Following Trump’s Lead, RNC Just Released An Attack Ad On The Squad

Forget about Republicans disavowing Trump or racism — oh, no, quite the reverse. Racism is the train that they taking on the road to 2020, full speed ahead. The Republican National Committee just released an attack ad on the four freshmen women-of-color known as The Squad. The “goals” of The Squad, at least according to this video, are anarchy, plain and simple. That’s what the RNC wants you to believe, that’s what they paid for.

Manipulative cutting, to say the very least. The video starts out with AOC talking about concentration camps and you remember the firestorm that started. AOC made a lot of right-wing enemies by speaking the truth that day. Then the picture segues to a snippet of a Pressley speech, where she says, “You will see the light. And if you don’t, we will bring the fire.” Then, intriguingly, the video cuts to a bombing of an ICE facility in Washington state and a burned out car. Next there’s the cut to an American flag in Colorado being replaced with a Mexican flag. Nothing suggestive there, right? From the way that the cuts are made from real people to symbols of violence and the other, you can tell that whoever cut this together for the RNC has watched Birth Of A Nation any number of times. Then The Squad is asked to condemn the attack and none of them will respond. And why should they? They’re speaking for Antifa these days? Which is of course, what you are led to conclude; rather, that they’re not speaking in order to defend Antifa.

Then we see the words SQUAD GOALS? And the word ANARCHY fades in, and the last thing you know is that this was paid for by the RNC. Good of them to sign their work. We do applaud their creativity.

The Washington Post analyzed this ad point by point:

We will note that seeking and earning elected office is a very odd way to achieve one’s goal of anarchy. But, more broadly, the ad is dishonest in often subtle ways.

The debate over whether the detention centers are “concentration camps” is in large part a semantic one, though the point of using the term is clear — to compare what’s happening now to what happened in Germany during World War II. When Ocasio-Cortez first drew the analogy, a furious debate erupted that we don’t now need to resuscitate.

That Pressley snippet, though, is worth some elaboration. It’s a small part of a longer speech given during a visit by the group to a detention facility. In fact, it’s a part of one sentence from that speech.

The longer version?

“We need a system that works, that is humane and that is compassionate and that keeps families together,” Pressley said. “I learned a long time ago that when change happens, it’s either because people see the light or they feel the fire. Today, we are lifting up these stories in the hopes that you will see the light. And if you don’t, we will bring the fire.”

Clearly, she is not actually advocating the use of fire but, instead, suggesting that opponents of the facilities will bring heat to the subject. By clipping the speech where it did, the RNC is suggesting a direct link to the attack in Washington state and to that burned car.

That attack is described as an “antifa attack” in the questions to the Congress members later in the video. That appears to be true in one sense; the suspect killed at the scene identified himself as a member of “antifa,” an often loosely organized movement, the name of which derives from “anti-fascist.”

He was also not what you might consider a typical member of antifa, given that he was 69. His daughter believes that the car that burned was his own; a longtime friend believes the attack was an elaborate form of suicide.

Mitch McConnell made a cryptic remark earlier this week about how “the president might be onto something there,” when he was asked to take a stance on Trump’s now-famous racist tweets about The Squad. No one knew what he meant, but apparently what McConnell was saying is that Trump is indeed the face of the Republican party. It is the party of racism and evidently they’re all quite comfortable with that. He was also saying that Trump wants a foil in The Squad and so, fine, let him run with it. Ironically, in the same speech, McConnell made the case for “both sides toning down the rhetoric.” Right. This attack ad is going to accomplish just that. This is the return to civility that Ronna Romney McDaniel assured us Trump had “taken the lead” in, last October. Absolutely.