Don't Link The MAGA-Bigots To Covington-- They're From Park Hills

Covington Catholic High School (CCH) is a private, all-male high school in Park Hills, Kentucky, southwest of Covington. It used to be in Covington. It moved in 1954 and kept its name. Covington is a small city (population 40,797) in Kenton County directly across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, where the Ohio is joined by the Licking River. Its population has been steadily decreasing since 1950, when there were 64,000 living there. The biggest employee in the city is the IRS-- 4,500 workers haven't been paid in a few weeks. The city is a blue island in a very red area, Tom Massie's 4th congressional district. In 2016 primary day was interesting in Kenton County:

• Hillary- 5,146
• Bernie- 4,880
• Cruz- 2,475
• Trumpanzee- 1,997
• Kasich- 1,741
•Rubio- 1,095

The general election was... less interesting, if more predictable and more in line with the statewide vote which had gone to Trump 62.5% to 32.7%.

• Trumpanzee- 42,958 (59.7%)
• Hillary- 24,213 (33.7%)

Don't expect this state and this county to be at all sympathetic with Nathan Phillips. Don't recognize the name? I'm about to tell you about him and what happened to him and what it has to do with Covington. First of all, I have 2 friends who live there, "Jack" and "Jill." Jack was born and raised in Covington and Jill moved there when they got married. They both agree that the behavior from these Covington Catholic High kids was disgusting, and they told me that "most of the people who actually live in the City of Covington are pretty firm on that" but wanted me to remember that Covington Catholic High School is not in the City of Covington and that most of the kids who go to Covington Catholic do not live in the City of Covington. They live in the surrounding suburbs with their MAGA-obsessed parents. They are alarmed that the national media is showing-- at best-- its lazy nature and is using terms like "Covington High School" and "Covington kids" and "Covington parents" etc. "Everybody. said Jill, "knows exactly what they're seeing in those videos because we all see it at basketball games and football games when they show up at your local school. There are lots of folks who will rally behind Cov Cath, but their reputation for obnoxious behavior towards other people and the way they weaponize 'normal school chants' has been a topic of conversation in the region for decades. They've always been like this, and lots of other schools hate them because of it... even some of the other Catholic schools, but the public schools especially. You can imagine why people in Covington are alarmed. Dave explained it:

"The Covington Independent Public School system is the poorest school district in the state of Kentucky. As poor as any district in the mountains of Appalachia, in the fields of Western Kentucky, in the cities of Lexington or Louisville. 89% of the students in Covington Independent Public Schools qualify for free and reduced lunches. 46% of the students in CIPS are white or Caucasian, 31% Black, 14% Hispanic. CIPS is a majority-minority district.

As #CovingtonBoys continues to trend, and news stories about “Covington High School” spew forth, and national media self-flagellate for jumping the gun, the real story of Covington is lost. CIPS is bounded by some of the wealthiest public school districts and private schools (like Covington Catholic) in the state.

This is not a complicated story, nor a story unfamiliar to most. It’s a story of social, racial, and economic stratification, of white flight and urban-suburban division.

As national news descends on the city and region, I ask three things: 1. spend some time talking with actual Covington High School students; 2. spend some time focusing on the larger structural problems that produce the absurdity you’re witnessing; and 3. visit and enjoy the city of Covington."

On Tuesday, Jodi Jacobson published a post at Rewire News, that is crucial reading for anyone following this story: White-Washing White Supremacy: Media Rushes to Excuse Covington Catholic Students. Short version: "In another incidence of white-washing white supremacy, white journalists are rushing to excuse a clearly racist incident involving white teens from Covington Catholic school in Kentucky, in part by discounting the testimony of a Native elder and Vietnam war veteran." Jodi starts off by expelling how Nathan Phillips wound up interacting with a gang of racists from a private Catholic school in Park Hills, Kentucky.

Every single day across America, women seeking abortion and other forms of reproductive health care have to run a gauntlet of intimidation just to enter health clinics. Protesters, self-anointed street “counselors,” and religious fundamentalists bring gory signs, and yell and scream—often using high-decibel amplification equipment—to harangue and harass patients and staff calling them “baby-killers” and promising them damnation. Clinic protesters feel righteous in their actions because they believe they are morally superior to the people seeking care, and they believe they have a right to impose their will on others. These and other tactics of intimidation are an integral part of the misogynistic, patriarchal arsenal of the “pro-life” movement, which every year in January hosts a “March for Life.” And every year, the march organizers bus students in from parochial schools across the country to ensure someone actually shows up. This year, they brought students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.

