With Senior Execs in the Dark, Storm Brews over Anheuser-Busch’s Trans Spokesman

“I’m a businesswoman, I had a really clear job to do when I took over Bud Light, and it was ‘This brand is in decline, it’s been in a decline for a really long time, and if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand there will be no future for Bud Light,’” vice president of Marketing for Anheuser-Busch, Alissa Heinerscheid, told the “Make Yourself At Home” podcast in March of this year.

The company’s shares promptly nosedived after an ill-fated marketing campaign featured spokesman Dylan Mulvaney, a male who identifies as female, on their flagship beer: Bud Light. Mulvaney’s face was cast on a special edition can of the beer and marketed the limited release via TikTok videos featuring the trans influencer in a bubble bath. On the heels of the announced partnership, shares of the company plummeted by five percent, the equivalent loss of $6.65 billion of their market value over the course of just six days.

The move ignited a firestorm of angry customers and calls to boycott the brand.

Jeff Fitter, owner of Case & Bucks bar in Barnhart, Missouri reported a drop of 40% in sales of Anheuser-Busch products.

“In Bud Light’s effort to be inclusive, they excluded almost everybody else, including their traditional audience,” he told Fox Business.

Popular country music stars Travis Tritt and John Rich also weighed in against the beer giant.

“Other artists who are deleting Anheuser-Busch products from their hospitality rider might not say so in public for fear of being ridiculed and cancelled. I have no such fear,” Tritt tweeted on April 5.

“In full disclosure, I was on a tour sponsored by Budweiser in the 90’s. That was when Anheuser-Busch was American owned. A great American company that later sold out to the Europeans and became unrecognizable to the American consumer. Such a shame,” he continued.

“I own a bar in downtown Nashville. Our number one selling beer up until a few days ago was what? Bud Light,” John Rich told Tucker Carlson. “We got cases and cases and cases of it sitting back there. But in the past several days you’re hard-pressed to find anyone ordering one. So as a business owner, I go, ‘Hey if you aren’t ordering it, we got to put something else in here.’ At the end of the day, that’s capitalism. That’s how it works.”

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was equally surprised by Anheuser-Busch’s move. “It is an amazing phenomenon how woke corporations have decided that their customers are idiots, that they look down on their customers,” he said on an episode of his podcast “Verdict” this week. “We’re seeing big business after big business embrace the radical left, embrace a left-wing agenda, in this case someone who’s transgender, put them forth as the spokesperson for Bud Light. When I saw this whole thing, my first thought was, ‘Have they ever met a typical Bud Light drinker?’”

Beer distributors and retailers across the American heartland and South have reportedly been wary of stocking Bud Light in the wake of customer backlash, according to one popular beer industry trade publication. Whether this trend continues or fades is yet to be seen. But perhaps the most shocking revelation is the emerging possibility that senior leadership of the Anheuser-Busch company may not have been aware or approved of the partnership.

Twitter user DC_Draino, aka Rogan O’Handley, reported that insiders at the company were as shocked by the marketing as many of their consumers.

“Scoop: Anheuser Busch insider tells me execs are angry at release of Dylan Mulvaney can. It wasn’t posted on any AB/BL social medias & the leading theory is that a Leftist manager secretly did it on their own to push trans agenda. … New PR statement expected. Possible lawsuit…” O’Handley alleged.

“No one at a senior level was aware this was happening,” an anonymous source told The Daily Wire. “Some low-level marketing staffer who helps manage the hundreds of influencer engagements they do must have thought it was no big deal. Obviously it was, and it’s a shame because they have a well-earned reputation for just being America’s beer — not a political company. It was a mistake.”

Mistake or not, Anheuser-Busch may need to resurrect the Bud Knight in order to recover their marketing appeal. In either case, the young drinkers they were attempting to lure will have to decide for themselves if they prefer to drink beer from a company who puts men dressed like women on their cans.