Warnock Needs To Respond To This False Walker Ad Now, Before It Does Him Damage

If there was one, central criticism that was to be made about how Democrats drop the ball, generally speaking, it would be that we don’t have a rapid response mechanism in place. Nobody does. Not individual candidates and not the party as a whole. Not even the White House.

This is how a lot of damage gets down. Right-wing propaganda pours out into the ethosphere, like an open sewer, and either the pushback is too little, too late, or not at all.

Right now, Raphael Warnock is facing one of these moments. Herschel Walker has an ad out, misquoting Warnock as having referred to police in general as “thugs” (he did not) and also claiming that Warnock “cut police funding,” which he did not. No pushback has come and this could get serious.

Here’s a link to the ad and here’s a transcript.

Right now, Atlanta is seeing murders on the ride City rocked with four shootings and three dead cities increase was just named the 10th highest in the nation. The democrats answer to rising crime defund the police, put criminals ahead of victims. Raphael would not call police thugs, then cut the funding. Now he wants to end cash bail, putting criminals back out on the street. I’m Herschel Walker. I approved this message because stopping crime starts by keeping bad guys in jail.

PolitiFact:

We found that Walker’s assertion that Warnock “called police thugs, then cut their funding” is misleading. Walker’s campaign did not respond to inquiries for this article.

This appears to refer to remarks Warnock made in a sermon on March 8, 2015, when he was pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He gave the sermon about seven months after police shot and killed an unarmed Black man, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, an event that led to widespread local protests, some of which turned violent.

Warnock’s sermon came days after the Justice Department declined to prosecute the officer who shot Brown. The department issued a report highly critical of how officials ran the local police and government, including an elaborate system of fines and penalties that disproportionately affected low-income Black residents. […]

This enforcement of spiraling penalties on poor and mostly Black residents prompted Warnock’s “thug” comments, as he equated the baton beatings on the Pettus bridge with the lower-profile but grinding injustices of Ferguson.

“And as they gathered in Selma — or was it Ferguson?” Warnock said at one point. “They were met with overwhelming brute force. The truth of the matter is, the road to Ferguson goes through Selma, 50 years later.”

We found no evidence that Warnock has sought to cut police funding.

The way Walker phrased his ad is also misleading. It gives the impression that Warnock cut police funding right after calling police “thugs.”

We can’t have disinformation like this floating around. This could cost Warnock votes and needlessly so.

This is how it started with Dr. Fauci. Right-wing media made him into a ghoul. He has, according to the Breitbarts and Epoch Times of the world, made “billions” off of COVID-19, murdered pooches after blinding them first, you name it.

Right-wing media outlets are nothing to ignore. They are organs of misinformation and disinformation and they have cost this country plenty already, due to the falsehoods that they’ve spread. As Hitler’s aides said, “Tell a lie a thousand times and it becomes the truth.” At least it becomes indistinguishable from truth.

I hope Raphael Warnock gets on top of this and I hope that the Democrats stay on top of this, generally speaking, as we go into the last few weeks until Election Day 2022.