Is this the publicity stunt that secures the White House for ‘McDonald Trump’?
If Donald Trump serving fries at a Pennsylvania drive-thru doesn’t clinch him the swing state, then a side order of Elon Musk just might, says Sean O’Grady
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Fascistic, babyish, menacing monster that he is, the Donald Trump we saw in the footage of him visiting a McDonald’s yesterday came across as... somewhat genuine and relatable. Even if he wore cufflinks while handing out Happy Meals.
Donald “aced” the fries, as he might put it, and managed to hand over huge bags of fast food to stunned customers without swearing once. That’s a bigger feat for him than it might sound, now that he’s gotten a bit more uninhibited lately.
He didn’t demean anyone or threaten them with vengeful vexatious prosecution as he did after the last election (“Would you like a lawsuit with that?”). Nor did he bring up that “a lot of people” tell him how intelligent he is. He didn’t even do those inane dances he does when he’s run out of things to say.
Dare I say it: “McTrump” was almost… charming. Almost.
But, of course, this scene was all a ruse. He did not, as his PR team would have you believe, put in a full shift at the drive-thru in Feasterville (yes, really), Pennsylvania. Rather, he was there for one hour max, in a carefully controlled environment.
The proud Americans he served prefer Big Macs and Filet-O-Fish to eating pet dogs and cats or (as per the Trumpian fantasy) wild geese like those nasty illegal immigrants – and so found themselves worthy of Trump’s courtesy.
But, nice as he was, he’s fooling no one. Those who choose to believe in Trump – and there are many who do – will also choose to believe that he’s just like they are; kinda relatable. And those who despise him, an equally large group, will dismiss the exercise as a stunt driven by Kamala Harris’ more substantial experience at the sharp end of the fast-food business.
In terms of McDonald’s, after all, the super-sized Trump has spent a lot more time guzzling burgers than flipping them. Despite liking a Big Mac, Trump and the life he has always led are about as far away from the average Pennsylvanian as, let’s say, the human settlement on Mars that Elon Musk is preparing for them to migrate to.
Which brings us nicely, like a Musk starship being eased back to base, to the role now being performed by the world’s richest man to get Trump back into the White House.
While the McDonald’s appearance is unlikely to shift the vote much in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, Musk’s “win a million dollars” lottery might.
As a stunt, this is the one that has the capacity to do much more damage – not so much to the outcome in the state and thus the electoral college (a vital 19 votes, which could get the Orange Man over the line of 270 to win), but to the wider integrity of the system – to the notion (and the law) that people shouldn’t be bribed to vote or even to register to vote.
No doubt, the Musk legal team think that it’s all OK, and the Maga folk will say that prosecuting Musk for electoral interference is just another example of these patriots being persecuted by Democrat lawfare. But it’s plainly against the sport of the law, and most likely the letter.
The Trump-Musk axis is really unprecedented in the political history of the United States, and perhaps of the world – the two billionaires forming an alliance to form an authoritarian regime, tempered only by the impractical madness of their ideas.
It is as if, in an earlier age, Henry Ford, John Pierrepoint Morgan and William Randolph Hearst teamed up to put some earlier Republican protectionist and isolationist in the White House. Musk, with his car business, his vast wealth and his hold on social media (where he is personally and actively working for Trump) is indeed those past business moguls all rolled into one.
At this point, no one knows who will win the election – and even the opinion pollsters have become politicised and polarised. What does seem clearer, however, is that something around half of the US electorate is prepared to vote for the biggest threat to American democracy since the civil war.
He already has the Supreme Court in his pocket and unprecedented freedom to use his executive power. If he wins, the civil service will be purged of anyone who isn’t Maga-compliant, and the media will be cowed by Trump and undermined by Musk, whose social media site will be a Maga machine.
Indeed, Musk himself looks set to be appointed to the Trump administration with a remit to vandalise the federal government in the way he turned X, formerly Twitter, into a racist, misogynistic hellhole. Sooner or later Trump and his creed of populist nationalism was always going to get lucky, as it did in 2016, just failed to in 2020, and may well do so again, probably with JD Vance inheriting the mantle.
It’s astonishing that the known character of the man, the chaotic experience of the first Trump term and the insurrection on 6 January haven’t permanently disqualified Trump from consideration for any public office, but here we are – with the convicted felon being all folksy at a McDonald’s drive-thru as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
It isn’t, of course. But at some point the rest of the world will just have to face up to the fact that who the Americans vote for as their leader is rightly their business, and if they want a nutter in charge that’s the way it’s going to be.
We have to cope with the fact that America, the shining citadel, is slowly descending into the kind of authoritarian semi-democracy we see in places such as Turkey. We have to accept that votes can be bought in Pennsylvania more openly than they can be in Moldova. Europe, in particular, will need to look to its own resources for its defence and to look after its economic interests.
We’re not lovin’ it, though.
Рижскому русскому театру им. Михаила Чехова запрещают русский язык. Пока в рекламе.
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Столичная дума мешает театру исполнять обязанности, запрещая рекламу на русском языке, заявила в интервью руководитель театра Дана Бйорк.
Бйорк напомнила, что возглавляемое ею учреждение является государственным театром, которому делегирована функция обращаться к русскоязычным зрителям и показывать спектакли на русском языке.
Без рекламы, в свою очередь, театр недополучает зрителей, что в условиях сокращения госдотаций бьет по бюджету.
Еще год назад Бйорк обещала ставить только "политкорректные" спектакли. Чтобы "объединять" русскоязычных по давно утвержденной латышами антисоветской и антироссийской госпрограмме. Однако язык все равно отнимают. Как же так?
А теперь забавное – г-жа Бйорк намерена обращаться в суд, Минкульт и даже Минюст. То есть ведомства, которые меньше всех заинтересованы в работе театра.
В продолжении
обширная статья по истории чирлидинга:
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How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular
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Nikki Jennings started cheering when she was 4 years old. She was small and flexible and became a flyer, a human baton spinning and twisting through the air before being caught by teammates. Until sometimes she wasn’t: She got her first concussion in the third grade.
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Jennings was a budding star, and at 13 she joined a competitive gym called Rockstar Cheer in Naples, Fla. She was the golden child of her coach, Carlos Realpe — even if he sometimes pushed her too hard. Like when he ran practices late into the evening on school nights. Or when Jennings pulled a hamstring and he threatened her position on the team unless she pounded ibuprofen and powered through the pain. Or when he screamed and threw shoes and water bottles. (Realpe denies throwing things; two other team members supported Jennings’s account.) Parents of other children complained about Realpe’s coaching style, but Jennings brushed it off.
Jennings’s family moved to Georgia, and after her new team there won the Cheerleading Worlds in 2019, she became a minor “cheerlebrity,” modeling uniforms and taking photos with little girls who waited in line to meet her. That visibility led to a scholarship to cheer at the University of Hawaii, where she clocked up to 50 hours a week in training, games, hair and makeup and late-night, punishing drills after making mistakes on the field. According to Jennings, her coach, Mike Keolaokalani Baker, insulted his athletes when the team performed poorly. Jennings had begun swimsuit modeling, and she told a friend at the time that Baker said her Instagram feed looked as if she was prepping for an OnlyFans career. (Baker denied making that comment. He said the team did not typically practice and perform more than 20 hours a week; another cheerleader supported Jennings’s memory.)
Her junior year, Jennings slammed into a teammate’s shoulder during a basket toss, snapping her head back and giving her yet another concussion — her seventh. Soon afterward, she got sick from an unrelated illness and became depressed. Baker sent her an email cutting her from the squad. She could have lost her scholarship, too, had the athletic director not intervened on her behalf.
Nikki Jennings was cut from the cheer squad at the University of Hawaii.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Two years ago, at 21, Jennings retired from cheerleading with a chronic hip injury, occasional slurred speech and intermittent headaches that she called “stingers.” She resolved to seek treatment for a traumatic brain injury. It was only when she was out of cheer entirely that she realized her difficult career in the sport was more than just a random string of bad luck. Jennings’s experience — of injury, grueling hours and emotional abuse — is not an uncommon one in the vast world of American cheerleading. “Every day I make more and more pieces click,” she said.
Nationwide, just over a million children, mostly girls, participate in cheer each year (some estimates are even higher), more than the number who play softball or lacrosse. And almost every part of that world is dominated by a single company: Varsity Spirit. It’s hard to cheer at the youth, high school or collegiate level without putting money in the company’s pocket. Varsity operates summer camps where children learn to do stunts and perform; it hosts events where they compete; it sells pom-poms they shake and uniforms they wear on the sidelines of high school and college football games. Each year, Varsity ships 4.6 million pieces of apparel, from $80 leopard-print “Cheer Mom” fleeces to custom uniforms covered in Swarovski crystals.
Critics like Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project, claim that the cheer giant is a monopolist whose dominance in its area rivals that of Google in tech and has had negative impacts for participants and their families. Varsity, based in Memphis, generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, with gross profit margins at times topping 40 percent, making the company a cash cow for a series of private-equity owners. Parents have reported spending upward of $10,000 a year per child in competitive cheer, with Varsity controlling, by some estimates, more than 80 percent of that market.
Jeff Webb, the man who founded Varsity, has been called “John D. Rockefeller with glitter” and the “Dark Sith Lord” of cheer by some of his detractors. Webb, now in his 70s, pioneered the gravity-defying acrobatics of modern cheer. He paired his innovations with a desire for control over every facet of the sport, which he pursued over the course of more than four decades.
To maintain his influence, lawsuits have alleged, Webb lobbied against categorizing scholastic cheerleading as a sport at the high school and college levels. Had the N.C.A.A. recognized cheer, it might have protected Jennings in college, limiting her practice hours and ensuring that she got a hearing if her scholarship were threatened because of an injury. Instead, Varsity founded governing bodies whose representatives sometimes downplayed safety concerns in the media as flyers like Jennings returned to the mat again and again after serious concussions. Competitive cheer is shockingly dangerous: In the past 40 years, the number of catastrophic injuries sustained by cheerleaders is greater than those sustained by female athletes playing all other high school and college sports combined. For many years, those same governing bodies failed to comprehensively track and ban problematic coaches, who bounced from gym to gym. Sometimes they did more than yell or throw things: Cheer is now dealing with a sexual-abuse scandal with parallels to that of USA Gymnastics.
Cheerleaders at Varsity’s American Cheer Power competition in Philadelphia this April.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Varsity’s market power has made the cheer world a paranoid place. In my reporting for this story, dozens of people spoke about the company in conspiratorial tones better suited to a spy thriller. My sources were at least right that the company was paying attention. Not long after beginning my reporting for The Times, a managing director from Teneo — the high-powered public-relations firm whose clients have included Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund — contacted me. I soon found myself dealing with separate P.R. agencies representing two private-equity firms, Varsity and Jeff Webb himself, who invited me to interview him. “I don’t think I’ve done a great job marketing myself,” he told me. “I would rather let the deeds speak for themselves.”
Varsity had been hit with a raft of antitrust and personal-injury lawsuits, which provided an unprecedented glimpse into Varsity’s operations: Thousands of pages of documents and emails showed how Webb, a former cheerleader himself, built a company so powerful that its market position has not been meaningfully challenged by the many lawsuits and controversies. In July, KKR, one of the largest private-equity firms in the world, bought Varsity and its affiliate companies from Bain Capital for a reported $4.75 billion, a clear bet that Varsity’s control of cheerleading will survive the current scrutiny. Since the KKR sale, a sense of foreboding hangs over the world of cheer: Is there any scandal big enough to shake Varsity’s grip on American cheerleading?
