Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie showed up to a state NAACP conference this past weekend but conveniently forgot to bring his racist campaign with him. Since Gillespie put down the racist dog whistle to pick up the racist bullhorn, he’s gone from Willie Horton-style, anti-immigrant ads to hitting his Democratic opponent Ralph Northam “for Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s work to automatically restore voting rights to those with felony convictions after they've served their time.” Gillespie’s been pretty vocal in “his inexorable slide toward the Donald Trump/Corey Stewart style of GOP politics” by releasing more offensive content than you can count on one hand, but you wouldn’t know that considering the Gillespie who showed up to speak to the NAACP event:
Gillespie spoke and answered questions for 25 minutes, but in that time he never once mentioned the gang MS-13, the subject of an ad campaign that has been running seemingly on loop in Virginia for two months. In the ads and accompanying mailers, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic nominee, is accused (falsely) of backing sanctuary cities, and therefore, of enabling violent crimes by scary Latino gang members. One representative ad featured a group of tattooed Salvadorans over the text “Kill. Rape. Control.” Perhaps giving away the game, the Central American men featured in that anti-MS-13 spot were not members of MS-13, and the photo came from a prison in El Salvador. Virginia’s big, but it’s not that big.
Likewise, Gillespie avoided any discussion of restoration of felon voting rights at an organization that has been one of the leading champions voices on the issue. He’s not so quiet elsewhere. In a new spot last week, Gillespie attacked Northam over the re-enfranchisement of 150,000 ex-felons, tying the lieutenant governor to the case of a child pornographer. “Ralph Northam’s policy of automatic restoration of rights for unrepentant, unreformed, violent criminals is wrong,” Gillespie says in the ad.
As part of his kinder, gentler pitch, Gillespie told his audience Saturday that “it is a legitimate concern to have a criminal charge or conviction dog you for the rest of your life” (in response to a question about marijuana sentencing), but again he steered clear of his campaign’s new talking point.
Regarding the neo-Nazi and white supremacists who gathered for a rally in Charlottesville that eventually that led to the murder of Heather Heyer this past summer, Gillespie said that “they were in Virginia … but they were not of Virginia. I can tell you that what I saw there made me want to vomit.” But as Mother Jones notes, white supremacists were in Virginia because they want confederate monuments to stay and Gillespie’s latest ads are now defending those monuments: “In Gillespie’s newest digital ad about the statues—the second this month—a narrator refers to the monuments as “our” statues, the same word used by Trump. Although he was speaking just a few miles away from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, the epicenter of the statue fight, the subject didn’t come up.” How convenient.
Fight back against the Virginia GOP’s racist campaign tactics by donating $3 to elect Ralph Northam and other Democrats on Nov. 7!