A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! The Left and Right agree: Boycott Bud.

If so, it won’t work, because the problem here isn’t so much Mulvaney as it is Alissa Heinerscheid and the execs at Bud and A-B. If not for her derogatory comments about Bud Light’s consumer base, the one-off can for Mulvaney may have passed with only a mild and short-lived impact. Other brands have gone farther in choosing trans endorsers; David wrote yesterday about Smirnoff and its massive parent Diageo, for instance, and Nike actually paid Mulvaney to endorse its line of sports bras with a ridiculous video that all but mocked the athleticism and skills of legitimate female athletes. Why didn’t those brands take the same kind of damage, at least thus far?

Because their execs didn’t go out of their way to insult the people who buy their product. This one-minute clip will likely get at least five lectures in the Death of Bud Light Harvard Business case study. In sixty-four seconds, Heinerscheid demolishes her career at A-B as well as any impression that the beermaker knows or cares anything about the people who buy its industrial-level lagers:

This is what happens when corporations take sides in social debates — especially when their executives either don’t know their customer base, don’t like their customer base — or in Heinerscheid’s case, both. The ignorance in this is breathtaking, and on a core level. People buy and drink beer for fun, at least aspirationally (it can’t be for the taste). They’re not buying it to get lectures on “representation,” they’re not buying it for the “equity,” and they’re certainly not drinking it to toast Mulvaney’s “womanhood.”

That’s why all of the marketing campaigns that preceded Heinerscheid worked. That “fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor” appealed to consumers’ desire for fun, and the opportunity for social connections that fun presents. Those ad campaigns got designed by people who not just understood the consumer base for industrial-scale beer but actually kinda liked the people buying it. Or at least liked their money enough to refrain from pushing lectures on “representation” as a rebuke to their “out of touch humor” and their desire for fun over political battles.

Anheuser-Busch (which one wag in Ed Morrissey’s comments section called “Tranheuser-Busch,”) whose parent company AB InBev brews or distributes a whopping 600(!) brands of beer worldwide will weather this storm as a whole, but Heinerscheid has done a fine job as a one woman wrecking crew making her former brand toxic across the aisle.