Vivek Ramaswamy: Bud Light is alienating customer base with trans activist partnership
The GOP presidential candidate discusses Anheuser Busch and Nike’s promotion of Dylan Mulvaney.
Remember the "Bud Light Party" campaign during the 2016 election season? The beer behemoth paid outspoken left wing celebrities Amy Schumer and Seth Rogan to tip their hat to Democrats. The only person that ad would ever convince to crack open a cold one is Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Now the King of Beers is paying homage to the newest cultural zeitgeist by paying trans activist Dylan Mulvaney to prod grown men into dressing like Audrey Hepburn while drinking beer. For a drink that was once a blue-collar staple of middle America, this isn’t a winning sales strategy. It’s a way for the CEO to signal his virtue while alienating a customer base that is too afraid to say so out loud.
One of the goals of my candidacy for president of the United States is to close the gap between what people are willing to say behind closed doors versus what they say in public. In that spirit, here goes: Dylan Mulvaney might need mental health care, not endorsement deals.
The commemorative Bud Light can featuring TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney. (Dylan Mulvaney/Instagram)
More often than not, when someone identifies as a gender different from their biological sex that is a sign and a symptom that they are suffering from a mental illness. I reject the idea that it is somehow "humane" to affirm their confusion, rather than to actually help them. It’s inhumane.
This is simply stating a hard truth. Every serious leader should say so without apology. When they don’t, it reveals they are willing to lie in order to avoid criticism from Twitter or MSNBC. When CEOs, politicians and celebrities affirm people’s confusion, they are simply fueling the problem.
Here’s the reality: transgenderism is not a civil rights issue, it’s a social contagion. Psychological epidemics have been well documented for over 300 years – as my friend Jordan Peterson has rightly identified. Western culture is periodically consumed by social psychoses that grip certain groups into hysteria, particularly the vulnerable among us.
Not dissimilar to religious self-flagellation of the 14th century, genital mutilation is the new self-sacrifice to the false idol of the cult of gender ideology in America. Notable 20th-century examples have included multiple personality disorders, bulimia and self-harm through cutting. The recent explosion in the number of gender dysphoria clinics is all the evidence you need to know that transgenderism is simply the latest.
THE FUTURE OF WOMEN'S SPORTS IS AT RISK BECAUSE OF TRANSGENDER ATHLETES
In prior decades, social contagions disappeared over time because people became skeptical and eventually rational people said "enough is enough."
The difference today is that the left has turned transgenderism into an essential pillar of its ideological dogma and uses it as a cudgel to beat its political opponents into submission – by crying "bigot" at anyone who dares question this new cult.
Drew Barrymore interviewed Dylan Mulvaney on "The Drew Barrymore Show." (CBS)
The cult of gender ideology increasingly foists sexuality upon children ("drag queen story hour"), makes a mockery of women (can’t answer "what is a woman"), and undermines female sports (Lia Thomas and countless others) by creating a zero-sum game where men with mental health disorders dominate at the expense of women. Trans MMA fighter Fallon Fox beat her female opponent so severely she broke her skull.
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Back when I was growing up, we would call that violence against women. Now we call that a victory for trans rights.
But by hitching itself to the ever-growing alphabet soup of "queer rights," the trans movement has successfully wrapped itself in a veneer of legitimacy and shut down rational debate or reasonable criticism.
Here’s how you know its belief system relies on religion rather than logic. The gay civil rights movement was based on a foundational principle: the sex of the person you’re attracted to is hardwired at birth, even though there’s no gay gene. Yet the trans movement tells us that your own sex is entirely fluid over your life, even though there is a definitive sex chromosome. These two beliefs are impossible to espouse at the same time – yet the LGBTQIA+ cult demands that you embrace them simultaneously nonetheless.
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When this social contagion finally ends, those who stood up to it – from J.K. Rowling to Jordan Peterson – will be remembered as compassionate thought leaders who saved our culture from the cult, even as they are publicly flogged today.
Let’s abandon the farce that the "humane" thing to do is to affirm gender confusion, rather than to actually help those who suffer from it. That’s what it means to crack a cold hard truth.