The students’ visit to D.C. did not end well.

In a now widely reported video, students from Covington Catholic, a virtually all white, all male elite private school, taunted and mocked Nathan Phillips, a Native elder from the Omaha Nation, former U.S. Marine, and Vietnam veteran. Phillips was in D.C.-- which like much of the United States is land from which indigenous peoples were forcibly removed-- to attend the first Indigenous People’s March, a gathering of prayers, songs, dances, and speeches, calling attention to the global injustices perpetuated against indigenous peoples. In trying to intercede in what he believed to be an escalating situation between a large and increasingly rowdy group of at least 60 white teen boys and five Black men, he walked between the two groups, drumming in an effort to defuse the rising tension. Phillips then came face to face with Nick Sandmann, the young man who became an instant and iconic image of white entitlement exhibited by him and his classmates.

What happened next is telling: In short, the testimony of a Native elder, former Marine, and Vietnam veteran of an incident in which a very large group of raucous boys surrounded him and acted with extreme disrespect is being ignored in favor of an after-the-fact narrative created by white teens from a virtually all-white school with a history of blatant and public racism. The boys narrative also is being amplified by white journalists, further disrespecting the Native elder, and of eye witnesses at the scene. This discounting of experience is familiar to many of us, the women who seek reproductive health care who are effectively told we should endure abuse, the Native elder who on sacred ground is the only adult who tries to intervene in a situation being made the “aggressor,” the people of color who constantly have largely male, majority white media telling them “there’s more to the story” of their abuse than they what they say. It’s the same story, different characters that we saw played out only recently in the Supreme Court hearings of Brett Kavanaugh, who also attended an elite Catholic school and who many defended as just “boys being boys.” White boys, of course.

The entire incident reads like the script of a remake we’ve seen too many times before. The initial video showing a large group of boys being aggressive and disrespectful to Phillips exploded across the internet and drew outrage. Then, new videos purporting to show “other perspectives” (including helpful offers by #MAGA followers on Twitter to send me their “spliced videos” showing the “true picture”) were circulated. This was followed by a letter ascribed to Sandmann but actually written by a PR firm, which effectively blamed Phillips for the entire incident, stating: “he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I [Sandmann] did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.”



The letter was crafted and disseminated by RunSwitch, a Kentucky-based PR firm. One of the three founding partners of RunSwitch is Scott Jennings, a conservative commentator, and a former political operative who worked for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush, and other Republican politicians.

I watched at least five of the initial short videos shot by different people, and there was no question as to what I saw: A large unsupervised group of boys, acting entitled and out of control. They had come from an event that is focused on controlling women’s lives, choices, and bodies. Indeed, a group of them harassed a young woman before the incident with Phillips. And another suggested that rape “is not rape if you enjoy it.” The young men who’d just come from the “March for Life” were directly mimicking their movement’s views on the agency of women by harassing young women and discounting rape. In other words, in their eyes women deserve no agency.

The boys were wearing #MAGA hats, “March for Life” sweatshirts, and toting bottles of “Trump water,” which in several videos they can be seen proudly exhibiting to others around them. Though they were high school students, they appeared to have no adult supervision, but for one lone adult who stood at the back of this large pack of boys and did... nothing. Indeed, in a nearly two hour video, Phillips was the only adult I saw who tried to intervene in what clearly appeared to be an escalating and potentially dangerous situation. If I had been there, I would have done the same.

In the videos, it is clear the boys surrounded and hemmed in a Native elder, laughing, chanting, “war whooping,” and at various times doing “tomahawk chops” right in Phillips face. Hunter Hooligan, who attended the Indigenous People’s March to honor her Mvskoke family, wrote in The Cut: “Nathan stopped walking, but he kept singing and playing his drum-- staring right into the smirking boy’s eyes. We all huddled around him as the other boys began to push, prod, and bump us into a tighter and tighter cluster. They were mocking Nathan’s sacred music with purposefully disrespectful dancing and a perverted imitation of his singing. Their imitations were the racist tropes of “Indian chants”-- the stereotypical grunting and “hiyahiyahiyas” of representations past.” Her personal testimony appears not to have been read by many of the Covington Catholic boys’ apologists.

