Dave Rubin, John Bachman, and Spencer Clavin dissect the Bud Light boycott triggered by Dylan Mulvaney's sponsorship, noting a $7 billion market cap loss. They critique the campaign as corporate mismanagement by VP Alicia Heinerscheid and a social contagion among youth, contrasting it with Daily Wire's success. The discussion extends to Tennessee lawmakers Justin Pearson and Justin Jones suspended for protests, accusing them of code-switching while ignoring left-wing rioters, before mocking President Biden's "lick the world" speech in Ireland amidst Hunter Biden controversies. Ultimately, the episode frames these events as evidence of systemic liberal overreach and corporate blindness to cultural backlash. [Automatically generated summary]
Holy cow, people, we are live on the internet, or as some of you call it, the World Wide Web.
That means the government's watching us.
And joining me today is the host of John Bachman Now on Newsmax TV, John Bachman, cleverly named show right there, and associate editor of the Claremont Institute, host of the Young Heretics show, and author of How to Save the West, Spencer Clavin.
I sense they'll be jockeying for position throughout the show.
But what we're going to do today is a recap of just some of the craziness this week.
That's what I try to do on Fridays here.
The big thing this week, sort of in the culture wars, was that Dylan Mulvaney, a name that none of us should know, but for some reason all of us do know, who is the guy who Transitioned, I suppose, to a woman.
It's unclear to me whether that involved all of the full transition, if you know what I mean, but he or she is getting sponsorships from major, major corporations, the big one being Bud Light, who put his or her name on a can, and it has cost Bud Light about $7 billion, that's billion with a B, in market cap since this began.
Here's Dylan talking about the partnership with Bud Light.
unidentified
Hi!
Impressive carrying skills, right?
I got some Bud Lights for us.
So, I kept hearing about this thing called March Madness, and I thought we were all just having a hectic month, but it turns out it has something to do with sports.
And I'm not sure exactly which sport, but either way it's a cause to celebrate.
This month I celebrated my Day 365 of womanhood and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever, a can with my face on it.
Check out my Instagram story to see how you can enjoy March Madness with Bud Light and maybe win some money too.
You know, given the devil his due, I have to say his comic timing is not terrible.
There's something sort of amusing there.
If he would say, I am a guy dressed up as a woman pretending to be the worst stereotype possible of a woman, that might actually be something that would be remotely funny.
You know, every time I actually watch this guy, I think, you know, he's pretty funny.
And he's a kind of guy that I generally sort of like.
He's your stereotypical garden variety theater kid gay guy.
You know, everybody's known this dude at some point in high school.
And one of the things that actually makes me most upset about this new kind of trans extremism everywhere, everything is always trans, right, is that That kind of guy, the tomboys of the world, the boys and girls that don't perfectly fit into this bizarre stereotype of what men and women are, which is the trans movement's fantasy, those guys are now getting, you know, sort of led down this weird garden path.
And I wish, Dave, that I didn't know the answer to your question about bottom surgery.
But I actually feel like based on another sponsorship that this guy's got with Nike, which had him wearing these incredibly tight leggings, I actually think I do know the answer to that question.
I'm gonna leave that there and simply say the whole thing of shoving this in people's faces,
obviously it's hugely unpopular, it loses money every time they do it,
so it's clearly meant to portray a certain idea about boyhood, girlhood, what you can be and should be,
and the people that should be most angry about it, honestly, are gay people
who are getting caricatured out of existence.
So that now a guy that grows up like Dylan has to put on a wig and pretend to be a girl
Just to be clear, I think what you're saying is that Dylan still does have a wang.
I knew you were going to draw this out of me.
I am not going to ask my guys to Google it because we didn't do it yesterday and I thought maybe for the first time in months we could do two shows consecutively where we wouldn't have to Google who has a wang.
That's a great question, because there is a lot of real news to talk about here.
You guys mentioned the financial downside of this for Bud Light.
And then there's also, I think, questions we can ask Anheuser-Busch about the management.
From what I'm reading today is that senior level managers at Anheuser-Busch did not know that this was happening.
