In a 30-second ad released over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Andy Barr — running for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s Senate seat — is pictured on a farm. The sun is shining. There is a barn and an American flag behind him. “You know what DEI really stands for?” he says, smiling. “Dumb, evil, indoctri nation.” The scene shifts and we see a black man in a crowd. He is wearing a Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. t-shirt and holding up a sign that reads “Stay woke America.” “Woke liberals spew it,” Barr says, “corporate losers fall for it, but thanks to Trump, America is rejecting that trash.” An interesting choice for the Barr campaign to release the ad on the heels of President Donald Trump’s racist social media post (which was primarily about debunked claims of voter fraud) depicting former President Barack Obama and his wife as apes, an image I first became aware of last October when Bobbie Coleman, then-chairperson of the Hardin County Republican Party, shared the extended AI video depicting the Obamas as apes on her county party’s Facebook page.  The Barr ad was likely already scheduled for release, but ads can be pulled. The ad ran and continues to run. The YouTube version already has 297,000 views as of this writing, and it must be noted that we are now a decade deep into Trumpism and Trump himself, whose presidential aspirations were initially fueled by his insistence that Obama did not have an American birth certificate and was, therefore, not American.  It was a lie. It was racist hogwash. It also launched Trump from elderly white billionaire New York City playboy reality show host, known for his bankruptcies and stiffing of contractors, straight into the White House.  The high spark of low standards and even lower morality.  Trump continues to lie about the 2020 election results (he lost) and is pushing for the anti-immigrant SAVE Act that also would exclude many citizens from voting. It reminds me that in 1965 — the year the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting, was signed into law — Joan Didion in “On Morality” wrote “when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.” Watching Barr’s most recent ad inflaming white hysteria, we see that we are still there: stuck in the past, stuck in racist tropes, stuck in an immoral morass of bold bigotry. The last words of his 30-second ad for a U.S. Senate seat are, “I’m Andy Barr. It’s not a sin to be white, it’s not against the law to be male, and it shouldn’t be disqualifying to be a Christian. I’m Andy Barr, and I approve this message to give woke liberals something else to cry about.”  I am white and have never heard that it is a sin for me to be white. I have yet to see anyone crying. Is there a law somewhere against being male? Funny, I can’t seem to locate it. And when did it become disqualifying to be Christian? The answer is … drumroll, please … never. What a fantastical farce. I watched Barr’s ad more than a dozen times, and the central message seems to be: I am a white Christian man who will make liberals cry.  That’s it? Is this a winning message for Kentucky Republican primary voters? Because it sure looks like this — not the economy or grocery prices, not the cost of health insurance, not education, not public safety or taxes or conservatism — is what Barr is banking on. We often hear that, just because someone voted for Donald Trump, it does not mean that they are racist, that they are simply willing to ignore that the president is openly racist because he is a conservative doing conservative things. But this is also a lie. Conservatives, by name and nature, conserve things, and what we have witnessed over the last year of the Trump presidency with the destruction of everything from the East Wing of the White House to the U.S. Agency for International Development and other American institutions via DOGE, there is nothing conservative about him. There is only the power to destroy. And the racism. Always the racism. It is 2026. Barr runs an ad in which he appears to believe simply being white and male qualifies him to be a United States senator. The president posts a video about voting machines depicting the Obamas as apes. In our statehouse, we are now years into fights by our mostly white, mostly male GOP supermajority to rid our institutions of any whiff of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).  The racist spigot is wide open.  The moral rot is deep. The post A low bar for Andy Barr and Kentucky’s US Senate campaign appeared first on The Lexington Times. ...read more read less