But all it took was the mournful letter written by a right-wing PR firm to change the situation. Almost immediately after “the other side” letter was released, the white-washing began. White journalists across the internet paused for a collective white sympathy moment, writing mea culpas at having “misread the situation.”

Robby Soave of Reason claimed that the media had “wildly mischaracterized” what happened. Jake Tapper tweeted his piece, without indicating whether he’d personally looked into whether Soave’s position had merit.

John Harwood and S.E. Cupp tweeted mournfully that they’d wished they’d waited for more information. Michael Cohen of the Boston Globe complained on Twitter about lost nuances, and Sam Stein of the Daily Beast asserted “it was a tricky story to unpack.” In other words, those of us who saw this scene for what it was, a pack of entitled, racist boys taunting a Native elder were engaged in “motivated reasoning.” In The Atlantic, Julie Irwin Zimmerman wrote about how she “failed the Covington Catholic Test” [🙄].

I hated the MAGA hats some of the kids were wearing, their listless tomahawk chops, the way some of their chanting mocked Phillips’s. But I also saw someone with Phillips yelling at a few of the kids that his people had been here first, that Europeans had stolen their land. While I wouldn’t disagree, the scene was at odds with the reports that Phillips and those with him were attempting to calm a tense situation.

As I watched the longer videos, I began to see the smirking kid in a different light. It seemed to me that a wave of emotions rolled over his face as Phillips approached him: confusion, fear, resolve. He finally, I thought, settled on an expression designed to mimic respect while signaling to his friends that he had this under control. Observing it, I wondered what different reaction I could have reasonably hoped a high-school junior to have in such an unfamiliar and bewildering situation. I came up empty.

“Listless tomahawk chops?” Of course Zimmerman “began to see the smirking kid in a different light.” That was the point of the PR effort in the first place. Poor young white boy trying to stave off 60 of his best friends yelling and chanting disrespectfully by staring down a Native elder and-- really-- just praying for peace. It’s as though the PR firm had cast a spell.

In an effort to figure out what had actually happened, I watched the nearly two hour video taken by a member of the Black Hebrew Israelites three separate times. And here is what I saw.

In the first hour of the video, four members of the fringe Black Hebrew Israelites sect are standing well in front of (not on, as Sandmann claimed) the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the patio that leads to the reflecting pool. They were facing the Washington Monument, away from the memorial steps. They never moved from this spot. Black Hebrew Israelites, which the Southern Poverty Law Center says includes a small extremist element, believe that African Americans, not Jews, are the real descendants of Israel. They often engage in street preaching in places like New York City and D.C. They are homophobic, racist, and misogynistic. They can be verbally abusive but, as police in New York attest, they are not generally physically dangerous. Most people ignore them.

In the long video, hundreds of people do just that… either walk right by them, or mill around listening for a while and then walk away. At one point in the first hour, two women engage them in an argument for a few minutes and then walk away. In that first hour, the Hebrew Israelites appear to get agitated by a skateboarder who circles them purposefully over and over, clearly there to taunt them, and indeed the skateboarder is the only one with whom they engage directly. One of the Hebrew Israelites suggests getting a “MAGA hat for this Republican,” referring to the skateboarder.

At 59:09, the video pans to the steps of the memorial, well behind the Hebrew Israelites and it’s clear that sometime in the prior 15 minutes or so, a large group of the Covington Catholic High School teens has assembled there. The Hebrew Israelites still have their back to the steps. The man making the video says, “Take a look at these Make America Great Again crackers,” apparently referring to the large group.

