The Pendulum Finally Swung Away From The Cultural Elites In 2023 | Bobby Burack

The ruling class enters every new year with the same mission: to obtain more control by convincing you that you’re powerless.

Most years, they are successful. By year-end, the elites merrily celebrate knowing they have more control over the state of the country than they did the year prior.

But they will not be able to celebrate at the end of 2023. This year, the pendulum started to swing in the other direction.

The American people fought back. They finally tried to wrest back control of the message. They reminded those above them, that despite an inherent disadvantage, the people are not powerless. This is their country, too.

The most illuminating example of this change is what happened to the number-one beer brand in the world. Or former number-one brand, that is.

Last April, Bud Light teamed with Dylan Mulvaney for a marketing campaign at the behest of Alissa Heinerscheid, who graduated from Harvard and went on to become the company’s vice president of marketing.

Mulvaney is not a girl. Yet he called himself a girl for over 365 days and so Bud Light honored him with a special can.

Consumers of the beer brand were not as impressed with Mulvaney's efforts. Sales declined so much that the partnership cost Bud Light's parent company, AB InBev, $27 billion in market value, and the Bud Light brand its standing as the top-selling beer in the U.S. for the first time in 22 years, along with two bottling plants.

Beer drinkers, hardly a group of elites, demonstrated that they do not answer to Bud Light but that Bud Light answers to them.

That goes for all major corporations that profit primarily from middle-class Americans.

Disney received the same message. In 2023, seven of Disney’s eight major theatrical releases significantly underperformed in the U.S. to the tune of over $400 million in losses.

The company blamed the losses on a “misalignment” with consumer preferences during an annual SEC report in November.

That is Disney’s way of admitting that woke, for lack of a better term, films run afoul of the interests of moviegoers at large -- such as children's films that include same-sex kissing, non-binary persons, and gender ideology. 

An Axios Harris study also attributed Disney’s political messaging to its declines, finding that Americans now consider the brand the fifth most polarizing in the country.

Americans dealt a similar financial blow to the two pharmaceutical companies that sold them underperforming vaccines during the Covid pandemic: Pfizer and Moderna.

Pfizer and Moderna benefited from a top-down lie that their vaccines would prevent infection and thus the spread of the virus. They did neither.

There’s since been an eerie rise in heart irregularities and myocarditis. But don’t you dare ask if the vaccines could be responsible for those trends on Facebook or YouTube. If you try, you will be deplatformed immediately.

And yet, the CEOs of Pfizer and Moderna still encourage Americans to vax up for the next wave. Fortunately, few people are listening.

The stock charts of both resemble outlooks of companies that lost the trust of the everyday consumer.

Last week, Pfizer forecasted that sales in 2024 could be as much as $5 billion below Wall Street expectations given the ongoing trend.

OutKick’s Clay Travis marked Pfizer and Moderna as the biggest losers of 2023:

“Who is the biggest loser of 2023? I’d go Pfizer and Moderna. Stock prices have collapsed. No one is getting their worthless shots, fraud investigations coming,” Clay posted on X.

Yet where the pendulum swung the furthest away from the cultural elites is from the place where most of them were born: Ivy League universities.

Ivy universities have long been farm systems for future and preeminent doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and politicians.

Employers and voters are groomed to hold up Harvard above the rest of society, even if said graduates "earned" their way to the school via affirmative action or nepotism. And most do.

The relationship between Ivy grads and the rest of society is meant to be idolatrous.

However, detractors have warned about the inverse effects of attending an Ivy League university, explaining how graduates depart programmed to see the globe as a land of the oppressors and oppressed.

That exact Marxian concept prompted Ivy students to adopt such an odious view of Jews that elite student bodies organized rallies in support of Hamas in October.

Those rallies and school presidents -- like Pennsylvania's Liz Magill and Harvard's Claudine Gay -- refusing to declare calls for the genocide of Jews a “violation of campus policies” during a House hearing proved those detractors correct.

The Ivy League enters 2024 substantially weaker than one year ago. The list of billionaire donors, early acceptees, and law firms ceasing association with said universities continues to grow.

The people are fed up. They are fed up with being reorganized by their identity. They are fed up with being lied to and made a pawn for a rapacious ruling class.

As they should be.

Looking ahead, that should serve as a warning to the institutions that espouse political values in conflict with the country at large.

Americans do not have to support corporations compromised by DEI, ESG, and the Corporate Equality Index, concepts that compel employers to reward and punish you based on the color of your skin.

Americans do not have to pretend that men who dress up as women are women, a lie exacerbating our already daunting mental crisis.

You empower those above you. Meaning, you have the power to diminish them. The falls of Bud Light, Disney, Pfizer, and Harvard confirm that.

Twenty-twenty-four is an election year. These cultural wins ought to be a direct message to people in Washington, both Democrats and Republicans. As goes the saying, “Politics is downstream from culture.”