Even non-political people are upset at Bud Light’s move to put the little Pee Wee Herman guy on their beer cans to promote alternative sexual lifestyles. It’s no surprise that beer sales for Anheuser-Busch are way down, catastrophically down, but it’s entirely something to see that impact in an intimate way. Recently I was at the Back Porch Saloon in West Chester, Ohio, where it’s a popular drinking spot for the business world, and people I spend a lot of time with, who are usually avid Bud Light fans, were refusing to order the brand, instead picking anything but, because of the embarrassing marketing campaign that has clearly backfired. These people order buckets of beer that come in an actual bucket of ice full of beer to be set on the table for rapid consumption while dealing with the world’s problems. These are monster truck, deer hunting, American football fans who tag beer to their lifestyle choice as an associate garment to express the values of their existence. And having the little gay guy on their beer cans was a bridge too far, and they did not want anything to do with the brand. To see this behavioral change up close at a recent dinner was a bit stunning. It’s one thing to hear about it on the news; it’s quite another to see people you know change their behavior entirely so quickly in retaliation. I could have told the Bud Light people not to do it, not to listen to the goofy Klaus Schwab loser from the World Economic Forum. But the Bud Light people got caught hiring woke people to manage their brand, and they bought the bait that people wanted their product so much that they’d overlook any social justice message the company was going after to get a better ESG score. Instead, people voted with their dollars, as any market economy should expect. 

The Disney Company is going through the same mess, they went openly woke several years ago, and it is impacting their brand. Looking at their money and health, it’s not a good story. It costs something in the neighborhood of 5.5 billion dollars to operate that company, and they just don’t have the kind of revenue that they are used to getting coming in because of their commitment to woke political causes, the gay lifestyles, the Democrat political position of the global citizen movement, and other non-American values that come from the bullet points of the World Economic Forum. If you really trace back the behavior to single point causes of switching from money market management, where dollars represent a vote for the value of a product, and the transition to ESG value systems, then it’s BlackRock who has made the biggest move to switching public sentiment. The plan was to switch all these economic values away from the dollar and onto ESG, and now we are seeing the backwash. Disney is in real trouble so long as people are out there who refuse to buy Bud Light beer because of the push to accept transsexual social issues. The mistake came from corporations’ attempts to assume that they controlled public sentiment and that people wanted their products so severely that they’d accept social positions to get that product. Disney is learning the hard way with seriously declining revenue. They don’t have many billion-dollar films on the horizon to cover their operating costs as they did during the past decade with animated films, Star Wars, and Marvel. Now that they’ve gone full woke, as they certainly did in the monstrosity, The Eternals with actual gay kissing in the movie, they have destroyed their brand, and the revenue shows it. The decision-making behind the choice for woke films is the same as Bud Light. And the market results were predictable. 

When you hire people to run these companies for purely woke reasons because they are women and open to progressive ideas, then it should not be surprising that they lead their companies down a destructive path of revenue generation. The arrogance of many companies buying the World Economic Forum nonsense, and the BlackRock political activism, is that people are suckers and will buy whatever companies want to sell them, which is obvious. The game’s rule is that spending money on a product is a vote. Companies would have to work hard through advertising to build a brand; then, people would show their appreciation by buying the product. But in this new communist view of the global market, corporations want to do as little as possible to compete, so they seek the safety of government alignments under communist controls to make it easier for lazy CEOs to show quarterly profits to shareholders by tricking them into this smoke and mirrors ESG garbage, because they had to hide that corporate communism was actually hurting their market growth, and they couldn’t show shareholders continued increased projections. So they tried to sell this social and environmental score stuff that average people have no desire for as a new value—then thought that if they could enforce corporate policy through BlackRock to control most corporate boards, the public would be forced to support them if they wanted their beer or their entertainment options. Instead, what has happened is that people moved as they always do toward choice. So long as there were choice options in the world, people would always move in that direction. But the stupidity of the Desecrators of Davos types, the Larry Fink’s of the world, the Klaus Schwab insanity, was that so long as progressive politics controlled the big brands, like Disney, like Bud Light, that people would then be forced to embrace their woke ideas, and that has turned out to be very wrong.

Communists tried this kind of thing with the Berlin Wall, they tried it in Cuba, and they tried it in China. Communism has consistently failed, and this rebranding of the communist idea through corporate cultures will also fail, just as seen with the Bud Light brand. And governments, in partnership with this communist push, are trying to make it hard for competition to exist so that people don’t have other market options to go to. They thought they had it all worked out, that the transition from capitalist markets driven by shareholder values would merge seamlessly into ESG scores that would make corporate communism the taste of the day. And the little gay guy on the Bud Light cans was an ostentatious dip into the cold pool of reality. And that reality destroyed a brand that many assumed was foolproof. Beer sales are almost as common as water in America, and the corporate pinheads from the World Economic Forum thought so little of the buying public that they thought they’d buy the beer no matter what was on the can. But quickly, they found out otherwise, just as Disney did when they put gay and trans characters into their movies, only to have the public massively reject those efforts. And that splash of reality that market share would still go to those who most reflected what the public actually wanted was a scary reality. One that I knew would never work, but one that apparently all those woke people at the corporate boardrooms were disconnected from reality and didn’t understand. Well, they do now; everyone is learning that this ESG attack on capitalist markets wouldn’t fly. And that became most obvious at the local level among people who are largely not interested in politics. That’s when you know the people behind the movement are in serious trouble, and they seem to be mystified as to why.

Rich Hoffman