The Dylan Mulvaney wars establish that virtue signaling and cancel culture are alive and well on the political right

A lot of goofy YouTubers would have to get jobs if not for the Wokish excesses they bemoan, in this case a poorly chosen but at least identifiable target

The entire reason I have complained about the current amped-up generation of trans-identifying people is because some of the things these people do and agitate for—often with full legal sanctioning, sometimes without—affect the lives of others in plainly unjust ways, sometimes violently and with the victims almost always women, unless gunplay is involved.

If a male is in a female-only athletic competition, this is an unfair circumstance for the females. This is a categorical fact; social arsonists, grifters, the unwell, and brainwashed “liberals” flooding the media with baroque justifications and nonsensical cries of “await the science!” have moved this immovable needle not an angstrom. I’ll change my mind on this when it can be shown that, say, even ten percent of straight married women could prevail in a fair physical fight against their husbands. (I may have to exclude from this analysis trophy wives from Texas who marry octogenarians.)

So, no transters in female sports.

If a male calling himself a female is in a female-only space like a girls’ or women’s locker room and waggling his junk around like any other male lecher, this is not just clearly wrong but a criminal act, at least in non-gaslit minds. And if the female-only space is a jail or a prison and a convicted male rapist calling himself a woman—or any male, really—is raping female inmates, this is really, really bad. (Right?)

So, no transters in places for girls or women, especially jails, prisons, and other aggregations of the especially vulnerable.

And if a disproportionate number of trans-identifying persons (including “non-binary” people) are newly committing a disproportionate share of America’s obligatory pile of mass murders, this too is not okay; it should especially enrage the gun-hating left, but “mysteriously” does not. (Most of those people, however much they do despise guns in their hearts, are also grifters at this stage. See also: Climate. See also: Race. See also…) The FBI is not allowing the release of the (transgender) Nashville shooter’s manifesto, an odd stance given the public’s general hankering for such documents. A group of stalwart, modestly empowered citizens could, and should, take out the Hoover Building with a drone strike, and they shouldn’t wait until this becomes a genuine organizational and procedural hassle.

Some of you want to take guns away from people with MAGA hats whether they are sane or not, and also want “red flag” laws; the current manifestation of trans people is undeniably a shambling bag of psychiatric mayhem, even if not all of them are prone to violence. When George Soros finally croaks, some of the momentum for this aspect of the real disruptions trans-identifying people—who, let’s face it, are mostly mentally unstable males who have only seized on their identities for prurient reasons—cause.

So, no transters with firearms.

If, on the other hand—and “Just how many fucking hands do we* have?” is a fair question this many paragraphs in—a male calling himself a woman is suddenly associated with Bud Light, this has no palpable consequence on women anywhere. (The greater phenomenon of tiny males with narrow hips passing themselves off as women is causing a lot of females with body dysmorphia pain, but that’s a different concern.) Dylan Mulvaney has gone from a particularly queeny gay guy to being a painfully theatrical but harmless drag queen, but his endorsement by Anheuser-Busch and his mug on the nation’s top-selling beer threw the political right into an uncommonly energetic tizzy.

As some have heard, the face of Mulvaney, a transwoman influencer who really does have a burlesque sort of charm to him, recently appeared on a large number of Bud Light cans, many of which were destroyed by bullets in videos proudly uploaded to the Web by conservative celebrities such as Kid Rock (an underrated piano player).

I was surprised when the outrage progressed from scattered noise to an organized boycott. In the three weeks since Bud Light started its campaign, its sales have plummeted 17 percent. That’s staggering: For every seven cans being consumed or shot at before April, only a six-pack is disappearing now.

Bud Light Vice President of Jubilantly Fucked-Up Marketing Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid, now on a leave of absence that will probably include a stop in Davos, became a target of derision for wanting to steer Bud Light away from being a “frat boy” brand.

Heinerscheid’s claims about the brand flagging are counterfactual, as Bud Light has been outselling all other brands in the United States for years. The Mulvaney promotion appears to have been just one more typical contemporary gambit; it’s in the spirit of HOKA framing a blustering, lying, evil fat woman who cannot cover a single mile in under fifteen minutes as a fitness icon, but in theory not as harmful.

Oddly, though, it was harmful to Bud Light’s sales, whereas HOKA’s Wokistries haven’t hurt its brand at all. It’s not just that heavy beer drinkers are smarter, more discerning consumers than runners; it’s that sometimes, a gambit is a gamble. I think most people are surprised how much the ruckus around Mulvaney has driven down sales.

