It has now been almost four — months? years? millennia? — since Bud Light attempted to genocide all of America’s conservatives by allowing a transgender woman to drink it. But good, red-blooded Americans took to the streets and the Twitter threads and, much like the Jews fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto, heroically resisted this vicious assault on their right to drink pisswater without knowing that somewhere, a trans person might also be drinking the same pisswater. And enjoying it.
Bottom-five senators Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn have already announced they will probe Bud Light parent company Anheuser-Busch for the crime of not getting congressional permission for an Instagram promotion. Now Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has yet to meet the culture war issue he could not just ignore like a normal goddamn human, has announced his own governmental investigation of the brewer:
The 2024 Republican presidential-primary contender said in a letter to state legal officials Thursday and an appearance on Fox News Channel that AB InBev’s Dylan Mulvaney campaign may have “breached legal duties owed to its shareholders” by aligning the brand with “radical social ideologies.”
Let us be absolutely clear here so that even the naked mole rat carcass d/b/a Ron DeSantis, somewhere in his shriveled and blackened heart, might understand.
Bud Light sent one can of beer with her face printed on it to a trans woman as part of a generic corporate effort to expand its customer base to people it would very much like to convince to give it their money.
It was the conservatives DeSantis is desperately courting who reacted to this simple act as if the company had poured scalding hot water on a litter of newborn puppies. If Anheuser-Busch is guilty of any irresponsibility here, it is in grossly underestimating the bigotry, irrationality, cruelty, and nihilism of its conservative customers who have continuously attacked a woman who did nothing but drink a beer on video. To say nothing of their willingness to sustain a boycott large enough to crash their stock price.
Now DeSantis wants to hold the company liable for what, not being Extremely Online enough to know that conservatives have decided transgender people are the greatest threat to civilization since the Black Death?
DeSantis’s excuse is that public pension funds in Florida might have had some of their investments in Anheuser-Busch stock, so the crash meant those pension funds lost money that hard-working retirees were counting on:
“We must prudently manage the funds of Florida’s hardworking law enforcement officers, teachers, firefighters, and first responders in a manner that focuses on growing returns, not subsidizing an ideological agenda through woke virtue signaling,” Mr. DeSantis wrote in a letter to Lamar Taylor, the interim director of the State Board of Administration.
Let us step back and admire the contradiction here. As the writer Gabriel Malor noted on Twitter, in April DeSantis was encouraging the boycott, saying “pushback is in order across the board.” Three months later, DeSantis is threatening to sue the company for losing value because the boycott he cheered on actually worked.
Yr Wonkette is used to wingnuts contradicting themselves, sometimes in the space of a single sentence, and even we are shaking our heads here.
Interestingly, historian Seth Cotlar notes that this is not the first time Anheuser-Busch has reached out to the LGBTQ community and got its hand slapped by conservatives. Back in the 1990s, the company made a conscious effort to reach out to gay beer drinkers. This sent moral void Jerry Falwell and his flock into such a tizzy that the company had to set up a toll-free hotline just for conservatives to call and yell about their very angry feelings.
Damn snowflakes.
Cotlar also gave us an excuse to link to this great “Saturday Night Live” commercial, which came out in 1991 and makes us wish Chris Farley was still alive and Adam Sandler was still funny so they could update it.
Oh well, at least DeSantis’s campaign is cratering harder than the asteroid strike that created the Chesapeake Bay, so we’ve got that going for us.
I like how in the midst of catastrophic climate change, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the dangerous rise of fascism and other such trifling troubles, Ron DeSantis really has his pudding finger on the hot pudding issues of our time.
and maybe Der Santis should sue Russia next...
Florida’s pension fund is stuck holding $300 million in Russian investments – Orlando Sentinel
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2022/04/05/floridas-pension-fund-is-stuck-holding-300-million-in-russian-investments/