Gambling And Prostitution Czar Sheldon Adelson Is Underwriting The Republican Party's Overtly Racist Advertising

Macau/Vegas Mob-affiliated right-wing billionaire Sheldon Adelson continues to fund McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund and Ryan's Congressional Leadership Fund to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. He is, by far, the biggest contributor to right-wing politics in America, around $60 million so far this year... with plenty more coming. Among House races, the biggest Adelson cash dump has been in Wisconsin, against Randy Bryce, where hundreds of hours of vicious smear attacks have seriously changed the complexion of the race. An old friend of mine in Kenosha told me, "You can't escape the barrage of really ugly ads against Randy. Ryan is really doing a job on this guy. If there's a TV ad next week saying the Randy looked over someone's should in the 3rd grade to get a test answer, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. They don't want to talk about issues; they just want to attack, attack, attack on all this made-up personal crap... I hope it backfires on that little slimeball Ryan is pushing."

On Wednesday, one of the right-wing slime-buckets, Republican Nancy Douglass, who's been slanting the news on WLKG, her Lake Geneva radio station against Bryce for months, was forced to resign as chair of the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association. She appeared in an ad sponsored by Ryan's PAC, referring to Bryce as a deadbeat. Remember, Bryce is union iron worker who's been slaving away his whole life supporting a family. Brian Steil, a shady corporate attorney, has been busy working for a firm that specializes in sending Wisconsin jobs to low-wage hell-holes overseas.

Widely considered one of the most vicious broadcasters in the Midwest, Douglass is a frequent contributor to the Republican Party of Walworth County and has spent lavishly to support Paul Ryan and other right-wingers in southeast Wisconsin. An anti-union zealot and repulsive racist, Douglass represents everything that's wrong with the Trumpist party today. The Wisconsin Broadcasters Association is fortunate to be rid of her and her unAmerican propaganda.

Bryce may be getting the largest amount of Adelson sewer money thrown at him, but he's hardly the only one. Republican Party racism is on display big time as the party and its affiliated SuperPACS descend into a frenzy of white nationalism around the country. Jamiles Lartey has been watching for The Guardian as the GOP takes aim at non-white congressional candidates. Trumpism has given racism a seal of approval. He wrote that "as the 2018 midterm election campaign pulls into its homestretch, Republican attacks in two congressional races happening 3,000 miles apart have triggered alarm bells for targeting non-white candidates in an apparent effort to highlight their 'otherness.' The first comes from California’s 50th district, where Ammar Campa-Najjar is running as a Democrat for a seat currently occupied by the Republican Duncan Hunter. NBC’s Chuck Todd, a veteran political reporter and commentator called the spot 'maybe the most shocking and outrageous political ad I’ve ever seen,' in a Meet The Press Daily segment."

The ad zeroes in on Campa-Najjar’s heritage-- his mother is Mexican American and his father is Palestinian-- calling him a “Palestinian, Mexican, millennial Democrat” who is “working to infiltrate Congress” and a “security risk.”

“At best it’s desperate. That’s putting it mildly,” said Campa-Najjar, who also called the effort “blatantly ignorant” and “unhinged from reality.”

Last Wednesday a bipartisan group of dozens of national security veterans decried the spot as a “racist and bigoted” attack. “The baseless allegation that he is somehow a ‘security threat’ is an affront to our professionalism as national security experts, our American values, and our collective national dignity,” the group said in an open letter.

The ad accuses Campa-Najjar of being supported by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with no evidence, and despite the fact that Campa-Najjar is a Christian. “It’s just so interesting that we live in a world where Islamophobia even extends to non-Muslims,” Campa-Najjar told The Guardian.

...In a email statement to The Guardian, Hunter’s spokesman, Michael Harrison, declined to provide a source for the claims about the Muslim Brotherhood or the quote from Campa-Najjar’s father, but insisted that “the facts … raise national security concerns.”

Ironically, when Drunken Hunter was arrested and arraigned on a wide range of corruption, fraud and theft charges recently, Paul Ryan kicked him off the House Armed Services Committee since he really is a security threat. (And to make it worse, one of the groups he stole from was Wounded Warriors.) Hunter, a far right extrenmist, is a well-known philanderer and substance-abuser, who stole money to buy drugs and companionship from sex workers. First the San Diego area saw Duke Cunningham get thrown in prison-- a close "associate" of Duncan Hunter, Sr.-- and now it looks like Duncan Hunter will be the next San Diego member of Congress headed there.

“The fact is, there’s me, who was cleared by the FBI to work at White House, and there’s Hunter who was indicted by the FBI,” said Campa-Najjar. “So the law’s on my side and not his side as of late.”

David Schweidel, a professor of marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University said ads like this may increasingly be more en vogue in the post-2016 election climate largely because Trump’s well-documented reliance on personal attacks proved effective enough to win the White House.

“We saw pundit after pundit kind of commenting on the fact that these personal attacks weren’t coming across as presidential and how ‘it’s the wrong temperament.’ Well, guess what, people responded to it,” Schweidel said.

He added that spots like Hunter’s are generally not intended to sway undecided voters, but to inspire the base to show up at the polls. As US politics continues its long slog towards ever-increased partisanship, elections become more about turning out the base and less about converting undecideds: which could mean negative and personal attacks only become more prevalent.

On the other side of the country, attack ads on a black congressional candidate’s former career as a rapper have taken on racist undertones in a district that, like California’s 50th, is predominantly white. Antonio Delgado, a Harvard Law graduate and Rhodes Scholar is running as a Democrat for a seat in New York’s 19th district currently held by Republican John Faso.

As a young man, Delgado released a socially conscious and political hip-hop album under the name AD the Voice in 2006.

Since the album came to light, a number of Republican groups have seized on it to paint Delgado’s flirtation with hip-hop as out of step with the values of the district. The Congressional Leadership Fund released an advert spot referring to Delgado as a “New York City liberal” and “[Nancy] Pelosi’s candidate” before clipping a handful of Delgado’s song lyrics, overlaying dramatically loud “bleep” sounds over words like “fuck,” “sex” and “porno.”

The ad also accused Delgado of “lacing his raps with extremist attacks on American values”, playing a clip where Delgado states, factually, that more civilian lives were lost during the Iraq war than the 9/11 attacks.

Faso didn’t place the ads, but has not condemned them either, saying in a statement this summer that “Mr Delgado’s lyrics paint an ugly and false picture of America.”

The subtext of the ads was seemingly illuminated in a New York Times article from July when Gerald Benjamin, a friend of Faso’s and director of the Benjamin Center at State University of New York at New Paltz, posed the question: “Is a guy who makes a rap album the kind of guy who lives here in rural New York and reflects our lifestyle and values?”

He continued: “People like us, people in rural New York, we are not people who respond to this part of American culture,” eventually sparking protests from students at his home campus in New Paltz. Benjamin later apologized for his remarks.

Delgado has said the ads are an effort to “otherize” him in the eyes of the white voters he needs to win.

“It’s insulting to people in the district that Faso believes they will buy into this sort of deception and dishonesty,” said Delgado’s campaign manager, Allyson Marcus, noting that a similarly themed Super Pac radio ad was even pulled by the local radio station WDST, which called the ad “highly offensive” and “factually distorted” in a statement.

“The truth is Antonio grew up in a working-class family in Schenectady, right here in upstate New York, where he learned the values of hard work and accountability. The real question is, why won’t Faso condemn these divisive and deceptive ads,” Marcus asked.

Faso did not respond to a request for comment.