As far as big-brand Pride campaigns go, The North Face’s latest was fairly innocuous: drag queen Pattie Gonia inviting viewers to “come out” into the wilderness as part of its Summer of Pride campaign. “Nature lets you be who you are,” The North Face cheerfully posted on Instagram. 

What followed was a chorus of stories from right-leaning sites claiming The North Face was pushing a lifestyle on kids, causing gender confusion and turning Pride month into a whole summer. Partisan sites on the left jumped in to defend, praising the brand for “standing up to hate” and calling objectors “conservative cry babies.”

Pride month had barely begun, and we’d already seen this pattern play out several times: Bud Light, Target, the Los Angeles Dodgers, Kohl’s and PetSmart.

Big brands have supported Pride in various ways for years, but in 2023 any brand putting out rainbow merchandise risks backlash. And while some of this is a symptom of the political moment we’re living through, we cannot look past the role of hyper-partisan ad-supported media in making the outrage cycles worse, particularly around LGBTQ+ issues.

While there are examples of extreme vitriol on both the right and left, that doesn’t mean the instances are exactly equal and opposite. You probably have a very strong opinion of which side bears the most blame—and half the country believes the exact opposite.

What matters for brands is that enough people are convinced that their political opponents are literally threatening the bodies and lives of their children, and they are worked up enough to boycott, counter-boycott and affect the market cap of any brand.

And the outrage cycle has consequences: Just ask Bud Light, which was just unseated after two decades as America’s top-selling beer brand. 

There is a thriving online ecosystem of websites that sort of look like news whose content is hyper-partisan and so highly opinionated that it regularly crosses the line into propaganda and misinformation. Some telltale signs that you’re on one of these sites are that they tell you it’s specifically for your side, and the content is short, biased, angry and lacks journalistic effort. 

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