By Colby Malsbury

It was the Schlock Heard Round the World.

Professing themselves as competent to read the prevailing zeitgeist as an Egyptologist is to decipher hieroglyphics, the linguists at Anheuser-Busch decided it was time to pep up their most recognizable yet faltering legacy brand, Bud Light. And what better way to display relevancy than to dig through the sewer of YouTube and come across an especially egregious example of clickbait narcissism to use in an upcoming ad campaign? Behold – if you can stomach it – one Dylan Mulvaney, a repellent flaming cross-dresser who would have had to eke out a living haunting public washrooms at 4 in the morning in a better time, but who now does the whole transgenderism bit on a lark and rakes in filthy lucre by the score as a ‘social media influencer’. What better spokesthing could one hope to find for a low-grade but traditionally blue collar brew? Little wonder that the Saints have trouble getting up in the morning these days.

To the shock and awe of anyone who does not possess the inherent marketing sense of a newborn, this enlightened campaign lasted about a week before crashing and burning. Turns out welders watching the start of the baseball season on their days off don’t have their consciences raised by watching some refugee from the Weimar Republic covering its latex breasts with suds in the bubble bath and awkwardly offering up a Bud Light sixpack on its grandmother’s silver tray during the commercial break.

You don’t have to be a main character in Mad Men to discern the fruits of these labors. Towards the end of April, sales of Bud Light have plunged 17% in a single month – a month when warmer weather beckons and the thirst for the barley rapidly increases, incidentally. Barflies everywhere are refusing to order the stuff at their local watering hole, and are roundly mocking those who do. Bud Light marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid – and isn’t that a jolly good Celtic name? – added her part to the Cringe Festival by self-releasing a video defending her bold handicraft, in which she breathlessly insists BL had to get away from its ‘fratty’ image and embiggen its zeitgeistiness, or words to that effect. Her efforts were rewarded with the top brass bestowing upon her – and her boss – the most indefinite-termed “leave of absence” in all of business history. And in an age where narratives like this burn bright for a couple of weeks and then fade into the second or third tier, this puppy continues to have legs, with developing BL meltdown stories being released almost hourly, it seems like.

Guess the operation was a success except for the patient dying.

So…what’s going on here? Is this unprecedented incompetence?

Mere rote quadrupling/quintupling/sextupling down on wokeism?

Or is there a craftier game afoot?

Catering Bud Light to any facet of the LGBTQZXUPOA8230:?$ community, let alone its rabidly neurotic transgender component, is about as incongruous as putting RuPaul in a pair of Wranglers and expecting that to sell tickets to a George Strait concert. This demographic is so special that it insists that only the finest Chateau Mouton Rothschild vintages are suitable enough for its discerning palate. Maybe once in a while, when they let their ugly dresses down, they’ll partake in some diabetes-inducing vodka coolers, but that’s it. Bottom line: they’re not drinking cheap beer, period, no matter what kind of androgynous face is simping for it.

Problem is: no one else wants to drink Bud Light either, and they haven’t wanted to for years now.

One thing in Heinerscheid’s apologia video strikes me as genuine – and it sure ain’t the kiddie drawing of a rainbow strategically placed on the wall behind her to make it appear as though it’s gushing out of – or into – her ear. It’s when she says ‘this brand is in decline, and has been for a really long time’. That’s exactly right. Even those whose critical faculties towards alcohol don’t extend much further than it must be wet long realized what prostate-enlarging skunkwater this brew is. And with local craft outfits now being able to compete well with Legacy Brewing on price as well as superseding them in quality, Anheuser-Busch might understandably be undergoing a major rethinking of the best means to maximize cash flow. After all, Bill Gates doesn’t own all the farmland just yet, and no one company has a monopoly on malt-grade barley.

So, yep, they’re in the market for a little outside capital.

But from whence?

A popular theory making the rounds is that Anheuser-Busch is already in thrall to the non-tender mercies of cancel capitalists extraordinaire Blackrock, and are operating under a secret overweening ‘credit score’ in order to remain solvent. Now, there is no denying that Larry Fink’s Larcenous Leftist LARP of an investment firm exhibits onerous influence over teetering legacy corporations anymore. But in this case, I’m not necessarily buying the connection.