While the Hebrew Israelites face the Washington monument, the teens jeer from behind them. At 1:04:00, a homeless man wanders past and exchanges words with the Black Hebrew Israelites. At 1:05:00, it is clear that the group of teens behind the Hebrew Israelites has grown much larger and they begin to further engage the Black Hebrew Israelites by yelling from behind them, catcalling them; one of the Hebrew Israelites turns around at 1:06:00 to engage the boys briefly and turns back. The students continue to talk to the Hebrew Israelites from the steps. At about 1:08:00 the Covington Catholic students start chanting and jeering, though it is hard to hear what they are saying. At 1:09:51, a student runs down the stairs to face the others. He throws off his jacket, sweatshirt, and t-shirt, and naked from the waist up, starts jumping up and down and leading some sort of loud and grunting chant. The Black Hebrew Israelites never leave the spot they have been at this entire time.

Then the crowd of teens gets even rowdier. They are clearly taunting the Black men. Some of the teens move onto the patio and closer to the men, who still for the most part face away from them, talking to others. The teens are dancing and chanting. Then suddenly they huddle. At around 1:12:20 you can hear faint drumming of Phillips walking slowly into the picture, a distance away from the stairs.

Sandmann claims in his letter that “The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him.” First of all, Phillips was not a “protestor.” Second, this is clearly not what happens in the video. Instead as Hooligan wrote, the teens surround Phillips and start hopping, chanting, chopping hands, laughing. By 1:13:00 there is a very large crowd of teens surrounding Phillips; they are openly mocking him. There’s nothing respectful about it. If there is a chaperone or teacher around the vicinity, it is not obvious, and if as Sandmann asserts, they asked for and received permission from a teacher to do what they in fact did…well then, as a parent, I am aghast.

The Hebrew Israelites video focuses back on the teens who move closer to the Hebrew Israelites, some clearly taunting them again. Finally at 1:17:17 someone yells for the students to back up, but instead they quickly re-converge around and engage the Hebrew Israelites at which point the Hebrew Israelites themselves ask the teens several times to step back. From there until the end of the video, the Black Hebrew Israelites and teens are talking back and forth until it appears they leave.

Sandmann’s letter states: “I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor. He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.”

But as this video shared on Twitter by Waleed Shahid shows, Phillips was surrounded by jumping, whooping, mocking teens. As you can see in the frame below, Sandmann is in the background (red cap, gray jacket) smiling. It does not appear to me that Phillips “singled him out” for confrontation. That assertion also appears to be a lie.

Be sure to read Jodi's entire post here. And if you need more about the racism of these MAGA-hat brats... this HuffPo piece by Andy Campbell, who emphasizes that the "confrontation between MAGA-hat-wearing students at Covington Catholic High School and a Native American sparked a nationwide conversation about racism, the symbolism of the “Make America great again” hat and what it means for a group of white kids to stand face to face with a dark-skinned man and mock, sneer and howl at him."


UPDATE: Irony

This morning Ro Khanna told me that "the irony of having privileged kids yell build a wall to a Native American-- the first inhabitants of the land-- leaves me speechless. I kept thinking of Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom and how much work of reconciliation remains."

Ammar Campa-Najjar Will Make An Awesome Member Of Congress

Blue America has been raising campaign contributions for Ammar Campa-Najjar for several months on our our California-- Not Blue Enough page and, since his primary win-- against a DCCC-backed Republican pretending to be a Democrat-- on our Abandoned by the DCCC page. Today we officially added him to our main 2018 congressional page, the one that the thermometer below goes to. Please consider donating what you can to his run for Congress.

Before they had a record deal-- when they were just another struggling Bay Area band, I used to go over to Metallica's studio and listen to their rehearsals. They gave me tapes of their music I could play on my radio show. I don't know if I was the first person to play Metallica on the radio. But I think I was. When I was getting to know Ammar, after we had talked about Medicare-for-All, free state college and trade schools, infrastructure spending and job creation and some of that kind of stuff, I asked him what his favorite band was. Yeah, it was Metallica. He comes across as a regular all-American 29 year old kid-- who just happened to have worked in the Obama Department of Labor. He's very easy to relate too-- far more so than candidates who parse every word they say, like they learned to do in law school. Ammar is as straight-talking a candidate as I've come to expect working-class candidates to be-- like Randy Bryce, for example. And, in fact, he told me he and Bryce had bonded already and were eager to work together in the House next year. They were two real long shots last year when they declared their candidacies in districts the DCCC was not even considering.