And you have this vice president who's facing some criticism for making this decision.
She clearly doesn't understand the audience, the consumer base at Anheuser-Busch.
Uh, making this decision and what appears to be something that was small and supposed to be contained sending Dylan Mulvaney, uh, these cans of Bud Light.
It was supposed to be maybe the digital, uh, thing, but it's turned into this monster that continues to metastasize in a way that Anheuser-Busch can't get their arms around it.
Is this vice president going to be fired?
Are there going to be changes inside Anheuser-Busch?
There's all that stuff to talk about.
And then to what Andrew, Andrew's point before, I think is very important is how this transgender movement is, as some people say, it does appear to act like a social
contagion.
The average drama club gay dude that we all knew in high school does now seem to be encouraged
financially and for other reasons as well to pursue this transgenderism.
And when you look at the hard statistics associated with the trends, the number of kids saying
that they are now transgender, they don't feel comfortable in their own bodies.
It's just like to me, you guys remember when we were all in school and one person would come back from the lunchroom and say, oh my stomach hurts, I need to go home.
That person goes home and then like five other kids in the class say, oh me too, I have food poisoning and I need to go home too.
It's a moral hazard this whole thing creates for kids.
But I will just say in response to what you said at the end there, you know, as somebody who can quote every Stephen Sondheim lyric basically From memory, I shudder to think what would have happened to a kid like me in high school if I had been born just 10 years later.
You're exactly right, the way this acts as a...
Contagion.
The minute anybody says anything even remotely out of this narrow box, you get sucked into it.
There have been threats now against the Clydesdale horses.
Maybe false flag threats, who knows?
But still, they're having to make sure the safety of these horses is paramount because they still care about that, I guess, an American icon, the Clydesdale horses.
Spencer, to John's point, wouldn't it, if they really, if this woman really cared about this branding exercise that she's going through, wouldn't what John said be the right thing to do, which is, okay, we could add another vertical to the amount of beers we have.
We have four jillion beers and seltzers and vodka, this and all that.
Add one.
And actually nobody, you know, there would have been a little online, you know, whatever about it, but it wouldn't have been this, this thing about going after an iconic brand, like it was going after Diet Coke or something.
They don't just make a new story about a superhero that fits this particular demographic.
They have to take the superhero you love, the classic, the Supermans and the Batmans of the world, and turn it into a kind of idol, a sort of, you know, an image of their own stupid ideology because that's part of The message, the message is not just inclusion.
The message is we're coming for you.
We're coming to appropriate and recreate, transform everything that you know and love.
So you're right.
I mean, I'm sitting here trying to think like what the new Bud Light product would be that represents Dylan Mulvaney, specifically like Bud and Coke, Fireball Bud.
But anyway, I mean, without getting into too many of the stereotypes I've I've just been joking about.
I do think, you know, that you mentioned my association with the Daily Wire and I love those guys.
One of the things that we've seen is, you know, back when Hershey's did something very similar, had a transgender, you know, he, she chocolate bar and people got up in arms.
The next day, I kid you not, I walked into the Daily Wire offices and it was like Willy Wonka's pop-up shop.
They had transformed themselves into a, chocolate company and there's an enormous market for that
because they know who they're selling to. They don't hate the people
that buy their products.
They actually like them. They want to cater to their interests and get money
in return. That's capitalism. Whatever that woman is talking about is not capitalism.
I also love what they've done with the Razors too. The flip side of
that though for me is when you don't have something in common with somebody
that's the type of stuff before it was politicized you walk up to a bar and
maybe I might have a conversation with a transgender dude or transgender woman
and say oh you like Bud Light?
Me too.
And that's the one thing that we could have in common.
And maybe you could have that if this was done a different way.
But we're all separating into our own brands.
We have our own identities now.
And as much as I think that's necessary based on what's happening with corporate America, I do wonder about the long-term effect of that for our country and our society.
It's really sad that this is something which has to be done in order for people to just even feel... I mean, it's like ethically sourced conservative products, you know.
We're not supposed to be the guys that want that, right?
