All the while attendance and viewership skyrocketed, to the point where stock-car racing began threatening football’s claim as America’s pastime. It was a culture era that gave rise to an influential new demographic: the NASCAR dad. .. The setbacks, though, didn’t stop him from becoming stock-car racing’s top endorser (with hundreds of millions earned from the likes of PepsiCo and the Department of Defense),.. It also didn’t stop Earnhardt Jr. from becoming an unlikely progressive voice in a sport that has given rise to few. In the last two years alone he has condemned the Confederate flag (“offensive to an entire race”), opposed the Trump administration’s proposed immigration ban (“my fam immigrated from Germany in 1700s escaping religious persecution”), and lent his support to the NFL playerskneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic police violence and racial injustice.