The World According to GARM

How the Global Alliance for Responsible Media weaponized advertising — and how Elon destroyed it.

In 2019, a group of the most powerful ad agencies in the world created a consortium of some of the largest advertisers in the world, allegedly to help protect their brands and reputation by steering their 1 trillion dollars of annual ad buying away from the usual suspects who get rounded up whenever the speech police run a dragnet.

The utterly subjective and vague terms, “hate speech… misinformation… disinformation… insensitive… irresponsible”, seem only to have been applied to conservatives and moderates who question the party line. The Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) went after Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk’s Twitter.

Musk being Musk, he sued, and GARM almost immediately disbanded. But the issue did not die with the GARM cartel. Many of the premier companies in the world signed up for membership in this group whose leader thinks that free speech comes from “an extreme global interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.”

How did such a thing happen? More to the point, how can we make sure that it doesn’t happen again?

Countering GARM’s Harm

To counter the effect of the now-defunct global superpower of censorship in the Western world, we turned to the leader of the free (speech) world, Alliance Defending Freedom. ADF crafted a template of an anti-GARM proposal. Bowyer Research’s Isaac Willour tailored those proposals to each individual company and Susan Bowyer, project manager and COO, ran them through the paperwork and regulatory gauntlet.

At this point, we have proposals on behalf of several of you at the following companies:

• Disney

• Johnson & Johnson

• American Express

• Coca Cola

• PepsiCo

• Verizon

• McDonald's

• Merck

• Amazon

• Walmart

• Alphabet

We’ve met with six of those companies so far: PepsiCo, Johnson & Johnson, AmEx, McDonald’s, Disney, & Walmart. More meetings are coming, and we have announcements to make about some of these companies coming up very shortly.

One other thing: I’m sorry you haven’t heard from us for a few weeks. We’re doing a lot and we’re mostly winning. Large sections of the walls around corporate America are falling and we intend to keep running through those openings as long as they’re there. When there is a choice between doing the work and reporting to you about the work, we think you prefer the former.

But don’t worry, more reports will be coming soon. You might even get sick of hearing from us.

                                      Jerry Bowyer is President of Bowyer Research.