequivocal apology is delivered.
Many on the Right are reluctant to say it, but we’re at war with the Left, and we’ve been ceding territory all along. Now, finally, with a resounding victory at hand, the foot soldiers in this war, the drinkers of Bud Light, can either see it through or let the enemy slip away, there to regroup and fight another day.
Win, lose, or draw, the woke Left isn’t going away. It must be sent away by one powerful American business after another after another. And the only way to put that measure of steel in the spine of corporate America is for consumers to start flexing their muscles and to start speaking the language of sales.
The only way corporate America will learn a lasting lesson is for Anheuser-Busch to apologize unconditionally for having stuck its thumb in the eye of its customers, or, barring that, for those customers to go elsewhere and never come back.
Only when this episode becomes a case study in business strategy books will those in the C-suites of the nation’s largest corporations take notice. Only then will they realize that selling their souls to the woke devil can come at a terrible cost. Only then will they ask themselves: Is it worth it?
This is a signature moment. To let it slip away without concession would be disastrous. The “why” of corporate wokeism isn’t hard to figure out. It’s only the will to fight tooth-and-nail, hammer-and-tong that’s missing.
To borrow from Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg: “No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.”