Far-right Republicans in the United States aren’t even bothering to hide their bigotry and racism anymore, with the news that a governor from America’s ‘deep south’ has launched his re-election campaign replete with a ‘deep fake’ video of him as a gunslinger from the wild west… shooting Mexicans.
It comes amid heightening tensions on the southern border of the United States, which has seen more than a million undocumented immigrants cross the border in the past six months. And a few days after the video was released, a man drove his 4WD at high speed into a group of people outside an immigrant/homeless shelter in a border town in Texas. Eight people died, and another 10 were seriously injured.
We’re back. #msgov pic.twitter.com/sLzpwsqThq
— Team Tate! (@TeamTateReeves) May 2, 2023
Tate Reeves is the one-term governor of Mississippi, and last week he formally launched his re-election campaign, taking to Twitter with a brief video that has his face overlaid on Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood.
It’s a bizarre video, not least of all because if you know what Reeves actually looks like, it’s more than a bit of a stretch.
Think ‘moderately overweight’ 60-something-year-old man in his 60s whose hobbies include stamp collecting, double chins and getting a bowl haircut from his mother once a fortnight.
While immigration is a hot topic nationally, the dog-whistling racism from Reeves is a bizarre strategy when you consider the racial make-up of Mississippi, which doesn’t share a border with Mexico and is virtually unaffected by the growing numbers of immigrants crossing into the US without documentation.
About 58 per cent of Mississippi residents are white, and 38 per cent are African American, a figure which represents more than three times the national average. At the same time, less than 4 per cent of Mississippi residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, compared to a national average of almost 20 per cent.
The video harks back to earlier in the year, when former Republican president Donald Trump released digital trading cards with his likeness in various ‘action scenarios’, none of them even remotely possible given Trump’s advanced years and general condition.