Ted Cruz Launches Investigation Into Bud Light for Ad Featuring Transgender Influencer, Because No, He Doesn’t Have Anything Better to Do

If you thought, or perhaps held out some small glimmer of hope, that Republicans had tired of their manufactured scandal involving Bud Light and transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, we regret to inform you that (1) you have very much underestimated the GOP’s ability to obsess over ridiculous scandals of their own making and (2) they have not. In fact, they’ve taken it up a notch.

On Wednesday, Senator Ted Cruz announced that he had opened an investigation into “whether Anheuser-Busch’s partnership with influencer Dylan Mulvaney violates the Beer Institute’s guidelines prohibiting marketing to underage individuals.” In a letter sent to Brendan Whitworth, the CEO of Budweiser parent company Anheuser-Busch, Cruz, along with Senator Marsha Blackburn, also demanded Whitworth, as chairman of the Beer Institute, a beer industry trade group open his own investigation “to review Anheuser-Busch’s recent and ongoing marketing partnership with Dylan Mulvaney.” Then, to make it perfectly obvious that this whole thing is a political stunt, the GOP lawmakers said such an investigation could be scrapped if Anheuser-Busch would simply: “publicly sever its relationship with Dylan Mulvaney, publicly apologize to the American people for marketing alcoholic beverages to minors, and direct Dylan Mulvaney to remove any Anheuser-Busch content from his social media platforms.” (Cruz misgenders Mulvaney throughout the letter.)

There is, of course, no reason to believe that the partnership with Mulvaney was meant to target minors, despite Cruz and Blackburn’s claim that the influencer’s “audience skews significantly younger than the legal drinking age.” (Presumably, it was meant to target those who think that beer isn’t just for straight cisgender people.) There also isn‘t any reason to believe that Cruz, Blackburn, and the rest of their right-wing pals would care if someone whose audience allegedly “skews…younger” appeared in an ad for Bud Light had that person identified with the gender they were assigned at birth.

Meanwhile, if Cruz actually cared about children, perhaps he should do something about them being murdered in mass shootings, and that 50% of the 10 deadliest mass shootings in America in the last eight years have occurred in his state. Or the devastating effect Texas’s forthcoming ban of gender-affirming health care for minors will have on transgender kids. Obviously he won’t, and doesn’t, so instead we get things like this:

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“The only person this country should take orders from is me”