WaPo reports:
"Well hello there,” the call begins as the sounds of drums and monkeys can be heard in the background, according to the New York Times. “I is Andrew Gillum."
"We Negroes . . . done made mud huts while white folk waste a bunch of time making their home out of wood an stone."
The speaker goes on to say he'll pass a law letting African Americans evade arrest “if the Negro know fo' sho he didn't do nothin'."
It is unclear how many people heard the call.
WaPo is amplifying the call, and it seems likely that everyone who might vote in Florida will at least read the text of the call. I've long been skeptical of exaggerated racist incidents — like
the recent case of the man that urinated on a little girl and called her the N-word. I didn't blog that when it came out, because I didn't want to amplify a lie, which is what it turned out to be.
A spokesman for the GOP candidate for governor (Ron DeSantis) said: "This is absolutely appalling and disgusting — and hopefully whoever is behind this has to answer for this despicable action. Our campaign has and will continue to focus solely on the issues that Floridians care about and uniting our state as we continue to build on our success."
The robocall seems designed to keep alive the accusation that DeSantis displayed racism when he said "The last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That is not going to work. That’s not going to be good for Florida."
The word "monkey" — even used as a verb — was portrayed as intentionally stimulating racial feelings against the black candidate Gillum. The new robo call "begins as the sounds of... monkeys can be heard in the background."
It was Gillum supporters who made the "monkey this up" quote go viral, so I assume they think that accusations that the other candidate is racist helps Gillum's cause, and the new robocall leans in the same direction. But maybe you think DeSantis has more to gain from that robocall, because people really are racist and will be moved to vote against Gillum. I think it's more likely that the racist interpretation of "monkey up" and the follow-on robocall will edge people toward showing that they are
not racist, which they can do by voting for Gillum. I don't have a way to know the mind of the Florida voter, but I suspect that the words after "monkey this up" — "by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state"— are what have the most power to move the voters, and the racism charges are a wonderful distraction.
So who made the robocall?
A disclaimer at the end of the robo-call says it was produced by the Road to Power, a white supremacist and anti-Semitic group based in Idaho. The Southern Poverty Law Center has noted a recent rise in robo-calls across the country, describing them as a “new, high-tech, computer-delivered brand of hate,” according to the Times.
The Road to Power is also the group behind the most unsubtle attempt to turn the killing of Mollie Tibbetts in Iowa into anti-immigration policy and a 2018 campaign talking point....
According to the Des Moines Register, the man producing the robo-calls is named Scott Rhodes, of Sandpoint, Idaho. He has been linked to similar campaigns in California, Alexandria, Va., and Charlottesville. Rhodes could not immediately be reached for comment.
If you were making a false-flag robocall, it would be clever to end it with the assertion that it was produced by the Road to Power. I don't know why the Washington Post calls that a "disclaimer." It's a claimer, not a disclaimer, but I don't know if it's true. At least WaPo tried to reach Rhodes, but if you asked him if he made these robocalls, what would he say, and how would you know if he was lying?
You know, there's a lot of fakery out there, a lot of chaos-making and trollery. We need to handle it well, and yet what's happening — instead of us all learning good skepticism — is seizing upon whatever pops out and leveraging it for your own political cause. That is, roiling emotion and adding to the confusion.
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