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July 6, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
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Trump Court Victories Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 615
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Hi everyone, this is Brandon Gill.
I'm Dinesh's son-in-law.
If you're a regular listener to the Dinesh D'Souza podcast, you might have heard me in the past.
I'm the founder and editor-in-chief of an America First news outlet called DC Inquirer, which I highly encourage you to read.
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You can also follow me on Twitter at RealBrandonGill.
And you can find me on Facebook and Instagram.
So I write down a lot of my thoughts on politics and current events there.
So find me there.
And I'm hosting the podcast this week.
It's been a lot of fun.
We've talked about George Soros and the war in Ukraine.
And now today we're going to be diving into the Supreme Court decisions that are big wins.
We'll speak with Josh Hammer, editor-at-large of Newsweek, about these decisions.
So let's get started.
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The Supreme Court just ended its 2022-2023 term with a bang, three monumental conservative victories.
Biden's student loan forgiveness scheme was slapped down.
The court ruled the government can't coerce individuals into speech that violates their religious convictions.
And of course, they eliminated one of the most egregious examples of systematic institutional racism still surviving in the U.S. That's affirmative action.
And all this is on top of conservative wins last term when the Supreme Court strengthened the Second Amendment in a right to carry case And of course, whenever they struck down Roe v.
Wade. These are historic wins for conservatives that will impact our legal system for decades.
And they are, of course, attributable to President Trump, whose three Supreme Court justices, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh delivered the wins.
When it really mattered, Trump's picks pulled through, and that's a big deal.
President Trump deserves sole credit for that.
The reason the past two years have been so enjoyable, so refreshing, is that major Supreme Court wins are something new for conservatives.
For the past several decades, the court could only be described as center-left at best, if not far-left at times.
Conservatives have become accustomed to being disappointed by the courts.
It was just what we expected.
Why is that?
We've had several Republican presidents and lots of court nominations.
So let's take a look back at how they went and compare past Republican Supreme Court nominees to President Trump's.
While the last Republican president prior to Trump, George W. Bush, appointed two Supreme Court judges.
Of those two, one of them, John Roberts, has been considered a swing vote for the past decade.
You might remember him best for his activist work in 2012 where he rewrote the Affordable Care Act to give us Obamacare.
And for that alone, we should consider him an abject failure.
Bush's second pick was Samuel Alito.
He's been a winner.
He's consistently been a conservative leader on the court.
But if we're judging Bush's record, it's worth pointing out one caveat.
Alito was Bush's second choice.
His top preference was a woman named Harriet Myers.
She would have undoubtedly been far more liberal specifically on issues like abortion and affirmative action.
Her nomination was such a humiliating disaster that Bush had to withdraw it.
So George Bush in his eight years as president nominated two justices, only one of which was a reliable conservative, and even he was Bush's backup choice.
The 50% batting average, not good.
So what about his father, George H.W. Bush?
He also got two Supreme Court justices, and they were replacements for very liberal judges Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan.
That means President Bush Sr.
had an historic opportunity to massively reshape the court's ideology.
His first nominee, Clarence Thomas, of course, was a huge success.
He was instrumental in the affirmative action case last week, and he's been an all-around great justice, a great conservative leader.
And Bush deserves credit for sticking with Thomas through then-Senator Joe Biden's egregiously racist attacks against him.
But his other pick was David Souter, who was an unmitigated disaster.
Additionally, it's worth noting that when he was president, George Bush Sr.
also appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor to a U.S. district court in New York.
She was obviously later tapped as one of Obama's two Supreme Court picks.
In other words, Bush Sr.
played a key role in the career progression of one of the most radically left-wing Supreme Court activist judges in our history.
So Bush Sr.
also had a 50-50 record with the additional mark against him for aiding and abetting Sotomayor's rise to power.
Even Reagan Supreme Court justices were a mixed bag.
He appointed Sandra Day O'Connor, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy.
Of those, only two Scalia and Rehnquist could be considered reliably conservative.
Scalia was one of the greatest Supreme Court justices we've had in modern history.