Jeff Webb grew
up in the halcyon splendor of postwar Middle America. His father was a cowboy who became an accountant at an oil company. Childhood was a modest three-bedroom home, Little League Baseball and riding his bike around the neighborhood in Dallas. It was a “Leave It to Beaver” upbringing appropriate for the visionary behind a sport so intertwined with American nostalgia.
Jeff Webb (middle) with siblings, Greg Webb and Jenna Webb, in 1969.Credit...Dallas Times Herald
As a high school senior, Webb joined the cheer team. Today the sport is so freighted with cultural significance for American girlhood that it can be hard to believe it was once a male-only activity. The first cheers, copied from military chants, began at Princeton University around the time of the Civil War. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan were all cheerleaders.
During World War II, with many college-age men enlisted, women took up cheerleading. The war ended, and the men came back to campus, among them Lawrence Herkimer, a Navy navigator born in Michigan who returned from the Pacific theater and saw potential in the new female-dominated iteration of cheerleading.
Herkimer founded a company, the National Cheerleaders Association, and barnstormed around the country teaching the “herkie,” a jump still performed on sidelines today. He invented the pom-pom (patent No. 3,560,313) and soon acquired the moniker Mr. Cheerleader.
By the late 1960s, Herkimer was hiring hundreds of instructors for more than 150 camps teaching 100,000 high school cheerleaders around the country. Among those instructors was an ambitious young yell leader from the University of Oklahoma, Jeff Webb.
Jeff Webb, the founder of Varsity Spirit.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Webb worked for Herkimer in college and then after graduation, eventually becoming head instructor at his largest camps. Herkimer had no sons, and he saw a lot of himself in Webb. “I’ve been waiting 25 years for you to come along,” Webb remembers Herkimer saying. Webb had long planned to become a lawyer, but Herkimer, then in his mid-50s, made a pitch: Forget law school. Make a career out of cheerleading. At 23, Webb became general manager of the N.C.A.
Webb was quickly frustrated by Herkimer’s loyalty to the past: spirit sticks, stale cheers and modest stunts like shoulder stands. He decided to strike out on his own. In 1974, he poached 20 of Herkimer’s best instructors, and in an indication of his grand ambitions, Webb quit Herkimer’s National Cheerleaders Association and started the Universal Cheerleaders Association.
“I remember as a little girl, it was disconcerting when he broke off,” said Carolyn Herkimer, Herkimer’s daughter. “My dad had put a lot of trust in him. It was a little bit of a feeling of betrayal.”
One well-known piece of lore holds that when he split off, Webb sent Herkimer a funeral wreath with a note that read, “I’m going to bury you.” Webb calls that story a “total lie” — and its existence evidence of just how much he got into his rival’s head. Another example that Webb shares with a laugh: Once, when the power went out at Herkimer’s largest competition, a rumor spread that Webb himself was in the back, pulling out electrical cables.
Herkimer may have invented the pom-pom, but Webb knew where to use it: on TV. In 1984, he signed a broadcast deal with a fledgling ESPN to televise his cheer championships — first held at Sea World, then Disney World — and immediately reached 34 million American homes. Webb co-hosted the broadcasts, which he punctuated with personal demonstrations of pyramids and basket tosses.
The growth was fueled in part by a new category of cheerleading known as All Star. Just as travel baseball and soccer teams emerged for kids who wanted to compete year-round, dedicated cheer squads emerged, unconnected to schools or sporting events. They weren’t on the sidelines anymore; All Star cheer was the main event, showcasing routines with ever-more-daring stunts, all choreographed to earsplitting music mixes. Multiple divisions meant less-advanced children could participate. “If you could do a cartwheel, we had a team for you,” said Dennis Worley, a longtime Varsity employee who helped pioneer the All Star market.
Cheerleading was turning into an American cultural phenomenon, complete with a new breed of parent: the cheer mom, whose aspirations for her daughter made her a loyal customer of Webb’s. One mom’s obsession even turned dangerous. In 1991, after her daughter was passed over for the cheer team, Wanda Holloway agreed to pay $2,500 put a hit on a rival “pom mom” in Channelview, Texas. She was arrested instead, and the case became a global sensation.
Getting ready for a cheer competition held by Varsity Spirit in Philadelphia in April.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Amid this fervor, Webb continued to expand his camps and competitions, then added a uniform division. In January 1992, Varsity Spirit — the umbrella company Webb created for his growing cheer empire — went public. By that point, Varsity had 100,000 athletes in summer camps and $28.1 million in annual revenue. When a reporter from Sports Illustrated arrived at Webb’s Memphis office, she found a copy of The Harvard Business Review on the table, maroon and forest-green wallpaper and “a Ralph Lauren motif.” Cheer had officially gone corporate.
The 1990s were boom times. Varsity gained market share and quintupled its revenues to $136 million by the end of the decade. The capstone came in 2000, when a small-budget film called “Bring It On” grossed a surprising $90 million at the box office. The movie accelerated the shifting perception of cheerleading from sideline rah-rahs to the acrobatic routines that Webb had been promoting for more than two decades. During a five-year span in the early 2000s, the number of All Star gyms, which taught this ambitious tumbling and stunting, exploded to 2,500 from around 200.
Varsity’s growing power allowed Webb to cultivate an almost imperial presence. His staff nicknamed the private jet he traveled on Cheer Force One. When he arrived on set to host ESPN broadcasts, employees joked that “the eagle has landed.” He would eventually purchase Mallard Pointe Lodge, a more than 700-acre duck-hunting estate in Arkansas, and a yacht in Florida. But what drove him wasn’t the money. It was “about discipline and keeping score,” Webb told me.
Lawrence Herkimer had retired by then, and his N.C.A. was ready to be felled. Herkimer couldn’t hide his hurt at being eclipsed by his former protégé. “It was a lucky day for him the day he met me,” he told USA Today in 2002. Two years later, Varsity purchased his company.
By the turn
of the millennium, cheerleaders were now tumbling like advanced gymnasts. And yet Webb and Varsity insisted that scholastic cheerleading was not a sport. Varsity alternately called cheerleading “an athletic activity” and “more than a sport.” The company counseled the Department of Education, which enforces Title IX gender-equity requirements in college athletics, against considering cheerleading a sport. Webb has testified in federal court to the same effect. Varsity acknowledged in S.E.C. filings that if cheer were subjected to restrictions on off-season training — like N.C.A.A. sports — it would lead to a “material adverse effect on Varsity’s business.”
Practicing at Varsity’s American Cheer Power competition in Philadelphia.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
In 2004, Webb wrote an opinion essay in the NCAA News, arguing for a spinoff, cheer-like sport — “Something like AcroCheer might work” — that would leave the bulk of traditional cheerleading squads unrecognized. Later, the company spent more than $50,000 to lobby (unsuccessfully) against a 2015 bill in California that designated high school cheerleading an official sport and implemented stricter safety rules. Varsity told The Times that its opposition to sport status only applied to traditional cheer, and as cheer evolved to include more advanced gymnastics, the company had no objection to its receiving the designation.
Lacking a governing body, the cheer landscape in the early aughts was still chaotic. “It was the Wild West on steroids,” Worley, the former Varsity employee, said. “There were no rules — or if there were rules, they were different.” Cheerleaders regularly practiced stunts on grass and even on concrete. Some competitions allowed high-octane stunts like backflip baskets, and others didn’t. A squad that wanted to rack up points might start prepping a backflip basket just a week before a competition, which led to a surge in devastating head and neck injuries.
From 1980 to 2001, emergency-room visits for cheerleaders soared nearly 500 percent. Over that same period, competitive cheerleading was responsible for more catastrophic injuries to female athletes than all other high school and college sports combined, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. And those statistics included “bases,” the girls at the bottom of the pyramid, who were at lower risk for head injuries. Restrict the data just to flyers, the girls being tossed in the air, and injury rates became “semi-suicidal,” according to Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director of the research center.
“The flyer was the riskiest person in all of women’s sport,” he said recently. By some metrics, the risk of catastrophic head and spine injuries was higher in cheerleading than in football.
Krista Parks started cheering in the third grade, both at school and later for an All Star squad. By 2003, she was captain of the University of Memphis cheer team, a coach at Varsity camps and a respected flyer. “I lived it,” Parks said. “I was all in.”
At practice that year, as the team prepared for Varsity’s upcoming college nationals, Parks stood atop the pyramid, ready to execute a high front flip into the waiting arms of her squad. A teammate held onto her feet too long. “So instead of flipping, I just dove — like into a swimming pool with no water.” She landed on a two-inch-thick foam mat on top of concrete, breaking her neck in five places.
When teammates visited her in the hospital, they found a stranger. Most of Parks’s hair had been shaved for surgery and the rest sat in an awkward mullet, with a huge scar running around the top of her head. She underwent three operations, had a permanent shunt placed in her spine to drain fluid from her brain and endured years of physical therapy.
Krista Parks, former captain of the University of Memphis cheer team and a coach at Varsity camps, underwent three operations and had a permanent shunt put in her spine to drain fluid from her brain.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
When Parks began speaking to a lawyer, she says the team shunned her: At bars around Memphis, she bumped into former teammates, who, emboldened by alcohol, would whisper, “We aren’t supposed to be talking to you.” She later started a cheerleader-safety foundation. When she returned for a Memphis alumni cheer event, she says former teammates wouldn’t even make eye contact with her.
Despite the alarming injury statistics, Varsity was publicly dismissive of the risks. “We are all concerned about safety, but the fact is, the injury rate for cheerleading just isn’t that high,” Greg Webb, a senior vice president (and Jeff’s brother), told The Times in 2000.
Concerned coaches tried to impose order. In 2003, Jamie Parrish, a top-tier cheer choreographer who also owned a gym, banded together with other coaches to found a rules organization, the National All Star Cheerleading Coaches’ Congress. They met in Atlanta and merged more than 40 sets of rules into a single rule book and banned certain dangerous stunts like triple-twisting layouts.
The new organization threatened Varsity’s growing control of cheer. “That really set Varsity off, like in a big, big, big way,” Parrish later testified. Within a week, Varsity created a rival group, the United States All Star Federation (U.S.A.S.F.), and bankrolled it with a $1.8 million interest-free line of credit. The U.S.A.S.F. then required that gyms purchase a membership with the organization in order to compete at Varsity competitions. “You guys don’t have the money to do your own organization,” Parrish remembered one of Webb’s executives telling him, according to a subsequent deposition. “You guys don’t need to worry with this.”
Later, litigation would allege that the new safety organization was independent in name only: Some U.S.A.S.F. staff were full-time Varsity employees who “volunteered their time”; Varsity bought its web address; and the two organizations shared office space.
Varsity now began weaving together a regulatory net that would eventually cover all of cheer. Within a few years, Varsity created USA Cheer, a governing body devoted to safety and participation, and staffed that group largely with former employees too. The company later signed an agreement with the National Federation of State High School Associations, the rule-making body for most high school sports, and paid the group $345,000 annually to be a corporate partner. According to an email from a Varsity executive in 2015, the federation, in turn, created a “squad credentialing program” for high school cheerleaders “geared toward driving summer camp enrollment,” solidifying Varsity’s control over the camp business.
