As if Dodger fans didn’t have enough to piss them off during Saturday’s playoff game against the San Diego Padres, the show aired an openly racist commercial accusing President Biden and other Democrats of illegal immigration.
The ad, which aired during the break in the middle of the fourth inning of the game that eliminated the Dodgers from the postseason, consisted of video images showing a stream of apparently Hispanic immigrants pouring across the border.
“This massive tide of illegal immigration is draining your paychecks, wrecking your schools, ruining your hospitals, threatening your families,” the overwrought narrator explained over the obligatory ominous soundtrack. “Drug dealers, sex traffickers and violent predators mingle with the crowds.”
Vote to keep our borders, prisons and toilets open. Vote progressively
– Sarcastic billboard sponsored by right-wing Citizens for Sanity
Who is behind this commercial? The ad only identifies its sponsor as “Citizens for Sanity,” but the last line should give you another clue: It’s an organization made up of several former Trump aides who spearheaded his administration’s attacks on immigrants.
The ad’s characterization of immigrants as criminals mirrors almost exactly what Trump said about Mexican immigrants during his 2015 presidential campaign announcement: “They bring drugs. They bring crime. They are rapists.”
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Citizens for Sanity leaders are affiliated with the America First Legal Foundation, established by Stephen Miller, its President.
Miller was notoriously an architect of Trump’s cruel and crude family separation policy for immigrants, his Muslim ban, and his discontinuation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which provided a route to citizenship for immigrants they brought to the United States when they were minors Parents.
An entire page on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, is dedicated to Miller.
The immigration ad isn’t the only Citizens for Sanity product this election cycle. Another video accuses “woke” politicians — notably Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Vice President Kamala Harris — of fueling a spate of urban violent crime, illustrated by a sequence of will random videos of shootings, shoplifting and street robberies.
Another video attacks transgender athletes with the slogan, “Tell Biden and his radical allies: No men in girls’ sports.”
The group has also put up billboards nationwide, including in California, with sarcastic, infantile glosses on Democrat politics: “Vote to keep our borders, jails and restrooms open. voice progressive”; “Claim NOW for Pansexual Transport Fund”; “Too much freedom is bad. Get your IRS audit today.” Etc.
The connections between Miller, the America First Legal Foundation and Citizens for Sanity were laid out by the nonprofit group Open Secrets, which tracks money in politics. A public document cited by OpenSecrets identifies Citizens for Sanity’s top executives as Gene Hamilton, Ian Prior and John Zadrozny.
Prior told OpenSecrets that his group has “no relationship with America First Legal Foundation.”
Is that so? Prior describes itself on its own LinkedIn page as “Senior Advisor for America First Legal.” Hamilton is Vice President and General Counsel of America First Legal. Zadrozny is identified on America First Legal’s website as the Deputy Director of Investigations.
All three have impeccable credentials as former Trump aides.
Prior was a spokesman for the Justice Department during the Trump administration. While working in the Trump administration, Hamilton wrote the memo that officially ended DACA, according to a statement he made and was quoted by the New Yorker. According to emails released by the progressive organization Democracy Forward, Zadrozny worked under Trump at the State Department and the White House.
Citizens for Sanity did not respond to my request for comment.
Which brings us back to the playoff commercial. It’s not clear how widely the commercial aired, but it’s not just a California phenomenon — Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer captured this and the urban violence commercial during playoff broadcasts in the Phillies. Fox Sports didn’t respond to my questions about the commercial schedule or whether the ad was reviewed by a standard department at Fox.
Citizens for Sanity has said it will be spending at least six figures to get its messages out.
If so, be prepared for a flood of misleading and dishonest ads. The immigration commercial, for example, makes much of an immigrant’s arrest in connection with the rape of a 3-year-old child.
The ad asks, “Who is Joe Biden letting into our country?” However, the image associated with this point relates to the case of Christopher Puente, which occurred in 2020.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Puente was deported under the Obama administration in 2014 but managed to re-enter the country using forged papers. At the time of the alleged sexual assault, he was at large, having been arrested by the Chicago Police Department and then released despite a request from ICE to arrest him, according to the agency.
There are several blame candidates in this episode, but Biden is not one of them.
Where the money for the advertising campaign actually comes from, good luck finding out. Citizens for Sanity is a “dark money” group, which means they are not required to disclose their donors. Had the commercial targeted a local political campaign or a California ballot initiative, its major funders would have to be named on the show. But it’s a national ad, so its supporters are anonymous.
Of course, the demonization of outsiders for political gain is nothing new. When writer and socialist Upton Sinclair ran on a left-wing platform for governor of California in 1934, film studios contributed to the campaign against him by producing newsreels showing vagrants and vagrants streaming across the state line to get off the to benefit from generous pensions that Sinclair proposed to resident seniors; In this case, the images were footage from films then in production.
And who can forget the Willie Horton affair, when George HW Bush’s campaign aired a commercial aimed at blaming Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent, for the rape and murder committed by a black criminal who was released from prison over a weekend.
This ad had the same great Guignol elements as the Citizens for Sanity ad – mostly racism and fear of crime – but it seems almost an understatement today compared to the turbocharged bigotry that’s on your TV screens today. Can anyone look at this product and say that American politics is in a sane state?