But Anthony Kennedy, who was supposed to be a conservative, ended up being a swing vote and pushed the court to the left on most social issues.
And O'Connor was instrumental in expanding abortion in the U.S. The point of saying all this is that Republicans have historically had a terrible record of Supreme Court picks.
Since the beginning of Ronald Reagan's first term until Trump was elected, 12 Supreme Court vacancies were filled.
Of those 12, Republicans filled 8.
Democrats only filled 4.
That's two-thirds of Supreme Court vacancies in the 40 years leading up to Trump.
During that time, we should have had decisive victories on nearly every single major issue, but we didn't.
So when conservatives say President Trump gave us major wins on the Supreme Court, that's a big deal.
No other Republican president has been able to reshape the Supreme Court like Trump did.
In fact, based on the last few years Supreme Court wins alone, Donald Trump is one of the most effective conservative presidents in our history.
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Alright, we're back.
I'm Brandon Gill filling in for Dinesh this week on the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
We've been talking a lot about the Supreme Court and some really landmark rulings that we've seen over the past couple weeks.
And I've got Josh Hammer with us.
Josh is the senior editor of Largent Newsweek.
He's the host of the Josh Hammer Show podcast that I encourage you guys to check out.
And he's also a constitutional attorney by background.
He follows the court very closely.
He's a great legal thinker, and we're glad to have him on the show.
So thanks for coming, Josh. Brandon, you bet.
It's been a great week at the court.
I'm excited to unpack it with you.
Yeah, so let's start with this affirmative action case.
I think most people know what affirmative action is.
It's been a part of our political debate, really, for 40 years.
But help us understand a little bit of the background on this case specifically and what the ruling was.
Brandon, I actually just got chills down my spine when you asked that question because I know the man personally who engineered this litigation.
His name was Will Concevoy.
He passed away over the past year from brain cancer.
He passed away far too young.
He was a former clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Will is a brilliant constitutional attorney.
He co-founded a firm that still is in existence in Arlington, Virginia called Concevoy McCarthy.
This was his baby.
Will Concevoy quarterbacked this whole litigation along with Ed Bloom, who is the head of Students for Fair Admissions, which was the plaintiff organization in these twin consolidated cases out of Harvard and University of North Carolina.
My own former law school lecturer and one of my closest friends in the world, a man by the name of Adam Mortara, was the trial lawyer on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions in the Harvard litigation where he was able to kind of get Harvard via discovery to kind of show the world how structurally biased their admissions programs were against Asian Americans in particular there.
So this really was the brainchild of perhaps those three men in particular, Will Consway, Ed Bloom, and Adam Mortara, kind of came to fruition finally when the court finally, as they do, they grant search warrants.
You need four votes of the nine justices to actually vote to hear a case.
But the broader context, Brandon, is that affirmative action has been one of the white whales of the conservative legal movement for a very long time.
I joined the Federal Society when I started on law school campus at the University of Chicago back in fall of 2013, and I think back to that time, and I can tell you that after overturning Roe v.
Wade, which always was the white whale of all white whales, Affirmative action very well might have been next.
I mean, it is very, very high on the list of conservative legal movement priorities.
The Supreme Court first legitimized this in a 1978 case called Bakke at the University of California.
They re-legitimized it.
They tweaked the formula a little bit in a woefully misguided 2003 case out of the University of Michigan called Grutter.
And they've finally done it.
So that's the broader backdrop here.
Right. One of the interesting things about this is how unpopular affirmative action has been.
Even in California, left-leaning California, it's been put to a ballot twice and voted down.
But I want to read a couple lines from the opinion, and maybe you can unpack it and help us understand the subject here.
These are actually lines from Justice Jackson, because the logic from the other side seems to be pretty simple.
There are disparities in outcomes amongst races.
Therefore, institutional racism exists.
It doesn't really seem to be more complicated than that.
Some of her opinion reads like it's from a critical race theory textbook or like a first-year college student essay.
I mean, it's astounding that this is the logic, but I just want to read it.
The way out of this morass for all of us—this is Judge Jackson— Is to stare at racial disparity unblinkingly and then do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together, collectively striving to achieve true equality for all Americans.
