THOMAS LIFSON: Decoding the Bud Light disaster as marketing VP Alissa Heinerscheid ‘takes leave of absence’.
To be sure, this is not quite the same as being fired and carrying your personal belongings out of the office in a box, but I have a hard time imagining that Ms. Heinerscheid will ever again be entrusted with guiding a major beer to its customers. As the very first female to head marketing for what is claimed to be the world’s biggest beer brand, certain niceties must be observed by Anheuser-Busch in her defenestration.
No visible cruelty — in fact, quite the opposite. When she leaves for another job, perhaps a brand that is marketed predominantly to upscale women (a market segment she obviously understands better than beer-drinkers), I have little doubt that her vision, courage, and fortitude (or similar vague positive qualities) will be mentioned. Nobody gains by piling on a cancer survivor mother of three who made one mistake.
The exact nature of that mistake is what makes this incident so fascinating and meaningful. I believe that the political ramifications are profound.
The first point to make is that nobody at Bud Light or A-B had a clue that many of their customers would take exception to transsexual “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney getting his picture on cans of Bud Light and serving as a marketing agent. . . .
It is not at all clear who signed up Mulvaney. It might have been V.P. Heinerscheid, but given that the company says it has “hundreds” of influencers,” it is possible that one of her staff came up with the concept, in which case she probably signed off on the idea, perhaps without giving much thought to any adverse consequences.
Marketing is a discipline that uses a lot of research, normally, which makes the failure to understand the psychology of large numbers of Bud Light drinkers so curious. I can only assume that, in her daily life, she associates with her peers: highly educated, affluent professionals, many of them from Ivy League schools, none of whom would ever dream of saying anything negative about transsexuality. No blinking red light appeared in her mind to caution that not everyone approves of the trans movement, and that the trans extremists who bully and physically attack campus speakers like Riley Gaines, who insist on males showering with teenage girl athletes, and who have caused mass shootings, might have caused a powerful counter-reaction.
The reality is that the ruling class in the United States are so full of contempt for what they regard as the lower orders of society that they feel no moral imperative to understand them. The proper reaction to “transphobia” is contempt, because, after all, such retrograde views are “on the wrong side of history” and soon will be extinguished, just as resistance to homosexual “marriage” has vanished from the public sphere.
Ivy League marketing gurus are not the only ones carrying this view.
And there’s an active desire to rub the Normals’ noses in it, which is what really accounts for the backlash.