The alphabet soup of abbreviations and oversight groups was confusing. Cheer insiders understood that the tentacles came from the same octopus, but parents and schools often missed it. It even appeared to escape the notice of The Times. In several articles about cheer injuries in the 2000s, the paper quoted Jim Lord, executive director of the American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators. As he echoed Varsity talking points, The Times didn’t note that Varsity had founded and financed Lord’s organization.
Despite Varsity’s early opposition, 36 states and the District of Columbia now recognize cheer as a sport. It remains an outlier: None of the National Federation of State High School Associations’ other 17 member sports have this patchwork state-by-state designation, said Dr. Karissa Niehoff, the chief executive of the federation. Nor is there another sport where a for-profit company like Varsity is so intricately linked to its governance, she said. Varsity remains a corporate partner with the federation. “I find them to be a wonderful company to work with,” she said.
Sports-medicine experts have routinely proposed making cheer a sport in the remaining states and at the college level, which would mean improved access to certified and qualified coaches, athletic trainers and medical care, limits on practice time, improved facilities and inclusion in injury-monitoring data. “There is no question in my mind that if cheerleading was declared a sport under the control of an athletic department, the number of injuries would be reduced,” Frederick Mueller, the former director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research, who was among the first to draw attention to the cheer injury epidemic, wrote in 2009.
USA Cheer has found some success reducing injuries, said Lauri Harris, its executive director: A 2006 ban on basket tosses on hardwood floors, followed by a 2012 ban on double twisting dismounts at the high school level, led to a drop in catastrophic injuries. A 2021 study in The Orthopedic Journal of Sports Medicine found that emergency-room visits for cheer injuries are indeed down, but that same study stressed that visits for concussions continue to soar, increasing by 44 percent from 2010 to 2019. The increase could be, in part, a result of greater awareness of the dangers of concussions, but the risk remains high relative to many other sports: The journal Pediatrics reported in a 2019 study that the incidence of concussions during cheer practice was second only to football among high school sports.
In a response, Varsity said it created cheer’s first safety manual, in 1987, and has since invested millions of dollars in safety initiatives. Because estimates of the number of cheerleaders in the United States vary, there is some ambiguity and disagreement about how to accurately measure cheer injuries. The company cited data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which found that, in 2023, there were fewer emergency-room visits for girls ages 12-18 for cheerleading than basketball, soccer, volleyball and softball. USA Cheer concludes on its website that “cheerleading is a safe activity.”
Participants at Varsity’s American Cheer Power competition in Philadelphia this April.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
The control that
Jeff Webb was assuming over cheerleading is difficult to overstate. It was as if Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, also operated youth camps, owned Nike, hosted the N.B.A. Finals, called those games on TV and ran U.S.A. Basketball. But it wasn’t enough — Webb wanted to get bigger.
In 2014, a Varsity pitch deck began circulating around the offices of Charlesbank Capital Partners, a midsize private-equity firm in Boston that counted Harvard University among its investors. Impressed by the cheer giant’s profit margins and market dominance, Charlesbank purchased Varsity Brands — whose portfolio had grown, through a series of mergers, to include Varsity Spirit, in addition to makers of class rings, yearbooks and sports apparel — for $1.5 billion, putting up $300 million of its own cash. Most of Varsity Brands’s revenue today comes from these other companies, but the sale was a payday for longtime Varsity Spirit employees, who collectively received $79.5 million. For Webb, it was life-changing: He personally made $34.8 million, which he called “a pretty good slug of money.”
With a major private-equity firm behind it, Varsity had the war chest it needed. Charlesbank helped Varsity secure a $125 million loan facility. “We’ve got the dough for our acquisitions now,” wrote Joshua N. Beer, a managing director at Charlesbank, to his team. “Let’s make it sweat!”
The juiciest target was an event producer called JAM Brands. Aaron Flaker, one of the founders of JAM, was the rare cheer entrepreneur without a cheer background. He had quit the baseball team at the University of Louisville and learned about the cheer world when he successfully auditioned to become the school’s mascot, a cardinal. Flaker and his partners had already turned down Varsity once, in 2005. “Varsity is rolling up companies,” he said of his mind-set at the time. “Let’s roll up and fight.” JAM Brands acquired other event producers and became the Pepsi to Varsity’s Coke, controlling about 30 percent of the All Star market by some estimates.
And yet even JAM Brands struggled to compete. “They were so big,” Flaker told me with exasperation. Most cities had surprisingly few event venues that could host a cheer competition. They needed 20-foot ceilings to accommodate high-flying stunts, and plenty of floor space, but Varsity had exclusive contracts with many of them to ensure that JAM Brands and other producers couldn’t host there. Varsity’s generous loyalty bonuses to gym owners in the form of rebates hurt, too. And then Varsity began scheduling “attack events” — placing a competition in, say, Baton Rouge, La., on the same weekend that JAM Brands had an event in neighboring Shreveport, in order to peel off teams. In 2015, Flaker and his partners relented: They sold to Varsity for $32.9 million.
Varsity increased event registration fees by an average of more than 40 percent at JAM Brands and four other event producers it acquired in this period, according to a statistical analysis by plaintiffs in a subsequent class-action suit, which also alleged the company killed off some JAM Brands competitions in order to push teams toward higher-priced Varsity events. (Varsity disputes this analysis.) Today Webb says that some smaller event producers approached Varsity and asked to be acquired because they trusted him and his ability to steward their companies. “I didn’t get up one day and go, ‘We’re not controlling this whole thing,’” Webb says. “I had enough to say grace over, to be honest with you.”
And yet internal documents from that period tell a different story: Independent event producers were panicking. Varsity had created a major new competition: the Summit, a championship for lower-level teams that now generated $32 million a year in revenue for the company. The market power it gave Varsity was squeezing smaller event producers. They emailed the U.S.A.S.F. to propose leveling the playing field: The federation, not Varsity, should run all end-of-season events. The U.S.A.S.F. privately assured Varsity that it would table the idea for a future committee meeting. “It will die there without us having to publicly oppose it,” an internal memo concluded.
Still, the U.S.A.S.F.’s maneuvering on Varsity’s behalf was sometimes insufficient in Webb’s eyes, according to Les Stella, a former top federation executive for about a decade starting in 2004. Stella recalled a conversation with Webb in the late 2010s, after he had moved to another governing body, about Jim Chadwick, the U.S.A.S.F. president at the time. “I need to remind Jim why we started the [expletive] U.S.A.S.F.,” Webb said. “Not because we wanted some [expletive] governing body telling us what to [expletive] do. It was because we wanted to control the All Star market. And it [expletive] worked.” Stella was stunned. “My jaw hit the floor,” he said recently. (Webb denies saying anything like this to Stella.)
As it snapped up rivals, Varsity did not rename its new acquisitions. Rather, it maintained existing brands in order to keep parents in the dark about how much of their money was now flowing to the company, according to a draft version of a 2018 presentation prepared by investment banks working on behalf of Varsity.
An American Cheer Power competition in Philadelphia. Varsity expanded its business over the years by including younger competitors.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Varsity introduced other practices that many parents did notice. For the Summit, held at Disney World, Varsity bought four-day Disney “park hopper” passes in bulk for $173.24 apiece and sold them back to parents for $380, according to internal documents. The company’s Stay to Play program required teams to book rooms at Varsity-aligned hotels during some competitions. Parents protested they were overpaying — the very same rooms were often available for less online. What many didn’t know was that Varsity received a guaranteed $20 per room per night, according to an expert report later prepared on behalf of parents as part of a class-action suit. “It would not be good for our customers to know how much revenue we are generating in hotel rebates,” an internal Varsity memo warned.
“WHERE is that extra money going,” asked one gym owner on Facebook about the hotel scheme. “WHY am I forced to do this to myself and my gym families?” (Varsity employees took screenshots of this comment and others, tracking the dissent.) The company would eventually rebrand the program Stay Smart, which the choreographer Jamie Parrish, whom Varsity had since hired, admitted in an internal memo was “basically putting lipstick on a pig.” “THE ELEPHANT IN ROOM,” Parrish wrote in a separate presentation, was that the company needed to find ways to “avoid being viewed as a monopoly” as it continued its buying binge. (In a statement, a Varsity spokeswoman said Parrish never held any executive or senior leadership role and that any comments from him were not reflective of the company’s corporate strategy.)
On July 1, 2015,
Lawrence Herkimer died at 89 — or as his family affectionately wrote in his obituary, “Herkie jumped into Heaven.” There was now a moniker up for grabs. For decades, Herkimer had been known as the father of modern cheerleading. Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, had called Webb the sport’s “wayward son” for splitting off from his mentor years earlier. But when news agencies began calling Varsity for comment on Herkimer’s death, Webb was adamant. “I don’t want him to be called the father of cheerleading,” Sheila Noone, the vice president of public relations for Varsity Spirit, recalled Webb’s telling her. “He can be grandfather, but I should be the father.” (Webb says he does not recall this conversation.)
Webb had finally eclipsed his mentor. But he was experiencing friction with Charlesbank. One talking point that Charlesbank prepared for a meeting with Webb read, “You are uncomfortable and unhappy with the level of engagement we want in the business.” Charlesbank personnel discussed terminating his position in January 2016, according to court filings: “He is going to be very on edge that we have summoned him to New York alone to fire him.” Two months later, Webb resigned. But Charlesbank needed to keep Webb loyalists happy, a former Varsity employee with knowledge of the situation said, and so they agreed that Webb should stay on as chairman, and his protégé, Bill Seely, would soon be named president of Varsity Spirit. (Charlesbank did not respond to a request for comment.)
The U.S.A.S.F.’s ties to Varsity continued to thwart independent event producers, subsequent litigation would claim. Steve Peterson, who oversaw events for the U.S.A.S.F., was paid through Varsity. (Varsity told USA Today in 2020 that the company was reimbursed for paying Peterson “as part of an administrative agreement.”) An email from that period shows Peterson applauding a Varsity acquisition. “They are going to freak,” he wrote to Varsity employees, describing the mind-set of other event producers after the company’s 2018 purchase of EPIC Brands. “Congratulations guys!!!”
Performing at Varsity’s American Cheer Power competition in Philadelphia.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Peterson also privately mocked independent event producers’ pleas to level the playing field. “We are not the only company in jeopardy of closing our doors,” one owner wrote to the U.S.A.S.F. in February 2018. Peterson forwarded the email to Varsity headquarters with a note about its strategy: “FYI. … It’s working.” He added a smiley-face emoticon.
In June 2018, Bain, an even larger private equity firm in Boston, purchased Varsity Brands for $2.9 billion, internally citing the advantage of the “competitive moat” that Varsity Brands and Charlesbank had dug. In less than four years, Charlesbank had realized $1 billion in returns on an initial investment of $300 million. Peterson, in a subsequent deposition, admitted to personally netting more than $200,000 from the Bain acquisition through his participation — while working at a supposedly independent organization — in Varsity’s employee stock-option program. (Peterson did not respond to a request for comment.)