It's kind of an argument based on platitudes, it seems.
But help us understand what the response was from Clarence Thomas and the rest of the conservative side of the court.
First of all, Brandon, I would normally hesitate before I say what I'm about to say because I think a lot of people would then call me a racist.
But I feel like I'm on solid ground here for saying that Ketanji Brown Jackson was explicitly and overtly by Joe Biden's own words an affirmative action pick to the United States Supreme Court.
He literally said he wanted to pick a black woman.
So, you know, if his pick did not produce writings along the lines of which you did not read, you know, that would be a little odd, right?
Because that, after all, is the exact reason that she sits in her very high perch to begin with there.
But very hard to kind of think about the various...
You know, spouts of platitudes like you just said.
It sounds a lot like Ibram X. Kendi, doesn't it?
I mean, it sounds a lot like his famous or I should say infamous exhortation that the remedy to past discrimination is current discrimination and the remedy to current discrimination is future discrimination.
It's this whole, whole, whole, absolutely toxic, race-conscious, racial deterministic worldview.
And, you know, frankly...
As the majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and, more specifically, the magisterial concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas explain at great length, it is that race-conscious, racial-deterministic worldview that was espoused by the likes of John C. Calhoun.
In the antebellum South, you know, John C. Calhoun, a virulent racist himself who famously described the peculiar institution of slavery as a positive good.
That worldview was also espoused by people like the vehement racist Justice Roger Taney, who gave us the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which infamously and horrifically, erroneously held in a totally botched holding that black Americans never were nor never could be citizens.
That, ironically, is the race We're good to go.
Is that the Declaration of Independence and the 14th Amendment's Eagle Protection Clause specifically call for a colorblind society, for a colorblind rule of law, a colorblind political system, legal system, and judicial system.
And there is no one better in America, Brandon, who understands that.
And the greatest living American himself, that is Justice Clarence Thomas, the man who grew up dirt poor, dirt poor in the Jim Crow, segregated South.
English was not even his first language, who has overcome all the obstacles and has risen to the absolute pinnacle of his profession.
And he just tears Ketanji Brown Jackson a new one in his concurrence here.
I mean, he takes the argument head on.
You basically see this zero sum, only one side can prevail dueling visions.
You have the colorblind vision, which is the vision of Martin Luther King Jr., judge me not by the color of my skin, but by the content of my character.
And then you have this John C. Calhoun, Ibram X. Kendi opinion.
That is a dueling clash of worldviews there.
And I'm very happy, obviously, to kind of tell you that the correct view, the authentic view of the American founding and the American constitutional regime was the one that prevailed.
Right, and I think you're exactly right.
And I want to read the last...
It was a phenomenal opinion, but this was particularly moving.
He says, While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out endearing hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.
I think what you were saying is right.
There's this two radically different opposing worldviews.
It's not just about how do college admissions work.
It's about what does it mean to be American?
What does it mean to be equal before the law?
What is equality?
There was so much more in this than just admissions.
It was about What is our, what is America?
Yeah, no, totally. Look, I mean, I think, you know, I mentioned my friend Adam Martara, who was the trial lawyer for Students for Fair Admission.
You know, he tweeted about...
And Adam Mortar, I should clarify, clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas years ago and is very much still close with the whole Thomas-Clerk family.
He tweeted out a screenshot of that very paragraph that you just read on the day that the opinion came out, and his caption for the tweet was, this should be required reading for every civics middle school or high school student in America.
Because, again, that's not coming from someone who didn't lead that life.
I mean, again, Clarence Thomas led that life.
rural Georgia, Jim Crow segregated South, had a horrible childhood and has reached the pinnacle of his profession.
He has truly, this is kind of a cliche thing to say, but he has genuinely, truly lived the American dream.
And the American dream is one of true colorblind equality.
Again, America, I'll be the very first to admit, obviously has not done a perfect job of living up to its ideals, but we genuinely have tried over and over and over again to align current actual practice with those ideals.
That toll took the form of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans who slaughtered their fellow Americans in the form of the Civil War.
