Beer has long been a part of our shared human experience. 

Because the safety of local fresh water supplies was always in question, our ancestors (even the youngest child) often drank weak beer instead of drawing from the local well, and monasteries often brewed beers that were notable for both their taste and potency. Of course, this beer-making expertise crossed the ocean to the American colonies, and it is not stretching the point to suggest that our revolt against British rule was largely fomented—or is that fermented?—in taverns throughout the original thirteen colonies.

So perhaps it should not be a surprise that another revolt roiling America today revolves around beer.

In an effort to become a more Woke brew that will appeal to a younger audience of beer drinkers, the marketing experts at Bud Light recently decided that the time was right to feature a transsexual social influencer in their brand advertising campaign and create a special beer can to celebrate his conversion from a he to a she.

Has this marketing initiative been a success at selling beer? The early indications are that it has not. Sales of Bud Light have apparently cratered in many regions over the past couple of weeks, and the stock value of Anheuser-Busch has quickly dropped by billions of dollars. There is, of course, no way of knowing whether these declines will persist or abate, but it is certain this has prompted a national conversation about the many corporate partnerships that have sprung up with the LBGTQ community in recent years.

All of this is colliding with other white-hot discussions regarding those who claim to be transsexual women, many of whom are now entering women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and competitive sports. Many wonder why, if a penis no longer makes you makes you man, make-up, high heels, a sparkly purse will magically make you a woman. Whether we are talking about musclebound men setting performance records at women’s sports competitions or fathers worrying about their ten year old daughters sharing a restroom with a dude in a dress, the visibility of men who are now women—and, to a lesser extent, women who are now men—has never been higher in American society.

Running right alongside the aforementioned discussions are the determined efforts of many educators, librarians, and school boards to introduce transgender ideology into primary and secondary schools, where children and adolescents are now encouraged to “transition” without their parents’ knowledge or consent. 

Classroom materials, activities, and discussions that only a decade or so ago would have prompted a visit from the local police are now deemed both necessary and proper, and anyone who questions this abrupt shift is now considered to be transphobic and will be subjected to endless social media shaming.  Apparently children who are not allowed to choose their own bedtimes are somehow perfectly capable of choosing their own gender, and parental judgment and guidance is now deemed oppression and hatred by those on the forefront of encouraging boys to don dresses and girls to wear chest binders.

Just to add yet another twist to this twisty attempt to abrogate parental rights is the ongoing campaign to introduce Drag Queens to our nation’s young in schools and elsewhere. To express any concern or shock over the spectacle of middle-aged men in outlandish make-up, wigs, and attire prancing in front of five year olds is now not a right granted to parents—exactly the opposite, in fact. Your worries are robbing your friendly neighborhood Drag Queen of his/her right to express themselves to a captive—but likely completely befuddled—audience of goggle-eyed minors.

Which brings us back to beer.

Effective marketing is all about understanding your customers, and it seems Bud Light doesn’t understand its drinkers. Most customers who are enjoying a beer after a hard day at work or at a backyard barbecue, corner bar, or ballgame are probably not interested in enlisting as warriors in a corporately-sponsored transgendered army. Whether one wishes to label this as transphobia or a comfort with traditional norms and values, the harsh reality is that Uncle Dave is unlikely to be grilling up some Brats while wearing a feather boa and false eyelashes. In fact, Uncle Dave, while he is putting everybody’s lunches on paper plates, might also be wondering about what his niece or nephew is telling him about the books in their school library, the characters they are watching on the Disney Channel, or what their 3rd grade teacher told them about their personal lives that day in class.

Beer has, sometimes to our great regret (the dreaded “beer googles”), played a key role in the continued propagation of our species because it lowers personal inhibitions and judgment when consumed. However, it must be remembered that, not so long ago, beer’s consumers still typically possessed some inhibitions that needed to be lowered to make sexual intercourse possible. Today’s world without inhibitions—one where we are permanently drunk on our own unfettered physical desires—is one where the constraints of decency and decorum are abandoned, so the caring and intimacy that are the foundation’s of a healthy and functioning society are no longer possible.

In too many cases today we do not see young people forming caring relationships; they are much more like hit and run accidents that leave multiple victims in their wake.

No country can long survive the crazed onslaught of those who live their lives without boundaries, responsibility, or accountability. Any nation that is untethered from all moral restraint, personal standards of conduct, and concerns about the consequences of individual actions is one where sexual violence becomes normalized, pregnant women are callously abandoned by the fathers of their children, perversity and cruelty becomes popular entertainment, and children are left unprotected from the basest and most neglectful of human behavior—which is, unsurprisingly, exactly where our society is right now. 

We are fortunate to still have a significant base of hardworking and emotionally healthy people in America who keep the wheels turning and continue to guard our increasingly dysfunctional nation from harm. However, we are also saddled with a significant strata of indolent and parasitic elites who trade off the reputations of our crumbling institutions of higher education, law, medicine, technology, journalism, business, and finance in order to make loads of money for themselves and exert undeserved power over those who do not agree with their sexual agenda for America—which goes far to explain the current tensions between beer drinkers and beer marketers.

Today’s dissent about Bud Light’s celebration of transgenderism is less about our tolerance or support for gender fluidity and more about a broad and deeply felt concern among many Americans—those who do the hard work, pay their taxes, and try to protect their children and families from harm—that our nation has slid into a perverse libertinism, one that denigrates and dismisses those who are worried about the role models being presented to impressionable children and adolescents today. 

This episode will, of course, turn into another yet another partisan and unproductive exercise in name calling and unsupported accusations, but one has to wonder if beer has once again provided the fuel for a revolution against leaders who are unconnected, uncaring, and unconcerned with the rage of those whom they dismiss as mere rabble that must be crushed and silenced.