By the late 2010s, it was not unusual for a family to spend more than $10,000 annually per child in All Star cheer, including competition fees, uniforms, plane tickets, hotels and meals. Parents complained bitterly about rising costs. Fathers now attended competitions with a new T-shirt: “My bank account hit zero.” (It was a double entendre — to “hit zero” means to perform a cheer routine without any point deductions). Mothers worked as couriers for DoorDash and Uber Eats during their daughters’ practices. If that wasn’t enough, they were ready to pay with their blood, sweat and tears: In Crazy Moms of Cheer, a Facebook group that today has more than 46,000 members, hundreds of mothers began posting about selling blood plasma. “Can someone help a mama out and explain to me this plasma donation situation I see being commented about?” one mother wrote recently. “Who what when where why and how much? #TheStruggleIsCheer”
Competition at Varsity’s American Cheer Power in Philadelphia.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Gym owners were likewise hooked. Varsity gave gym owners a rebate for the money that families spent on competition fees and apparel once they met a certain threshold, using two loyalty programs, the Family Plan and the Network Program. Those programs annually doled out roughly $10 million, according to court filings, with some gym owners receiving more than $200,000 a year. Gyms with less-wealthy parents relied on those checks. But under Bain’s ownership, the company watered down the payments, shifting some of the cash rebates into apparel credits, which flowed right back to Varsity.
“We can keep them coming back for the Family Plan crack,” Jamie Parrish wrote to executives in August 2019. “Cons: Sooner or later, crack ho’s turn on their pimp wanting more crack, better crack, and for less output. How do we fix this?” Parrish suggested that Varsity reps could warn gym owners that if they continued complaining, the rebates might end: “Basically threaten the cheer community without threatening them.” Or, he wrote, the reps could suggest that Varsity might go public with the rebates and enrage parents, most of whom were likely unaware that gym owners were discreetly pocketing some of the competition fees they paid.
Lawsuits would later claim that, while Varsity grappled with how to subdue gym owners and wring more cash from parents, both the company and cheer governing bodies were ignoring troubling and even predatory behavior at gyms — a problem that was about to spill into the open.
On the morning
of Dec. 2, 2017, as Bain Capital was considering acquiring Varsity, Marlene Cota, a vice president at Varsity, was volunteering at a marathon in Memphis, when she checked her email on her phone. “Is this what Varsity stands for?” she recalls the message reading. It was signed “Concerned Parent.” Attached was a photo of a young girl kneeling in front of a teenage boy, his hand on her shoulder as she simulated oral sex. Obscuring her face was a placard that read, “Cheer, we’re so MAJOR,” a reference to Majors, a Varsity competition in a few weeks’ time.
Cota was a Varsity lifer, having arrived in Memphis nearly 20 years earlier, when Varsity poached her from her marketing job at Claire’s, the accessories chain for tween girls. She had never seen such collegiality in a corporate atmosphere. “I remember thinking, All these people really like each other,” Cota said of her first impression of the company.
Co-workers shared babysitters. Greg Webb, Jeff’s brother and a longtime Varsity executive, hosted companywide Easter-egg hunts and Halloween parties. When an employee struggled to make rent, she could walk into Greg’s office, where he advanced pay with a personal check. Jeff Webb let employees borrow the corporate jet to fly home when they had medical and family emergencies.
But now, looking at the photo on her phone, she felt a tremor of apprehension. Both cheerleaders in the photo represented one of the company’s biggest customers: Rockstar Cheer, a gym franchise based in Greenville, S.C. Scott Foster, who owned the gym with his wife, regularly fielded top teams, and he cut a memorable figure, with his fake tan and sleeve tattoos. Were it any other gym, Cota might have written off the photo as a crude joke gone awry — and yet because it came from Foster’s gym, it was the latest clue for her that something might be amiss at his franchise.
Foster had come up with a generation of hard-partying cheerleaders in the 1990s and 2000s. That period was an “out-of-control frat party,” said DJ Yeager, the founder of Cheer Updates, whose Twitter account dedicated to sharing cheer-world news has nearly 250,000 followers. Except now, in the 2010s, the revelers were older, and they had money: light beer and marijuana became martinis and harder drugs.
Cheer insiders say a code of silence developed among coaches and Varsity executives. Because so many people had joined in on the “frat party,” they were afraid to point fingers. Patrick Cowherd, a gym owner who briefly served on the organization’s national advisory board in the mid-2010s, and others told me that Foster was often visibly intoxicated. “The U.S.A.S.F. knew about Scott Foster and these issues he was having,” Cowherd told me. “They were not interested in anything that could bring a bad light.” Les Stella, the former U.S.A.S.F. executive, agreed. In his opinion, he said, the governing body was preoccupied with protecting gym franchises like Rockstar that were big moneymakers for Varsity. “It’s not good, honest to say it,” he said recently.
Marlene Cota, a former vice president at Varsity, was fired, she says, after she suggested that the company contact law enforcement about a gym owner, Scott Foster.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Cota suggested to colleagues that Varsity should contact South Carolina law-enforcement officials about Foster, arguing that the photo was evidence that his franchise needed scrutiny. But the reception among her co-workers was muted, she says. Foster’s gyms were a major earner for Varsity, which in 2006 had also purchased World Spirit Federation, a cheer company he founded with his wife, during an early phase of its buying spree. Around this time, the U.S.A.S.F. suspended Foster after videos circulated online that appeared to show him drinking alcohol with young cheerleaders.
A month after Cota flagged the disturbing photo, her colleagues took her out to lunch. Afterward, she says, her lunch mates retreated to their offices and shut the doors, which was unusual. John Newby, a top executive, appeared in Cota’s doorway. “I never liked you,” she remembers him saying. Newby was flanked by another longtime Varsity employee holding a manila folder.
Cota cut him off. “Nuh huh,” she said. She called a lawyer.
“Don’t sign anything,” the lawyer said. “Don’t say another word.”
Cota says she was escorted out of the building in the freight elevator, and her company cellphone account was killed before she made it out of the parking lot. The next day, human-resources employees packed the contents of her desk into five cardboard boxes. She put them in her spare bedroom. (In a statement, a Varsity spokeswoman denied that Cota’s firing was related to concerns she raised about Foster.)
Cota had worked at Varsity for two decades. One of her children had cheered with co-workers’ children, and their families vacationed together. But just as Krista Parks felt isolated from her friends after her catastrophic injury, Cota says her colleagues ghosted her. The “cult,” as she called it, closed ranks.
In the months that followed, Cota watched as photos of Foster at cheer events circulated online, seemingly in violation of his suspension. On Aug. 3, 2018, Foster even uploaded a photo to Instagram of himself in Las Vegas with top Varsity executives and their wives.
In a 2022 Sportico article in which Cota was also quoted, Susan Crumpton, then a Varsity spokeswoman, said the U.S.A.S.F. had taken appropriate action based on what it knew at the time. “U.S.A.S.F. notified Mr. Foster that he had been found guilty of violating numerous provisions of its codes of conduct in January of 2018,” Crumpton said. “It is extremely important to bear in mind that no allegations of sexual misconduct or abuse were raised at this time.”
The industry’s secrets would keep bubbling to the surface. In September 2020, USA Today began publishing a bombshell investigative series: The paper found nearly 180 coaches, choreographers and others “affiliated with cheerleading” who had been accused or convicted of charges related to sexual misconduct — some of which had occurred at cheer gyms — but whom the U.S.A.S.F. and USA Cheer failed to ban from working in the sport. The investigations underlined for Cota, Cowherd and others what they long suspected: that both organizations had been more engaged in protecting Varsity’s market dominance than in keeping children safe.
The details in a follow-up story were damning: USA Today cited a former U.S.A.S.F. contract employee who said that, during her nearly two years working for the company, she and the organization’s membership director were the only people tasked with investigating hundreds of abuse allegations. She said she worked only a few hours a week. Months could pass before action was taken against coaches — if it was taken at all. Many cheerleaders the paper interviewed received no reply from the U.S.A.S.F. — or became trapped in circuitous email correspondence with the organization that went nowhere. Reporting forms were 15 pages long when printed and required arcane knowledge of the rule or regulation the abuser had violated.
Within days of the first USA Today story, Bill Seely, the president of Varsity Spirit, sent a companywide email to assure employees that he was taking steps to improve reporting of cyberbullying, beefing up training for staff working at camps, hiring independent experts to assess reporting mechanisms and making plans to better coordinate with USA Cheer and the U.S.A.S.F. But nearly a year later, USA Today found that individuals the U.S.A.S.F. had suspended or banned continued to participate in the sport. On a recent visit I paid to the USA Cheer website, links to the reporting forms were all dead. (After being contacted by The Times, a USA Cheer spokeswoman responded that they were now functional. The U.S.A.S.F. did not respond to a request for comment, but the organization maintains a list on their website of individuals who are restricted or ineligible from participating in All Star Cheer and Dance because of a pending investigation or sanctions.)
Dana Storms, a San Diego cheer mom, became a node in the sport’s whisper network. Her Twitter inbox was seasonal. The busy time was the spring, around the end-of-season championships. Children who were abused at those events or saw an old coach that triggered a memory finally decided to act, she says. At those peak times, Storms could get as many as 20 direct messages a week. Cheerleaders, some as young as 12, asked how to report an abusive coach on the federation’s convoluted reporting forms or how to find a lawyer. Other correspondents were middle-aged former cheerleaders, recounting decades-old abuse.
USA Today did not publish a full list of the nearly 180 names it uncovered, and Scott Foster did not appear in the series. In fact, since Marlene Cota had lost her job, his Rockstar Cheer franchise had been thriving. Foster’s elite teams dominated Varsity’s championships, and he exuded bravado. “Don’t worry about what I’m doing,” he posted on Facebook. “Worry about why you’re worried about what I’m doing.” Life was good.
Then, Jerry Harris, a fan favorite on the Netflix series “Cheer,” was convicted of sex crimes involving minors. That high-profile case, along with the USA Gymnastics scandal and the #MeToo movement, helped lift the stigma and fear around reporting abusers, and now, Foster had a real worry: In summer 2022, officials in South Carolina began looking into a report that Foster had sexually abused a girl in the area, according to a federal officer involved.
Weeks afterward, on the morning of Aug. 22, Foster got into a car with a vanity plate that read RCKSTAR and drove to a state park near his gym. He parked in the upper lot, pressed a Glock 17 under his chin and pulled the trigger.
When authorities reached his wife, Kathy Foster, she told them she was “afraid that was going to happen,” according to the coroner’s report. Her husband had “a lot of secrets.”
In a civil suit filed a week after Foster’s death, more possible victims came forward — most of them teenage athletes at his gym. Among the allegations: Foster and his wife maintained a house — called the Rockstar House — where he and his coaches plied underage athletes with alcohol and drugs. (Kathy Foster could not be reached for comment.) One boy claimed that another coach at Rockstar House had forced him to watch pornography and attempted to engage in oral sex with him. Others said that Foster would have sex with them when they traveled to competitions.
The complaint named Varsity and the U.S.A.S.F. among the defendants, claiming gross negligence, among other charges. “When complaints or reports have surfaced, or social media images and videos circulate depicting illegal activity with minors,” it read, “the Defendants sweep it under the rug, do not report to any agencies, do not strip coaches of their eligibility, and often rally around coaches who have been accused of illegal conduct with minors, even ostracizing families who have complained or reported.”
