“If we’re going to get into Bud Light and Miller Lite,” Adam Baldwin asks, “can we really call it beer?” And are the two situations the same? Adam and I springboard off of an interesting essay from Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch that the Right overreacted to the Miller Lite ad that stirred up the Suds War last week. Jonah argued that the Right was looking for a fight, and that an ad celebrating women brewers was nowhere near the same level of provocation as the Dylan Mulvaney can from Bud Light. But is that what the issue really was?
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Welcome back to our VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
There’s more in common between those ads than Jonah allows, I argue. “I think Jonah is right to a certain extent” that the Miller ad doesn’t equate to the Mulvaney can, but the Mulvaney can wasn’t the big issue in the first place with Bud Light. The bigger issue was the sneering from Alissa Heinerscheid at the customer base that had responded to Bud Light’s “fratty” marketing campaigns in the past, and that was a major component of the Miller Lite ad too.
“This isn’t just an interview some exec gave,” I argue. “It was an actual ad which was saying, you know all that stuff that you used to like? Well, that’s bad shit. We did all that stuff and it’s bad shit and you should be ashamed of it,” I explain. “Now, I’m not paraphrasing … that was the language of the ad,” I continue. “The whole thing was a lecture on you are bad for having trusted us on our ad campaigns for the last 40 years.”
Adam tends to agree with Jonah that the backlash against the ad was overblown, in part because he thinks it might have been somewhat tongue in cheek. “The ad depicts a Karen caricature,” Adam argues, “a softer version of, say, Lilith Sternin whining about these hot girls in bikinis — but they’re still showing the hot girls in bikinis in the ad itself. … I think it was poking fun at itself.”
Going beyond the ads, the Suds Wars exemplify a sharp cultural/political divide in America about the linguistics of tolerance and “fairness,” Adam says. “James Lindsay talks about this,” he explains. “There’s the exoteric meaning of fairness and tolerance: Let’s be fair, rule, law, I tolerate you if you tolerate me, give and live and let live and all that stuff,” Adam continues. “The esoteric meaning, the hidden meaning that the left has of fairness and tolerance is: My way or the highway, pal. I tell you what’s fair. I’ll tolerate you only if you agree with me.” Jonah gets it right, Adam says, in his definition of toxic wokeness — “the effort by ideologues and activists to enforce or compel the use of certain terms so as to clear away undesirable ideas without having to debate them.”
And that, I concur, is why progressivism leads to totalitarianism rather than pluralism. We cover a lot more ground in this episode than just beer, so be sure to watch it all — and join us in the comments! (The player may not immediately initialize, but should work after a couple of minutes.)
