Kentucky’s latest Democratic Senate candidate to challenge Senator Rand Paul, Charles Booker, released a campaign video Wednesday which features him wearing a noose.
The video was an apparent attempt to highlight Senator Paul’s opposition to a 2020 bill that would have made lynching a federal hate crime. It appears that Booker wants to utilize racially charged imagery to illicit a response during the 2022 midterms.
The video starts with a graphic warning and opens with a shot of a noose hanging from a tree.
“The pain of our past persists to this day,” Booker says in the opening lines. “In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool for terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom.”
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“It was used to kill my ancestors,” Booker says with a noose around his neck. “Now, in an historic victory for our commonwealth, I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.”
“My opponent?” the candidate continues, “The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed The Civil Rights Act. The person who single-handedly blocked an anti-lynching act from being federal law.”
Booker’s criticism of Paul follows events in 2020, when Paul held up a bill to make lynching a federal crime, saying he wanted to see more discussion to “make the language the best that we can get it.”
It appears racism may well be the center piece of the ongoing election cycle for this Senate seat in Kentucky.