People talk about reparations.
You know, that was a reparation in and of itself, was the actual death toll of Americans slaughtering each other, brother-killing brother, horrific stuff there.
In the form of the Civil War, obviously the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, various other constitutional amendments, we have always, always strived towards what our preamble calls a more perfect union.
And, you know, it's just beautiful stuff from Clarence Thomas there.
I mean, I'm obviously very biased when it comes to this, but I thought that his concurrence just totally destroyed Kataji Brown Jackson's dissent.
You know, it fundamentally is sad.
I guess that's the final thing I'll say. I think it's just sad that the modern left in America, which once was actually liberal, not this illiberal, wokest, intersectional leftism, it's sad that the modern left has gotten to this point where they are openly and explicitly defending The use of race when it comes to our legal paradigms to our public policy.
I mean, the most devastating line of Chief Justice Roberts' majority opinion is that he cites Brown v.
Board of Education, which would famously overturn the Plessy v.
Ferguson line about separate but equal.
And Chief Justice Roberts says, you know, Brown said that Plessy v.
Ferguson's separate but equal is here, there, and everywhere wrong.
Well, the dissenting opinion says it depends.
That's pretty devastating stuff.
Right. And I couldn't agree more.
I think whenever we're thinking about how these are two very ingrained opposing views of how our society is structured, I think of Harvard's response here.
And maybe I'm a bit cynical, but...
Affirmative action is something that has been at the core of admissions for most, not just elite colleges, but most colleges across the country.
It's something that they advertise.
I mean, go on a walking tour of any college and your guide is going to tell you about, you know, we only have 30% of the college is white.
I mean, this is who they are, how they advertise themselves.
I'm a bit skeptical that just because of this ruling, that Harvard and these other schools are going to all of a sudden be totally race-blind.
I want to read Harvard's response.
Of course, they said we're going to follow the law, we're going to follow the rulings, but they also said, quote, No part of what makes us who we are could ever be irrelevant.
They also talk about how diversity is going to be a big part of admissions going forward still.
And I guess it raises the question of there are different ways to do affirmative action.
You can have explicit race-based quotas.
You can have race be one part of a holistic process.
There are all kinds of ways that you can obfuscate what you're actually trying to achieve with this, which is ultimately a race-based quota.
So Help us understand, one, where do we go from here?
I mean, what's the next battle?
Am I being too cynical and saying that these colleges are not going to follow at least the spirit of the ruling?
And if so, where do we go?
You're asking the right question.
There's no such thing as too cynical when it comes to various leftist woke institutions' attempts to get around this right-of-center court's holdings on this and various other issues as well, I might add.
So, look, there's a few things that should be said.
First of all, what you described there, this kind of taking race into account as part of a quote-unquote holistic view— That is what the court reaffirmed in the Grutter case at the University of Michigan in 2003.
But Grutter was overturned.
I mean, let's not mince words. Grutter was overturned by the Harvard University of North Carolina decisions.
I mean, there is no way to read the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts in any other way as to conclude that even the use of race as part of a holistic process is verboten.
I mean, it simply is not permitted.
And, you know, Roberts has this paragraph towards the end of his opinion.
He's responding to a line from the dissents.
And, you know, he says, you know, if universities try to get around this indirectly, it is still unconstitutional to get around that which we today hold unconstitutional directly.
And he cites kind of this example of talking about race in an admissions essay.
Now, it's true that you can talk… We're good to go.
I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain I'm not wrong, that university admissions officers under this current regime, they will be personally liable for monetary damages, actually.
If kind of a white or Asian or Jewish applicant, perhaps in particular, thinks that he or she has been wrongfully denied, they can actually sue these admissions officers because those officers cannot be indemnified by their employers, i.e. their universities, for the very simple reason that this conduct of taking race into account is itself illegal.
You cannot indemnify for illegal activity. So, you know, if you think about kind of the crass incentives, very basic incentives that drive human life, you're not wanting to be sued up your butt for monetary damages is a fairly compelling incentive that I think should dissuade a lot of this. Now, here's the one thing that the ruling probably does not touch, and which we will probably see a lot of, is just using other kind of proxies, right? I mean, there's nothing in the opinion that forbids the use of socioeconomic status, right?
