A new ad depicts supporters for Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie as racist murderers who hunt schoolchildren from a pickup truck.
The ad starts out with two children walking home from school. One is an African-American boy, the other is a girl wearing a hijab. A Latino-looking boy runs down the street. He’s being chased by a Confederate flag-flying pickup truck that bears an Ed Gillepsie bumper sticker and a Gadsden flag-themed license plate cover (“Don’t tread on me”).
The boy catches up to another boy playing basketball, who also appears to be of Hispanic background, and tells him to run. They catch up to the two children shown in the beginning of the ad and the group runs away from the truck that’s bearing down on them. The camera zooms in to the sticker with the Republican candidate’s name. All four children run through an alley and get to a chain-link fence. They’re cornered with nowhere else to run. They look back at the truck terrified as the headlights illuminate their faces.
The little boy suddenly jerks awake — it’s all a dream.
“Is this what Donald Trump and Ed Gillespie mean by the American dream?” a narrator asks while two parents watch news coverage of white nationalists carrying tiki-torches and marching in opposition to the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The video was paid for by Latino Victory Project, a leftist political action committee, which encouraged its Twitter followers to vote for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam in a tweet.
The message the ad sends is simple: people who vote for Republicans are white nationalist types likely to go on murderous hunting sprees.