On a recent Monday, an Amazon employee named Ernesto stopped at a South Lake Union street corner to take a picture. In front of him was a mobile billboard. Its all-caps message blared: “AMAZON, STOP FUNDING BIGOTRY. PLEASE PULL YOUR ADS FROM BREITBART.”
Picture taken, Ernesto continued on his walk to lunch. When I caught up with him, he told me he’s a 26-year-old software engineer and he moved to Seattle about three years ago from Miami. He declined to give his last name but said he voted for Hillary Clinton in the presidential election. “I haven’t read it so much,” Ernesto said of the conservative website Breitbart. “But from what I’ve read, it’s the leading website for the so-called alt-right.”
True. Breitbart, in the words of founder and current White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, is “the platform for the alt-right.” That’s one reason an anonymous online group called Sleeping Giants has spent the last eight months running a campaign aimed at getting companies to pull their ads from Breitbart.
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