It’s a tale as old as time…or at least as old as the 2012 election. A wealthy heir runs for office, gets caught making condescending comments about class, said condescending comments are cut into television ads and presto, you’ve got a campaign in crisis.
As reported by Politico: In this go round we’re talking about Stewart Mills, Republican Nominee for Congress in Minnesota-8 who is also a wealthy heir to a chain of successful general stores.
At an event last summer, Mills complained about attacks on the wealthy in 2012 for not paying their fair share of taxes, saying: “What happened in the last round elections, where you had folks saying that ‘the wealthy, the wealthy are not paying their fair share…To be singled out as a deadbeat is personally offensive.”
I’m sure we all feel sorry that you had your feelings hurt Stewart. A couple of groups allied with his opponents did their thing grabbed the sound, cut it into an ad and then… TV stations refused to air it.
Wait…what?
Yeah. In our democracy, 2 TV stations run by Stanley Hubbard who just happens to be a major financial backer of Stewart Mills and the RNC and who hangs out with the Kochs at their political donor summits. He decided that these particular ads were not fit to air saying in part: “We think it just crossed the line of how it tells its story or the message it’s trying to get across.”
I watched the video of Stewart Mills making his comments in its entirety online. The clip used in the campaign ad is definitely edited for time and cut together but wholly representative of the point that Mills was making.
There’s something deeper here though. The supreme court just paved the way to strike down laws banning lying in campaign ads over actually pretty legit first amendment concerns that the government shouldn’t act as a ministry of truth deciding which ads are acceptable.
So the *government* can’t police campaign ads but apparently, it’s ok for this one guy who is a clear partisan political activist to act as his own personal Ministry of Truth when ads don’t looks so good for one of his candidates. Hashtag Democracy. I guess it’s not enough to rig the rules in Washington, they’ve also got to rig the information that the public is exposed to. And *I* find *that* personally offensive.