It comes from the pure, like, streams of ideological excellence.
But what I suspect is actually the case is if we push forward in this direction and really try to offer to America the stories and the products and the advertisements and the brands that people genuinely want that connect them to their sense of patriotism that enable them to love their country again and think of their just basic normal
families as like basically good and a good thing to do. I think that's actually a huge tent. I don't
think that ultimately this is an attempt to silo people off into some conservative brand. This is to
say the conservative brand is the brand now. It's the thing that you, you know, it is the brand
that if you don't want to be like kind of hacked into bits and pumped full of hormones just because
you like skateboards instead of dresses or whatever, then come over to us. You know, it used to be
that conservatism was, you know, a particular set of
ideological commitments, it still is those, but those commitments now basically just amount
When people always say to me, "Dave, how can you call yourself a conservative
with some of your views?"
And it's like, well, if you basically believe in reality, we're pretty much in that thing.
That's what it is.
And by the way, that's why what you guys are doing of Daily Wire is blowing up.
It's exactly why we built Locals and Rumble, that we will build new things and they're not just for us, they're for everybody and they will be better.
But let's move on because the other big story this week, of course, was what happened at the Tennessee Capitol and these three lawmakers who got booted because they broke some of the rules by bringing in bullhorns and protesters that weren't supposed to be there and everything else.
Two of them were then suspended.
They've all been unsuspended subsequently.
We played a video yesterday, or the last couple days, this guy, Justin Pearson, with his fake MLK accent.
The other guy who's gone a little under the radar is, who is this, sorry, this is Justin Jones.
John, as a newsman, you have to talk with a certain cadence, but what is with these people who do these fake accents and then they're off camera and they sound like regular people?
I always try to give people a little grace, and I said this week on my show that it's true.
I do not sound like I sounded in college, and what changed is that I'm on camera all the time.
The thing is, I don't care what he says on camera.
Does it match what he says off camera?
That has always been the test of a really successful or a quality news person in my mind.
You see him on camera and then you meet him in person.
Is it the same person?
There's an authenticity gap in this country.
I talk about it all the time.
The other guy, Justin Pearson, is the one whose clips have gone viral, where he sounds like a speech coach almost in college, and now he's talking about a black Jesus, he's got an afro, and he's certainly changed.
I mean, that's what happens when you get into politics, right?
People start to influence you.
You very rarely see leaders in this country that get into politics and remain true to their core ideals.
Some people change, and they change for different reasons, because of lobbyists, because of different interests.
I certainly think these guys are playing to the field, so to speak.
They know what their audience and what the mainstream media, for the most part, is going to eat up.
And what really bothers me about this story, if you look at this through a Republican lens, you've got to be frustrated, because what happened in Tennessee was actually, I think, some pretty important legislation passed in terms of keeping schools safe.
The end result is that these two Justins now are national figures. You
better believe they're going to get featured speaking roles at the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago. I mean, there's probably people trying to build them up to be the
next Barack Obama. No kidding, right now.
So this is what the Republican Party does. They do something substantial and good, like pass this
legislation. They get mired in these types of debates and this kind of chicanery.
And on the merits, I agree with what the Republicans did.
You can't have people disrupting public, you know, regular course of business with bullhorns.
But you always got to think about what I always call, Dave, the third rule of politics, just like Newton's third law of physics.
In physics, it's for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.
In politics, for every action, there's a completely opposite and disproportional response to what you think is gonna happen, and Republicans seem to have forgotten that.
To that point, Spencer, is this one of those things where, okay, if everyone, I don't think anyone's debating or questioning whether they broke the rules.
They broke the rules, everyone's accepting it.
To me, even though I get John's point, you have to suspend them because we either have rules or we don't.
That's like a Trump, you know, you have a country or you don't.
But I still understand the second order of this stuff, which is that optics wise, it somehow makes all of Tennessee look racist because the two black guys got suspended.
I mean, in part because of this enormous news kerfuffle that kicked up around them.
Look, here's what I'd say about that.
I agree.
