TV Ads Ramp Up the Racism for Padres Playoffs
Baseball fans watching the major league playoff series on TV are getting a regular reminder of the ugly reality of what Republicans think they need to do to win in the form of unadulterated racism in ads paid for by a group calling itself Citizens for Sanity.
Dark and grainy footage offers up a stream of unsettling images of urban crime and civic unrest, or large migrant caravans streaming toward the border. President Biden and Democrats, we’re told, are fostering “illegal immigration draining our paychecks, wrecking our schools, ruining our hospitals and threatening your family.”
Videos of their advertising posted online come with a black screened content warning saying “The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.”
Major League Baseball, which forbids advertising for condoms among other things, doesn’t seem to have an issue when White Supremacism is the product being sold. And broadcaster Fox/FX1 depends on a steady flow of racism to keep its viewers engaged.
San Diego is not the only market seeing these ads. The same content, along with some localized variation, is airing for all the broadcast early playoff games. The point of these messages is to induce fear, using bigotry as its unique selling proposition.
White voters are supposed to be outraged enough to remember to vote in the midterm elections. Those of us who are offended are a feature, not a bug of this propaganda. In right wing circles this is referred to as “owning the libs,” a phrase used to describe the endorphin rush sadists feel.
Immigration is just one of many fronts where this technique is being applied.
Here’s Hunter at Daily Kos:
The premise of Citizens for Sanity: "Forget everything we've done, all you yogurt-brains. Instead, here are 50 new conspiracy theories. Just pick whichever one you want and go with it, we really don't care."
Once again: Republicanism is reliant on hoaxes. It is now how they campaign, and how they govern, and how they try to evade responsibility for even criminal acts. Not just the dark money groups, but individual campaigns are now centered around "The 2020 elections were secretly rigged against Trump," or, "The entire American education system is actually a trick perpetrated on the country by woke anti-racist groomers." Hoax-based gibberish is now the basis of all of Republicanism.
As is true with these types of messages designed to provoke outrage, deception and misrepresentation serve as a foundation for the content. Images associated with a news account of a 3 year old being raped came from (February, 2020) when Trump was President; people being shot by somebody who is undocumented in Las Vegas is supposedly more damning than dozens of people gunned down down at a concert in the same city by somebody who didn’t have brown skin.
And there is the supreme irony of these ads running during a sporting event for a league largely dependent on immigrants as their workforce.
I’ll forgive columnist Will Bunch for being a Phillies fan in order to give him a shout out for an excellent bit of writing, not only explaining who’s behind Citizens for Sanity but connecting the outrage tactic to the billionaire-funded torrent of hate unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling.
The non-profit Open Secrets looked into who’s who at Citizens for Sanity and discovered a veritable rats nest of Trump administration minions, starting with Stephen Miller (see Jean Guerrero's Hatemonger for a detailed account of his slimy history) and others associated with the America First Legal Foundation.
Citizens for Sanity’s treasurer is Gene Hamilton, vice president of the America First Legal Foundation and a former top aide in Trump’s administration who was considered to be a “key architect of the repeal of DACA.”
According to transcripts from an October 2017 deposition, Hamilton admitted writing the Department of Homeland Security memo that formally terminated Deferred Action for Children Arrivals.
In the end, the radical new thing that may tip the scales in November’s election — in which both control of the House and the Senate appear to be up for grabs — may be one of the oldest stories around: very rich people buying the outcome, thanks to their ability to spend millions of dollars on emotionally manipulative attack ads. But while the concept — billionaires using their wealth to bail out reactionary politicians who’ll keep their taxes low and defend corporate power — has been around, 2022 is standing out for the far-right extremism that the 1 Percent is now willing to fund…
..The world has seen this before. When fascism and other forms of right-wing extremism rose across Europe in the 1930s, large corporations and their rich investors who one might have hoped would have been revulsed by the ugliness, violence and racism of such movements instead hopped on the bandwagon, supporting some of the worst dictators. It took decades for corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and IG Farben successor Bayer to apologize for supporting Germany’s Nazi government. In 2020s America, it feels like the cycle is just starting.
Some might find that comparison extreme, but this fall’s rise of Citizens for Sanity shows that some secret billionaires are willing to fund commercials that feel like the modern heirs to Goebbels-inspired propaganda. Before this weekend’s ad blitz, Citizens for Sanity was engaged in coast-to-coast political trolling in the crude, “owning the libs” style that Trumpism has brought into the mainstream. Many are sarcastic broadsides that Democrats are “pro-criminal.”
Ultimately, this offensive content is about driving voter turnout.
Let’s face it: cutting Social Security, blocking student loan forgiveness, another tax cut for the wealthy, criminalizing abortion, and nutcase Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene on CSPAN 24/7 are not really good selling points.
So it comes down to fear, via the time-proven technique of “otherizing.” It’s not going to be limited to immigrants. Trans people, educators, librarians, and Jews (for starters) are all fair game as targets for this way of thinking.
Here’s Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times:
The demonization of outsiders for political gain isn’t new, of course. In 1934, when the writer and socialist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California on a leftist platform, movie studios contributed to the campaign against him by producing newsreels depicting so-called tramps and hobos surging over the state line to take advantage of the generous pensions Sinclair proposed for resident seniors; in that case, the images were stock footage from movies then in production.
And who can forget the Willie Horton affair, when George H.W. Bush’s campaign aired a commercial aiming to blame Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent, for the rape and murder committed by a Black felon who was on a weekend furlough from prison.
That ad had all the same Grand Guignol elements as the Citizens for Sanity commercial — mainly racism and fear of crime — but it seems almost understated compared with the turbocharged bigotry on view on your television screens today. Can anyone look at this product and say American politics are in a healthy condition?
Be sure to do your bit to oppose this. Vote, even if you have to hold your nose on some ballot items.
Here’s a link to my Voting Guide if you want some (obviously biased) coaching.
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Lead image: TheDigitalArtist via Pixabay
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com