So, you know, so if universities want to do some sort of newfound affirmative action for poorer Americans, they can do that. But, you know, once you start showing that they're focusing on poor Americans from, you know, largely black areas like urban Detroit or urban St. Louis, and not necessarily kind of poor white areas like Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, that's where we might start to have problems. But they might try to get around this by kind of other proxies like that. But again, if there is any
indication whatsoever that there is subjective intention of taking race into account, that is illegal.
And already we've seen some nice statements put out by Stephen Miller's America First Legal and some other organizations basically announcing that these right-of-center conservative legal funds and watchdogs are now on constant vigilance.
So, you know, I find that reassuring as well, but you're not right, Brandon.
We have not seen the last of this litigation to an extent also.
It's going to just have to play out in the lower courts over the next few years as well.
Right. So it's something we'll have to watch.
What you're saying is it speaks to the strength of the ruling, which is something we don't often get.
We get used to either losing in the court or getting soft rulings.
One of the things that the left is going to say, and they're already saying now, is that this ruling plus there were several, you know, we've had a pretty good Supreme Court term overall with some of the major cases.
They're going to say that the court shouldn't be ideological, it should be non-political, and conservatives just won on multiple big issues.
Therefore, the court is ideological, it's political, and therefore illegitimate.
What's your response to that?
Well, I mean, people who are giving that line just don't know what they're talking about.
I'm not really sure how else to say it.
They're not paying attention to the actual facts.
They're not paying attention to the actual decisions.
I wrote a piece earlier this week for Newsweek kind of debunking this narrative.
If you look at the actual number of six, three quote unquote ideological decisions, which basically means the justices who were nominated by Republican presidents were in the majority and the justices nominated by Democratic presidents were in the dissent.
It was it was actually far fewer of those style of cases than just the last term than just last year.
There really were not that many six, three ideological opinions.
It just so happens that we got three high profile six, three ideological opinions in the terms final two days.
And what I also find interesting is it's the three more moderate Republican nominated justices.
So that would be Chief Justice Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, who were in the majority most often this term.
But do you know, Brandon, or I should ask the audience, who were the two justices who actually found themselves in the majority least often this past term?
That would be the two most conservative justices on the court, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.
They actually were dissenting more often than any other justice.
And if you take a broader view of some of the other opinions that people have stopped talking about, there were these two major redistricting cases.
There was one out of Alabama.
There was one out of North Carolina.
That was the Milligan case out of Alabama and Moore v.
Harper out of North Carolina.
Roberts and Kavanaugh joined, and actually more than just Roberts and Kavanaugh joined the Moore v. Harper case, but at least those two justices joined the liberals in both of those cases.
really in very kind of a fairly partisan case actually.
Those two cases will directly redound to Democratic partisan interests as far as getting more congressmen in the U.S. House, census, things like that as well.
So, again, I don't think these people really know what they're talking about.
Until the final week of the U.S. Supreme Court term, now a change after the final week… But until that week, if I recall correctly, I saw a political article on this.
Before that, the justice who found herself in the majority most often was Sonia Sotomayor.
So again, that changed a little at the end there.
But the point is, Sotomayor and Jackson found themselves in the majority right around the middle of the pack as far as who was the majority most often this past term.
Right, right.
If you look at past Republican Supreme Court appointments...
Our side has done a pretty terrible job of deciding who should be on the Supreme Court.
I think prior to Trump, of the past 12 Supreme Court vacancies, we were able to fill eight of them.
And yet we've had a center left at best court.
And it seems like, and tell me what you think, it seems like there's a difference between what we see to be as Political ideology, Republican versus Democrat, the Republican versus Democrat ideological spectrum versus judicial philosophy.
And whenever there's a distinction between those two, it creates kind of some challenges if you're a Republican trying to decide who should be on the Supreme Court because it's not as clear.
Judicial philosophy isn't as clearly defined as the Republican-Democrat distinction is.
