There are political ads that make a clear point, and there is the new campaign ad from Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who is running for governor, in which she crushes fortune cookies with her hands while a narrator declares “Marsha Blackburn will hunt down every communist,” demonstrating how she will crack down on China using a food item invented by Japanese Americans in San Francisco that does not exist in China and never has.
“How hard am I gonna crack down on China?” Blackburn, who has avoided in-person town halls for nearly a decade, asks in the ad, before crushing the fortune cookies to answer her own question. The answer is: very hard, using the snack item that California Japantown bakeries popularized in the early 20th century and that Chinese restaurants in America began serving in the 1960s as a post-meal novelty, and that travelers to China have consistently noted is completely absent from Chinese cuisine, because it was invented in America, by Japanese immigrants, for American customers, and China does not recognize it as part of their culinary tradition, which makes it an unusual prop for a China crackdown demonstration.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration policy expert, posted: “Fortune cookies were invented in America and basically do not exist in China.” Benjamin Norton wrote: “Fortune cookies being completely American. As a wise man once said, this is the most racist and ignorant US Senator I’ve ever seen.” Chuck Todd posted: “Some TV ads are subtle and some…” and left the sentence there, correctly judging that it finished itself. Eric Hovagim noted: “This is the perfect analogy because the fortune cookie is literally an American invention,” which is correct and which is the specific observation that transforms the ad from a cringe campaign into an accidental statement about the senator’s research process.
The ad also features a gong, per HuffPost. The gong is not specific to China either, being used across multiple Asian cultures and in Western orchestral music since the 18th century. Blackburn’s production team appears to have assembled a set of props associated with a generalized idea of Asia rather than with China specifically, and then had her crush the American snack in front of them.
Blackburn has been a senator since 2019. She is running for governor of Tennessee, which ranks 44th in health care and last in per-student public school spending. The ad does not address either of these.
When the senator running to crack down on China uses a Japanese American invention as her prop, what research process produced the ad?
Sources
HuffPost: MAGA Sen. Crushed Over ‘Blatantly Racist’ Fortune Cookie Moment
