White Rex is alive:
Maybe there’s hope for Russian nationalism after all.
It’s a great way to start the year. I hope everybody is celebrating their hearts out today.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
No Reset for the Owls
When school is in session, I get up at 5:45 am. To make that possible, I’m in bed by 9:30 pm. And it’s fine.
But the moment school closes, I’m blissfully back to my natural state of going to bed by 1am and getting up by 9. My mental health experiences paroxysms of delight when that happens.
You can’t change us, fuckers. So don’t even try.
Anti-white
At least somebody gets it:
The whole idea of the “Global South” which is incongruously led by Russia is about this form of ethnic resentment. Why Russians decided to turn non-white is completely beyond me but there you have it.
The Second Stage
Anson Frericks believes that the current version of neoliberalism should be abandoned in favor of its original form. His idea is that Milton Friedman’s “shareholder capitalism” should be brought back instead of today’s “stakeholder capitalism.” These are terms that I don’t find particularly useful because they don’t explain anything.
Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism of half a century ago was hostile to government and uninterested in ideology. At that stage, neoliberalism needed to decouple nation-state structures from the economy. The best way to do that was to narrate business as a space of freedom. Freedom from government supervision and from ideology. This strategy made sense while the nation-state was strong.
Once the nation-state was weakened, neoliberalism proceeded to replace it. With itself. The nation-state creates ideology. It can only exist because it can create and impose ideology. So if you want to replace it with yourself, you should become the source of ideology. You must create and impose ideology. You must become the Big Brother.
Anson Frericks’ lament in Last Call for Bud Light is that we have departed from the Milton Friedman-era origins of the system. He’s like a mom who sighs that her teenager is rude and doesn’t want to kiss mommy but remember how sweet he was at 15 months? That a toddler grows up into a teenager is normal. Freedom as the highest value naturally leads to the idea that there should be freedom to edit the bodies of small children, especially if that’s very profitable. That yarn has unspun, and there’s no stuffing it back into the original packaging. Frericks’ biggest example of a business that managed to stay away from manufacturing ideology is … Netflix. Which promotes ideology with the rigidity of the Soviet Pravda.
Book Notes: Last Call for Bud Light by Anson Frericks
I wondered what made Anson Frericks so brave. A white man who is a businessman by trade is usually more terrified of criticizing DEI than an untenured lecturer of 18th-century English literature. In Last Call for Bud Light, the former CEO of Anheuser-Busch parts ways with his tribe of Harvard Business School graduates with gigantic investment portfolios and explains that race and gender quotas in hiring are not a great idea. Big business is more woke than a conference of academics in Queer Studies, so I had to wonder why Frericks decided to break the omertà and speak out against performative leftism.
In Chapter 19, Frericks finally lets it slip. He’s friends with Vivek Ramaswamy, and this “my best friend is diverse” positioning fueled Frericks’ rebellion against leftism. He and Vivek started a new venture that aims to bring meritocracy to the world of business. Frericks was embraced by the Right, as anybody who is so unexpectedly rational would be, and got interviewed by Tucker Carlson where I discovered him. I like to end the year by reading a business book, so I read Frericks story of how Anheuser-Busch destroyed its market capitalization by chasing after leftist approval. It’s an excellent book that gives a lot of crucial background for the Dylan Mullvaney fiasco.
While his friend Vivek Ramaswamy has made a name for himself for failing to understand American culture to an almost comical extent, Frericks loves American history and tradition with almost painful passion. He was a perfect Anheuser-Busch sales CEO because he was extremely into the Budweiser culture and everything associated with it. He resigned from the company because his plan to grant Black Rifle Coffee access to Anheuser-Busch’s distribution network was rejected on ideological grounds. Frericks was told that Black Rifle Coffee was too controversial at the exact time when Anheuser-Busch hired Dylan Mullvaney to promote the brand.
Last Call for Bud Light is an excellent book. It explains in great detail how and why business became far more leftist than academia. I’d take that explanation a lot farther than Frericks does but that’s why I’m an academic.
My Secret Hobby
January 1 is my favorite day of the year. It’s the day I anticipate all year long. Because on this day I add data points to my graphs and achieve absolute nirvana by contemplating them.
The graphs track how much I read each year and in what language, how many words I wrote, and how much time I dedicated to different activities. I started tracking my reading in 1997, so that graph has many data points. It’s not Big Data yet but it’s getting there.
You know how people say, “I don’t know where the time went”? Well, I do know. Down to the minute, I do.
And there you thought I had no hobbies.
Sweet Vindication
Just for fun, I entered a paragraph from the article I’m working on into an AI tool and asked it to continue my thought. Unsurprisingly, it turned my idea into the most vapid, inane blether possible. I feel vindicated.
Here’s to a new year filled with excellent writing, enjoyable reading, and no fake slop.
Cultural Competence
Another direction of the unfortunate Europeanisation of Anheuser-Busch was the kind of music events that it sponsored. Companies sponsor cultural and sporting events in order to promote their wares to attendees. Anheuser-Busch sponsored a lot of country music festivals where people are likely to know and appreciate the Budweiser beer brand.
But the Belgian CEOs of the newly acquired Anheuser-Busch didn’t like or understand American country music. They started canceling these sponsorships and instead invested into techno music festivals. In Belgium, this is something that works for beer companies but in the US it doesn’t. Enormous amounts of money were redirected from advertisement that works to the advertisement that doesn’t.
It’s really funny that the social class which invented the expression “cultural competence” doesn’t believe that America deserves a culturally competent approach. Its representatives want to be in America but they don’t accept the possibility that America has culture.
Europeanizing the Midwest
Anson Frericks, the former executive of Anheuser-Busch, explains that the downfall of the company began long before the Dylan Mullvaney debacle.
The company was historically based in St Louis (which is why I’m interested in its history even though I never drank beer). In 2008 it was acquired by a Belgian-Brazilian conglomerate. By 2012, almost all of the Americans in the leadership of the company were fired and replaced with Europeans or Brazilians. These people, and most importantly their wives, didn’t want to live in St Louis because they saw the city as provincial and backwards.
The company moved to New York. The European and Brazilian executives, and most importantly their wives, wanted to be part of the fancy set in NYC. This is not a group of people that drinks Bud Light or hangs out with anybody who does. The European and Brazilian executives, and most importantly their wives, felt like no social prestige was accruing to them by virtue of being associated with a Midwestern beer brand that catered to working-class Americans. But it was where their living came from, and the living was lucrative. If you can’t drop Anheuser-Busch, they reasoned, you can change what it stands for. You can associate it with the values that have currency among the fashionable people in NYC. The new leadership of the company started associating the company with the far-left values of the fancy set. Strangely, it didn’t occur to anyone among them that the customers won’t follow the brand into the boutique fru-fru territory.
There’s a lot more to the story but for now I want to share this aspect of it that stood out to me. We all know that Anheuser-Busch was destroyed but I wasn’t aware of this history of its Europeanisation.
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