Is Serious Person Samuel Alito Taking Stock Tips From Bud Light-Boycotting Bigots?
Is Serious Person Samuel Alito Taking Stock Tips From Bud Light-Boycotting Bigots?
But look at those alpacas!
Quite a few political observers have wondered for a while now if Samuel Alito, Supreme Court justice and thinnest of thin-skinned twat-waffles, has gone so far down the right-wing media rabbithole that he’s going to start citing the Gateway Pundit in his decisions.
The latest evidence that Alito might be inhaling Breitbart stories along with his morning goblet of kitten entrails comes to us via Chris Geidner and his excellent Law Dork newsletter. It involves the national tragedy of 2023 when wingnuts discovered that transgender people might enjoy beer.
To refresh your memories, the corporate honchos at Budweiser were promoting a sweepstakes contest, as is a corporation’s wont. As part of the promotion, they sent a few cans of Bud Light with her face on them to minor social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman. Mulvaney made a post holding the can and celebrating the first year of her transition.
All hell immediately broke loose. Wingnuts were furious to learn that the Bud Light that passed their lips might have once shared a brewery vat with the same Bud Light that passed the lips of a transgender woman, and oh my god what if transgenderism is contagious and these guys all had to trade in their manly Travis Tritt CDs for, like, Kacey Musgraves or something? (We don’t listen to country.)
The wingnuts put together a boycott of Anheuser-Busch, maker of Bud Light and other what we might loosely call beers, and announced their new allegiance to Molson Coors, another maker of canned liquids you might also laughingly refer to as beer. Sales of A-B products dropped.
The whole dumb dust-up had abated a bit when, a few months later, insane Twitter account Libs of TikTok posted a pre-transition picture of Mulvaney and referred to her as “a dude.” This was on August 13, and set off a new round of harassment of both Mulvaney and Bud Light, along with coverage from right-wing media. Which is where Alito comes in:
According to a periodic transaction report posted but now unavailable in the Federal Judicial Financial Disclosure Reports database, Justice Sam Alito sold at least some of his stock in Anheuser-Busch and bought stock in Molson Coors on Monday, August 14, 2023.
The possibility that at least one of the nine unelected tribunes who rule America is getting much of his news from, say, the same Right Side Broadcasting anchor who has been making coitus with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s nether regions is so incredibly disturbing. (That guy just quit by the way. The network, not the MTG.) But, as Geidner notes, there are legal reasons why Alito’s actions are a bad look:
As Alito agreed to when the justices announced their code of conduct, “A Justice should not engage in other political activity.” […]
Participating in a boycott is undeniably a political statement. And there are pending cases for which participation in an anti-trans beer boycott could be seen as his having a finger on the scale of justice on the side of the anti-trans advocates supporting — and in some cases, defending — these laws such that recusal could be required.
The Supreme Court is hearing a case in the fall that will decide the question of whether state bans on gender-affirming care for minors “violate the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the laws.” So while the cynical among us can easily guess Alito’s views on transgenderism, the least he could do is fake it.
The funniest part of all this is that if one wants to give Alito the benefit of the doubt and assume he was simply a small-time stock trader chasing a news story (he owned somewhere between $1,000 to $15,000 worth of A-B stock when he sold it), this was a bad decision financially. Since August 14 of last year, Anheuser-Busch stock is up somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent, while Molson Coors is down somewhere around 12 percent.
Is Alito so deep in the right-wing media bubble that he assumes, say, Steve Bannon’s daily podcast is a much bigger part of the daily discourse than it actually is? That whatever Federalist Society newsletters he reads have a true finger on America’s pulse?
Obviously we can’t say for sure. But the evidence certainly suggests the answer is yes.
[Law Dork]
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As much as I hate that slimy, sociopathic, lying, Christo-fascist hack, it's possible that Injustice Alito isn't thinking about the boycott, but believes that the new anti-Bud nonsense is bad for AB stock and good for the other one. Of course, that isn't the case in the real world, but right-wingers don't live in the same reality as normal people.
Think we’re long past due reducing federal judges term from life to 10-12 years. We need to churn the mix to keep up with the changing society rather than entrench politically motivated dinosaurs.