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Desperate times call for desperate measures, and luxury automaker Jaguar is so desperate these days to reinvent itself that it is gambling on a radical rebranding for a younger, gender-confused, “woke” market. In other words, Jaguar has gone full Bud Light.

Launched in 1935 and once hailed by no less a judge than Enzo Ferrari as “the most beautiful car in the world,” Jaguar became associated with a clientele of affluent rogues such as Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen. It even spawned “the Jag man,” defined by Car magazine as “typically in his late-40s and a bit of a lady-killer in his time. A little dodgy in his younger days, he’d subsequently gone legit and prospered. A self-made man made good, if not really the sort of bloke you’d really want to mess with.”

But the vehicle universally recognized by its sleek, pouncing big cat hood ornament has fallen on lean times. Newsweek reports that last year, fewer than 67,000 Jags were sold worldwide – that’s about half the number sold during the fiscal year that included the start of the COVID pandemic. By May 2023, the Telegraph UK was wondering, “Is it the end of the road for Jaguar?” Currently, there are only 122 Jaguar dealerships in the U.S., down from a peak of about 200.

With little to lose, Jaguar first announced last month that it would largely discontinue making gas and diesel cars and unveil all-electric models in 2026 to virtue-signal its environmental consciousness. Then the company rolled the dice on a new direction with a 30-second ad spot that looks like an outtake from the universally panned opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. It is replete with oh-so-self-consciously-artsy nonbinary freaks voguing along with pulsing club music on an alien landscape. Phrases like “create exuberant,” “live vivid,” “delete ordinary,” “break molds,” and “copy nothing” appear onscreen to hammer home the message for you boring normals that this ad is “different” and “creative.” Not a single car, or even the pouncing Jaguar logo, makes an appearance in the video.

Rawdon Glover, Jaguar’s managing director, said of the ad, “Jaguar is at its very best when it’s a copy of nothing, when it doesn’t follow the pack. The intention, absolutely, is to take Jaguar back to its heyday.” He concedes that this might polarize people, “but we’d prefer to be loved by a distinct group of people, rather than liked by lots of people.”

If Jaguar’s aim was to cater to “a distinct group” and alienate everyone else, then the ad is a rousing success. It will be loved by a dwindling number of wokesters who wouldn’t recognize cool if it punched them in the pronouns, and who can’t afford Jaguars anyway. Everyone else – the demographic that has always admired Jaguar as an icon of classic cool – is already jumping ship.

Needless to say (but I’m going to say it anyway), the ridiculous video has sparked widespread criticism, by which I mean outright mockery, online. Tesla founder Elon Musk himself weighed in, tweeting with tongue in cheek, “Do you sell cars?”

“Bye Jaguar, it was nice knowing you, to think, you were once the pinnacle of British motor engineering,” one person wrote on X.

“I’m not sure you all heard, but we aren’t doing that liberal artsy bullsh** anymore. Read the room,” a second X user added.

A third replies, “Didn’t you get the memo? Woke is dead. (And so is Jaguar, by the look of this turd).”

Australia’s Herald Sun posted more delicious examples of what it called a “brutal roasting.” One X user wrote, “All this ad tells me is to not buy your car.” Another called it “the worst ad I’ve ever seen.” Influencer Collin Rugg wrote, “Oof. We already turned the page on this.” And Virginia Republican state delegate Nick Freitas joked, “Well … we know where the advertising team for Bud Light went.”

Bud Light, you may recall, publicly committed harakiri by signing insufferable trans egotist Dylan Mulvaney to be the creepy face of its once-mainstream brand. Jaguar apparently decided to double down on that debacle.

Jaguar’s X account replied to the criticisms with hints of more gag-inducing advertising to come: “The story is unfolding. Stay tuned”; “We’re shifting gears, not our purpose”; and “Consider this the first brushstroke.” It promises to unveil the next stage of a “new era” for Jaguar at Miami Art Week on December 2, but catastrophic damage may already have been done.

As the brand’s chief creative officer Gerry McGovern explains, “Our vision for Jaguar today” is being built around something called “Exuberant Modernism.” (Pro tip for creatives of any field: if the word “modernism” is anywhere in the labeling of your art, scrap everything because it indicates that your work is a soulless, self-indulgent rejection of grand tradition and beauty. As time passes it will go the forgotten, meaningless way of all modernism.)

Managing director Glover explained that Jaguar is downshifting from the “Jag man” of old and accelerating toward more socially conscious buyers: “Customers need to feel they are joining a community. People today look for brands that they feel they share principles with. You need to feel like you’re not just purchasing a type of mobility – you’re buying into something bigger.”

But Lulu Cheng Meservey, co-founder of Rostra PR group, who dismissed the Jaguar rebranding as “disastrous,” pointed out on X, “It’s possible a marketing exec read too many think pieces about how millennials shop based on values and forgot that people want cars that are really well built.”

Tragically for a once-esteemed automobile brand whose sleek, masculine design was simultaneously classic and cutting-edge, Jaguar execs have indeed failed to “read the room,” as one X user put it. Jaguar is gambling on that “something bigger” its managing director referred to being wokeness, which is already in retreat thanks to Donald Trump and the resurgence of #MAGA. While our culture is far from being freed from the Left’s stranglehold, the beginning of the end – the unqueering of America – and a revival of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful is upon us.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior