If you suspected that Maria Bartiromo would be easily fooled, those assumptions were confirmed Wednesday morning when the Fox Business anchor spent more than six minutes interviewing an animal rights activist she believes was the CEO of Smithfield Foods, who bills himself as “” The world’s largest pork processor and pig producer. “
According to Instant action everywhere, activist Matt Johnson could be booked on the Bartiromo show as the new CEO and President Dennis Organ of Smithfield Foods. During the interview, he warned viewers that factory farms like Smithfield’s could cause the next pandemic, without raising any suspicion from Bartiromo, who just plowed through with the segment.
Bartiromo started by introducing Johnson as Dennis Organ and asking him about the company’s South Dakota processing plant, which became the worst COVID-19 cluster in the country early in the pandemic. For the first few moments, he played it fairly straightforward, calling the coronavirus ‘devastating’ to his industry and acknowledging the ‘heroic’ efforts of the factory workers – some of whom have died of COVID.
But he soon took “responsibility” for the horrific conditions these workers had to endure. Promising “transparency” and “brutal honesty,” he said, “The truth is that our industry, in addition to the outbreaks taking place in our factories, poses a serious threat to our industry effectively causing the next pandemic.” He called the company’s farms “petri dishes for new diseases” and noted that pig farming is also “causing tremendous damage to our air and waterways.”
And yet Bartiromo didn’t understand and kept calling him “Dennis,” asking the man she thought was Smithfield’s CEO about the company’s relationship with the Chinese conglomerate that had recently bought it. On behalf of the company, the activist pledged “half a billion dollars a year from 2021” to mitigate the environmental impact of the meat industry.
It was all part of the protest group’s ‘No More Factory Farms’ campaign, which ‘calls on government officials to proactively prevent future pandemic outbreaks by introducing a moratorium prohibiting the construction of new factory farms and slaughterhouses’.
At the very end of her show, Bartiromo released a “very important fix,” telling viewers, “Looks like we’ve been punked.” She called the man she interviewed “an imposter” who made “false claims” about Smithfield.