Bud Light’s Trans-Wreck
I watched a torturous millennium-long interview with the brains behind the infamous Bud Light commercial: a privileged white Millennial woman named Karen Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid. I watched it, so others won’t have to. You’re welcome.
The interminable interview could have been shortened by deleting from the 55-minute video every time the self-involved Heinerscheid says “kind of” (59 times), “sort of” (55 times), “incredible” (9 times), “incredibly” (17 times), and “like” (130 times).
Heinerscheid began preparing for an illustrious career in corporate America at a very young age. Before arriving at Anheuser-Busch, California, native Heinerscheid attended the elite Groton School, a private and very expensive preparatory boarding school in Connecticut, following which she attended Harvard University for her undergraduate degree and then received her MBA at another Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Heinerscheid, vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch’s Bud Light, explained her job—as she understood it:
You know 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 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. So, I had this super clear mandate. It’s like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand, and what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what is, what does ‘evolve’ and ‘elevate’ mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone. It means having a campaign that’s truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different, and appeals to women and to men. And representation is … sort of the heart of evolution. You’ve got to see people who reflect you in the work, and we had this hangover. I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty kind of out-of-touch humor.
From photos available online, Heinerscheid seemed to enjoy fratty kinds of activities before she didn’t.
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With a super clear mandate and a super-duper salary, the socially insulated Heinerscheid concluded that nothing says evolution, elevation, inclusivity, representation, lightness, and brightness quite like Dylan Mulvaney, a homosexual, cross-dressing fetishist who has had scads of cosmetic surgery in a futile quest to look like a young woman or little girl from a children’s picture book.
Armed with her Wharton MBA, Heinerscheid sashayed into Anheuser-Busch’s corporate offices and declared “fratty” humor “out-of-touch” with Bud Light’s consumers. In the Upside Down where Heinerscheid lives and moves and has her being, a female impersonator in woman-face is more in touch with the sought-after customer base of drag queens who like to touch young children at story hours.
Since “inclusivity” and “representation” are all the evolutionary rage in the corridors of corporate America (not to mention government schools), maybe Bud Light’s next commercial will feature polyamorists, sibling lovers, zoophiles, sex workers, or sadomasochists. When Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Kitchen Aid, CeraVe, Crest, Oil of Olay, KIND Snacks, Instacart, and Ulta Beauty—all of whom have partnered with the creepy Mulvaney—evolve yet more, there’s a vast underworld of perversion from which to find currently excluded representatives.
For many in America, evolution, elevation, lightness, and brightness signify progress, growth, edification, improvement, or positive development. A surgically altered, cross-dressing man embodies none of these.
In addition to revealing her reasons for creating the Bud Light anti-commercial—that is, a commercial that loses customers—this interview reveals what passes for Deep Thoughts in today’s superficial and foolish culture.
Accompanied by distracting hand gestures and faux-earnestness conveying her “authenticity,” Heinerscheid expressed that family is important, her husband is “magnificent,” she wants her children to learn how to weather hardships and celebrate their “wins,” she appreciates her job promotion, and she adores women.
Her fawning interviewer asked Heinerscheid about her pet COVID project called “100 Women in 100 Days,” in which she asked women, “What’s in your worry box?” Heinerscheid chose two stories to tell from her project about her worried friends:
Like one of them was so amazing. She was this … corporate lawyer, and COVID hit. She took her son to a playground, and she saw a swastika on her son’s playground in her kind of, community in Connecticut. And she was like, ‘I actually cannot, I cannot do what I do every day. I’m gonna quit. She quit her corporate law job. She became an anti-hate activist, and now she has recently—since I closed the project—she’s run for Congress locally and won. But she’s amazing. I mean, they’re these like amazing women.
“This other woman, she was at a hedge fund. She quit during COVID, and she’s now a climate change startup because she’s like, ‘I actually can’t be stressed about money anymore. I’m stressed about the planet and my children, and that’s where I’m going to channel my energy.
I wonder if this woman who, like, “actually can’t be stressed about money” is married and, if so, what her husband’s salary is. As the nation learned from the Bud Light commercial, Heinerscheid is clearly in touch with the common man and woman.
Following the backlash against Anheuser-Busch, various news outlets have reported that no one in senior management was aware of Heinerscheid’s commercial debacle. Maybe that’s true, or maybe senior management is tossing the privileged white Karen under the bus to Woketopia. Either way, we know Heinerscheid will be A-OK. We know that because in her interview, she shared this Deep Thought that she learned during the lockdown in her $7.5 million dollar apartment near Central Park:
I just think making hard decisions, codifying this restlessness, and finding a way to connect to what makes you tick and your joy and then being purposeful about it that was the thing that was like electrifying to me.
Maybe, like her attorney and hedge fund pals, Heinerscheid will soon have more time on her hands to find her electrifying joy. And let’s hope she limits her evolutionary activities to the privacy of her home rather than polluting the public square. The rest of America has seen too much of Mr. Mulvaney already.
