Black Republicans Keep Chasing White Racist Votes

[Celerity]

Racially aggrieved white conservatives actually love to vote for “the Black guy,” as long as they’re attacking blackness.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/black-republicans-keep-chasing-white-racist-votes



There have been plenty of Republican campaign ads featuring candidates tacitly threatening to shoot people. There’s the one where Missouri Senate wannabe Eric Greitens advocates “RINO hunting,” or the one where Michigan gubernatorial contender Garrett Soldano fires multiple guns for 45 seconds—but the latest Jerone Davison ad stands out for a few reasons.

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

For starters, Davison, who is running for a U.S. House seat representing Arizona, is a Black Republican and regardless of what every Black Republican claims, that’s still the rarest kind. Then there’s the fact that the ad shows a gathering mob of men in Ku Klux Klan robes, various crude weapons in their hands, descending on Davison’s back yard as he sips coffee at a kitchen table. The commercial ends with Davison crossing his lawn toward the mob, a machine gun held aloft.

“​​When this rifle is the only thing standing between your family and a dozen angry Democrats in Klan hoods,” Davison says in voiceover, “you just might need that semi-automatic and all 30 rounds.” There was plenty of outrage after Davison posted the ad on Twitter (though he somehow escaped criticism for a shot in the ad that so clearly bites an iconic photo of Malcolm X that it should trigger an immediate settlement payment and note of apology to the Shabazz family). Most of the indignation focused on the ad’s violence, but there was also the matter of its near comical ahistoricism.



In the midst of an ongoing gun epidemic that has seen white racists stalk and cut down Black folks in spaces as sacred as a Charleston, South Carolina, church, and as mundane as a Buffalo, New York, grocery store—here’s Davison manipulating the timeline to make it seem as if the current scourge of murderous white racial terror isn’t a rightwing phenomenon tied to the GOP. We know this because of all the intelligence reports indicating that “far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States” and investigations indicating a surge of white supremacist and “right-wing extremist attacks and plots greatly eclipsing those from the far left and causing more deaths.”

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