If Ed Gillespie becomes the next governor of Virginia, Confederate flag-waving racists will feel emboldened to run down minority kids with their pick-up trucks.
That’s the message of a new ad put out by the left-wing group Latino Victory Fund. The over-the-top, fear-mongering commercial tries to tie the milquetoast Republican Gillespie with the white nationalists who rallied in Charlottesville two months ago.
The ad features a scary pick-up truck — complete with a massive Confederate flag, Gillespie sticker, and “Don’t Tread on Me” tags — chasing after a diverse group of kids playing in a suburb. Fortunately, it turns out it was just a nightmare, but that nightmare is the American Dream for Gillespie and his supporters, according to the ad.
Ed Gillespie and Donald Trump promise the American dream, but can only deliver an American nightmare. No more. Vote @RalphNortham. #GameOnVA pic.twitter.com/mwpWXM47HZ
— Latino Victory (@latinovictoryus) October 30, 2017
The commercial ends with a Latino family watching the Charlottesville torchlight rally, which is somehow connected with the Gillespie campaign.
Making such an ad would have been considered too ridiculous in years past, but 2017 is a different age. While this ad is not the direct creation of Ralph Northam’s campaign (Gillespie’s opponent), it is in keeping with the Democrat’s current message.
The Democratic Party of Virginia sent out mailers linking Gillespie to Charlottesville and racists last week. The Latino Victory Fund ad is just a more extreme version of that line of attack.
It appears Democrats believe this is the winning message that will give them the edge against Gillespie.
Whether that’s true or not will be determined next Tuesday. But the pick-up truck ad is sending a clear message to red-staters: Democrats think you are in the same league as Nazis.
The imagery of the ad is designed to play on stereotypes of rural Virginians — the truck, Confederate flag, Don’t Tread on Me license tags that are popular among conservatives in the state.
The ad tells non-white voters that they need to fear those hateful rubes living beyond the beltway, with their backward ways and fondness for large motor vehicles. Gillespie will inspire them to violence by winning because he wants to crack down on MS-13 and opposes the removal of Confederate statues.
Yeah, those are well-known calls for committing racially-motivated vehicular homicide.
Played off in the ad is the ever-present liberal delusion that the country is suffering from a wave of Trump-inspired hate crimes. There is of course Charlottesville and a few other cases of white nationalist attacks, all of which have been met with the full force of the law. But they’re certainly not common enough to justify the hysteria that women in hijabs are attacked every time they step foot on public transport.
What is far more prevalent are hate crime hoaxes. Time and time again, stories the media picked up as genuine acts of hate turned out to be not the case. (RELATED: Hate Crime Hoax Spree Continues, This Time Hitting A Small College)
Just this week, a black man was arrested for vandalizing an African-American church in Kansas City with racist graffiti and setting fire to it. Those inexcusable crimes were done in order to cover-up up his robbery of said church, according to federal authorities.
That case was similar to a story that captured national attention right before the election of a black church in Mississippi that was desecrated with racist slogans, one of which said, “Vote Trump.” That turned out to be the work of one of the church’s own parishioners. (RELATED: Black Man Burned African-American Church, Painted ‘Vote Trump’ On The Walls)
One of the more famous cases was the trend of violent threats made against Jewish Community Centers. Liberal journalists put much energy into denouncing President Trump’s “silence” on the matter, and the commander in chief later did condemn the apparent anti-Semitic harassment during his February congressional address.
But those threats turned out to be not the work of Trump-loving neo-Nazis. The two men believed responsible for all of the threats are a disgraced far-left journalist and a 19-year-old Israeli Jew. There is no proof that either man was a Trump supporter.
Another famous case is that of a young Muslim woman who claims she was berated by racist white men on a New York City subway last December. The case generated tons of media coverage that bought the woman’s story, all before it turned out she made up the whole thing. (RELATED: Muslim Woman Reportedly Admits To Fabricating NYC Subway Attack)
These are just a few examples of the kind of hate hoaxes that were blamed on Trump, all going to serve the liberal delusion the president was inspiring epidemic levels of racial violence in America.
It’s worth remembering that the seeds of hysteria over Trump-inspired hate crimes was planted long before Trump won the election. Just a month before the 2016 election, prominent liberal journalists Matt Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie both believed a Trump presidency would mean racist mobs would be able to kill with impunity and even receive help from the state.
“The GOP has brought the country to the edge of fascism and state-sanctioned racial violence and there will be no consequences,” Bouie, who writes for Slate, said in a since-deleted tweet
“My guess is that in a Trump administration angry mobs will beat and murder Jews and people of color with impunity,” Vox’s Yglesias agreed in the same Twitter conversation. That tweet has also since been deleted.
Both journalists now believe the anti-Gillespie ad is totally appropriate.
If Gillespie becomes the next governor of Virginia, one can expect every act of alleged racism — including hoaxes — in the state to be pinned on him. Just like Trump.
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