And now, finally, the floodgates opened. Lawsuits poured in from cheerleaders around the country who charged that the U.S.A.S.F. ignored or soft-pedaled their reports of sexual abuse by coaches and choreographers. Carlos Realpe, Nikki Jennings’s coach in Florida, was named as a defendant in civil litigation for supposedly failing to report the rape of an underage male athlete. (Realpe says that the gym reported the rape to the police and the U.S.A.S.F. Last month, Realpe and other coaches settled with the accuser.)
Still more litigation followed. Groups of parents, apparel makers and gyms filed antitrust lawsuits, one of which echoed the claims — leveled by Les Stella, Marlene Cota and others — that the U.S.A.S.F.’s mandate to protect athletes from sexual abuse had come into conflict with Varsity’s profit motives. Varsity’s “exclusionary scheme,” attorneys for gym owners claimed, had enfeebled oversight efforts and “allowed Varsity and the U.S.A.S.F. to resist the demand to prevent sexual abuse in the industry.”
In 2021, attorneys representing gyms saw an interview that Cota gave on HBO Real Sports about the growing abuse scandal and called her at home to ask if she had any documents that might be related to their case. Cota went to the spare bedroom where she had stored five cardboard boxes years earlier. The Varsity employee who packed up her desk had made a mistake: Inside were voluminous journals and handwritten notes from her time at Varsity, some of which outlined the company’s business tactics. She handed them over.
In four major antitrust lawsuits, lawyers combed through years of Varsity emails and presentations. They accused the company of building a monopolistic juggernaut that inflated prices for families and drove rivals from the business.
In March 2023, a judge rejected one of the antitrust cases, dismissing it with prejudice. That same month, Varsity settled a second class-action suit, from gyms and parents, for $43.5 million. Analysts from the S&P Global had already assured investors that the settlement was a mere speed bump and would “not result in any material structural changes to the company’s operations.” This spring, the U.S.A.S.F., Varsity and other defendants in the suit filed by plaintiffs at Rockstar Cheer either settled, continuing to dispute the claims, or had their charges dismissed. Varsity, Bain and other co-defendants, meanwhile, settled the antitrust suit from parents and athletes for $82.5 million.
As part of the settlements, Varsity agreed, among other concessions, to shrink the scope of the Stay Smart hotel program, to stop requiring that teams attend Varsity-run cheer camps to be eligible for end-of-year championships and not to directly or indirectly pay the salaries of any U.S.A.S.F. employees. The U.S.A.S.F. agreed not to disclose confidential information about event producers to Varsity. Varsity claims that the U.S.A.S.F. is now run “entirely independently” from the company, and reaffirmed its commitment to the safety of its cheerleaders. “Varsity Spirit’s mission is grounded in creating a safe and empowering activity for children and young adults,” a spokeswoman wrote in a statement.
Cheerleaders practicing at their gym.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
In the background, the wheels of private equity were turning. This summer, KKR announced that it would acquire Varsity Brands. Those legal settlements now looked like exit tolls for Bain Capital. It was a stunning turn of events. Bain, which had presided over a calamitous six years of scandal, now seemed set to walk away with hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — in profits. Big Cheer was only getting bigger. DJ Yeager, the founder of Cheer Updates, was among those who belatedly realized that the sport had become a line item on a private-equity spreadsheet. “Bain Capital was going to get their money one way or another,” he said. “They don’t care what the industry looks like after they’re done with it.” (Bain did not respond to a request for comment.)
By this point, Jeff Webb was long gone from Varsity. After the Bain acquisition, he took another payout. But the company continued to slip from his grasp. The private-equity firm rejected his efforts to put non-Bain executives on the board, according to a court exhibit. Webb resigned in 2020.
On a sweltering afternoon in June, I met Webb at the Midtown offices of the public-relations firm representing him. He wore a navy jacket over his broad shoulders and looked even younger than his photos. He had brought his lawyer, a former U.S. attorney from Dallas, to sit in on our meeting, too. Webb was charming, self-deprecating, and beamed with a sunny optimism that befitted the country’s cheerleader in chief.
I had dozens of questions, but he had come prepared, too, with a notebook full of talking points. For two hours, he recounted the company’s growth from his spare bedroom to sprawling cheer empire. At one point he was moved to tears while reflecting on his good fortune. Speaking about the abuse scandals, Webb told me that “one incident is too many.” The USA Gymnastics case had encouraged victims from all sports, including his own, to come forward. “I think it’s a good thing,” he said.
When I asked Webb about resigning from his company, he was quick to change the subject to his new ambitions: the Olympics. Making cheer an Olympic sport is the career capstone he now craves. The man who had testified that cheerleading was not a sport was now the president of the International Cheer Union, pushing for cheerleading to be included at the games in Brisbane in 2032.
Webb was riddled with contradictions. He had written a book that warned of the dangers of corporate monopolies, but he himself has been accused of creating a mighty one. He wanted to save the American middle class — and yet his company had transformed into a wealth-extraction machine affecting those same families. He wanted to expand cheerleading, but the rising cost of All Star cheer has flatlined participation as the costs have become unaffordable for many families. I reminded him that he boasted that Varsity had grown 42 of the 43 years he ran it. But that growth had come from somewhere, specifically parents’ pockets. Was that what he had in mind when he started the company?
“No,” he said, his face reddening. “Exactly the opposite.” I asked him what he wanted on his tombstone. “Father of cheer,” as he insisted on being called years earlier? Or “entrepreneur,” whose obsession with growth had delivered the sport into the hands of private equity?
The question seemed to catch Webb off guard. He shifted in his seat. He could never have gotten the sport to these heights without the private-equity money, he said. But it had been a trap. “Once you are on that treadmill,” he said, “it’s almost impossible to go back.” And the profits? He’d made millions, but Charlesbank and Bain made billions, he said.
At a Varsity American Cheer Power competition in Philadelphia.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Cheer was too expensive, he admitted. Injuries were too high. Something had to change. “I don’t know what to say,” he said finally. His face tightened into a smile, the mask of a cheerleader. “I hope it works out for all concerned.”
And still, they
come. The minivans pull up after long drives, and the families tumble out. Mothers lug garment bags with labeled pockets for bows and makeup. Gen Z girls voluntarily part with their phones and prep for their routines in convention-center hallways and hotel bathrooms. They lock arms or meditate against walls, or pray.
Music splits the air, and then they’re off: all different sizes and abilities, all playing a crucial role — stronger girls as bases, smaller girls flying up in the air, the more athletic tumbling on the mats. Fathers in custom jerseys lose their minds with delirium. Girls land stunts and then celebrate backstage — or wobble and fall and collapse into tears and group hugs.
By evening, the hotel lobby has become a giant sleepover. Kids run around in pajamas, clipping hand-painted “spirit pins” onto unsuspecting strangers’ back pockets. Parents sip espresso martinis and swap videos of the day’s tumbles and stumbles. All across America, this empire of cheer rolls on.
And then there are the broken and banished. After seven concussions and her ejection from the University of Hawaii cheer squad, Nikki Jennings, 23, still lives on Oahu. Magnesium pills help control her migraine-like “stingers.” She stretches to keep her hip injury from flaring up. When she walks into the gym where she works as a personal trainer, the thumping music opens a portal in her memory, and she imagines she’s flying through the air again, twisting and falling into her teammates’ waiting arms.
“I let myself think about it,” Jennings said, her eyes filling with tears, “but then I kind of just push on past.”
A flyer performing a stunt.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Varsity Spirit is too vast for her to contemplate. Too big to take on. So Jennings does what cheerleading taught her to do: focus on what she can control. Three days a week, she attends graduate classes online. She’s training to be a therapist, with a specialty in victims of sexual abuse and grooming.
This spring, during two weeks of in-person classes, an older classmate in her 40s pulled Jennings aside. She had been a cheerleader herself.
“I know what you’ve been through,” she said. “Nobody here gets it. But I do.”
_________________
С этнокультурным интересом и отраслевыми пожеланиями, Dimitriy.
If you’ve been seeing more pro-Harris ads online lately, here’s why
...
Democrats are mounting an unprecedented digital advertising campaign in the closing weeks of the presidential race, pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a targeted effort that the party hopes will tip the balance in one of the closest elections in US history.
The effort is being steered by Future Forward PAC, or FF PAC, the largest single-candidate super PAC in the 2024 election. And the group is breaking from traditional political advertising by focusing half of its $450 million budget on digital platforms – including what it says is the largest political ad buy in YouTube history – crafting highly targeted content to capture and hold the attention of voters.
FF PAC’s approach, particularly in the campaign’s final weeks, has emphasized digital advertising aimed at non-political audiences, including younger voters, especially younger women, Black voters, Latino voters and other key demographics that Vice President Kamala Harris will need to form a winning coalition.
Super PACs are prohibited from directly coordinating with the campaigns they support. But leveraging its scale, FF PAC has produced and tested more than 1,000 unique ads, locking in on the economy and abortion as top messaging priorities. And in the closing stretch, the group is advising Democrats not to overemphasize attacks on Donald Trump’s character and fitness for office – such as recent messaging by the Harris campaign calling the former president a fascist – and remain focused on voters’ pocketbooks and reproductive rights.
The group’s staggering war chest is funded by some of the Democratic Party’s wealthiest supporters, taking advantage of loose campaign finance regulations that allow outside groups like FF PAC to raise and spend unlimited sums as they work to influence the outcome of elections.
It’s an effort that reflects some of the key dynamics at play in the 2024 race, characterized by big money, transforming media and analytics-driven campaigning. And countering Democrats is a network of Republican groups that are also breaking new ground in the American political arena.
Next week’s election will be a test for the powerhouse FF PAC and its digital investment, measuring the efficacy of some of the most cutting-edge tools and tactics available to modern campaigns.
FF PAC’s role this cycle
The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission transformed US elections, opening the floodgates to groups like FF PAC, which were allowed to accept unlimited contributions from wealthy megadonors and faced no limits on the amount they could spend influencing campaigns.
In the years since, those groups have proliferated and dominated political advertising, driving the cost of US elections to new heights. The 2024 election is poised to break the record set by the 2020 election and see $10.2 billion worth of campaign advertising, according to the ad tracking firm AdImpact.
Out of the large universe of outside groups, the Biden-Harris ticket selected FF PAC in July 2023 as its officially endorsed super PAC for the 2024 campaign. The group has taken on an unprecedented role in this year’s White House race, centralizing Democratic outside efforts in marked contrast to the balkanized network of pro-Trump outside groups.
From the start of 2023 through October 16, the end of the most recent FEC reporting period, FF PAC reported raising $394 million and spending $373 million – including $38 million before President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race in late July. An aide with the group said its budget for the condensed general election between Harris and Trump totaled $450 million, primarily targeting seven key battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Georgia.
The group has received a substantial portion of its funding from a Democratic dark money hub, Future Forward USA Action, which, as a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, faces no requirements to disclose its donors and is able to contribute huge sums to super PACs like FF PAC. Among those donors is billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who gave $50 million to the dark money network this year.
FF PAC had reported receiving $128 million from its dark money parent organization through October 16. Top-named donors to FF PAC include Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who has given $38 million; LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who has given more than $10 million; and Bloomberg, who has also given $19 million directly to FF PAC in publicly disclosed contributions.