You can't just let people interrupt every possible rule of decorum and procedure and let that slide, especially when conservatives, Republicans are getting hammered every day about what happened on January 6, you should be able to say, well, you know what one set of rules for the whole country or none.
But I do think that Republicans have to catch wise to the fact that they are not going to be treated fairly.
They're not going to be treated fairly in the news media.
They're not going to be treated fairly, even, you know, in the federal government.
Like we've known this for a long time now, at least since 2020.
And really, we should have known it for decades more than that.
So we ought to be ready for it.
We ought to be prepared.
I mean, these guys, these two Justins, they are rhetorically prepared in a way
that Republicans don't seem to be, because they're doing this act.
It definitely is an act.
People talk about code switching, whatever.
It's obviously a sham and a phony.
I mean, Justin Pearson's actually quite eloquent.
Justin Jones sounds like he's just trying to think about what he's going to say next.
I mean, this is something that PJ Keenan made this point in The Federalist, that this is not like a kind of authenticity that's welling up from his, you know, time in the black.
Church or something.
This is a, it's an expressly woke appeal to white women and men who want to excuse their guilt.
And it's working great.
I mean, it's incredibly cynical ploy, but I think the Republicans can get a little more shrewd about how this stuff tends to work.
All I know is I hope this really isn't a Justin thing, because if I'm ever feeding Justin and he looks at me and he's like, you think I gotta listen to you, motherfucker?
Let me show you one other thing on Justin Jones because he's also making it sound like he's always been this peaceful guy and he's never done anything wrong and it's only because of racism they're going after him.
But let's play this video.
It's b-roll so there's no audio so I could talk over it for a minute.
This is in the summer of love 2020, when we were all supposed to be locked home,
you know, making sure we didn't get COVID.
That is Justin Jones in the hat right there, approaching the car.
So they're blocking the road.
He's one of the people blocking the road there.
You can see on the other side of the street, watch this guy with his little fake fall,
come over there and now he's gonna, "Oh, I'm out."
But watch Justin Jones.
He's kind of going yelling at the guy in the car and he's sticking his hand in the car.
This guy's probably just got a truck there.
He's probably just trying to go to work.
Now he's taking a traffic cone and he's sticking it in the car and he's gonna throw it at the driver who's driving away.
That is very peaceful Justin Jones.
Spencer, I'm guessing that's probably not the only time he's done something like that.
I'm looking out my window as you're talking to see if Mostly Peaceful Justin is about to come knocking on my door for like, you know, for broadcasting evil thoughts and opinions.
No, I mean, this is part of that inconsistency that at this point we should be used to and understand that it's always going to be baked into this elite cake.
They get to do insurrections.
We don't, right?
That's how this works.
If we even step a moment Out of line, it's effectively the Reichstag fire, and Trump is Hitler, and everything needs to come crashing down to persecute these people to the furthest extent of the law and beyond, right?
We need to indict Trump, we need to do all these things.
Now, when the left riots, of course, it's mostly peaceful.
There's a little arson, there's a little property damage here and there, but really, these are civil rights heroes, and so we ought to excuse them.
I mean, that is expressly the ideology at work here, so it shouldn't surprise us, I don't think.
And I was going to say, you know, we don't want to fall in the same trap that Democrats do when they compare January 6th to Pearl Harbor and 9-11 and everything else.
I mean, we can say this stuff is not right, but, you know, what happened in Tennessee Disruptive, of course.
Illegal, perhaps.
Were they justified in suspending him based on what happened?
I believe so.
But it wasn't an insurrection.
And we have to stick to the facts and point out that when people are not arrested like Justin Jones in that video for assault, which he should have been, or maybe even aggregated assault because he's a traffic cone, or when Riley Gaines goes to San Francisco and people detain her in a classroom and the administrators of the school are negotiating an extortion fee, you know, there's kidnapping, there's extortion, there's assault, and they're not prosecuted in San Francisco.
Brooke Rollins, the district attorney out there, what is she doing?
That's where we hold them accountable, using facts and obvious common sense to our side.
Speaking of bad, have you guys heard of this guy we have in charge, supposedly, of the country, Joe Biden?
