How Bud Light got 'Tootsie' rolled

Life imitates art. Dylan Mulvaney is today’s example. He is the man in drag who is dragging down Bud Light’s sales and perhaps all of Anheuser-Busch’s other brands of beer with it.

Mulvaney is a real life Tootsie, which was the name of Dustin Hoffman’s 1982 comedy in which he played a difficult-to-work-with actor who becomes a difficult-to-work-with actress who becomes a big star on a soap opera and a role model for feminists.

I don’t think writer Larry Gelbart (of TV’s M*A*S*H fame) meant this to be the moral of the story but the film’s message was actors who are difficult to work with get shunned, while actresses who are difficult to work with get Emmys. Hoffman’s character also showed men make better actresses than women do.

The role may not have been much of a stretch for Hoffman. Gelbart said of him, “Never work with an Oscar-winner who is shorter than the statue.”

Mulvaney likely channeled Tootsie to revive his moribund acting career amid a pandemic. He transitioned — at least cosmetically — into a woman, specifically Audrey Hepburn. I think Hoffman channeled his Aunt Pearl.

Tootsie caught the zeitgeist of the time. Feminists ruled. Men were pigs.

Mulvaney caught the zeitgeist of our time. Trannies rule. Feminists are TERFs.

Whereas Gelbart likely did not mean to imply men are better at being women than women are, I am pretty sure Mulvaney and his brethren believe they are better at being women than women are.

Libs say the boycott isn’t working, but show me the person who switched to Bud Light because Mister Mulvaney drinks it. I’ll wait. The company isn’t waiting. The New York Post reported, “Budweiser releases new pro-America ad with iconic mascot in wake of Anheuser-Busch Mulvaney controversy.”

We know why. Rasmussen Reports is polling and will release the results later this week. The polling service tweeted, “These results are not interesting, they are devastating.”

So how did Mulvaney get in a position to bring Bud Light down?

The story begins with a wedding announcement in the New York Times on May 6, 2011.

It read, “Alissa Mary Gordon and Henry Charles Heinerscheid were married Saturday evening at St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in La Jolla, Calif. The Rev. John H. Finley IV, an Episcopal priest, performed the ceremony, with the Rev. Eleanor Ellsworth, also an Episcopal priest, taking part.

“The bride, 27, and the bridegroom, 28, met at Harvard, from which they both graduated cum laude. In August, they will each begin studying for an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania.”

Now I have many readers who are very accomplished in their various pursuits in life. I doubt any of them had a wedding announcement in the New York Times. A few of them may land a New York Times obituary someday, but none likely achieved the coveted New York Times wedding announcement. For that you have to be born into wealth and social position or marry into it.

A dozen years after her coveted New York Times wedding announcement — and her cum laude degree from Harvard — and her MBA from the Wharton School of Business at Penn, what is Alissa Mary Gordon Heinerscheid doing? She is, according to her, the first woman vice president to lead Bud Light — “the largest beer brand in the industry.”

That is an accomplishment, true. Beer Lives Matter. But being the first woman vice president of beer is no big deal when we finally have the first woman vice president of the United States. And Kamala got her job before Heinerscheid got hers.

The beer job is not a lot of fun. Newsweek uncovered an interview she gave eight days before the Mulvaney train wreck began.

She said, “I am a businesswoman. I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, this brand is in decline. It has been in decline for a very long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light.

“So I had this super clear mandate. It's like, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. What I brought to that 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.”

To appeal to men and to women, she brought in a man who pretends to be a woman. That makes perfect sense when you have one of the best marketed MBAs in the land.

The problem, though, is people really don’t like men who pretend to be a woman and then demand to use the little girl’s room.

The first woman vice president of beer did not think this one through. Bud Light competes with a score of other beers, hard liquor and wine. This makes it vulnerable to boycotts, which work best when there is a cheaper or better alternative.

The Montgomery bus boycott following the arrest of Rosa Parks on December 5, 1955, worked because black people had other means of transportation, which included walking. A court ruling in favor of civil rights ended that boycott.

The lefty boycott of Chick fil-A failed because lefties were not eating there anyway and righties rallied around the chicken joint because they don’t like being bullied by lefties.

Which of those situations best fits Bud Light’s situation? Will lefties suddenly get a hankering for mass-produced low-calorie beer?

The early returns are not doing well for Bud Light, Anheuser-Busch or Alissa Mary Gordon Heinerscheid.

Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute reported, “The parent company Anheuser-Busch’s stock lost $5 billion or 4% in value since the ad campaign rollout. Sales have fallen 50%-70%. 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.”

People overlook the importance booking the Clydesdales. It is a big deal and the ultimate feather in the cap of a distributor. The guys at the warehouse saw the storm coming long before the media or the corporate suite did. Heinerscheid still sees nothing wrong. She is shielded by her education and matrimony.

Meanwhile, the New York Post reported, “Coors stock surges 9% after backlash to Bud Light’s Dylan Mulvaney campaign.”

Heinerscheid is the Coors Saleswoman of the Year.

Tucker wrote, “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.”

Tucker hit on why this boycott hit so hard. People are tired of being shoved around by crybullies on the left. It is not just the pronouns, the lockdowns and the putdowns. The 21st century has seen a removal of our God-given rights in the name of some manufactured rights.

Consider gay marriage. In 2008, voters in California — the most leftist state in the union — voted to ban homosexual marriage in their state constitution. The Supreme Court promptly made homosexual marriage the law of the land by pretending the U.S. Constitution protects it. Nowhere in the Constitution is marriage mentioned. Freedom of religion is. But thanks to that unconstitutional ruling, states now force Christians to abandon their principles and accept homosexual marriage.

Or else. Colorado keeps suing a baker for not making a homosexual wedding cake.

Meanwhile, Congress is abridging free speech in the name of banning misinformation and hate speech. At the same time, we must call men women and women men as government officials amuse themselves as they push the nation through the looking glass.

How do you fight the power when your votes do not matter to the Supreme Court?

Righties have chosen beer.

Tootsie’s climactic moment came when Dustin Hoffman pulled off his Aunt Pearl wig on live TV and revealed he was a man, baby.

My guess is Mister Mulvaney will someday do the same — but only after he accumulates enough money to warrant a New York Times wedding announcement for his daughter in 2050.