Heng's anti-AOC ad wrong six ways from Sunday, and more

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has enjoyed a great deal of positive notoriety in and out of the  media because she is “telegenic,” articulate, forceful in her opinions, and prone to publicity gimmicks like her unsuccessful Michael Moore-like search for the “MIA” Sen. Mitch McConnell, in which a few cameramen tagged along to record the event. But courting notoriety has come with a cost, such as becoming open season for Donald Trump and assorted political opponents and—since she is Hispanic—racists, most of whom naturally claim they are not. 

In the midst of the televised Democratic debate last Thursday, in select areas where the conservative Sinclair Broadcast owns the local ABC affiliates, a Republican ad was run that featured the image of Ocasio-Cortez being set afire to reveal scenes of horror from the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, including an image of skulls of unburied dead—something which seems to be an Asian “thing,” dating back at least to Tamerlane’s reported habit of exhibiting mounds of skulls to frighten the enemy into submission. The most “famous’ image of skulls were those placed in a memorial in the village of Ba Chúc, where 3,000 Vietnamese civilians were massacred by Cambodian soldiers in 1978.

Elizabeth Heng, the daughter of a Cambodian immigrant, was behind the ad. It seems that she needs to “bone-up” on her history; there is certainly a difference between European-style “socialism,” which most Western European countries adhere to in one form or another (the UK, like the rest of Europe, has a national health care system, rather than a mostly privatized for-profit one like the U.S.), and the Asian form. The Khmer Rouge governing “philosophy” was based partly on anti-Vietnam nationalism and on a particularly mindless form of social “cleansing”—intellectuals and urban dwellers in particular were targeted for exile or death by a regime that favored "rule" by rural people (kind of like most of Trump’s voters). To test the level of hypocrisy of those who supported Heng’s ad (on one YouTube posting, it appears that 90 percent of 55,000 respondents were insanely gaga in favor of it), both the Reagan and Bush administrations supported Pol Pot’s regime in exile after the Vietnamese invasion drove them out, because it was viewed as opposed to the Soviet Union’s “orbit”—and thus a “friend”  in the fight against "communism." Or is that "socialism"?

Let’s be a little sensible here: Heng’s ad was particularly despicable in the wake of the El Paso shooting, done by a white man whose goal was to kill as many Hispanics as he could before giving himself up to police like a coward so that he could brag about his killing. Ocasio-Cortez pointed out "Know that this wasn’t an ad for young conservatives of color — that was the pretense. What you just watched was a love letter to the GOP’s white supremacist case." Heng responded with “indignity” that she wasn’t a “racist.” How could she be a “racist” if she is Asian? Easy; Asians come to this country from homogenous societies that actively discriminate not just against people from other races, but against other Asian “ethnicities.” Hell, Koreans and Filipinos are “recruited” by the Japanese to do their “dirty” work, yet not only are they denied rights that are enjoyed by Japanese citizens, but they are banned from seeking Japanese citizenship. As for China, it was reported that many Chinese were “shocked” when Barack Obama was elected president because they thought blacks only did janitorial work in this country. Yes, it is possible for some Asians to be racist. Even Asian women like Heng.

NumbersUSA was also allowed to run an ad during the debate. That anti-immigrant organization has a lousy way with “numbers,” beginning with the fact that China seems to be doing well despite the fact that it has four times the population of the U.S. within the same land area—thus the U.S. isn’t exactly “full,” and it is population growth that expands the economy, and the majority of jobs that need to be filled are not “tech.” Obviously, despite the group’s denials, it is all about race. NumbersUSA has been linked to white supremacist John Tanton, who has had his dirty fingers dipped in every anti-immigrant outfit, including being the founder of the Center for Immigration Studies, currently headed by some racist nut-job named Mark Krikorian who is Trump-like in his resort to hate rhetoric that is a famine of fact. While the CIS sounds “legitimate” and has been treated as such by many Republican lawmakers (including Jeff Sessions) as well as the usual Fox News suspects, the SPL Center has it on its list of anti-immigrant hate groups, and whose “studies” concerning economic impacts and crime have been described by actually legitimate think tanks like the Cato Institute as engaging in deliberate mangling and fictionalizing to conform to preconceived conclusions. White nationalist fear is of course much in evidence, as in this claim by the group:

You don’t know how long it will be here before the political activists get engaged in [the Mexican] community and foment something that will look like the civil rights movement for African Americans, but I can promise you it will be a lot bloodier.

Reading this makes more clear the nature of the racial paranoia behind Heng’s ad.  I suspect that this is what many on the right and most Trump supporters are really “afraid” of: Hispanics as a group have been a “sleeping giant” that has been beaten on like a dog that hasn’t bitten back yet. I frankly don’t see that happening, since the only Hispanics who seem willing to take on “the man” are those for whom the prevailing stereotypes do not fit, yet they are daily confronted with the hypocrisy of ignorant bigots (and they don’t have to be just white), or those who are in positions where it is difficult not to take personally the ignorant claims made by non-Hispanics (whether as politicians or in the media). But they are a minority of a minority, and as yet as a whole, Hispanics seem to think that keeping a low profile will keep them “safe”—the fallacy of which was made plain by the El Paso shooting, in which none of the white or black shoppers who had been allowed to escape unharmed by the shooter attempted to stop him. 

I suppose if you want to play “devil’s advocate” it is a legitimate question whether local affiliates who ran the ads during the times they did, did so to “fire-up” the Democratic voters who were most likely the ones watching, to the doings of the Republicans. But that doesn’t excuse ABC or Disney from approving either ad; the Heng ad was a particular outrage that is both racist and false every day  including Sunday. Ocasio-Cortez advocates for a country that survives its own worst impulses, whether socially, economically and environmentally. Heng’s own response to her smacks of the same racial, social and economic “entitlement” and “privilege” that any white racist holds dear.