Black Americans for the President’s Agenda, a pro-Trump super PAC, created an ad to support Arkansas Representative French Hill in his reelection campaign against Democrat Clarke Tucker, which claims Democrats could bring back lynchings against black men. Hill represents the state's 2nd District, which includes parts of Little Rock and is 23 percent black.
The ad features a conversation between two black women about the sexual misconduct accusations leveled against recently-confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, claiming that the accusations are a sign of a shift toward the presumption of guilt before innocence in the United States.
“If the Democrats can do that to a white justice of the Supreme Court,” one of the women says, “what will happen to our husbands, our fathers, or our sons, when a white girl lies on them?”
"White Democrats will be lynching black folk again," the second woman responds, adding: “We can’t afford to let white Democrats take us back to bad old days of race verdicts, life sentences, and lynchings when a white girl screams rape.”
The ad was immediately condemned.
Hill soon responded, distancing himself from the ad.
Tucker, his opponent, had earlier condemned the ad, writing: "Rep. Hill & his allies will have to live with the kind of campaign they're running."
Hill later claimed his opponent had "decided to spread this race baiting ad rather than join in bipartisan condemnation of this message."
According to Vernon Robinson, who co-founded the pro-Trump super PAC and once led the effort to elevate Ben Carson to the presidency, the ad, which cost nearly $50,000, has been running in radio slots for about a week and a half. He called the ad “payback” for the Kavanaugh hearings. Speaking to The Washington Post, he said the ad was necessary because black voters, "a constituency that Democrats have to win,” could be convinced to fear false rape allegations.
The #MeToo movement overreached,” he said. “If Claire McCaskill gets less than 90 percent [of the black vote], she loses.”
Robinson has run inflammatory ads before. He ran for Congress and lost in 2006, after running a political ad set to mariachi music that claimed his Democratic opponent wanted to turn the United States into a “fiesta for illegal aliens and homosexuals.”
"A man from North Carolina named Vernon Robinson is behind this PAC," wrote the Arkansas Times of the debacle. "He's a former Congressional candidate and long-time crackpot. He's black. Anti-gay and xenophobic messaging is his stock in trade."
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