On Friday night, CNN reported the story of Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.)’s medical school yearbook photo featuring him either in blackface or a Ku Klux Klan hood. While airing his apology video, however, the network labeled Northam a Republican.
In the video, Anderson Cooper rightly identifies the governor as a Democrat, but beneath the governor’s image, CNN ran the chyron: “Ralph Northam (R) Virginia.”
Not only was this false, but the mistake is insulting to Virginia Republicans who remember the 2017 election in which Northam won the governorship. During that election, the Democrat distributed flyers branding his Republican opponent, Ed Gillespie, a white nationalist, comparing him to the protesters in Charlottesville earlier that year.
While Gillespie had defended keeping Confederate statues (a position that does not make you a racist, by the way), he had immediately denounced the Charlottesville white nationalists in no uncertain terms.
Remember this? Ralph Northam won after tarring Ed Gillespie as a racist. https://t.co/Y9CrnW78Cg
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) February 2, 2019
Later in the campaign, a group called the Latino Victory Project ran a disgusting ad depicting Gillespie as a genocidal racist, intent on running down minority children in a pick-up truck. Northam said his campaign would never run such an ad, but he refused to condemn it and reported it as an “in-kind” contribution to his campaign.
Terry McAuliffe, then the Virginia governor and also a Democrat, accused Gillespie of running the most racist campaign in Virginia history — worse than the secessionists who defended slavery and started the Civil War, worse than the segregationists, and worse even than the opponents of interracial marriage.
CNN may have just made a mistake, but the KKK blackface photo is a major scandal for Democrats in Virginia and painting Northam as a Republican seems a heinous form of damage control for a network that consistently slants Left.
Read more about the Democrats’ disgusting 2017 tactics in this thread.
Thread: This Ralph Northam photo makes my blood boil because one of the reasons Northam beat @EdWGillespie in 2017 was his strategy of tarring Gillespie as a racist connected with Charlottesville. /1https://t.co/1VzFZYpTyV
— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) February 1, 2019
Follow the author of this article on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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