“Liberals are the new racists,” according to an unintentionally comical political ad that aired during the World Series this week.

The ad plays out of context clips of three women of color (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Rep. Ilhan Omar D-Minn.; and “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin) speaking about race, cut together with a horror movie aesthetic. Then comes the ad’s real message: “Today’s liberals are full of hate. They hate America. They’re obsessed with skin color,” says an unnamed female narrator obscured by shadow. “I can’t even show my face, because my skin is white and they’ll spew hate at me,” she laments.

Days before the midterm elections that will serve as a referendum on the job performance of America’s most abjectly racist president in a century, I couldn’t help but wonder who ponied up the reported $550,000 it costs to air a 30-second spot during this year’s Fall Classic.

If “liberals are the new racists,” according to America Next, who are the old racists? Maybe it’s the people at the highest positions of power and influence in the Grand Old Party and the MAGA movement?

New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger posted to X that the ad was paid for by America Next, a PAC created by former Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. According to its website, America Next is “not focused on elections” but rather “winning the war of ideas.” Bensinger also cited Federal Elections Commission data showing America Next paid $250,000 to a firm called Breakthrough LLC for the specific purpose of “opposition” to the Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed. The Guardian reported that Breakthrough was founded by former Jindal aide Timmy Teepell, whose son Tommy went viral after asking El-Sayed if he’d denounce the Muslim Brotherhood at a campaign event earlier in October. (Neither of the Teepells, nor America Next responded to The Guardian’s request for comment.)

It’s particularly ironic for Jindal, the son of immigrants from India, to bankroll an ad accusing the left of being “racist” and “obsessed with skin color.” It has, after all, only been a month since MAGA’s recent heated debate over whether Indian Americans can ever be “real Americans,” which was sparked by a Republican candidate’s outrage at a photo of nonwhite University of Texas football fans.

And the irony is further enhanced by the fact that among the defining features of the second Trump administration — which also include unprecedented levels of corruption, illegal foreign incursions and killings without due process, repeated violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and a vast censorship industrial complex — is the complete normalization of the kind of gutter racism that, prior to President Donald Trump’s political rise, had been pushed toward the fringes of society.

On Wednesday, the Trump War Room X account (the Trump White House’s more overtly political account) quote-posted an official White House account post warning, “The chaos, looting, and destruction we’re watching [in France] is exactly the future radical Democrats are pushing for America.” To drive home its point, the War Room account posted a photo of Trump with the caption, “Which way Western Man?”

For the uninitiated, “Which Way, Western Man?” is the title of a book published in 1978 that has become a foundational text for the neo-Nazi movement. It praises Adolf Hitler, advocates for violence against Jews and Blacks; quotes liberally from the antisemitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion;” and likens birth control to “the knife by which [the] civilized White man is cutting his own throat.” (That line, in particular, is evocative of a post Charlie Kirk wrote the day before his assassination: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”)

It must be said that this is hardly the first time the Trump administration has embraced Nazi sloganeering in its political outreach. The Department of Homeland Security has already put many “Which way Western Man” posts on the internet. It even used the white supremacist marching song “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again” on its social media accounts back in January.

But if “liberals are the new racists,” according to America Next, who are the old racists? Maybe it’s the people at the highest positions of power and influence in the Grand Old Party and the MAGA movement?

For the uninitiated, “Which Way, Western Man?” is the title of a book published in 1978 that has become a foundational text for the neo-Nazi movement. It praises Adolf Hitler, advocates for violence against Jews and Blacks and quotes liberally from the antisemitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

At a GOP get-out-the-vote rally in Michigan on Monday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — noted anti-vax maniac and serial fabulist — went on a fact-bereft and racist rant seemingly directed at El-Sayed, saying, “There are five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science … They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Medal. They don’t win the Wolf Prize.”

Two days later the Libs of TikTok X account — which is so influential on the White House that Reuters noted its “symbiosis” with the administration has “has triggered harassment and threats” — posted a photo of four Black high school students with the caption: “St. Cloud Area Schools in MN announces students chosen for an award. What do you notice?” As vile as it is for Libs of TikTok to draw children into its culture war obsessions, the obvious implication is that the Black students are undeserving. There’s a word for that.

And, of course, Trump in recent weeks has filled his campaign rallies with rank racism. Whether it’s repeatedly calling Somalis “low IQ” or referring to El-Sayed as “Abduladadalalalala” or using an antisemitic slur to defend Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall — Trump is very comfortable in his own skin as an old-school bigot.

While trying to frame anyone but themselves as racist, Trump and his MAGA allies dig ever deeper into the swamps of prejudice, then laugh about it. On Thursday, the White House posted an image of a pumpkin with a sombrero carved into it, and a caption reading, “Spooky szn is here.”

It’s an obvious troll meant to signal that Mexicans are scary, with the added goofy internet meme lingo deployed to soften the delivery. But fear and hatred of the other is the message — and normalizing racism is the point.

