https://news.yahoo.com/column-unbelievably-racist-ad-during-195612168.html
LA Times
Column: That unbelievably racist ad during the Dodgers playoff? Ex-Trump
aides were behind it
Michael Hiltzik
Mon, October 17, 2022 at 12:56 PM
FILE - White House senior adviser Stephen Miller listens as President
Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in
Washington, June 21, 2018. Miller, who served as a top aide to President
Donald Trump, will appear Thursday before the congressional committee
investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. That's according to a person
familiar with the matter. Miller was a senior advisor for policy during
the Trump administration and a central figure in many of Trump's policy
decisions. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
As if Dodger fans didn't have enough to nauseate them during Saturday's
playoff game against the San Diego Padres, the telecast featured an
openly racist commercial blaming President Biden and other Democrats for
illegal immigration.
Airing during the mid-fourth inning break of the game that eliminated
the Dodgers from the post-season, the ad consisted of video images
depicting a torrent of obviously Latino immigrants pouring over the border.
"This giant flood of illegal immigration is draining your paychecks,
wrecking your schools, ruining your hospitals, threatening your family,"
stated the overwrought narrator, over the obligatory ominous soundtrack.
"Mixed among the masses are drug dealers, sex traffickers and violent
predators."
Vote to keep our borders, jails and bathrooms open. Vote progressive
Sarcastic billboard sponsored by right-wing Citizens for Sanity
Who's behind this commercial? The ad identifies its sponsor only as
"Citizens for Sanity," but that last line should give you a further
clue: It's an organization of several former Trump aides who spearheaded
his administration's attacks on immigrants.
The ad's characterization of immigrants as criminals almost exactly
echoes Trump's line during his announcement of his presidential campaign
in 2015 about Mexican immigrants: "They’re bringing drugs. They’re
bringing crime. They’re rapists."
The leaders of Citizens for Sanity are associated with the America First
Legal Foundation, which was founded by Stephen Miller, its president.
Notoriously, Miller was an architect of Trump's cruel and crude
immigrant family separation policy, his Muslim ban and his shutdown of
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted
a path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors by
their parents.
A whole page on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
tracks hate groups, is devoted to Miller.
The immigration ad isn't Citizens for Sanity's only product during this
election cycle. Another video blames "woke" politicians — specifically
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Vice
President Kamala Harris — for fomenting a tide of urban violent crime,
illustrated by a sequence of random videos of gunplay, shoplifting and
street assaults.
Another video attacks transgender athletes with the tagline, "Tell Biden
and his radical allies: No men in girls' sports."
The group has also erected billboards nationwide, including in
California, with sarcastic, infantile glosses on Democratic policies:
"Vote to keep our borders, jails and bathrooms open. Vote progressive";
"Demand Transportation Equity for Pansexuals NOW"; "Too much freedom is
a bad thing. Get your IRS audit today." And so on.
The connections tying together Miller, the America First Legal
Foundation, and Citizens for Sanity have been laid out by the nonprofit
group Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics. A public document
cited by OpenSecrets identifies the top executives of Citizens for
Sanity as Gene Hamilton, Ian Prior and John Zadrozny.
Prior told OpenSecrets that his group has “no relationship with America
First Legal Foundation.”
Is that so? Prior identifies himself on his own LinkedIn page as "Senior
Advisor for America First Legal." Hamilton is vice president and general
counsel of America First Legal. Zadrozny is identified on America First
Legal's website as its deputy director for investigations.
All three have impeccable credentials as former Trump aides.
Prior was a Justice Department spokesman during the Trump
administration. While working in the Trump administration, Hamilton
wrote the memo that formally ended DACA, according to a deposition he
gave that was cited by the New Yorker. Zadrozny worked at the State
Department and the White House under Trump, according to emails
published by the progressive organization Democracy Forward.
Citizens for Sanity didn't respond to my request for comment.
That brings us back to the playoff commercial. It isn't clear how widely
the commercial has been aired, but it's not a California-only phenomenon
— Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer caught that one and the urban
violence commercial during Phillies playoff telecasts. Fox Sports didn't
respond to my questions about the commercial schedule or whether the ad
was reviewed by any standards department at Fox.
Citizens for Sanity has indicated that it will spend at least six
figures promoting its messages.
If that's so, brace yourself for an outpouring of misleading and
mendacious ads. The immigration commercial, for example, makes much of
the arrest of an immigrant in connection with the rape of a 3-year-old
child.
The ad asks, "Who is Joe Biden letting into our country?" The image
associated with that point, however, refers to the case of Christopher
Puente, which occurred in 2020.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Puente was
deported in 2014, under the Obama administration, but managed to
re-enter the country with false papers. At the time of the alleged
sexual assault, he was at large after being arrested by the Chicago
Police Department and then released despite a request by ICE to detain
him, according to the agency.
There are several candidates for blame in that episode, but Biden is not
among them.
As for where the money for the ad campaign is actually coming from, good
luck finding out. Citizens for Sanity is a "dark money" group, meaning
that it doesn't have to disclose its donors. Had the commercial been
directed at a local political campaign or a California ballot
initiative, its principal funders would have to be listed on the air.
But it's a national ad, so its backers are anonymous.
The demonization of outsiders for political gain isn't new, of course.
In 1934, when the writer and socialist Upton Sinclair ran for governor
of California on a leftist platform, movie studios contributed to the
campaign against him by producing newsreels depicting tramps and hobos
surging over the state line to take advantage of the generous pensions
Sinclair proposed for resident seniors; in that case, the images were
stock footage from movies then in production.
And who can forget the Willie Horton affair, when George H.W. Bush's
campaign aired a commercial aiming to blame Michael Dukakis, his
Democratic opponent, for the rape and murder committed by a Black felon
who was on a weekend furlough from prison.
That ad had all the same grand guignol elements as the Citizens for
Sanity commercial — mainly racism and fear of crime — but it seems
almost understated today compared with the turbocharged bigotry on view
on your television screens today. Can anyone look at this product and
say American politics are in a healthy condition?