By
Charles C. W. Cooke
Wednesday,
April 12, 2023
In explaining
her mandate as Bud Light’s VP of marketing last month, Alissa
Heinerscheid made sure to hit all of the requisite
buzzwords. “If we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand,”
Heinerscheid warned, “there will be no future for Bud Light.” “What I brought
to that” endeavor, she continued, “was a belief in, okay, what does ‘evolve and
elevate’ mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means
having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and
brighter and different and appeals to women and to men.” “Representation,”
Heinerscheid concluded, “is sort of the heart of evolution.”
As a
non-native speaker of this peculiar form of English, I feel obliged to ask what
all of this actually means. Evidently, Alissa Heinerscheid believes that these
unusual strings of words provided a comprehensible answer to the question she
was being asked. To me, they merely invite more inquiries. Heinerscheid took
over in July of 2022. Are we to conclude that, before that point, Bud Light was
uninclusive, heavy, and dark? That there were large numbers of Americans who
suspected that Bud Light was quietly bigoted? That the country’s bars were
chock full of anguished “young drinkers” worrying audibly about the presumptive
social trustworthiness of Corona versus Allagash White? And if they were, are
we to believe that they’ve been assuaged by the company’s mystifying decision
to place the face of a performing
minstrel atop
its brand?
I am not
a habitual drinker of Bud Light, but, from my limited experience with the
product, I can tell you that “uninclusive” is among the last terms that I would
have used to describe it. Bud Light is the Amazon Basics of bad beer. I have
drunk it on hunting trips with friends who have Second Amendment tattoos, and
on the beach with friends who are gay. I’ve drunk it with Protestants and
Catholics and Jews and Hindus. I’ve drunk it at football games, at baseball
games, at NASCAR, and at concerts. I’ve drunk it with black friends, with
Hispanic friends, and with white friends of both sexes. When Heinerscheid says
that she wants Bud Light to be more “inclusive,” I must ask what that actually
means? Putting the pope on Bud Light cans would be “inclusive.” Putting
homeschooling parents on the cans would be “inclusive.” Putting feminists who
find Dylan Mulvaney’s act infuriating on the cans would be “inclusive.” Hell,
putting Old Order Amish people on the cans would be “inclusive.”
One
might wonder how it is possible for the “truly inclusive” “tone shift” that
will supposedly save Bud Light from the darkness to have lined up so perfectly
with the exact collection of obsessions that are held by Heinerscheid and the
cadre to which she belongs. Well, I’ll tell you: Because, when Heinerscheid
talks about “inclusivity,” she doesn’t actually mean “inclusivity” in the way
that an average observer would assume she means it. Once again, we have an
example here of America’s rapidly diverging languages. In theory, terms such as
“diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” sound presumptively desirable; who, in a
country such as the United States, wouldn’t want those things in abundance? In
practice, however, they mean something else altogether. In practice,
“diversity” means people who look different but all think the same thing;
“equity” means equal outcomes achieved by government force; and “inclusion”
means prioritizing and protecting groups that progressives like. So it is here.
In its modern context, “inclusive” has begun to resemble those “COEXIST” bumper
stickers that you see on Subarus: Nominally, the message applies to a whole
host of disparate groups; practically speaking, it’s aimed at just one.
As for
Heinerscheid’s claim that, absent a takeover by the woke, “there will be no
future for Bud Light,” this is true only in sense that, absent acquiescence
with the 1980s-era Brooklyn mafia, there was no future for Giuseppe’s Waste
Disposal Corporation. Why, some have asked, would any beer brand take such an
obvious risk with its reputation as to ally itself with Dylan Mulvaney? The
answer, alas, is that it’s not really a risk at all. As the New York
Post reported last week, in contemporary corporate America, some
people are simply more equal than others. “At stake” for companies such as
Anheuser-Busch, the Post noted, “is their Corporate Equality Index
— or CEI — score, which is overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest
LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world.” And that score is compiled in
an extremely narrow way. On the list of important attributes
are “Workforce Protections,” “Inclusive Benefits,” “Supporting an Inclusive
Culture,” and “Corporate Social Responsibility and Responsible Citizenship.”
Not on the list are “Free Speech,” “Conscience Protections,” “Religious
Liberty,” or anything else that one might expect to see in a free country.
“Inclusive”? Hardly.
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