Brownstone Institute
What the Bud Light Fiasco Reveals about the Ruling Class
From the Brownstone Institute
What were they thinking? How did someone believe that making “trans woman” Dylan Mulvaney the icon of a Bud Light ad campaign, complete with a beer can with Mulvaney’s image on it, would be good for sales? With an ad featuring this person vamping around in the most preposterously possible way?
Dylan, who had previously been interviewed on trans issues by President Biden himself, was celebrating “365 Days of Girlhood” with a grotesquely misogynistic caricature that would disgust just about the whole market for this beer. Indeed, this person’s cosplay might as well be designed to discredit the entire political agenda of gender dysphoriacs.
Sure enough, because we don’t have mandates on what beers you must buy, sales of the beer plummeted.
The parent company Anheuser-Busch’s stock lost $5 billion or 4 percent in value since the ad campaign rollout. Sales have fallen 50-70 percent. Now there is worry within the company of a widening boycott to all their brands. A local Missouri distributor of the product canceled an appearance by Budweiser Clydesdale horses due to public anger.
Ads are supposed to sell products, not prompt a massive public backlash that results in billions in losses. This mistake could be for the ages, marking a distinct departure from corporate deference to wackadoodle ideas from the academy and a push for more connection to on-the-ground realities.
The person who made the miscalculation is Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, Vice President in charge of marketing for Bud Light. She explained that her intention was to make the beer King of ‘Woke’ Beers. She wanted to shift away from the “out of touch” frat party image to one of “inclusivity.” By all accounts, she actually believed this. More likely, she was rationalizing actions that would earn her bragging rights within her social circle.
Digging through her personal biography, we find all the predictable signs of tremendous detachment from regular life: elite boarding school (Groton, $65K a year), Harvard, Wharton School, coveted internship at General Foods, and straight to top VP at the biggest beverage company in the world.
Somehow through all that, nothing entered her brain apart from elite opinion on how the world should work with theories never actually tested by real-world marketing demands. Would that she had worked at Chick-Fil-A at some point in her teen years, perhaps even preserving some friend relationships ever since. It might have protected her from this disastrous error.
She is a perfect symbol of a problem that afflicts high-end corporate and government culture: a shocking blindness toward the mainstream of American life, including working classes and other people less privileged. They are invisible to this crowd. And her type is pervasive in corporate America with its huge layers of management developed over 20 years of loose credit and push for token representation at the highest levels.
We’ve seen this manifest over three years and ruling-class types imposed lockdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates on the whole population without regard to the consequences and with full expectation that the food will continue to be delivered to their doorsteps no matter how many days, months, or years they stay at home and stay safe.
The working classes, meanwhile, were shoved out in front of the pathogen to make their assigned contribution to herd immunity so that the rich and privileged could preserve their clean state of being, making TikTok videos and issuing edicts from their safe spaces for two or even three years.
In the late 19th century, the blindness of class detachment was a problem that so consumed Karl Marx that he became possessed with the desire to overthrow class distinctions between labor and capital. He kicked off a new age of the classless society under the leadership of the vanguard of the proletarian classes. In every country where his dreams became a reality, however, a protected elite took over and secured themselves from the consequences of their deluded dreams.
The people who in recent decades have drunk so deeply from the well of the Marxian tradition seem to be repeating that experience with complete disinterest in the lower classes, while pushing a deepening chasm that only became worse in the lockdown years in which they have controlled the levers of power.
It was startling to watch, and I could hardly believe what was happening. Then one day the incredibly obvious dawned on me. All official opinion in this country and even the whole world – government, media, corporations, technology – emanated from the same upper echelons of the class structure. It was people with elite educations and who had the time to shape public opinion. They are the ones on Twitter, in the newsrooms, fussing with the codes, and enjoying the laptop life of a permanent bureaucrat.
Their social circles were the same. They knew no one who cut trees, butchered cows, drove trucks, fixed cars, and met payroll in a small restaurant. The “workers and peasants” are people the elites so otherized that they became nothing more than non-playing characters who make stuff work but are not worthy of their attention or time.
