The Washington Post’s Dark Turn

[size=13px]Columnist and editor Ruth Marcus has become one of many journalists to resign from the newspaper following increasing interference by its owner Jeff Bezos.[/size]

Chris Lehmann

March 11, 2025

A former Anheuser-Busch executive criticized the company’s decision to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, saying it wasn’t “authentic at all.”

“The problem with the Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney partnership was they just were not an authentic partnership at all,” Anson Frericks told Fox News Digital. “They were catering to a lot of those special interests.”

Frericks began his career at Anheuser-Busch in 2011 and was with the company for over a decade. He told Fox News Digital he realized he needed to leave when DEI was preventing the brand from making what should have been no-brainer business decisions, like partnering with veteran-owned Black Rifle Coffee.

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Sales were down nearly 30% year over year in January 2025.

Frericks said Bud Light was pressured by outside interest groups, like the Human Rights Campaign, to go more and more extreme with LGBTQ advocacy and ultimately wound up alienating its core customer base.

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The former executive claimed Bud Light having a European owner, InBev, caused it to lose sight of the American values the brand had come to represent. In Frericks’ view, it is normal for business and government to collude to influence social outcomes in Europe, but that kind of partnership was antithetical to Bud Light’s business values and alienating to its customer base in the United States.

The COVID-Era Smearing - And Resurrection - Of Trump NIH Appointee Dr. Jay Bhattacharya

by Tyler Durden
Saturday, Mar 08, 2025 - 09:00 PMJay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic.

Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of medicine ordered him to stop speaking to the press. Top leaders at the National Institutes of Health, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, dialed up the attacks, dismissing him and his colleagues as what Collins termed “fringe epidemiologists” while their acolytes threw mud from a slew of publications, including the Washington Post, The Nation, and the prestigious medical journal BMJ.

In the years since, many of Bhattacharya’s scientific concerns about the efficacy of lockdowns and mask mandates have been corroborated. Fauci, meanwhile, accepted a pardon from President Biden, protecting him from COVID-related offenses dating back to 2014, the year he started funding research at a Wuhan, China, lab that U.S. intelligence agencies now believe probably started the pandemic. And this week, Bhattacharya looks set to achieve surprising vindication as the Senate holds a hearing on his nomination to head the NIH, in a Department of Health and Human Services run by science nonconformist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Bhattacharya’s path from health policy scholar to NIH director nominee is pockmarked with craters from missiles launched to destroy his scientific credibility by NIH leaders and their minions in academia. Even as he seeks to advance medical research, Bhattacharya’s personal experience will likely inform his pledge to clean up the NIH and clear the agency of some career civil servants who silenced dissenting scientific voices during the pandemic and created national policies that were not always supported by the public.

“Free speech is fundamental for science to function properly,” he notes simply.

Bhattacharya first caught the attention of the nation’s scientific bureaucracy in April 2020 when he reported that the COVID virus was not as dangerous but more widespread than many of his colleagues and government officials were maintaining. This suggested a policy focusing on the most vulnerable populations with fewer restrictions on younger, healthier Americans. The study was discussed at the highest levels of the government and was passed around by Fauci and others in the White House, according to emails made public by a Freedom of Information Act request.

“For anyone with an open mind, the study’s results implied that the lockdown-focused strategy of March 2020 had failed to suppress the spread of the disease,” Bhattacharya wrote in a 2023 essay. But the paper’s other obvious conclusion put Bhattacharya in the crosshairs of Stanford faculty: It suggested that fear-mongering about the fatality rate of the virus was irresponsible.

Bhattacharya’s contrary conclusions generated complaints that the research was unsound, and Stanford put together an ad hoc group to investigate. It directed him to change the study protocols, which would have shut down the research. “They also demanded to review and approve any manuscripts we would write,” Bhattacharya said. But he eventually ignored them and kept publishing.

In April 2020, a series of damaging articles by Buzzfeed reporter Stephanie M. Lee carried allegations that Bhattacharya and his colleagues failed to disclose funding for their study, even though they had actually already disclosed it to Stanford. Buzzfeed is the now-defunct news site that first published the now much-maligned Steele dossier.

Bhattacharya was confused by the articles when they appeared. He later concluded from the intimate details that Stanford faculty were leaking the information to the reporter to harm him, including a false allegation that a “whistleblower” had come forward.

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