It’s one thing to corner the stock on mass-media outfits like Disney or Netflix – which, after all, are in the business of producing content designed to meld a culture and be widely available for many, many decades. That’s a synthetic pretend-steak to sink your teeth into. Such products suit Blackrock’s business model to a T. It’s quite another, however, to tank a brand based upon one infamous ad campaign – a tool which, after all, is a very short-lived asset by definition. And why were the rest of Anheuser-Busch’s products not held to the same inexorable demands? Michelob, for example, didn’t launch a similar campaign. Individual beer cans are not going to be held onto by years to come by a mass demographic like Disney paraphernalia is – even if Mulvaney itself is featured prominently on the can – so this is definitely Busch-league (sorry) stuff well beneath Blackrock’s “talents”. Even communist investors need a return.

Not to mention that it ill behooves a holding company to reward its top tier management by handing them all pink cards. There’s some great morale-boosting. So yes, scratch this theory.

A far more promising money trail to follow would be from our old friends: The Federal Government™.

Hey, Anheuser-Busch isn’t living in Narnia. They know that they’re a loser brand, and that their core customer base of methheads and those who appear in People of Wal-Mart compilations pretty soon are going to have a whole lot less money to spend on their joyless juice. Food stamps will never cover the purchase price.

So….why not get in Washingtonian good graces early in order to qualify for a future billion-dollar bailout? Because after all, the good ol’ days of 2008 are here again, and Biden’s handing out the pogey like he’s trying to collapse the petrobuck! Which he is, but that’s another article. The precedent’s been set with Silicon Valley Bank already this year. Best to reserve your spot in the coming corporate welfare line good and early. Ukraine’s already got a tent set up in the office itself.

The fact that Mulvaney had a track record with the White House prior to its hiring by BL – having appeared with Cmon Man to discuss trans acceptance, and climate change, and how good the old sitcom Bosom Buddies was, and how Hunter never owned a laptop in his life, among other scintillating topics, adds credence to this scenario. What organization wouldn’t want to acquire the services of a DC lobbyist with high-ranking connections? Best insurance policy on the market.

And this, friends and neighbors, is why ‘Go Woke Go Broke’ is ultimately a false presupposition.

You can well imagine my personal opinion regarding the Hegelian cliche ‘There is no stopping an idea whose time has come’, but there is no denying that it has been the mantra of our overlords for a very long time now. And if they have decreed a time has come for something, they will tap into their fathomless reservoirs to obtain it.

So no, Bud Light is not ‘going bankrupt’ anytime soon. Fifteen years after nearly hemorrhaging themselves to death, General Motors and Chrysler are still gallivanting merrily along thanks to the macro-economic equivalent of food stamps. Ditto Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Lehman Brothers was the sacrificial goat in that instance, and Bud Light is betting heavily they won’t be placed in the same position in the current economic meltdown.

Lending credence to this state of duplicity is the date on which the Mulvaney campaign was ingloriously rolled out – April Fool’s Day. Can’t be a good Cryptocratic agent without throwing out a patently obvious riddle or two to tickle the cerebrums of a severely dumbed-down populace, after all.

As fiat currency – at least in its Western globalist iteration – becomes increasingly debased and meaningless, there will nary be a cash-strapped source that won’t be clamoring to have a good suckle on that sweet, sweet sugar teat proffered forth by Central Banking United. Why do so many local yokel libraries in the likes of Seclusion, ID glom onto the aggressive child recruitment strategy of Trans, Inc? Why, because federal monies are sure to flow freely toward such a path of least resistance, just like oil came a-burbling Jed Clampett’s way when he shot at that jackrabbit.

So yes: you can expect this strategy to be utilized by other cash-strapped organizations of all sorts in the future. Take Ford. Having bet the entirety of their last remaining reservoirs of customer goodwill on the stupendous success of the electrical F-150 Lightning, and seeing that bet about to be raked in by the croupier as bad word of mouth is crippling sales and making it a poisonous inventory stockpile for wary dealerships, expect them to throw in the mortgage to the farm with an ad campaign featuring a gender-elliptical couple (or maybe threesome) making a cross-country road trip with their multiracial and non-binary adopted children to attend a queer film festival in Boulder, CO in their spanking-new Lightning, and marveling at the range they get traversing the mountains on just one charge. Mainly because such film festivals are not held in the winter, but be that as it may. It’s not like these trucks were ever destined to be staples of the rodeo circuit and oilpatch anyway, and why not fish for some of that sweet, sweet DC dinero? They missed out on the 2008 bailout, after all. T’would do the Sage of Dearborn himself proud.

To conclude, all I can say is the cliched mantra ought to be revised to read “Go Woke, Go Broke, and the Government You Can Soak”.