'Rolling Over in Their Grave': Anheuser-Busch Heir Says What Ancestors Would Think of Bud Light's Mulvaney Partnership
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
Billy Busch is going to need a new chapter for his book.
The heir to the Anheuser-Busch family might be making the rounds plugging his new history of the legendary brewing dynasty, but the shadow of Bud Light’s spectacular catastrophe this year is following right on his heels.
And in a fiery interview with liberals on the website TMZ, Busch made it crystal clear how his ancestors would have viewed the disaster.
Busch (no relation to the former “Entertainment Tonight” host Billy Bush) was doing the interview to promote “Family Reigns: The Extraordinary Rise and Epic Fall of an American Dynasty,” his insider’s account of the Anheuser-Busch clan and the product that made it famous.
“Busch’s unique upbringing within the Anheuser-Busch empire provided him with a perspective few could comprehend,” as KTVI in St. Louis reported in a short piece on the book.
And it turns out he has a perspective that not only was not appreciated by the liberals at TMZ, but they even had trouble comprehending what, to normal people, would be a perfectly understandable statement.
Harvey Levin, host of the “TMZ Live” podcast, kicked off the interview by asking Busch’s opinions about Bud Light and its Dylan Mulvaney disaster.
Busch didn’t pull any punches.
“I think my family, my ancestors would — are — rolling over in their graves,” Busch said. “They were very patriotic. They loved this country and what it stood for. They believed that transgender, gays, that sort of thing, was all a very personal issue.
“They loved this country because it is a free country and people are allowed to do what they want. But it was never meant to be on a beer can, and never meant to be pushed in people’s faces. So they would have, they would have never marketed their brands that way.
“As you know, AB was one of the greatest marketers ever in any business, and they were incredible with what they came out with.
“The Clydesdales, the frogs, the lizards, all the different promotions they had, all the different advertising they had, and the last thing they would have done was to get as controversial … as InBev has with Dylan Mulvaney advertising.”
Check out the interview below:
There is literally nothing anyone sensible could disagree with about those words. And it’s a rock-solid bet that every man and woman whose paycheck depends on Bud Light wishes the company had never even heard the name “Dylan Mulvaney” at this point, given that former Bud Light fans have abandoned the brand in droves.
But it didn’t sit well with Levin, who claimed the beer drinkers who’ve turned to alternative beers, such as Modelo Especial (which has dethroned Bud Light as the nation’s top brand) are engaged in “prejudice.”
“I remember my dad telling me stories that there were bars in L.A. that used to have signs that said ‘no dogs, no Jews.’ So there’s been a history of prejudice in the country people get over certain things,” he said.
“It’s happened to Jews, it’s happened to black people. It’s happened to gay people, and it’s happening to transgender people.”
Please. Can we leave the Jews and black Americans out of it for a bit? Even a liberal should know those arguments don’t apply.
There is nothing “happening” to “transgender people.” What’s happening is that a lifestyle that until the last decade was virtually unheard of has suddenly exploded into the popular media, driven by and driving a social contagion that’s about as real as Beatlemania, pet rocks, mood rings, big-hair arena bands, Beanie Babies or the Macarena were in decades past.
But this time, it’s not just the business of retail sales, there’s political power involved, too.
Now, of course, those previous fads like the very picture of innocence, being as they didn’t involve mutilating the genitals of children, or the breasts of pubescent girls, or pumping confused boys and girls full puberty blockers and hormone interventions that are going to screw up their bodies for the remainder of their human existence.
But the modern left is nothing if not committed — to using other people’s lives to make a point.
The back and forth in the interview pretty much summed up the impasse right now between the modern left and anyone with common sense — with Levin claiming that Busch was standing for intolerance, while Busch simply stated the facts.
“I think there are just so few transgenders, with that identity, that, to put that on the majority of people that don’t identify as that, their beer can, who drink that, I that is a bad move on the part of InBev. I really do.”
Levin wasn’t giving up: “What you’re saying is, that the majority of people don’t identify, and don’t want it in their face, that’s prejudice! That’s what prejudice is!”
That’s what leftist arguments are reduced to in 2023: If you don’t want something in your face you don’t agree with, it’s prejudice.
Busch deserves credit for at least giving it a 10-minute effort to explain that American beer drinkers, in the vast, vast majority, just want to drink beer — without associating themselves with the leftist cause celebre.
He especially deserves the credit because it wasn’t like this was a social call in the first place. He was on TMZ for a reason that had nothing to do with Dylan Mulvaney.
“I thought we were going to talk about my book,” he said. “Here was are talking about the politics of transgenderism.”
“I happen to believe that that majority of people that drink Bud Light, or that used to drink Bud Light, do not identify with transgender people. Not because they are prejudiced against that.
“They look at it as a sexual orientation that they don’t want to be … They don’t want their beer advertised by that, and be a part of that.
“To me, it doesn’t make any sense that Bud Light would have advertised in that way.
“I just don’t think it makes any sense.”
It doesn’t make any sense — not to normal people.
But that’s a topic for a whole book by itself. If Billy Busch writes it, he knows one interview to skip.
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