The ad laboratory
With its massive war chest, FF PAC has faced the challenge of effectively and efficiently distributing its resources. Part of its response has been operating a massive advertising laboratory, at an unprecedented scale. The group has produced and tested more than 1,000 unique ads and measured their effectiveness at moving voters. And after surveying voters watching the ads, the group has honed in on messaging about the economy and abortion.
It’s a focus that the super PAC is urging Democrats to mirror as Harris delivers her closing message. An October 25 email from the FF PAC to Democrats with advice on messaging contained this cautionary note: “How effective is attacking Trump for being a fascist? This topic is not as persuasive as contrast messages featuring Harris’s economic plans, and her promise to protect reproductive rights.”
Those lines of attack – focused on Trump’s character and citing criticism from former administration officials – have featured prominently in late advertising coming from the Harris campaign, such as a spot that began airing over the weekend and included audio of Trump’s onetime chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, telling The New York Times that the former president “certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist.”
Appearing Monday on CNN, Harris campaign spokesperson Ian Sams responded to FF PAC’s argument, saying that “the American people are capable of processing numerous things at once, and there are a lot of people who have a lot of different concerns about the country and the future.”
As part of its strategy, FF PAC has launched waves of ads that feature the candidate discussing tax policy. The group had received positive feedback about ads that include Harris speaking, as opposed to the dramatic narrators who often accompany political spots.
Voter testimonials are another key tactic, and FF PAC has produced dozens of spots that feature voters reacting disapprovingly to clips of Trump praising his “rich as hell” donors, a sustained line of attack.
Additionally, reflecting its effort to reach key groups such as young women, FF PAC has run TikTok-style ads targeting the “MomTok” audience, touting Harris’ proposals to “cut taxes for families, up to $6,000 for your family.” (TikTok does not allow political advertisers to buy ad time on its platform.)
The super PAC’s ads have also emphasized abortion rights, a top issue for Democratic voters that is contributing to a yawning political gender divide. Many of those ads feature women and medical professionals warning against abortion restrictions and criticizing Trump, who appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who voted with the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A digital focus
Amid a transformed media landscape in 2024, TV advertising still draws the most dollars. Out of nearly $2.9 billion spent on advertising for the presidential race since the start of 2023, more than $2.2 billion has gone toward TV ads, according to data from AdImpact. FF PAC is spending hundreds of millions on TV, too, but it’s on digital platforms that the group hopes to make its mark.
“Our program has been about reaching voters where they are and on the screens they use,” Margit Westerman, FF PAC’s digital director, said in a statement. “That means a surround-sound approach where people see it while watching their favorite streaming show, looking at the latest YouTube clip and visiting their go-to website. We spent months understanding where people were and we’ve found the content that is persuasive as long as we make sure people see it.”
That includes a $44 million YouTube buy, targeting an audience that skews young and diverse. And the campaign has targeted high-profile live events, beginning with the Olympics late this summer and including the NFL’s “Sunday Ticket” through Election Day.
FF PAC has also bought ad time on popular gaming platforms such as Unity and Frameplay, targeting younger male voters, a key area of concern for the Harris campaign. And straining to reach screens, FF PAC also bought ad time on premium streaming TV platforms, including Hulu, Disney, Peacock, WB/Discovery/Max, and Univision. (Warner Bros./Discovery is the parent company of CNN.)
The group estimates it has delivered 3.71 billion high-quality video impressions so far. And it has done so by paying a premium: Many of FF PAC’s 30-second TV ads have 15- and 6-second versions designed for digital platforms’ unskippable slots.
On traditional TV too, FF PAC has been creative with its resources, spending millions on national ad buys that – while airing everywhere – still represent a cheaper way to reach swing states than buying ad time from local stations getting slammed in the race’s final sprint.
GOP countereffort
FF PAC’s commitment to digital advertising has enabled the group to blitz its Republican counterparts on leading platforms during the final weeks of the race.
In the first week of October, FF PAC spent $6.7 million advertising on Google and its affiliated platforms, including YouTube, while the leading pro-Trump advertiser spent about $1.5 million. The following week, FF PAC ramped its spending up to nearly $9 million, while the leading pro-Trump advertiser spent about $1.2 million. During the third week of October, FF PAC spent $10.5 million, while the largest pro-Trump advertiser spent about $2 million; and during the fourth week, FF PAC led with $12.3 million on Google platforms, while the top GOP advertiser spent $3.5 million.
While FF PAC has a singular role as the leading pro-Harris super PAC, Republicans have taken a divergent approach, deploying a network of large super PACs that each take on a share of the pro-Trump messaging.
Five of the largest groups – MAGA Inc., Preserve America, America PAC, Restoration PAC and Right For America PAC – have combined to raise $718 million and spend $709 million from the beginning of 2023 through mid-October. The largest, MAGA Inc., reported spending about $113 million before Trump had secured the GOP presidential nomination.
Each group has devoted a share of its spending to digital advertising, but FF PAC had exceeded their combined spending on Google platforms through October 27, $37.7 million to $11.4 million. On Facebook over the past 30 days, those pro-Trump groups collectively led FF PAC, about $4.8 million to $2.3 million (including about $700,000 in ad spending from a MAGA Inc. merchandise site).
One of the pro-Trump groups, America PAC, has received nearly $120 million from Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and it has also taken an iconoclastic approach to its spending – though its efforts have differed from FF PAC’s.
Musk’s group has probed the limits of weakening campaign finance enforcement – including daily giveaways of $1 million that have drawn scrutiny from the Department of Justice and are the target of a civil lawsuit from the Philadelphia district attorney. America PAC is also engaged in an unprecedented on-the-ground effort, devoting more than $70 million to canvassing and field operations in battleground states, a huge lift for the Trump campaign.
Part of that is out of necessity – the former president’s campaign has been dramatically outraised by Harris’ team, leaving the Democratic nominee with significantly more campaign cash to spend on staff, door-knocking, phone banking and other turnout efforts.
FF PAC has not engaged in a comparable turnout effort, leaving that traditional campaign activity to the cash-flush Harris operation. But the super PAC is betting that its innovative and unprecedented digital advertising program will help Harris close what’s shaping up to be one of the closest elections in the country’s history.
CLARIFICATION: This story has been clarified to reflect that FF PAC’s TikTok-style ads do not run on the platform because it does not allow political ads.
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Surprise Hit of the Campaign TV Ad Season: Giving Voters Permission to Go Rogue
Both parties are running ads that tell voters it’s OK to break from their party. “You can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know,” one says.
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The advertisement opens with three older women sitting around a table in a diner, talking about threats to Israel and American Jews and Donald J. Trump. One admits she “never cared for” the former president. “But at least he’ll keep us safe,” she says.
The advertisement, produced by the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund, is an example of one of the most striking advertising tactics of this campaign.
Going after their skeptics, both Democrats and Republicans are highlighting relatable characters offering measured testimonials — even acknowledgments of the shortcomings of the candidates they are pitching — to coax voters into crossing party lines. They implicitly speak to the reality that, in a polarized country where people are defined by their tribe, one of most difficult things is to step out of that box and vote against type.
It is intended to “create a permission structure,” said Todd Harris, a Republican consultant. “In order for a message to sink in, you have to have people listening and paying attention.”
The diner ad, for instance, tries to give Jewish voters, who are mostly Democrats, permission to vote for a Republican former president.
An ad from the group Vote Common Good, aimed at shy Harris supporters living in Trump households, shows a woman stepping into a voting booth with the reminder that her vote is private.
“The one place in America where women still have the right to choose,” it says as the voter marks Harris on her ballot, a knowing smile flashing on her face. “What happens in the booth stays in the booth,” the announcer adds.
Candidates often try to reach across party lines to expand their appeal. Campaign groups led by prominent members of the other party, or endorsements from a party-switcher, have been common over the decades — from Nixon to Bush, from Clinton to Clinton.
But analysts said the proliferation of those targeted appeals this year — and more significant, the way they have moved to the front of the stage, in the form of splashy advertisements — was testimony to the challenges campaigns face in reaching audiences in this glutted and divided environment.
It also shows how tight the race for president is, where even a sliver of votes from, say, Jewish grandmothers in Philadelphia, could be critical. In the case of Mr. Trump, Republican analysts said, the hurdle is to appeal to voters who might be open to him based on his policies — in this case, his unyielding support for Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister — but are put off by his style and behavior on the campaign trail.
(Harris supporters, signaling the grandmothers ad’s effectiveness, responded with their own digital ad, set in the same suburban deli, with familiar Jewish political faces, Republican and Democratic alike, saying they were voting for the vice president.)
“Our politics are so tribal,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant and ad maker. “The campaign is so marginalized people are trying to chip away at the edges. If you can take a historical Republican and get them simply not to vote for Trump, you take his number down by one vote. Get them to take the leap for Harris, and you move totals in the actual arithmetic by two.”
Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, now routinely enlists Republicans to attest in its advertisements to why they are supporting Vice President Kamala Harris. “I voted for Trump twice, but I can’t do it again,” a voter says in one.
Bill Knapp, a Democratic ad producer working for Future Forward, said that “finding authentic and credible voices is more critical then ever.”
“And to be credible, they have to share the ‘message journey’ of the viewer,” he said.
One permission ad is targeted at supporters of abortion rights, seeking to address what has been a political liability for Mr. Trump. The former president opposes abortion rights, and takes credit for appointing Supreme Court justices to help overturn Roe v. Wade, the court decision guaranteeing a federal right to abortion.
“I’ve never voted for Trump,” a woman wearing a purple sweater and sitting in a well-appointed living room, says in an ad from RBG PAC, a Republican super PAC that uses the initials of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the former liberal Supreme Court justice. Her family denounced the ad.
“But when he was president life was a lot better,” the woman goes on. “Freedom to choose is also important to me. And there’s been a lot of talk about where he stands. But he has been clear. He does not support a federal abortion ban.”
Video
While most of these ads have appeared in the race between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, some have also popped up in Senate races in swing states.
In Nebraska, an independent candidate, Dan Osborn, seeking to defeat the Republican incumbent, Senator Deb Fischer, ran an advertisement inviting Republicans to step away from the party line and support him.
“Deb Fischer has more in common with Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump,” a voter says in the ad.
In Maryland, a blue state where Ms. Harris is running strongly, the Republican candidate in the open Senate race, former Gov. Larry Hogan, has made an ad directly appealing to Harris voters to support a Republican for Senate.
The ad reminds voters that Mr. Hogan supports abortion rights and has a record of working across the aisle — and it ends with a voter firmly placing a Hogan placard next to a Harris placard on her lawn.
“This isn’t complicated,” said the voter, identified as Rebecca of Rockville, Md. “I’m splitting my ticket: Harris and Hogan.”
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С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
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How the US election outcome will influence 3 key areas of digital advertising
From ‘little silver spoon boy Donald Trump’ to ‘Kamala is for they/them’, Eric Garcia breaks down the most ostentatious ads from the final weeks of the US election
It’s hard to ignore the contrasting positions taken by former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris during their 2024 US presidential election campaigns. As with any election, no matter who wins, the business implications will be profound. Here, we explore how digital marketing and advertising will be affected.
