Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio will pounce on any cute anti-Trump angles they can find in the final days of this campaign. On Friday, NPR political reporter Susan Davis posted this beaut at NPR.org – “Meet the Democrats using porn ads to convince Trump voters to stay home.”
Davis told the story of Wally Nowinsky and Matt Curry texting back and forth about what they, two everyday voters “with no ties to any political campaign,” could do to help beat Donald Trump.
Davis might have heard about it from the Obama-bro podcast "Pod Save America." Wally was happy about that one.
Wally and Matt figured out that they could campaign against Trump on porn sites because the advertising is cheap. Mainstream advertisers don't like the association with sleazy porn.
The ads are simplistic: a five second static image the viewer must see before they can hit "skip" to get to the video they’re there to watch. The image has ominous music and features things like a woman in lingerie with this message: "Trump’s Project 2025 will ban porn. Enjoy while you can." The ads also instruct the viewer to "Google Trump porn ban."
Their goal is also simple: Convince some of these Trump-leaning, porn-watching white guys to sit out the election.
"While this is certainly a different sort of approach, it's not unusual and it's smart in some ways, in a lot of ways it's smart to go where your audience is," said Steve Caplan, a professor at the University of Southern California, who is teaching a class this semester on political advertising in the 2024 campaign.
Steve Caplan, by the way, writes for hard-left Salon.com. NPR knows how to find reliable experts.
So NPR wants to highlight anti-Trump ads no matter where they appear, and applaud these porn-exploiting bros for being "smart" strategists. There's only one problem. Trump isn't campaigning on a porn ban, which NPR acknowledges:
To be clear, Trump has not endorsed a pornography ban, and his campaign has repeatedly distanced itself from the conservative blueprint Project 2025, although it was crafted by Trump allies and it does call for all pornography to be outlawed.
"I think it's a fascinating example of how far campaign advertising, targeting and hyper targeting has evolved," said Caplan.
In other words, "this ad is false, but we admire it any way."
PS:
NPR had to turn off comments on their instagram post about FTW PAC. 😬 pic.twitter.com/6Js1t8EEej
— Wally Nowinski (@Nowooski) November 1, 2024
