I had a similar epiphany. They want us to chalk this up to incompetence, an "oopsie, someone made a decision that their bosses wouldn't have approved of and we had no idea, OOPSIE!" Yeah, I'm sure the bosses of the person who hired a freakish troon for the tune of MILLIONS OF DOLLARS were completely unaware of the stunt. They just throw massive spokesperson deals around without anyone really knowing. /s "All publicity is good publicity". That's really how they view this shit. This is long-game. They're setting themselves up for a "redemption story" IMO. They come up with the stunt, then a few plans for what to do afterward. They enact the stunt, and then observe the public's reaction. In this case, they dipped their toes into the pond of faggotry, and pulled their foot out minus a few toes. If the stunt had gone over well, all of these assholes who are saying "We didn't approve this!" would be *taking credit* for being sooooo progressive. Now, they have to enact their plan for "If people fucking hate our stunt". Step 1: blame someone, claim that the real decision-makers were circumvented. Step 2: Apologize. Step 3: Try to win back the image of the "working man's beer" (this is probably a very complex, multi-faceted plan). Getting really conspiratorial: Whenever a company makes a move like this, I always wonder if it's a sort of "Litmus test" to see how the general population reacts- they can use this to gauge how accepting general population is of their bullshit. With social media, gathering the data on how people react is trivial. So, could one of Budweiser's parent companies (one of the massive conglomerations that owns EVERYTHING) have used their Budweiser brand as a test to see how far they could push faggotry with their other corporations? Government involvement can't be ruled out, either, as I'm sure glowfags and such are very interested in this kind of data.