1. What happens to high-growth digital advertising channels like CTV and retail media?
Connected TV (CTV) and retail media have established themselves as two of the fastest-growing, most intriguing channels in digital advertising in recent years, and the election outcome could affect growth. Under a Trump administration, inflationary pressures could influence retail media spending, while a Harris administration raises the question of whether privacy legislation will extend to CTV.
If Trump wins
The primary impact on digital ad spending under a Trump administration is likely to be inflation.
Trump has proposed imposing tariffs as high as 60% on foreign goods, deporting illegal immigrants, and cutting the corporate tax rate—all policies that leading economists believe could send inflation soaring.
However, an inflation spike could make retail media a more valuable ad channel.
Inflation would restrict ad budgets and encourage marketers to spend more on high return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) channels like retail media. Advertisers who deal with essential goods are unlikely to be affected by pullbacks in consumer discretionary spending, which means they might still spend ad budgets freely.
But for advertisers late to the retail media game, a high-inflation environment could make the barrier to entry greater.
New entrants to retail media might struggle to see immediate results, as it typically takes time to optimize campaigns. In an inflationary landscape, companies with tighter profit margins might hesitate to allocate resources toward these channels without prior experience, potentially hurting retail media growth among smaller and less established advertisers.
If Harris wins
Expect more progressive regulation.
In September, the FTC published a report calling for tougher rules for the digital ad industry, and a Harris presidency is likely to keep the regulator’s active leadership in place. That has led to speculation that CTV could soon face the same kind of privacy scrutiny and signal loss as other ad sectors, like third-party cookies. Given the momentum behind digital streaming, though, CTV ad spending may not be weighed down by stricter regulation.
But if regulation limits the ability for data brokers to shuffle user data around the ad ecosystem, CTV platform owners like Amazon and Roku could benefit, restoring some power to their so-called walled gardens.
2. How will regulatory priorities shift?
The future of tech regulation, TikTok's potential ban, and the direction of antitrust actions (e.g., Google) hinge on who takes office.
If Trump wins
Though Trump typically has a pro-big-business agenda, antitrust action is not off the table.
He and other Republicans are outspoken critics of Google and social media platforms. The DOJ brought its search monopoly complaint against Google under the first Trump administration, and JD Vance said the company should be broken up in July.
Trump favors fewer content restrictions while also weakening Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects platforms from being held responsible for their users’ speech.
As such, content moderation policies on social media could become more relaxed. This shift may raise brand safety concerns for advertisers, potentially driving some to platforms with stricter controls.
Trump has shifted from supporting a TikTok ban in 2020 to opposing it, recently promising to “save” the app if reelected
after receiving support from ByteDance investor Jeff Yass. But Trump may still face pressure from Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint for a Republican administration that calls for TikTok’s ban, though he has tried to distance himself from it. The question remains how much political capital Trump would be willing to use to prevent a ban that Republicans already voted in favor of.
If Harris wins
A Harris DOJ and FTC could pursue breaking up Google—dramatically shifting the ad landscape and accelerating Google’s decline.
We forecast that its share of the search advertising market will fall below 50% for the first time this year, and a potential breakup could lead to even sharper contractions.
Harris’ stance may lead to stronger enforcement aimed at promoting competition, benefiting open-web platforms.
Harris is more likely to push for oversight to maintain brand-safe environments under Section 230. Brands could face stricter content guidelines under Harris. Her focus on consumer protection could also translate into enhanced transparency and accountability in digital advertising.
Harris has shown caution around TikTok, citing national security concerns with ByteDance’s ownership but recognizing the app’s value to users.
The TikTok ban was passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden, and Harris would be likely to continue its enforcement. Still, her campaign has used TikTok trends to connect with voters. And according to EMARKETER forecasts, TikTok over-indexes with younger women, who are more likely to be Harris voters. If an appeals court strikes down the ban, Harris could opt not to pursue further action, allowing TikTok to keep operating in the US.
3. What happens to traditional media?
As traditional media grapples with declining engagement and ad spending, the 2024 election outcome could shape its future.
A second “Trump bump” might provide temporary gains, while a Harris administration may bring a steadier news cycle with some legislative coverage spikes.
If Trump wins
Traditional media, like CNN and The New York Times, could increase their audience engagement, similar to the gains during Trump’s first term when controversial policies drove near-constant news. Fox News saw significant prime news viewership increases under the first Trump administration, outpacing CNN and MSNBC, per Pew Research, which suggests conservative media will benefit most.
This potential rise in viewers may help linear TV and other legacy platforms offset some of their audience losses,
giving players like Paramount, Warner Bros. Discovery, and NBCUniversal more time to explore digital distribution models.
Digital newspaper ad spending could increase as it did during Trump’s previous term,
but print newspaper spending will continue declining. Digital newspaper ad spending rose from $4.04 billion to $4.74 billion from 2016 to 2020, while print newspaper ad spending plummeted from $13.33 billion to $5.5 billion. However, more news doesn’t necessarily mean more advertising; brands may be hesitant to appear alongside upsetting stories.
If Harris wins
A Harris’ administration would likely attract significant initial attention as she would be the first woman and person of South Asian descent to become president.
However, over time she is likely to generate a less volatile news cycle than Trump, with fewer high-profile controversies, while maintaining moderate engagement.
The likelihood of a Republican majority in the Senate could still result in a contentious dynamic, sparking frequent legislative news coverage that might offset a calmer executive branch.
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Russia was behind second fake video spreading false voter fraud claims, U.S. officials say
Experts warned that the new videos, which also appear designed to stoke racial animus, have gained large numbers of viewers online.
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Russia was behind a video falsely claiming Haitian immigrants had voted illegally in Georgia with fake IDs in Moscow's ongoing bid to undercut Americans’ confidence in the 2024 election results, U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity officials said Friday.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told MSNBC that a forensic analysis clearly showed Russia was behind the video, the second one in a week from Moscow designed to sow division in the United States before next week’s election.
“We can definitively report that it is Russian produced and specifically designed to go viral, to undermine American confidence in the security and integrity of our elections,” Easterly said when asked about the video.
It was the second piece of sophisticated Russian disinformation in a week to gain traction online that falsely asserted voter fraud in a key swing state. Easterly said she expected more attempts by Russia and foreign adversaries to spread false information before and after Election Day.
“This is all about spewing disinformation designed to undermine trust in our elections, and to sow partisan discord, and we cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy,” Easterly said.
The first video falsely claimed to show a person ripping up filled-in ballots in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. U.S. intelligence officials said the video was Russian-made and designed to shake public faith in the democratic process.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI and CISA said in a statement on Friday that Russian influence operatives “manufactured” the bogus Georgia video and that it resembled previous disinformation put out by Moscow.
In addition, Russian cyber operators produced a video that falsely accused “an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer,” the agencies said in a joint statement, without elaborating.
Emerson Brooking, who studies disinformation at the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council think tank, said the recent videos showed how Russia was now creating its own false material that was getting traction online, unlike the last presidential election.
“That’s really a sea change from 2020 when we see these foreign networks amplifying domestic disinformation and misinformation, but not producing their own,” Brooking said.
The original material quickly attracted a large audience on X.
“It is much more likely that Americans are sharing content produced or directed by Russians than in 2020,” he added.
The two recent videos falsely claiming voter fraud and the destruction of ballots all involved nonwhite actors, and that was not a coincidence, Brooking said.
“There’s this undercurrent of racial animus, which these attempts are also trying to activate,” he said.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, at a news conference at the State Capitol on Oct. 23 in Atlanta.Alex Wong / Getty Images
Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, has suggested on Thursday that the false video about voter fraud in his state was likely the work of a foreign adversary. He called on the owner of X, Elon Musk, to remove the video from the social media platform.
After being caught flat-footed by Russian information warfare in the 2016 election, federal law enforcement and intelligence officials say they are trying to move faster this time to expose and disrupt foreign disinformation operations.
Federal authorities were countering foreign disinformation by “flooding the zone with accurate information,“ Easterly, of CISA, said in her interview on MSNBC.
“We’ve been putting out information about how our foreign adversaries are specifically using tactics to try and undermine the integrity of our elections," she said.
“There is a fire hose of disinformation that Americans have been subjected to,” Easterly said. “So it’s not a surprise that there are some who question the integrity of our election processes,” referring to the large volume of false election-related information circulating on social media.
Easterly also said that if prominent Americans repeat Russian propaganda and disinformation aimed at eroding public faith in the electoral process, it could cause serious damage to the country’s democracy.
“It is incredibly irresponsible for anyone of power or influence, regardless of party or politics, to be spewing Russian propaganda, designed to undermine American confidence in the security of our election,” she said. “It’s corrosive to our democracy."
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The D.N.C. Targets Regional Newspapers in New Ad Campaign
The ads seeking to define Donald Trump as “unhinged, unstable, unchecked” are running in smaller suburban newspapers.
Jamie Harrison, the chair of the D.N.C., ahead of the Democratic National Convention in August.Credit...Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
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The Democratic National Committee is turning to an age-old advertising medium — regional hard copy newspapers — in a final push to define former President Donald J. Trump before Election Day.
In 25 local newspapers in the seven battleground states, the D.N.C. has taken out a full-page ad calling the former president “unhinged, unstable, unchecked” and “unfit to lead,” with a reproduction of the infamous mug shot of Mr. Trump from his indictment on election racketeering charges in Georgia.
The ads, which cost in the low six-figures, are not running in major swing state newspapers like The Philadelphia Inquirer or The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, but in smaller suburban newspapers like The Delco Times and The Erie Times-News in Pennsylvania or the Macomb Daily and Northern Express in Michigan.
Appealing to voters who subscribe to or buy such mainstream newspapers, the D.N.C. argues, is part of the party’s approach to aggressively court the suburban vote, which has shifted significantly to Democrats in both previous presidential elections with Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket. Subscribers to these smaller, regional papers, the D.N.C. says, tend to be moderate voters whom it is targeting in the closing days.
“In the final week of the election, Democrats are not leaving any stone unturned, reminding voters in key battleground states that their vote means the difference between chaos and revenge with Donald Trump, or a New Way Forward with Vice President Harris,” said Jaime Harrison, the chair of the D.N.C.
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С интересом и понятными ожиданиями, Dimitriy.
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U.S. political ad market projected to reach record $16 billion in 2024
U.S. political advertising spend.
Annually; 2016-2023, 2024-2028 projected
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The advertising dollars spent on U.S. elections and advocacy issues will grow to roughly $16 billion next year, up 31.2% compared to the last presidential election in 2020, according to a new forecast.
Why it matters:
The U.S. political ad market has gotten so big that next year it’s expected to become the 10th largest ad market in the world, surpassing all of Australia.
Driving the news:
New projections from GroupM, one of the world's largest paid advertising agencies, suggest that political ad revenue will reach $15.9 billion in 2024, or $17.1 billion including direct mail.
• A majority of political advertising spend in the U.S. goes to local broadcast TV, but an increasing amount is moving toward digital channels.
• These figures are higher than projections from other firms that estimate political ad spend in the U.S. will total around $10 billion in 2024.
• GroupM's figures include a wider array of political placements across different channels, such as digital out-of-home billboard signs. Its numbers also include issue advertising spend from political action committees and advocacy groups.
What to watch:
Artificial intelligence is becoming a much bigger part of political advertising in the U.S., prompting concerns from regulators about deception and disclosures.
