April 15, 2023

A couple of weeks ago, millions of Americans awoke to news that Bud Light had sponsored Dylan Mulvaney, a man who has become famous by pretending to be a ditzy teenage girl.  Suddenly, if you bought a Bud Light, you found yourself financing and promoting the radical transgender ideology that demands that chemical castration and surgical mutilation be normalized in order to affirm the delusions harbored by thousands of gender-dysphoric children and adults across America.

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On the surface, it was a move so boneheaded that many wondered if it was an April Fools gag, given the timing.  But it was genuine, with Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, initially defending the business partnership with Mulvaney.

While those responsible for it probably expected some conservative backlash, the bipartisan response has been overwhelming and brand-shattering, with sales falling dramatically and Anheuser-Busch having shed around $24 billion in market capitalization over just 13 days.

What’s important to understand is that the people overseeing this marketing effort were not trying to sell more beer.  Earning greater market share and profit by satisfying and attracting customers may have been central to the corporate incentive structure when America was an ascendant economic power, but the corporate incentives have changed.

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“The business of America is business,” said President Calvin Coolidge.  But today, the business of America is wokeness, and neither the American people nor the global marketplace is lining up to buy it any more than people have lined up to buy Bud Light these past weeks.

Anheuser-Busch cannot simply try to grow its brand by becoming more appealing to their customer base in today’s world, you see, without first paying tribute to the political commissars who are directing market capital.  And the only way it can do that is by signaling its corporate allegiance to their political pursuits.

Too many people scoffed at the warnings about the danger of the social credit system in communist China, which punishes individuals for a lack of fealty to the ideological ambitions of the government.  Western politicians and corporations apparently thought that too good an idea to not import it, so social credit scoring is now a reality in America.  Here, it’s taken the shape of the “corporate equality index,” overseen by the Human Rights Campaign, which is the “largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world.”

The world’s most influential portfolio managers are directing billions toward corporations that they deem worthy of investment on the basis of that score, which is determined by their level of commitment to far-left organizations like Black Lives Matter, for example, or their having a nonbinary lesbian on the board of directors, or their proud partnership with a man who pretends he’s a little girl.

That’s the ugly truth in this.  Anheuser-Busch was simply reacting to incentives, as all individuals and corporations do.  The reason that these incentives have become twisted is because the game has been rigged by companies like BlackRock and State Street, such that having a good social credit score is needed just to get a seat at the table at which these politicians and leviathan investment firms are feeding woke corporations the billions upon billions of dollars that we investors gave them.   

Of course, we don’t invest money with firms like BlackRock to advance wokeness.  We invest that money to achieve the best possible financial return on our investment.  That means investing in the very best opportunities available.  This is impossible when investment firms like BlackRock prioritize wokeness over value, efficiency, and profit.