Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker films an ad campaign that highlights racial injustices.
On Tuesday, the 37-year-old politician released the controversial 1-minute and 30 seconds ad. The video opens up with a shot of a noose hanging on a tree. The scene then leads to Booker reflecting on the history of lynching.
“The pain of our past persists to this day,” Booker says. “In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool of terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom. It was used to kill my ancestors.”
The ad transitions to Booker with a noose around his neck. The politician spoke on the historic nomination and took shots at his GOP opponent, Sen. Rand Paul. Booker. Booker pointed out Paul’s controversial remarks about the Civil Rights Act, his comparison of health care to “slavery,” and his disapproval of an early version of the anti-lynching bill.
“My opponent?” Booker continues. “The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who single-handedly blocked an anti-lynching act from being federal law.”
He continued, “The choice couldn’t be clearer. Do we move forward together, or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?”
Paul’s team later responded to Booker’s ad, saying he initially opposed the anti-lynching bill because he believed it was too broad.
“Dr. Paul worked diligently to strengthen the language of this legislation and is a cosponsor of the bill that now ensures that federal law will define lynching as the absolutely heinous crime that it is. Any attempt to state otherwise is a desperate misrepresentation of the facts,” Paul’s office wrote in a statement.