The result was a massive transfer of wealth upwards in the social ladder as digital brands, technology, and Peloton thrived, while everyone else faced a barrage of ill health, debt, and inflation. As classes have grown more stratified – and, yes, there is a reason to worry about the gap between the rich and the poor when malleability is restricted – the intellectual producers of policy and opinion have constructed their own bubble to protect themselves from by being soiled by contrary points of view.
They want the whole world to be their own safe space regardless of the victims.
Would lockdowns have happened in any other kind of world? Not likely. And it would not have happened if the overlords did not have the technology to carry on their lives as normal while pretending that no one was really suffering from their scheme.
The Bud Light case is especially startling because the advent of commercial society in the high Middle Ages and through the Industrial Revolution was supposed to mitigate against this sort of myopic stratification. And this has always been the most compelling critique of Marx: he was raging against a system that was gradually winnowing away the very demarcations in classes that he decried.
Joseph Schumpeter in 1919 wrote an essay on this topic in his book Imperialism and Social Classes. He highlighted how the commercial ethos dramatically changed the class system.
“The warlord was automatically the leader of his people in virtually every respect,” he wrote. “The modern industrialist is anything but such a leader. And this explains a great deal about the stability of the former’s position and the instability of the latter’s.”
But what happens when the corporate elites, working together with government, themselves become the warlords? The foundations of market capitalism begin to erode. The workers become ever more alienated from final consumption of the product they have made possible.
It’s been typical of people like me – pro-market libertarians – to ignore the issue of class and its impact on social and political structures. We inherited the view of Frederic Bastiat that the good society is about cooperation between everyone and not class conflict, much less class war. We’ve been suspicious of people who rage against wealth inequality and social stratification.
And yet we do not live in such market conditions. The social and economic systems of the West are increasingly bureaucratized, hobbled by credentialism, and regulated, and this has severely impacted class mobility. Indeed, for many of these structures, exclusion of the unwashed is the whole point.
And the ruling class themselves have ever more the mindset as described by Thorstein Veblen: only the ignorable do actual work while the truly successful indulge in leisure and conspicuous consumption as much as their means allow. One supposes that this doesn’t hurt anyone…until it does.
And this certainly happened in very recent history as the conspicuous consumers harnessed the power of states all over the world to serve their interests exclusively. The result was calamity for rights and liberties won over a thousand years of struggle.
The emergent fissures between the classes – and the diffusions of our ruling class into many sectors public and private – suggest an urgency for a new consciousness of the real meaning of the common good, which is inseparable from liberty. The marketing director of Bud Light talked a good line about “inclusivity” but she plotted to impose everything but that. Her plan was designed for the one percent and to the exclusion of all the people who actually consume the product, to say nothing for the workers who actually make and deliver the product she was charged with promoting.
That the markets have so brutally punished the brand and company for this profound error points the way to the future. People should have the right to their own choices about the kind of life they want to live and the products and services they want to consume. The dystopia of lockdowns and woke hegemony of public opinion – complete with censorship – have become the policy to overturn if the workers are ever to throw off the chains that bind them.
The boycotts of Bud Light are but a beginning.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
For me, it’s not difficult to see what the world’s real rulers are trying to achieve. They’re trying to obtain more power and control for themselves. In fact, they’ve largely already achieved this goal. The terrifying thought is they are far from done.
We know they are not finished because their most conspicuous initiative at the moment is their quest to slay the petulances of “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
The correct definition of misinformation/disinformation is any speech that challenges what authority figures say is the truth.
The world’s real rulers don’t want their pronouncements challenged, as this would pose a grave risk to their continued rule and their ability to implement myriad programs that will effectively defeat, once and for all, human freedom.
As long as persuasive dissent doesn’t go viral, the Powers that Be know they will achieve their objectives, which are authoritarian world government much closer to the communist utopia envisioned by thinkers and tyrants like Marx, Mao, and Lenin.
But real communism is not the real goal either, as communism was supposed to make every person equal. The modern form of communism, not unlike all previous forms of communism, ensures the world’s elite organizations will remain ultra-powerful while the proletariat will beg for crumbs.
Who are the World’s Elite Organizations?
They are every important organization – those with great influence (and police-state powers) – including all governmental agencies and departments as well as international government organizations like the UN, WHO, and European Union.
They are also all the major “crony” corporations that benefit from close ties to government and non-governmental organizations.