Randy was running against a powerful Speaker of the House and entrenched incumbent with unlimited campaign funds, Paul Ryan, and Ammar was running against the scion of a powerful political family in a district with an R+11 PVI, where Obama had lost both times and where Trump beat Hillary 54.6% to 39.6%. But both candidates-- ignored by a DCCC that doesn't take long-shots seriously enough to pay attention-- created their own brands and started climbing in the polls. Bryce took off like a rocket, gained immense national notoriety as an everyman candidate from Wisconsin and raised more money-- 100% from small contributions-- than any of the DCCC candidates other than the self-funders. The DCCC noticed and asked if they could endorse him and learn how to bottle the magic. Randy's success appealing to independent voters in Wisconsin left Ryan with no path to victory... and he announced his retirement. Ammar shocked the political establishment by beating his DCCC-favored "ex"-Republican primary opponent 25,799 to 18,944 in the state's jungle primary. He was endorsed by the California Democratic Party, by the California Labor Federation, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Working Families Party, J Street, and Our Revolution-- and by some pretty impressive political figures who don't rush willy-nilly into endorsing House candidates: Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, L.A. Mayor Eric Garretti... and by the two best DCCC vice chairs, Ted Lieu and Joe Kennedy.

This morning, Robin Abcarian wrote a piece for the L.A. Times after spending the last day or two following Ammar around southern California, Folk songs, tears and zippy one-liners: On the trail with the longshot candidate trying to oust Duncan Hunter. I should add something she didn't... the latest poll, by Tulchin, shows Ammar in an exact dead-heat with Drunken Hunter, 46-46%.

Retired FBI agent Jeff Iverson had his doubts about Ammar Campa-Najjar, the 29-year-old Democrat whose race to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter took on an unexpected importance after federal prosecutors charged Hunter and his wife with stealing $250,000 in campaign funds.

“It’s not his politics, it’s his age,” Iverson, 67, told me as we stood on the porch of a stunning home overlooking Lake Hodges in Escondido.

But after listening to Campa-Najjar speak and take questions for more than an hour Sunday morning, Iverson’s doubts disappeared like so much Hunter campaign cash.

“He’s articulate, prepared, and given his background-- growing up as a Palestinian-- I think that gives you some life experience right out of the box,” Iverson said. Campa-Najjar is a Palestinian Mexican American.

I spent about five hours with him Sunday at the campaign event in Escondido (which is in his district), at a meeting of the La Jolla Democratic Club (which is not), and at a late lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, where he seemed mellow from fatigue.

“It’s been a long couple of days, but I’ve been doing this for 20 months,” he said. He had flown to New York on a red-eye to attend a fundraiser on Thursday, flown back to Orange County to attend a Barack Obama rally in Anaheim on Saturday, then to Arizona for a fundraiser that evening, and back to San Diego for Sunday’s events.

In Anaheim, he met with Obama, but was not invited onstage.

...Among beleaguered Democrats in the 50th District, which includes the suburbs of northern and eastern San Diego County, there is hope that someone, finally, has come along to topple the ultra-conservative Hunter political dynasty. Ten years ago, Hunter replaced his father, also named Duncan Hunter, who held the seat for 28 years.

“This is the first time I have ever done anything like this,” hostess Rhonda Farrar said as she introduced Campa-Najjar to her 40 or so guests. “And he’s not too bad to look at either.”

Campa-Najjar, in boot-cut jeans, a blue-and-white checked shirt with rolled up sleeves, smiled. He is tall and lean, and occasionally hooks his thumbs through his belt loops as he speaks. He is fashionably unshaven and single-- “married to my campaign,” he says.

I asked Campa-Najjar if voters had a hard time remembering his name.

“Well,” he said, “a good memory device is ‘camp in a jar.’ At least I don’t have ‘Hussein’ in my name.”

As befits someone who has worked in communications at the Department of Labor and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he is easy in front of a crowd-- paraphrasing chestnuts from older politicians like Bob Dole. (The night Trump was elected, he said, he slept like a baby-- “Woke up every two hours and cried.”) He borrows Obama’s famous riff, “Fired up? Ready to go!”

And he isn’t above a cheesy joke or two:

“America,” he said, “has never been at the mercy of one person, or president, whatever the color of their skin. Even if they’re orange.”