• The Federal Election Commission (FEC) in August opened up a public debate over whether and how campaigns should be allowed to use artificial intelligence (AI).
• Broadly speaking, in countries around the world that enforce stricter regulations around political ads, such as many European countries, the growth of political advertising is slower than in countries with fewer rules, such as India, Mexico, and the Philippines, per GroupM.
Zoom in:
Fueling the growth in political ads this cycle is the presidential race, which has so far seen record primary spend on the Republican side.
• More than $100 million was spent through September on Republican primary races, faster than any previous cycle, per political AdImpact, an advertising intelligence firm.
Zoom out:
The overturning of campaign finance restrictions in 2010 led to unprecedented investment in U.S. elections. New digital ad formats created more opportunities for campaigns to spend that money on paid marketing.
• One of the fastest-growing segments is Connected TV (CTV) advertising, or video ads that run on digital TV sets connected to the internet. They offer campaigns the ability to target their ads more narrowly to voters with certain interests, instead of just age and gender demographics.
• The phaseout of internet tracking cookies is forcing campaigns to rely more heavily on digital formats outside of traditional digital banner ads, such as streaming, keyword searches, and podcasts.
Be smart:
Historically, campaigns were limited to advertising opportunities on heavily regulated mediums with limited inventory, such as television, radio and print.
• Today, the internet offers infinite inventory for campaigns to place ads with few regulations. That has also contributed to the historic growth of political ad spend in the U.S.
The big picture:
The onslaught of political ads in the U.S. has widespread implications for industries outside of politics.
• Advertisers have been forced to adjust their marketing strategies during election years to avoid inventory competition on local broadcasts.
• Political ads tend to falsely inflate growth rates for traditional media channels like newspapers and television, helping them to stay afloat longer than they otherwise would.
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Political ads boost local TV
Local TV ad revenue
2005-2025
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Local TV stations are experiencing an advertising windfall this election cycle, thanks to a record amount of U.S. political ad spend.
Why it matters:
Despite an influx of new ways to reach voters online, local broadcast is still the top place campaigns spend their ad dollars, due to its effectiveness for voter persuasion and buying efficiency.
• While streaming ads make it easier for campaigns to target niche voting demographics, they often lack the scale necessary to persuade large amounts of voters in a particular region.
• Regulations around local broadcast ads meant to prevent bias also benefit campaigns, allowing them to unlock cheaper rates and protecting their ads from being blocked because of inaccuracies or misinformation.
State of play:
Local TV broadcast stations have historically benefited in even-numbered years from huge upticks in ad spending around congressional elections. Every four years, that number balloons even higher with the presidential election.
• For example, a whopping $2 billion was spent on local political ads in 2020, followed by just $208 million in 2021 and then $1.9 billion in 2022.
By the numbers:
This year, around $11.7 billion in political ad dollars are expected to be spent locally, according to BIA Advisory Services, up 21.3% from 2020. Political ads will make up roughly 6.7% of the total local ad market ($173.7 billion).
• Last presidential cycle, around 7% of all local advertising ($138.2 billion) was spent on local political ads, or around $9.6 billion.
• Local broadcast stations are also expected to bring in a record amount ($2.2 billion) in "TV digital" political advertising this year, or advertising sold by local broadcast stations on their digital properties, like their websites or owned and operated streaming apps.
How we got here:
The 2010 overturning of campaign finance restrictions led to unprecedented investment in U.S. elections. The pandemic pushed more of those dollars into paid advertising, as campaigns pulled back their ground operations.
• This year, several highly competitive congressional races, combined with new fundraising energy around a close presidential election and a surge in state ballot measures, have driven huge ad opportunities for local broadcasters.
• While campaigns are experimenting more than ever with new mediums, like connected TV (CTV) ads on streaming, more video ad dollars are still flowing to local broadcast than any other medium, for now.
• BIA estimates more than $2.6 billion will be spent on CTV ads this cycle, and because CTV is growing faster than any other medium, more political ad dollars are expected to move into the category in the coming years.
The big picture:
One of the reasons local broadcast ads are still so competitive is because there's a finite amount of inventory.
• As such, ad experts don't anticipate the rise of CTV ads to eat at the share of local political broadcast ad dollars anytime soon. Instead, CTV will grow as a complement to local broadcast ads as inventory is squeezed
What they're saying:
Local broadcast executives are touting this year's election to investors as record breaking.
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E.W. Scripps,
one of the largest owners of local broadcast stations in the country, said it believes its 2024 local political advertising revenue will reach record levels, thanks to Senate races in Montana and Ohio, as well as controversial ballot issues in several states.
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Nexstar
saw political advertising double in the second quarter compared to the same three-month period in 2020. In its latest earnings call, Michael Biard, Nexstar president and COO, noted that the shift from Biden to Harris at the top of the Democratic ticket "kept the existing Biden-Harris fundraising in place, seemingly galvanizing both parties and driving meaningful incremental fundraising that ultimately will flow back into political advertising."
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Tegna
then-president Dave Lougee said in the firm's August earnings call that fundraising was suppressed when Biden remained in the race, but now with Harris at the top of the ticket, "it's going to keep the enthusiasm in all the Senate races and the fundraising there ... very, very strong."
What to watch:
Outside of political advertising, local broadcast faces pressure from digital alternatives, but there are some bright spots.
• Changes to local broadcast ownership rules by the Trump administration gave way to a record level of local broadcast consolidation, which has helped local networks reduce costs through synergies.
• More sports rights are moving out from regional cable networks and into local broadcast stations, boosting viewership.
• New technologies are also expected to make broadcast viewing more sophisticated, which executives believe will help local stations grow to become less reliant on cyclical political advertising.
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Download AdImpact’s 2024 Political Spending Projections Report
AdImpact projects the 2023-2024 election cycle will be the most expensive of all time, totaling $10.2B in political expenditures across broadcast, cable, radio, satellite, digital, and CTV. This would represent a 13% increase over the previous record of $9.02B set during the 2019-2020 election cycle. Through August 2023 we have seen $652M and are pacing 75% ahead of 2019 and 16% ahead of 2021. The off-year of an election cycle traditionally receives between 10-14% of total spending for the two-year cycle.
Presidential spending is projected to receive $2.7B in political ad spending this cycle. The contested Republican primary coupled with a concentration on seven key general battleground states will drive spending in the category. Senate spending, projected at $2.1B, and House spending, projected at $1.7B, will be driven by razor-thin margins in both chambers as both parties vie for control of Congress. Gubernational spending is expected to see a predictable drop-off compared to the 2021-2022 election cycle at $400M as there are only 14 seats up for re-election. The area projected to see the most spending on political advertising is what we call “Downballot.” This category consists of all political spending that is not Presidential, House, Senate, or Gubernatorial and is expected to receive $3.3B.
Download our full report to learn more about projected political spending in the 2023-2024 election cycle!
Background on the 2024 Presidential Election Cycle
One of the major drivers of spending in the 2023-2024 election cycle is the return of a Presidential election to the top of the ticket. The Presidential race is already off to record pace with Republican primary spending surpassing $100M by early September, faster than any previous cycle. The 2020 Democratic primary did not surpass $100M until October 2019 and the 2016 Republican primary did not surpass $100M until December 2015. With more than 120 days until the Iowa Caucuses, the well-funded and crowded field is expected to continue driving spending. We expect to see similar levels of spending in the general to the 2020 Presidential general as current polls indicate a rematch between President Biden and former President Trump could be on the horizon. General spending will be concentrated in seven key swing states: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Wisconsin.
The competitive nature of the House and Senate maps will be a major factor in overall Congressional spending during the 2023-2024 cycle. Court-ordered redistricting has shifted the landscape of the House map and provided some races with the potential to be exceptionally more expensive than they have been historically. Previously safe Republican seats are now viewed as potential Democratic pickup opportunities, which has tightened the race for the House as they only need to flip 6 seats. The possibility of Democrats taking control is becoming more realistic outcome. An unfavorable Senate map for Democrats will also play a major role in political advertising spending. 23 seats held by Democrats are up for election compared to just 11 by Republicans. Several Democratic incumbents are running in more conservative states, such as Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Jon Tester in Montana, and Sherrod Brown in Ohio. Democratic Senate candidates will likely be on the defensive and will likely have to spend heavily to protect their slight majority. Gubernatorial elections are expected to receive much less focus this cycle, as only 14 seats are up this cycle compared to 38 in the 2021-2022 cycle.
Through the end of August 2023, the Downballot category has already seen nearly $440M in spending, pacing ahead of 2021’s 415M in 2019’s 238M over the same period. Abortion-related ballot measures will play a major role in Downballot spending this cycle. During the 2022 cycle, six states had abortion-related measures on the ballot with Michigan’s receiving nearly $50M in spending and Kanas’ seeing almost $14M Three states have already placed abortion-related measures on the ballot this Cycle: Ohio, New York, and Maryland. Ohio’s is the only measure that will be voted on this November and has seen more than $33M through the end of August. Seven states have proposals for an abortion-related measure to be placed on the ballot in 2024: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota. If all the proposals make it to the ballot, Downballot spending could see a spike around this issue.
Political Media Advertising Background
Broadcast continues to be the dominant media type in political advertising as we project it to see over 50% of total cycle spend at $5.1B. Cable is projected to maintain its position as the media type receiving the second most spending with $1.9B, about 18% of overall spending. Spending on digital platforms such as Facebook and Google are utilized by campaigns and issue groups to reach a more target audience and as a major fundraising tool. From the 2020 Cycle to the 2022 Cycle, we saw a $700M drop-off in digital spending, from $1.7B to $1B with the absence of a President race at the top of the ticket. While we do not expect digital spending to return to 2020 levels, we do project to grow by nearly $100M during the 2024 Cycle.
To date in 2023, we have seen approximately $100M spent on Connected Television (CTV), or nearly 13% of the overall political spending landscape. We project CTV will total over $1.3B during the 2024 Cycle, a nearly $250M increase over the 2022 Cycle. This is a slight increase in share as CTV made up 12% of total spending during the 2022 Cycle. As voters continue to “cut the cord” and shift away from traditional forms of media, reaching them regardless of consumption habits has become a main goal of advertisers. We have seen rapid adoption of CTV advertising in the political advertising space and expect this category to continue to grow over the upcoming political cycles.
Political Spending Projections Methodology
We set out to build our projections from the ground up. Rather than dividing the topline numbers from previous years, we built a model to project spending at the individual race level and then rolled these numbers up to reach our topline conclusions. Spending levels in a race correlate strongly with the competitiveness of a seat, so we based our 2024 estimates on each seat’s previous spending levels and Cook Political Report’s race ratings (Lean D, Toss Up, Lean R etc.).
Historic spending levels come from our comprehensive database of political media expenditures. Our database includes $25B of spending, more than 15,000 elections, and 20 million ad airings. This baseline number is then adjusted by factors such as the price of a media market and candidate cash-on-hand reports. On average, a race in a very expensive market like Los Angeles, CA will see far more spending than a race in a cheaper market, such as Norfolk, VA, since it costs significantly more to reach the same relative audience levels.
These projections will also likely change as the landscape changes. Unexpected retirements, billionaire self-funders, strong fundraising, redistricting, and changes in the political winds can, and will, cause the spending landscape to shift. We will periodically update these projections as we see the political spending environment unfold.
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