Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito joined the legion of savvy investors who dumped their Anheuser-Busch InBev stock when sales of the beer giant’s Bud Light brand tanked after it partnered with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney last spring.
Alito sold between $1,000 and $15,000 of AB InBev shares on Aug. 14, CNBC reported Monday, citing a financial disclosure filing.
On the same day, the justice purchased the same amount of stock in rival Molson Coors, according to the filing.
At the time of Alito’s stock sale, Anheuser-Busch InBev was embroiled in a nationwide boycott by consumers who were turned off by its harebrained decision to promote its Bud Light brand by celebrating Mulvaney’s “365 Days of Girlhood,” a video series about his “transition.”
It sent him a can of Bud Light with his face on it, which Mulvaney proudly displayed in an April 1, 2023, social media post.
Before the Mulvaney debacle, Bud Light had been the top-selling beer in the United States for 20 years.
The fallout of this disastrous partnership was quick and catastrophic.
Will you ever drink a Bud Light again?
Within a month of his post, two Bud Light marketing executives were placed on leave amid a crushing conservative boycott.
In July, Anheuser-Busch laid off hundreds of employees following a devastating sales plunge.
By August, AB InBev stock had experienced a consistent drop in value.
Given this development, it’s understandable that Alito joined the scores of investors who also dumped their shares in the Belgian beverage conglomerate.
Fast-forward eight months, and left-wing activists are accusing the justice of violating judicial ethics aimed at preventing the appearance of partisan bias.
Alito also sold his Anheuser- Busch stock when the Bud Light idiocy was happening. He’s NOT impartial. He needs to be removed from SCOTUS. https://t.co/FCvoERaEpY
— Kevin (@KVP798) May 20, 2024
Read “Samuel Alito Sold Anheuser-Busch Stock During Right-Wing Boycott: Report’ on SmartNews: He needs to be removed voluntarily or involuntarily asap! https://t.co/sujT07y9BY
— John Shea (@JohnShea122Bost) May 20, 2024
Canon 5 of the Code of Conduct for U.S. Judges states that they should “refrain from political activity.”
Gabe Roth, the executive director of Fix the Court — a liberal judicial activist group — claims Alito made a political statement with his stock sale.
“I believe Supreme Court justices should refrain from making political statements — even oblique ones or even ones their wife or broker may have made on their property or in their brokerage accounts, respectively,” he said in an email to CNBC.
Roth, who does not have a law degree, added, “If the sale was in response to the Bud Light controversy last year, [Alito] might have an appearance-of-bias problem when it comes to future court cases related to trans rights.”
However, he conceded that neither AB InBev nor Molson Coors has any pending business before the Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, four attorneys who are legal-ethics experts told National Review they see no issue and Alito was well within his rights to sell his cratering stock.
“Absent more, this is a non-story,” Hofstra law professor James Sample told the outlet.
Cornell Law School professor Bradley Wendel noted that Alito never even publicized his stock transaction, so it wasn’t as if he was trying to make a political statement.
“If Justice Alito had made a big public show of selling his A-B stock, that would be one thing, but we actually don’t know anything about his motives for doing so,” Wendel said.
Susan Koniak, a professor emeritus at Boston University Law School, drew the same conclusion.
“I do not see the sale of this stock some months into the boycott, nor the buying of Coors stock later, as a problem in and of itself,” she told the outlet.
Even Alito critic Charles Geyh, a professor at Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law, said the justice did nothing wrong.
“[T]here is nothing problematic about a justice selling his stock in a company because it is losing its share value,” Geyh said.
“If he made a speech in which he disparaged trans people or opined that such people were undeserving of equal rights, we’d be having a different conversation,” he added.
“But to draw negative inferences about the justice’s impartiality from the mere fact that he sold stock in a company when it was under fire is too attenuated a connection to warrant concern.”
Geyh, a former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, concluded, “I have been critical of Justice Alito’s conduct on occasions in the past, but this one does not give me heartburn.”
What gives many Americans “heartburn” is the avalanche of inane, manufactured accusations that left-wing fabulists concoct against conservatives. Give it up already.