In a community room filled with La Jolla Democrats, Campa-Najjar clasped his hands and shut his eyes as he sang a folk song with his former philosophy professor Peter Bolland on guitar. It felt a little like church, which the candidate had skipped that day. “God help me,” he said, “but I feel like this is the Lord’s work.”

Bolland, who had a profound influence on Campa-Najjar when he was a student at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, said he was proud of the young man, lauding “his kindness, his mercy, his insight, his virtue.”

“You are doing your best to make me cry,” said Campa-Najjar, whose attempt to hold back tears failed once he started talking about his mother, who struggled financially after his father left the family and moved back to Gaza. He swallowed hard, and his voice dropped.

“So this race is really personal for me. My mom’s name is Abby and there are countless Abbies out there. I meet them every day. People who tell me ‘I have to decide, do I get a gallon of gas to get to work tomorrow, or a gallon of milk to give my kids breakfast?’”

...As has been widely reported, his grandfather was a mastermind of the murder of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and was killed by Israeli commandos in 1973.

In Escondido, 81-year-old Andy Pinto asked Campa-Najjar how he plans to handle his grandfather’s “situation.”

“That’s a good question,” Campa-Najjar said. “Well, I have a biological grandfather, and he died 16 years before I was born. So to those who are wondering about my relationship, I knew him as well as much as all of you did.”

Sometimes on the trail, said Campa-Najjar, a Christian who is deeply involved in his church, people will come up to him and say, “I don’t want you to bring Sharia law here. I say, ‘Me neither. We have that in common.’”

Campa-Najjar won’t let up until election day. If he wins, he said, his first two priorities will be an anti-corruption bill and a jobs program for his district. Democrats say the race has tightened.

It’s hard to believe that San Diego County Republicans would rather elect an accused thief who might face years in jail than... a Democrat.

In American politics right now-- for better or worse-- anything is possible.

Facebook-- Making It Harder On Challengers Like Shastina Sandman To Run For Office

This morning Jacquie sent me this note. She's happy because it helps with the independent expenditure Blue America is doing for Jovanka Beckles up in Richmond, California:

Hey, good news-- we got Facebook ID/Political Ad approved. The secret code was delivered here today. (I think it’d had gone to a neighbor’s house, as it just showed up today- a non-mail day)

We try hard to follow FEC rules-- in fact all the government mandates that govern what we can and can't do as a PAC. In fact we even have a lawyer who helps us to stay on the sometimes not intuitive straight and narrow. But when it comes to Facebook, no one can screw up... because Facebook just assumes everyone wanting to place a political ad is a Russian political operative and they've put in fail safe rules that they enforce themselves. In other words, committees like ours can't make a mistake if we wanted to because Facebook won't run any ads unless they've determined you're not a Russian operative trying to get Trump into the White House again. The letter, Jacquie told me, "took WELL over 7 days, when they told me it would take 3-7. Since it came from 25 minutes down the road, I’d hoped for speedier delivery."



This came from Ad Age last week and I'm sure it put something of a chill onto the whole advertising industry: Facebook's Election Ad Rules snag Challenger Candidates. It starts with the imagine of an ad from a right-wing crackpot, Shastina Sandman, running today for Congress against Dana Rohrabacher in Orange County's CA-48. Aside from the 5 Democrats in today's open primary, there are 6 Republicans opposing Rohabacher as well. Democrats worry that one, Scott Baugh, could possibly come in second and set up a Republican vs Republican run-off in November, locking a Democrat out of the contest entirely.

So, the more right-wing votes that candidates like Shastina Sandman drain off from Rohrabacher and Baugh, the better. But Shastina Sandman hadn't raised enough money ($5,000) bu the FEC reporting deadline, May 16, to even trigger a report. She was depending on a relatively inexpensive Facebook ad to get her crackpot Trumpist message out there.

Shastina Sandman is waiting for a letter from Facebook, coming by U.S. mail, that she hopes will contain a verification code to buy ads for her upcoming primary in California's 48th Congressional District.

She's running out of time. The primary to determine who will advance to the November general election is Tuesday.

Sandman is caught in Facebook's new, stringent vetting process to approve political ads, a response to foreign meddling in the 2016 presidential race. Some candidates from Florida, Mississippi and other states say they have been impacted as well.