No, it's like, you know, molestation for everybody.
This is when Gavin Newsom is currently making his, like, lizard people tour.
of the United States.
It's like, what if we did California government, but everywhere?
This is the same thing.
It's like, what if, you know, what if we did what Biden does to an ice cream cone, but to the whole world?
I mean, there is this sort of bizarre, I think, ultimately, Dave, you, you must be right that there is something just kind of, you know, there's a screw loose that we've known this for a while, he's sort of doddering around saying whatever comes to mind, and he doesn't have the luxury of a Justin Pearson or a Justin Jones to sort of take that long, dramatic pause.
He has to actually like put Words in front of one another.
And I just want to say, to your point about, you know, rhetorical excess, you're absolutely right.
And I was, by the way, like, kidding about insurrections.
Because I use the term insurrection-y, or it looks a little like an insurrection, but that's where I, you know, you draw the line to be very clear that this is, you know, what happened in Tennessee, not January 6th and so forth.
thing that January 6 has been made out to be, but neither was January 6, right? Very bad,
not a thing to do, but it wasn't this like kind of massive inflated. And so there is something
to be said, I think, for like, for just laughing at these people, because this is Biden, the Jones,
the Justin Joneses of the world, the Justin Pearsons of the world, what they really get off
on most is this incredible sincerity, the gravitas, the just inviolable air of dignity that you're not
ever allowed to question or even raise an eyebrow at, or you're some kind of anti-American insurrectionist.
I mean, this is kind of how this stuff Works.
And, like, if nothing else, for the sake of gallows humor, you gotta laugh a little bit when the President of the United States says he wants to lick the world.
He's now chilling with his dad in Ireland, basically acting as security so that when Joe starts wandering off, which he always does, Hunter can pull him back in.
And today we're also going to talk about ProPublica, who's coming after Clarence Thomas's mom right now, 94 years old, because Clarence Thomas helped her sell her house to one of his friends.
It's like a $194,000 transaction, but there has not been a peep from ProPublica about Hunter Biden or any of these foreign business deals since right before the South Carolina 2022 Democratic National Primary, the point at which all Democrats and media determined that Joe Biden was untouchable.
But they're going to go after Clarence Thomas' mom.
And no mention about Hunter Biden, who allegedly also had some foreign business deals.
And you guessed it, Ireland.
I'm sick and tired of paying for this guy's trips.
I think that's one theme of everything we've talked about today, right?
It's supposed to be offensive to you that Dylan Mulvaney is drinking that beer.
It's supposed to be extravagantly, obviously hypocritical, the way they treat lawmakers and rioters in different States, it's supposed to be hypocritical the way they treat Biden and and Hunter versus the way they treat Clarence Thomas.
And, you know, whether we are calling it out or laughing at it or or whatever, I do think we should take it for as understood that this is the message they want to send.
We ought to believe them when they tell us who they are.
So that's kind of to me with all of this stuff, especially the Hunter Biden thing, which was such an embarrassing, disgusting display on the part of our media overlords as well, and part of the New York Times,
which took forever to acknowledge that the story had been unjustly suppressed.
We should listen to them when they tell us this about themselves.
They genuinely don't think the rules apply to them.
Because we can say bad words on this show, I'm going to say, "Well, I saw Margate from
the New York Times say yesterday on MSNBC with Nicole Wallace is such bullshit."
The New York Times, the Washington Post, they refused to address the fact that they got so much wrong and they won Pulitzer Prizes for their bullshit reporting on Trump and the Russian collusion stuff.
And then she goes on MSNBC and lectures Fox News.
On what they should and shouldn't be in terms of journalists, please.
For the record, Mara Gay, my audience knows her because I forget whether it was in the New York Times she called me that she said this was either a white supremacist show or an alt-right show.
John, you've got a show to do in about a half hour and then this afternoon I'll see you.
Spencer, it's a shame you're not in Florida because John and I are going to the Miami Beach Pier and we're gonna dump giant cases of Bud Light into the ocean to show those social justice warriors what's up.