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Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr issued a threat this week that adds a sinister new dimension to the Trump Censorship Industrial Complex.

Without citing specifics, Carr decried what he called “a significant surge in entirely Fake Polls and Suppression Polls designed to do nothing more than interfere with the regular functioning of the electoral process and alter the normal patterns of voter turnout and enthusiasm.”

“Broadcasters are advised to avoid engaging in News Distortions or running Broadcast Hoaxes by airing Polls that would violate their regulatory obligations,” Carr warned Wednesday.

It’s possible Carr was referring to news this week that an obscure group called Wedgewood Polls had propagated fraudulent polling data that, despite news outlets’ due diligence, made its way into polling aggregations at several outlets, including The New York Times and MS NOW. The problem of apparently malevolent actors fudging poll numbers before an election is not something to take lightly, but responsible news organizations have been transparent with their audiences, appending corrections, editor’s notes and updating their aggregations as needed. (The commission’s lone Democratic appointee, Anna Gomez, posted to X on Wednesday, “FCC rules on news distortion or hoaxes do not apply to a station that reports this data in good faith.”)

This would hardly be the first time Carr has used his office to threaten broadcasters from airing bad news about his boss.

But Carr’s track record as an anti-free-speech warrior for Trump makes it hard to see his comments as an earnest effort to prevent the distribution of incorrect information before an election. In nearly two years as FCC chair, Carr has demonstrated that he’s an unprincipled, hyperpartisan hack who cosplays as an advocate of free speech and limited government. Examples abound of him using his office to try to silence Trump critics and strong-arm risk-averse media corporations that prioritize nothing more than their bottom lines.

More likely, Carr is helping lay the groundwork for Trump to — once again — falsely claim fraud in the event of a GOP wipeout in the midterm elections, lest Trump’s historic unpopularity be blamed for Republicans losing control of one or both houses of Congress or any number of statehouses.

In March, as it became evident that Trump’s war on Iran was destined to become an unwinnable quagmire, Carr threatened broadcasters from airing “hoaxes and news distortions” in war coverage. Those words, in MAGA-speak, typically translate to “reports that accurately reflect the president’s incompetence.”

Carr also effectively censored Jimmy Kimmel after the September 2025 assassination of Charlie Kirk by jawboning ABC’s corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, into suspending the late-night comic, even boasting, “When we see stuff like this, look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” So egregious was this government gangsterism that no less a Trump lickspittle than Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, condemned it as “mafioso” behavior. When Carr wasn’t acting as the comedy police, he went after ABC’s daytime talk show “The View,” claiming the program violated the FCC’s antiquated “equal time” rules regarding political candidate interviews, despite the fact that talk shows had historically been considered exempt from that regulation.

Sadly, the FCC’s censorship campaign has been such a success that ABC’s lawyers claimed in court recently that the network’s news division has been tempering its election coverage to avoid further harassment by the Trump administration.

This spring, Carr himself bragged about how effective Trump’s authoritarian attacks on the free press have been: “Look at the results so far. PBS defunded. NPR defunded…[Stephen] Colbert is leaving. CBS is under new ownership. And soon enough, CNN is going to have new ownership as well.” (Skydance, the company controlled by the Trump-friendly billionaire trust fund baby David Ellison, now owns CBS and CNN.)

The FCC’s censorship campaign has been such a success that ABC’s lawyers claimed in court recently that the network’s news division has been tempering its election coverage to avoid further harassment by the Trump administration.

Thankfully for Carr, his efforts earned him a good-boy pat on the head from Trump at an Alaska campaign rally this month, when the president praised his FCC attack poodle as “the most-feared man in government.” If you were wondering, yes, it is bizarre that the head of the historically bipartisan FCC would be attending a partisan political rally. But then, Carr — who’s known for wearing a lapel pin in the shape of Trump’s head — broke decades of precedent when he told a Senate committee in December 2025 that the FCC is not an independent agency. References to “independent” have also been removed from the FCC’s website.

Twelve former FCC officials — who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations — issued a joint statement Wednesday condemning Carr’s “dangerous and unconstitutional” attempt to “censor and control the information available to Americans as they prepare to vote.” They added, “Make no mistake: this is a direct attack on free and fair elections, which is especially concerning in the days and weeks when Americans are heading to the polls.”

In an X post Wednesday, The Bulwark’s Will Saletan aptly summed up Carr’s pathology: “Stephen Miller might look the part, but Brendan Carr is actually Trump’s most dedicated authoritarian apparatchik. In a fascist regime, he would do anything the boss ordered.”

Trump’s recent claim that Carr is the “most feared” person in government is in keeping with the president’s flattery of thugs, and Carr no doubt appreciated the ego-stroking. That’s probably overstating the case a bit — the Trump administration does have high-ranking officials who brag about committing likely war crimes, after all — but Carr is most certainly a giddy soldier in Trump’s war on the Constitution.

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