Tipsheet

Georgia Senate: Warnock Won't Answer Whether He Attended Fidel Castro Celebration at His Church

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  November 16, 2020 10:25 AM

We are less than one month away from early voting in the Georgia Senate runoffs, and Republicans are blitzing both Democrats in the race.  Last week, the GOP revealed that the Perdue and Loeffler campaigns, together with the NRSC, raised $32 million in six days, an impressive haul that telegraphs how bruising and expensive the high-stakes campaigns will be.  Some of that cash is being spent on ads like this one from Team Perdue:


If the themes and content of that spot seem vaguely familiar, that might be because Loeffler is running nearly the exact same ad:


These ads are effective because they allow Democrats to spell out the consequences of these races in their own words.  Schumer says his party will take Georgia in order to "change America."  Stacy Abrams does the same, usefully mentioning illegal immigrants as part of her party's coalition.  And as we highlighted last week, AOC explained to CNN's audience that Democrats must win the Peach State runoffs in order to prevent a Republican Senate and vitiate the need for negotiations with Republicans, under one-party rule.  GOP slogans about "holding the line" and building a "firewall" have the double benefit of being both politically potent and factually true -- as confirmed by the opposition.  

It seems clear that the game plan for Perdue and Loeffler is to run as a joint ticket, presenting Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as a joint ticket to voters.  Ossoff is being framed as a callow lightweight who would do whatever national Democrats tell him to do. Warnock is being framed as ideologically radical.  And they're being attached at the hip.  The Democats are preaching "unity," taking bold stances on such crucial matters as loving puppies:


But Ossoff told a crowd of partisan Democrats that Trump and his supporters need to be beaten so badly that they'd never show their faces in public, and Warnock preaches messages like this in his sermons:

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Can you feel the unity?  Warnock's defenses of Jeremiah Wright seem to make sense, don't they?

Warnock has expressed support for Reverend Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s former pastor, who has been criticized for anti-Semitic remarks, including a now-famous sermon in which Wright proclaimed “God damn America,” and, in a separate incident, said that the U.S. government created AIDS to kill African Americans. Wright’s “God damn America” remarks were “extracted from its theological and rhetorical context and looped to the point of ad nauseam,” Warnock said in remarks to the Yale Divinity School in 2013. According to Warnock, Wright’s sermon was consistent with “Black prophetic preaching,” in which “preachers are expected, indeed encouraged to speak the truth, tell Pharaoh and tell it like it is with clarity, creativity and passion.” About six months into President Obama’s first term, Wright blamed Jews for not letting him speak to the president. “Them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me,” Wright told the Daily Press of Newport News, Va. in June 2009. “They will not let him to talk to somebody who calls a spade what it is.”

Warnock is also denying that he's a socialist, despite his former church's anti-American celebration of a Communist dictator in the 1990's, and his 2009 sermon "in which he argued that socialism is supported by Scripture and compared socialized health care to such run-of-the-mill government services as police protection."  Meanwhile, some reminders from Ossoff world:


The China issue keeps cropping up.  No wonder these guys would prefer to talk about puppies.  I'll leave you with Warnock refusing to say whether he attended the Fidel Casto speech at his church, and declining to acknowledge that Castro is rightly considered a murderous tyrant unworthy of celebration: