I'm guessing many of you will have seen this email too? (Sorry for long copy and paste):
Dear
Breitbart - aka Trump News - is on its way to Europe. But thanks to heavy pressure from SumOfUs members and other campaign groups, over 800 of its advertisers have taken their business away from the hateful news outlet.
Now we need to scale up this campaign - and the stakes for democracy couldn’t be higher. Steve Bannon, the former CEO of the white nationalist website Breitbart News and now chief White House strategist was just given a seat on the National Security Council - making him one of the most powerful unelected people in the world.
Bannon used a flood bigoted demagoguery and fake news stories to install Trump in the White House. Now Foreign Policy Magazine is calling him “President Bannon” - and the Independent is calling him “the unelected figurehead running the White House”.
In a climate of growing uncertainty and violence for so many people, we can’t let Breitbart spread its ideology of bigotry and fear to Europe. Can we count on your support to scale up our campaign to stop it?
Yes, I'll chip in £1 now to fight back against Trump News going global.
SumOfUs, as a global corporate accountability watchdog, is in a unique position to fight back -hard. We’ve already helped convince corporations, universities and companies to ditch Breitbart. We're super close to a number of key wins in this campaign, and with your support we can take our campaign to the next level.
Here’s just some things we can do with your support:
launch major campaigns to get advertisers to dump Trump News including scale up our existing campaigns against Amazon, Shopify and others to include dozens more;
use online ads to warn readers that Breitbart is not a worthy news source;
file complaints with media regulation agencies;
financially support other grassroots efforts to fight back against Breitbart, and support legitimate local media outlets.
This is worse than many of us thought it would be. Since Trump’s inauguration, person after person from Breitbart has left to work in the White House. Each subsequent executive order signed by President Trump reads like a page out of Breitbart - and that’s because many of them are.
Mr Bannon’s past statements, aired primarily on Breitbart, are serving as the playbook for Trump’s administration. And if it has its way, Breitbart wants to go global.
The implications of this cannot be overstated. Breitbart already has unprecedented access and a direct line to the West Wing, the closest thing we’ve ever seen to state-run media.
SumOfUs specializes in corporate accountability - and we have the tools and means to fight back right now. With your support we can run more campaigns targeting advertisers, get experts drafting complaints, run local campaigns to push back against Breitbart's expansion, and fund much-needed local media.
Please chip in £1 or whatever you can now so we can get to work fighting Trump News’ global expansion.
Our campaign is already making waves. Over 330,000 SumOfUs members have signed a petition calling on Amazon to drop Breitbart. And Amazon just announced it is looking into a “longer term solution to use a 3rd party brand safety, which may block Amazon.com ads from showing up on certain pages on sites like Breitbart in the future" - in part because of our pressure.
And last week alone, SumOfUs members helped get nearly one dozen advertisers to drop Breitbart.
The world feels extra scary right now - particularly for those who are and will be most affected by Trump’s policies. But together we can fight back in meaningful and tangible ways.
Thanks for all that you do,
Emma and the team at SumOfUs