Plus, foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which have more money than many nations and certainly more ideological commitment to deploy their resources to implement their agendas.
A simple method to define the establishment organizations would be to simply identify the world’s key authorized narratives and then ask yourself what organizations zealously support these initiatives (aka “The Current Thing”).
In the last four years, any organization that vociferously supported all the Covid protocols would be examples of “captured” organizations that enthusiastically supported the Current Thing.
But these same organizations also support all the other ascendant political movements, such as the fight against (allegedly) man-made Climate Change, numerous wars or “interventions” to advance “democracy,” central bank digital currency, and ever more mRNA “vaccines.”
Furthermore, it’s obvious these same organizations support initiatives designed to discredit long-accepted cultural norms in favor of more “progressive” thinking that normalizes gender reversal, race grievances, LGBT+ initiatives, or any reform that advances “diversity, inclusion, or equity.”
The promotion of policies that make mass illegal immigration much easier to achieve has also become a crucial program of our planet’s establishment rulers.
I believe the above summary provides an accurate assessment of the state of the world today.
I also note that it’s an undeniable truth that every program of these establishment organizations has made the world a darker place, with future developments planned by our leaders guaranteed to decrease the qualify of life for children or young adults who may live another 50 to 80 years.
For example, at the moment, unelected delegates who serve on the World Health Organization continue to deliberate in secret as they finalize a new health treaty and make changes to “international regulations” that will affect virtually every citizen on the planet in decades to come.
The salient point about the WHO is that this agency was provably and disastrously wrong on every policy and piece of guidance it issued involving the response to Covid-19.
Another way to identify the members of the Establishment ruling class is to simply identify those who were spectacularly wrong on every key issue of our times. These are the people and organizations who are seeking even more power and control.
Who Will Prevail in the End?
The good news is our side – those who still believe in human liberty – vastly outnumbers the group that is clearly aligned against us.
Above I listed many of the world’s captured organizations. These organizations are staffed by probably a couple hundred thousand key leaders who are committed to supporting the nefarious and freedom -eradicating components of “The Current Thing.”
As I’ll show below, the numbers who identify with “our side” surely exceed tens of millions of citizens.
The bad news is the the enemies of freedom – the worshippers of Big Brother – control all of the institutions and organizations in the world that actually matter.
Whoever sought to capture all of these organizations – from the CDC, the military, the Federal Reserve, the WEF, and the mainstream press – didn’t embark on these projects just to entertain themselves. They did this for a reason. This reason? They wanted to use these organizations to advance/achieve their goals.
To be more specific, they must have known that if they captured all of these organizations it would be almost impossible for any private citizens to stop their plans.
Our Side Actually has a Major Numeric Advantage
Still, the committed generals and staff officers who are seeking even more global control of the masses are…greatly outnumbered by people who are repulsed by their programs.
I’m currently working on a business idea that might supplement the dissident class of independent writers or “citizen journalists” found in the alternative media and on Substack.
In working on this project, I’m very interested in gauging the size of the market for content that resonates with the world’s population that still values freedom. This would be the group of citizens who is skeptical of the authorized narratives and values (genuine) “watchdog” journalism.
My estimate is there must be tens of millions of people who think like I do, people who would like to stop all the goals of the WEF, Davos, and WHO crowd.
The Tucker Carlson Metric
Perhaps the simplest way to estimate the size of this market is to examine the audience of one of the world’s best-known “contrarian journalists,” Tucker Carlson.
Before Carlson was fired by Fox News, his nightly news show routinely drew four million viewers per night, which made it the top-rated news program in North America. Over the course of a month, the show might have attracted 10 million viewers.
As we all know, Carlson was fired for producing content that was extremely popular with millions of adults. But Carlson didn’t disappear or stop producing “taboo” commentary and news segments, he simply moved to Twitter (now X) and kept doing the exact same thing.
Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin garnered more than 150 million views and his various streaming podcasts routinely double or triple the number of people he was reaching on Fox News.
Since Tucker covers many of the same “taboo” subjects I do, one can conservatively estimate that at least 10 million of Carlson’s regular viewers strongly oppose everything the world’s so-called leaders want to make a reality. And that’s just Carlson’s audience.
