Jonathan Weisman, New York Times congressional correspondent, infused racism charges into the 2022 campaign’s final stages under a partisan headline: Democrats Say Racism is the Real Messaging In Republican Crime Ads.
Weisman began by presenting Republican crime concerns as a cynical, “seize” of an issue. Before quickly inserting race,
Republicans have used a series attack lines, terms, and imagery to inject race into the contests across the country as they seize crime as a major issue in the final weeks before the midterm elections.
Advertisements in states as diverse as Wisconsin and New Mexico have called a Black candidate “different” or “dangerous” and darkened the hands of a white man as they depicted him as a criminal.
These tactics have never been able to dominate the debate in a major election, but a survey involving competitive contests, especially those involving Black candidates, shows that they have become an important weapon for the 2022 Republican arsenal.
However, his first example was a complete failure.
Wisconsin is where Lt. Governor. Mandela Barnes, a Black Democratic nominee for Senate is featured in a National Republican Senatorial Committee ad. It juxtaposes his face with three Democratic House members, all women of color, and adds the words “different” and “dangerous.”
Further evidence was provided that liberal media will not stop accusing Republicans as racists for bringing up Willie Horton’s murder while he was on weekend furlough. This tactic was used against liberal Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.
Appealing to white fears and resentments is an old strategy in American elections. This is evident in ads like George Bush’s 1988 ad using Willie Horton, a Black convict, against Michael Dukakis, and Jesse Helms 1990 commercial showing a white person holding his hands to denounce his Black opponent for supporting “quotas.”
These tactics became more difficult to defend over the decades, but Donald J. Trump’s rise has broken down taboos as he spoke of “rapist immigrants” and “shithole nations” in Africa and Asia. While Democrats called Republicans racist in 2018, Republicans remained silent. This year, however, Republicans responded with defiance. They said they saw nothing wrong in the imagery and had nothing to be sorry for.
He acknowledged that “legitimate policy disagreements have emerged between the parties over gun violence and easing access to bail, funding police budgets”, but he said in the “news” story that some Republican arguments could not be considered serious policy critiques.
And Weisman’s observation about Trump setting a “sharply different tone” for his party on race, one that should be condemned, ignores the fact that every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has been labeled a dangerous racist by the left and its media allies.
Weisman’s accusations of racism are not uncommon. In late September, Weisman co-wrote a lengthy front-page story in which he also accused the GOP of racism for emphasizing crime in its campaign rhetoric.
Weisman was obsessed with the black-white dichotomy in a hostile profile for Republican Senate candidate from Georgia, Herschel.
In a story written with Jazmine Ulla, he even accused Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas that he “barely coded racist appeals” during hearings into the current-sitting Supreme Court Justice Ketanji brown Jackson.
