Un-Trumping America by Dan Pfeiffer

Author:Dan Pfeiffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2020-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

6: Activism Works

Corporate America wants to have it both ways. They celebrate Pride Month with rainbow-colored social media posts and floats in parades. They have progressive diversity policies and syrupy commercials that celebrate the contributions of immigrants to America. But then their ads run on Fox News right after a racist rant by a millionaire white nationalist TV personality. If corporations want to decry racism and court racists at the same time, it’s important to call them out. And here’s the thing. It can work as a strategy.

In 2016, Breitbart was the leading edge of the pro-Trump propaganda machine. It is the preeminent white nationalist site on the internet and pumps out a shocking amount of racist, misogynistic, and homophobic content.206

After the election, Matt Rivitz and Nandini Jammi decided to do something about Breitbart. Rivitz and Jammi are not political operatives by profession. They both work in advertising in the Bay Area, which gave them an inside view of how companies make decisions about where to advertise. They started Sleeping Giants, an anonymous Twitter account that asked the public to take screenshots of company ads appearing on Breitbart. Sleeping Giants would use that screenshot to pressure the company to remove their ad. A large portion of digital advertising happens through ad networks, and the entity placing the ad often doesn’t know where the ad is placed. Many of these companies were shocked to find their ads on Breitbart and immediately removed them. This strategy was phenomenally successful.

Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart and former Trump senior advisor, was quoted in the documentary The Brink as saying that because of Sleeping Giants Breitbart’s ad revenue “dropped like 90 percent.” Sleeping Giants has turned their focus to Fox News—pushing companies to stop advertising during Fox’s prime-time hours when Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson pollute the airwaves.207 In 2019, they were making real progress especially during Tucker Carlson’s show. A number of major advertisers fled, and Fox was forced to run ads for other Fox programs during otherwise lucrative commercial slots. The efforts of Sleeping Giants and others were having a real financial impact on the network. They were struggling with the stink of being a platform of, by, and for racists when all of a sudden an unlikely savior swooped in.

Bernie Sanders.

Yes, that Bernie Sanders208—the Democratic Socialist from Vermont. As part of his campaign for president, Sanders agreed to do a town hall broadcast on Fox News. Sanders, to his credit, crushed it. He made Bret Baier, the moderator, look foolish and got the crowd to go wild for single-payer health care.209 Somewhere in the eleventh circle of hell, Roger Ailes’s head exploded.

Sanders’s success caused a mad rush of Democrats to schedule Fox town halls. Mayor Pete Buttigieg also had a boffo, campaign-boosting performance in his Fox town hall. Senators Gillibrand and Klobuchar were next, and it went on and on. It got to the point where Fox, which is often scraping the bottom of the barrel for a Democrat to go on air, was turning away Democrats.

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