Substack has more than 35 million subscribers, probably 20 percent of whom are searching for content they know they won’t find in, say, the New York Times or CBS News. That would be a “market” of 7 million freedom-supporting citizens.
Tucker was recently the guest on Joe Rogan’s podcast show. Rogan probably has an audience just as large and loyal as Carlson. Indeed, in their wide-ranging and fascinating conversation, Rogan made the point that shows like his and Tucker’s should now be considered “mainstream”…because they reach far more viewers than, say, the newscasts of the big TV networks (which actually aren’t so big anymore).
As far as I can tell, all the “alternative media” outlets are growing rapidly while all the traditional news outlets are Dead Men Walking.
Again, this is an extremely encouraging sign for anyone who believes that skeptical and independent speech is important to help ensure a world where real freedom might continue to exist.
But I Haven’t Mentioned the Biggest Group of Citizens
While “our side” greatly outnumbers the figure of key employees occupying all the captured organizations, the real population group that matters is the immense group that is sitting out this existential battle for freedom.
The citizens who will probably determine the outcome of this battle are the people who have not discovered the Substack contrarians or who never watch Joe Rogan…or who think Tucker Carlson is a dangerous extremist who should have been fired by Fox (and should now be fired by Elon Musk and X). This group numbers in the billions.
(This would be the group that doesn’t want to think anymore about the Covid response or think about the possibility that scary-looking, worm-like clots might be in their veins and arteries right now.)
This group just wants to get through each day with adequate supplies of bread…and if they’re given a few mildly entertaining circuses to distract them from the challenges of their daily lives, that’s enough.
For this segment of the population, any big debate on “freedom” is either boring, not germane to their lives, or they love and appreciate Big Brother and are convinced he is protecting them.
What this means to you and me is that the denouement of this historic battle will be determined by a relatively small percentage of the world’s population.
On one side, we have the 200,000 or so leaders of thousands of important captured organizations. On the other side, we have 10 to 20 million citizens who’ve found each other in the alternative media. In the middle, we have a couple billion people who are oblivious to what’s really at stake.
Whatever way this massive middle group swings in the future, so goes the world.
One suspects the world’s real rulers know that their track record and planned agendas won’t stand up to close scrutiny. They know that their arguments are not as persuasive and could easily be debunked if our side’s arguments were to “go viral.”
To help keep this middle group indifferent or on their side, the Deep State concocted the concepts of disinformation and misinformation to smear or throttle the influence of those on our side.
The ever-growing Censorship Industrial Complex has performed its most important job with (disgusting) distinction. For now at least, the depressing truth is the masses don’t seem to care much about the issues that some of us think are tectonic.
This means recruiting the legions of people we need to recruit will be a strangely tough sale.
Our charge of persuading more of our neighbors to join our side has been made far more difficult by the false narrative that all of the important disinformation is coming from citizens like us, when, in fact, we don’t control any of the important information.
If and when the masses realize who’s been producing the real disinformation, freedom might pull an upset victory.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
I’ve seen some crazy things over the last few years but this is off-the-charts insane.
Last week, Michael E. Mann spoke at the EcoHeath Alliance: Green Planet One Health Benefit 2024. Just to recap who each of these players are:
- Michael E. Mann is the creator of the “hockey stick graph” that has driven the global warming debate for the last 25 years.
- EcoHealth Alliance is the CIA cutout led by Peter Daszak that launders money from the NIH to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create gain-of-function viruses (including SARS-CoV-2 which killed over 7 million people).
- “One Health” is the pretext the World Health Organization (WHO) is using to drive the Pandemic Treaty that will vastly expand the powers of the WHO and create economic incentives for every nation on earth to develop new gain-of-function viruses.
So a leader in the global warming movement spoke at an event to raise money for the organization that just murdered 7 million people and the campaign that intends to launch new pandemics in perpetuity to enrich the biowarfare industrial complex.
And then just for good measure, Peter Hotez reposted all of this information on Twitter, I imagine in solidarity with all of the exciting genociding going on.
Mann’s appearance at this event is emblematic of a disturbing shift that has been years in the making. Serious and thoughtful people in the environmental movement tried to address industrial and military pollution for decades. Now their cause has been co-opted by Big Tech and other corporate actors with malevolent intentions — and the rest of the environmental movement has gone along with this, apparently without objection. So we are witnessing a convergence between the global warming movement, the biowarfare industrial complex, and the WHO pandemic treaty grifters.
