A new political ad started running this week on Fox News, and it is so race-baiting that it will make ethical viewers long for the more innocent time when Willie Horton’s mug shot brought controversy.
The ad features a woman in a dark room telling the viewer she can’t show her face because her skin is white. She’s presented in lighting that obscures her face, as if she were a mob witness having their identity protected. She’s ostensibly hiding from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Sunny Hostin, three of the most photographed women of color in American politics, clips of whom open the spot.
The thirty-second political ad is unironically called “Full of Hate.” It has run at least five times on Fox News this week, once in a commercial break during Special Report. Watch it below:
The three clips of AOC, Omar, and Hostin's opening lines are real, but, SHOCKER, all three clips are edited in a completely misleading way.
Ilhan Omar did say a line about “fearing white men,” but as the opening sentence of an answer she gave in 2018 about the hypocrisy of profiling Muslims. This is the same sentence that went viral in 2019, and fact-checkers took apart. Similarly, the clip of Ocasio-Cortez talking about “white supremacy” cuts off just before she adds it has nothing to do with the hate in any individual’s heart. Hostin’s line comes from a 2024 event where she said people deserve equal treatment regardless of color, according to Fox News’s own report.
This irresponsibly racialized political ad accuses liberals of being obsessed with skin color. Yet it features a montage organized entirely by skin color.
The disembodied voice-over, ostensibly representing the white woman hiding her identity, says, “Today’s liberals are full of hate. They hate America. They’re obsessed with skin color. I can’t even show my face because my skin is white and they’ll spew hate at me. Hate leads them to racism. Liberals are the new racists.”
Here’s what the ad is actually saying. Three women who are Black, Somali-born, and Puerto Rican talk about race, which the ad takes out of context and calls it hate. A white woman says nothing about race except that hers is under attack, which the ad suggests is courage.
Three nonwhite women are discussing racism and, as a result, are clearly depicted as racists. A white woman appears, her identity hidden because she’s afraid, and is presented as the victim. The only thing separating the two groups on screen is the color of their skin. The ad’s producers literally segregated the ad.
The benchmark for this sort of nakedly race-baiting campaign ad is the Bush campaign ad featuring the aforementioned Willie Horton. That comparison flatters this new ad. Horton was a real man who committed a real crime on a real furlough, and there was a real candidate who had to answer for the program. The racial message was in the mugshot, and the people who made it could deny it with a straight face.
This “Full of Hate” ad throws the abstraction out. It fails to explain what actually happened to this woman that led to her anonymized fear. It doesn’t explain any threat, incident, or crime she suffered. It only shows the misleading edits of comments from women of color that preceded her. White fear is the product, and the ad sells it straight, uncut, and with zero shame.
America Next, the ad’s sponsor, is a nonprofit operated by Bobby Jindal that doesn’t disclose its donors. On Sept. 29, it paid $250,000 to Breakthrough LLC, a consulting firm that shares its Baton Rouge office suite, for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against Abdul El-Sayed. Breakthrough belongs to Timmy Teepell, Jindal’s former chief of staff.
If the Teepell name is familiar, it’s because his son Tommy Teepell is the young man who stood up at a Michigan town hall and demanded El-Sayed answer for the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s the clip a CBS News correspondent cheered before she deleted the post and apologized. Did Tommy get paid for his backfired ambush? We don’t know, and nobody has proven that was connected to this ad. But the group that put a frightened white woman on television is spending a quarter million dollars to frighten Michiganders about a Muslim candidate.
The Willie Horton ad named a candidate it supported. “Full of Hate” doesn’t name anyone, so no campaign has to answer for it. Its “star” has no face, so nobody can ask her what happened. Its funders have no names, because our current campaign laws say they don’t have to provide any. Vivek Ramaswamy is getting buried this week for a disgusting ad with his name on it. The people behind this one can hide their names in shame.
Is the woman featured in the ad real? Or is she just an actress reading a script about a threat that never came? And does Fox News’s ad department have any standard for a spot built on a clip its own newsroom debunked? Until somebody answers, she’s the most honest thing in the ad.
She’s exactly as real as the danger she claims to fear.e on nothing but the disclaimer.