Implemented in late May, the timing of the election integrity measure seems to be hitting hardest states like California that are in the middle of primaries. The policy requires candidates and political groups verify their identities and locations and then wait for a code, by snail mail, that lets them make those ad buys on the social network, and some challengers claim the new rule hits them harder than it does incumbents.

When it was nine days out from the election, says Sandman, "I get this disapproval notice from Facebook about a video that had already been running as an ad. That's ridiculous."

A Republican and Donald Trump supporter, Sandman is running for the seat held by Republican Dana Rohrabacher. More than 10 candidates will appear on that primary ballot on Tuesday, and the top two finishers, regardless of party, will compete in the general election.

Sandman has a Facebook presence; she runs a page called Magapreneur, a play on Trump's "Make America Great Again" catchphrase, which she uses to promote Trump-themed merchandise. But that page and her personal Facebook page were blocked from buying ads until she could verify her identity.

Sandman thinks incumbents like Rohrabacher have millions of dollars and massive staffs to help with just these kinds of hoops and hassles. "I understand Facebook wants to verify candidates but by doing it like this it almost seems like meddling in elections," Sandman says.

Facebook says it has been trying to find a formula that balances the need to take control of the abuse on the platform with the need to stay out of sensitive political matters. But the new policy seems to mean some candidates in heated races can pay to boost their messages to voters, while others cannot.

Mark Meuser, a Republican candidate for California state secretary of state was recently caught up in the verification protocols, too, saying he couldn't promote a video he created about "illegal voting."

"Facebook gives challengers like me a much better opportunity to get a message out for less money," Meuser says, explaining why his timeout from advertising has been such a disadvantage.

On Friday, Meuser said he was still talking with Facebook representatives who seemed to want to help him fix the issues he was having.

The issue is bipartisan. "It's happening to Democrats, too," says Adriel Hampton, creative director at his political consulting firm, The Adriel Hampton Group. "I was shut down for a few days but had a team member who was verified. The hard part is the letter takes more than a week. So that's what's really frustrating people."

(Poiticians are not the only ones caught up in the new rules. Even Showtime had to get verified to run ads for a new series called "The Fourth Estate," about New York Times reporters. The Verge reported that Facebook blocked ads for the show until the channel went through the same snail mail process as candidates.)

Facebook had notified Meuser and Sandman in routine reach-out efforts, according to a company spokeswoman.

"We're committed to helping advertisers as they go through this process. At the same time, it's incredibly important to verify political advertisers so we can help prevent bad actors from interfering in elections. Doing this won't be perfect to start, but the important step is to start," says Katie Harbath, Facebook's global politics and government outreach director.

Facebook has been telegraphing its moves for months now, with public blog posts, notices sent to pages and e-mails, it says. In April, it announced the identification process and started notifying pages it determined would be most likely to be affected. The identification requirement officially took effect in the last week in May.

Republican Richard Boyanton, who is running for senator from Mississippi, tweeted that he wanted a primary do-over because Facebook cut off his ad spending.

"I am starting to push to have this election redone," the candidate tweeted on Thursday. "The Facebook canceling our ads puts the election as bias to incumbent because of denying our ads 10 days before June 5th election. Facebook should pay for the new election."

Hampton, however, says candidates should have been more prepared and capable of following the warning signs.

"I think it's a screw up by consultants," Hampton said. "Just because Facebook has a complicated interface you can't ignore real ID requirements."

Facebook new requirements come after it uncovered 475 fake accounts that had purchased some 3,000 political ads in an attempt to influence the 2016 presidential race. YouTube and Twitter were similarly attacked by bad actors, and all the companies sent representatives to Congress to testify last year about the disinformation campaigns on their platforms.

By the way, here's Shastina Sandman's video. If you're a Republican who plans to vote in the primary today, please forget about voting for Rohrabacher or Baugh, who are practically RINOs compared to Shastina. If you want the real Trump candidate, you need to vote for Shastina. Do you have any friends or family in the district? Don't let them waste their votes on Baugh or Rohrabacher when they can strike a real blow for Trumpism. Send them this video before it's too late. And tell them Facebook, the mainstream media, the Clintons, Obama and the Iluminati have tried to keep it away from them. Fast... before the polls close!