I wish it wasn’t true but here we are.
Before I go any further I need to make one thing clear: the notion that pandemics are driven by global warming is complete and total bullsh*t. The evidence is overwhelming that pandemics are created by the biowarfare industrial complex including the 13,000 psychopaths who work at over 400 US bioweapons labs (as described in great detail in The Wuhan Cover-Up).
Unfortunately “global warming” has become a cover for the proliferation of the biowarfare industrial economy.
Mann’s appearance at an event to raise money for people who are clearly guilty of genocide (and planning more carnage) made me realize that this really is World War III. They are straight-up telling us who they are and what they intend to do.
The different sides in this war are not nation-states. Instead, Team Tyranny is a bunch of different business interests pushing what has become a giant multi-trillion dollar grift. And Team Freedom is ordinary people throughout the world just trying to return to the classical economic and political liberalism that drove human progress from 1776 until 2020.
Here’s how I see the battle lines being drawn:
TEAM TYRANNY
Their base: Elites, billionaires, the ruling class, the biowarfare industrial complex, intelligence agencies, and bougie technocrats.
Institutions they control: WEF, WHO, UN, BMGF, World Bank, IMF, most universities, the mainstream media, and liberal governments throughout the developed world.
Economic philosophy: The billionaires should control all wealth on earth. The peasants should only be allowed to exist to serve the billionaires, grow food, and fix the machines when necessary. Robots and Artificial Intelligence will soon be able to replace most of the peasants.
Political philosophy: Centralized control of everything. Elites know best. The 90% should shut up, pay their taxes, take their vaccines, develop chronic disease, and die. High tech global totalitarianism is the best form of government. Billionaires are God.
Philosophy of medicine: Allopathic. Cut, poison, burn, kill. Corporations create all knowledge. Bodies are machines. Transhumanism is ideal. The billionaires will soon live forever in the digital cloud.
Their currency: For now, inflationary Federal Reserve policies. Soon, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) that will put the peasants in their place once and for all.
Policy vehicles to advance their agenda: One Health; WHO Pandemic Treaty; social credit scores; climate scores; vaccine mandates/passports; lockdowns and quarantine camps; elimination of small farms and livestock; corporate control of all food, land, water, transportation, and the weather; corporate control of social movements; and 15-minute cities for the peasants.
Military strategy: Gain-of-function viruses, propaganda, and vaccines.
TEAM FREEDOM
Our base: The medical freedom movement, Constitutionalists, small “l” libertarians, independent farmers, natural meat and milk producers, pirate parties, natural healers, homeopaths, chiropractors, integrative and functional medicine doctors, and osteopaths.
Aligned institutions: CHD, ICAN, Brownstone Institute, NVIC, SFHF, the RFK, Jr. campaign, the Republican party at the county level…
Economic philosophy: Small “c” capitalism. Competition. Entrepreneurship.
Political philosophy: Classical liberalism. The people, using their own ingenuity, will generally figure out the best way to do things. Decentralize everything including the internet. If the elites would just leave us alone the world would be a much more peaceful, creative, and prosperous place. Human freedom leads to human flourishing.
Philosophy of medicine: Nature is infinite in its wisdom. Listen to the body. Systems have the ability to heal and regenerate.
Our currency: Cash, gold, crypto, and barter. (I don’t love crypto but lots of smart people in our movement do.)
Policy ideas: Exit the WHO. Boycott WEF companies. Repeal the Bayh-Dole Act, NCVIA Act, Patriot Act, and PREP Act. Add medical freedom to the Constitution. Prosecute the Faucistas at Nuremberg 2.0. Overhaul the NIH, FDA, CDC, EPA, USDA, FCC, DoD, and intelligence agencies. Make all publicly-funded scientific data available to the public. Ban insider trading by Congress. Support and protect organic food, farms, and farmers’ markets. Break up monopolies. Cut the size of the federal government in half (or more).
Our preferred tools to create change: Ideas, love for humanity, logic and reason, common sense, art and music, and popular uprising.
What would you add, subtract, or change in each of these lists?
Republished from the author’s Substack
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