Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who’s in a close race for New York governor, has a campaign ad claiming to show “actual violent crimes caught on camera in Kathy Hochul’s New York,” including police shooting a black man named Saheed Vassell.
But Vassell committed no crime. He was a mentally ill man holding a pipe. Police thought it was a gun, ordered him to drop it, then killed him. The incident occurred in 2018; Hocul wasn’t governor until August 2021. (See story here.)
The ad is racist, because it stereotypes black men as criminals; it falsely represents the Vassell incident as a “violent crime”; and falsely implies the incident happened on Gov. Hochul’s watch, when in fact it occurred years before she became governor.
This isn’t the first time a Republican campaign has played fast and loose with facts. For example, in 2016 a Trump TV ad purporting to show illegals crossing the southern U.S. border used footage from Morocco (see story here).
Voters should hold candidates for governor or president to a high standard of truthfulness. A false campaign ad indicates the candidate isn’t trustworthy. But as most people should know by know, Republicans don’t care about truth. I don’t think voters should reward that attitude by electing them.