Help us understand, am I diagnosing that correctly?
And then how can we be better about picking judges?
So this is the million-dollar question.
I mean, I've been writing prolifically about this for years, and I hope to continue to do so, and hopefully we start to do better at this, frankly, because I agree that Republicans have a very long and inglorious track record of vetting and selecting, I mean, not just Supreme Court nominees, but in particular Supreme Court nominees, literally going back as far, if you want to go, to the Eisenhower administration, certainly going back as far as President Nixon, who nominated, among other people, Harry Blackmun, who gave us the Roe v.
Wade opinion. But even in kind of the post-1982 era, 1982 was the founding of the Federal Society and kind of the beginning of the originalism revolution.
Even since then, we've had any number of massive swings and misses.
I mean, Reagan gave us Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor.
George H.W. Bush gave us David Souter.
George W. Bush gave us John Roberts.
I frankly would argue actually that all three of Trump nominees, while they are clearly center-right, they're actually not as solid as Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito.
So there's really a lot to look here.
So I have a lot of thoughts on this.
I'll kind of just throw a few things at you.
So one is, I think at a very basic level, our people who are kind of in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms are just not doing a good enough job of actually vetting these people.
So Justice Gorsuch, for example, gave us a horrible decision in 2020 called Bostock, which read sexual orientation and gender identity into Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Well, if the people doing their job had actually read through his entire resume, they would have seen that in 2009 in a case called Castle, that Gorsuch actually basically did the exact same thing.
So that should have stood out like a massive red flag. Some other ideas, this is admittedly both under and over inclusive. It's not a perfect remedy. But what I have said is that we should have a actual moratorium on Harvard, Yale, and probably Stanford Law School graduates until we can figure out what the- Totally in favor of that.
Yeah. I mean, just to try to get a better cross section of America, Amy Coney Barrett, of course, went to Notre Dame Law School. I think we should have a literal moratorium on the maximum number of years or a ceiling of maximum number of years that one can have lived inside the beltway, call it five, eight, 10 years, something like that. But no more than that, no more swamp creature attorneys, anything.
I think that we take judges from the D.C. Circuit way too often.
The D.C. Circuit has an administrative law heavy docket, and the administrative state is definitely an important issue for us to take on.
But when that is viewed in contrast to the cultural, civilizational issues, I think that the latter definitely should win out.
And then one other thing that I would just mention there, you know, I've kind of been among kind of the tips of the spear in terms of encouraging, you know, federal society, car-carrying member, originalists to rethink the actual substance of their judicial philosophy and their methodology of constitutional interpretation a little bit.
I kind of laid this out at length in a 2021 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy essay that basically argues that originalist theorists have gotten too kind of in the weeds of a very narrow literal interpretation of the four corners of the page.
And sometimes it's important to, as Alexander Hamilton states in the opening line of Federalist 31, to remember kind of the anchoring principles and anchoring truths upon which all of these actual legal laws are only, only then can they make sense.
So taking a slightly more kind of wholesome communitarian view as opposed to kind of a literalist view that often redounds to minimalist libertarian outcomes.
So that's kind of the final piece of the puzzle, I think, as well.
Josh, thanks for joining us.
Always a fascinating conversation and always good to catch up.
Remember, you guys can find Josh at Newsweek.
Again, he's the host of the Josh Hammer Show, and I encourage you guys to check him out.
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business school students will be reading about the Bud Light debacle as an example of precisely how not to handle public relations.
Embracing radical trans activist Dylan Mulvaney absolutely shattered the beer's public image, possibly forever.
And now, finally, we are seeing meaningful calls to fire the CEO of Anheuser-Busch, which is Bud Light's parent company, Last week, Anson Freerichs, the former president of Anheuser-Busch Sales, published a letter in the Daily Mail saying just that, that CEO Brendan Whitworth has to go.
It's worth quoting, Freerichs writes, Anheuser-Busch's CEOs failed to fix the Bud Light crisis.
He must quit now and let someone else right this sinking ship.
He goes on, Whitworth has clearly shown himself to be incapable of solving the Mulvaney crisis.