Perhaps people are eager to “make a difference” because there is little or nothing everyday consumers can do about schools, colleges, or the Olympics letting males compete as females, or about women getting raped in prisons. Withholding their money is useless there, and bringing an AR-15 to a swim meet and shooting it into the air to express displeasure with trans policies isn’t going to get anyone far.

In any case, Bud Light responded to the backlash with a “cure is worse than the disease” commercial that, on YouTube, currently has 3.8 million views and 1,400 likes for a dismal likes-to-views ratio of 1 in 2,714. It would difficult, maybe impossible, to not laugh while viewing it even without knowing the reason for its release.

I would not waste time, however, praying for the health and safety of Anheuser-Busch. The company is partnered with the World Economic Forum, which means it made its Mulvanizing move—picking a blockhead like Heinerscheid on purpose as its architect—to keep its ESG score appropriately high. The company will not be allowed to fall far, even should the bleak momentum of its Bud Light brand persist.

I have my own Bud Light story, which of necessity is old because I haven’t had any alcohol to drink in almost six and a half years. I am reserving it for subscribers, because it strays from the main point and strikes me as the kind of watery anecdote most others would be inclined to skip.

In the summer of 2006, I was living, not neatly, in Roanoke, Virginia (actually, a tiny town next door called Vinton). I had moved there into a one-bedroom apartment there Florida in the spring with some money saved, and was busy working as a freelance textbook copy editor when I was not drinking. By July, I was drinking for weeks on end.

Anyone who has ever achieved a respectable level of alcoholic drinking knows that, at a certain point of tolerance, regular beer, or really anything not at least as strong as wine, is all but pointless. It is impossible for someone who can walk and talk at a blood-alcohol level of 0.40—not very well, but better than you might believe—to become blackout drunk drinking any sort of beer alone. All that happens is bloating, constant pissing, and a serious but still-insufficient buzz.

Nevertheless, my drinking mechanics were such at the time that I often opted for beer over liquor. Virginia at the time had state-run liquor stores, and I was close to a mile from the nearest one, whereas an Exxon station peddling beer was about six-tenths of a mile away. I was also occasionally leery, in spite of how I was living, of having a massive supply of vodka around with no one to watch me closely, and figured there was only so much trouble I would get in with beer.

One morning I woke up at around 6:15 on the couch, still half in the bag from the night before. I had watched The 40-Year-Old Virgin the previous evening, on a DVD mailed to me by Netflix, but would have to watch it again because beer had compromised my memory of some of the critical plot elements. For this task, I required more beer, and noticed that I appeared to be out.

As a frequent patron of the 24-hour Exxon, I was aware that the clerk shifts at this location were 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. This was helpful to know so that I didn’t try to buy a case of beer from the same clerk twice in the same day; they might not care about that shit in most places, but in that part of Virginia you run into a lot of purse-lipped Bible-thumpers eager to not sell to a swaggering tosspot who only wants to poison himself a bit more.

I got myself to the Exxon before 7 a.m. to get a twelve-pack, knowing I would have to go back for more later. And I remember always buying Bud Light because it was the first thing I saw in the cooler and was no more discriminating than a 14-year-old when it came to beer. I was doing a fair amount of walking at this time, often in an expansive graveyard near my apartment where I would chat up the ladies underground and stare lovingly through a Bud Light buzz at the Blue Ridge Mountains, so making multiple beer-runs a day didn’t trouble me; hell, all those daily beer-curls and walking was probably about the same as running 10 miles a day and staying sober.

On this fine July day, I was done with the beer by around 10 a.m. I was still practically sober, so I wandered back to the Exxon for another dozen beers. In case the clerk thought I was already drunk, I bought a small bag of Lays potato chips to dissolve this perception. But as usual, my purchase was unfettered by glares or other complications.

I finished this twelve-pack by around 2 p.m., feeling drunk but not off-balance. I considered, briefly, not going back to the Exxon to buy a twelve-pack from the third person to work that register there that day. But I had nothing better to do, so off I went again. I was very friendly with all the dogs along this route on days I got shitfaced because they got to see me at least six times, and I was often a different version of the same genially wayward ape.

I once more secured my purchase without interference or even concern, and this time I was done by around 8 p.m. I was now drunk, but not blackout drunk, because I remember walking over to the cemetery to watch the sun set, and thinking that having 36 beers in me while it was still light out was a sign I should probably consider some changes.

Good think Dylan Mulvaney didn’t endorse Budweiser or Michelob, or else I would have had to either keep this story to myself or lie about the brand. But Bud Light it was.

By the way, they had cases of Bud Light at this Exxon was well as twelve-packs, but I didn’t want to be seen lugging as whole case up beer up the road by myself in broad daylight; it made more sense, I guess, to be seen continually shuttling rwelve-packs along the same street multiple times a day.