In a ridiculous new campaign ad released this week, Jerone Davison, a Black Republican in Arizona who’s running for Congress, scares off what he calls Ku Klux Klan Democrats by brandishing an assault-style rifle.
Anybody arguing that today’s Klan and today’s Democrats are simpatico doesn’t have good walking-around sense.
A Black man claiming he needs an AR-15 to keep a dozen Ku Klux Dems from invading his home may believe he’s being clever, but really, he’s just making an argument for putting would-be gun owners through a battery of cognitive tests. Because anybody arguing that today’s Klan and today’s Democrats are simpatico doesn’t have good walking-around sense, to say nothing of good walking-around-with-a-gun sense.
But Davison must know that nonsense is more likely to make him attractive to the voters he wants to send him to the House, especially the kind of nonsense that implies that Black people are fools to vote blue.
“Democrats like to say that no one needs an AR-15 for self-defense, that no one could possibly need all 30 rounds,” we hear a voice say as Davison stands in his window with an AR-15-style rifle watching a whole klavern of Klansmen approach with a barbed bat and, for some reason, an assortment of garden tools. “But when this rifle is the only thing standing between your family and a dozen angry Democrats in Klan hoods, you just might need that semi-automatic. And all 30 rounds.”
Make Rifles Great Again 💪🏿
— Jerone Davison for Congress #AZCD4 (@Jerone4Congress) July 6, 2022
👉https://t.co/J7lHnodhku#JeroneForCongress#2A #SelfDefense pic.twitter.com/Gs6iAHVVAP
Before we get to the main point, let’s pause to point out the ad’s assumption that a dozen Klansmen looking to invade this Black man’s home would themselves eschew AR-15s in favor of garden rakes and hatchets. In what part of Arizona would a homeowner have 30 rounds and a dozen Klansmen not have 360?
But that’s the reality that the GOP’s gun fetishists consistently ignore as they promote a political philosophy based on old Westerns: There’s nothing about being a so-called good guy with a gun that provides an advantage over a bad guy with the same.
On one level, Davison’s false charge against Democrats is as flippant and reflexively dishonest as the claims that the Jan. 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol was carried out not by Trump loyalists but by those opposed to Donald Trump. It doubles as an iteration of an older Republican argument: Because the Emancipation Proclamation, the preservation of the Union and a constitutional amendment ending slavery were Republican victories, Black people are fools to vote for anybody but Republicans — but especially foolish to vote for Democrats, given that many were on the wrong side of the war, made up the bulk of the opposition to emancipation and, yes, included people who belonged to the Ku Klux Klan.
If there’s a politician caught up in some kind of, er, klandal, safe money is on its being a Republican. Had Republicans remained devoted to championing Black causes over Democrats’ objections, then puzzlement over Black people’s voting habits would be warranted. But to repeat a point previously made in this space, white Americans began their great migration out of the Democratic Party when it embraced civil rights, voting rights and anti-poverty programs. No Democrat running for the White House has won the white vote since. At the same time, if there’s a politician caught up in some kind of, er, klandal, safe money is on it being a Republican. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., attended a white nationalist conference in Orlando, Florida, and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., with whom Davison would represent Arizona if he’s elected, sent a recorded greeting to the same conference. Years ago, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, now the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House, accepted an invitation from David Duke’s campaign manager and political adviser to address a meeting of the European American Rights Organization, or EURO. As for Duke, who founded the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan decades before he founded EURO, he says he’s a Republican, and he has run for office as such, greatly embarrassing Louisiana’s Republican Party leadership. (Duke’s political history is also emblematic of the political shift mentioned above, in that he first ran for office (in 1979) as a conservative Democrat.) Then there’s Trump. When a coalition of white supremacist groups followed the Ku Klux Klan to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Trump declared that there were good people among them even after a woman protesting their evil presence was run over and killed. If Trump had thought the Klan was made up of Democrats, he’d have said so. Davison’s ad is a reminder that Republicans rarely try to attract Black voters to the party; they try to shame and insult them into it. How could you possibly vote for a party that fought for slavery, they ask? As if Black people would be better off choosing the party that’s looking to finish off the Voting Rights Act. It’s past time that Republican candidates stop insulting Black people’s intelligence and acting as if we can’t separate the past from the present. Arguing that every Ku Klux Klan member is a Democrat because of what happened in the past makes about as much sense as arguing that Davison’s peering out of a window with a rifle pointed upward makes him Malcolm X.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