He's had multiple chances and he's failed.
It's time he did the right thing and stepped aside to make way for somebody capable of riding the sinking Bud Light ship.
And there's no doubt at all that the ship is sinking.
Since this controversy started, Bud Light has lost 27 billion dollars in market value.
27 billion.
Billion with a B. Gone.
That's 20% of the company's entire market capitalization wiped away in just a couple months.
And what's amazing is that even though this has been going on for almost three months now, things aren't getting any better.
And that's unusual.
With most boycotts, people get upset.
They're fired up.
I'm never going to shop at so-and-so store again.
So they don't for a Usually, eventually people get over it.
They go back to living the way they did before, shopping at the same stores, buying the same products.
I mean, how many people are still boycotting Target or Disney or Costco or any other major woke company?
Not many. Boycotts just usually don't last.
But things are a bit different here.
It's been almost three months now and if anything the trend in Bud Light's weekly sales numbers is down.
As in they're selling less and less beer every week.
Last week they sold 31.3% less beer than they did in the same week a year ago.
The week prior to that sales were down 31.1%.
Sales are getting worse, not better.
In fact, it's so bad that at some retailers, according to the Daily Mail, Bud Light is now cheaper than water.
There have even been stories of bars trying to give it away, but nobody wants it.
And it's not because people aren't drinking beer.
A quick look around any 4th of July party will tell you America didn't just become a nation of teetotalers.
It's just that Americans aren't drinking Bud Light.
Bud Light used to be the number one beer brand in America, but not anymore.
It's now Modelo. And by the way, occasionally you'll hear people say that Modelo is owned by Anheuser-Busch, so it's a wash, but that's not totally true.
Anheuser-Busch owns Modelo's international distribution, but not the U.S. business, where the hit was the biggest.
So the impact to Anheuser-Busch is still huge, which is why their stock is down so much.
Anyways, the point is that by now, it's not really a boycott anymore.
It's really just that the Bud Light brand has been ruined.
It's not the same beer that it was a year ago.
People don't have to work or make a conscious effort to not drink it.
There's now a social stigma to drinking Bud Light.
So nobody wants to be that guy that drinks the trans beer.
And neither are other Anheuser-Busch brands.
Michelob sales were down 4.4% last week compared to a year ago.
Budweiser was down 12.1%.
But the most entertaining thing about this, I think, is that once everything went downhill after they promoted Dylan Mulvaney and there was this massive uproar, Bud Light didn't really take a stand one way or the other.
They definitely didn't disavow Dylan Mulvaney or the ad or admit it was a mistake, which is what they should have done.
But they also didn't really defend the partnership either.
Sure, they put out a few generic corporate talking points about how they're trying to best serve their supply chains and stakeholders, blah, blah, blah.
But they never really actually addressed the issue.
And in some ways, taking the middle road being lukewarm is the worst.
Because last week, instead of Bud Light dumping Dylan Mulvaney like they should have done months ago, Dylan Mulvaney dumped Bud Light.
He put out an Instagram video where he explained his side of the story.
Quote, Bud Light sold out their customers for some woke gender nonsense,
but when the backlash came, they clammed up and became indecisive.
Listen to the statement that they put out when Mulvaney's video went viral.
The privacy and safety of our employers and our partners is always a top priority.
As we move forward, we will focus on what we do best, brewing great beer for everyone and earning our place in moments that matter to our customers.
So a totally empty response, about as milquetoast as it gets.
So again, Bud Light cheated on its customers with Dylan Mulvaney, lost all its customers, and then when the backlash came, didn't defend Mulvaney.
So Mulvaney dumped Bud Light.
And if you think about it, for Bud Light, it's like getting publicly dumped by your mistress.
It's humiliating.
And that humiliation is exactly why we need to keep the pressure on them.
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If you enjoyed today's show, make sure to check out my website, dcenquirer.com.
That's dcenquirer with an e.com, where my team of writers and I release breaking news content and commentary on everything going on in U.S. politics.
I think you'll like it.
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Enjoy the rest of your day, and we'll see you back here tomorrow.
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