By Akela Lacy\The Intercept
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
In the First month of its spending in a Missouri congressional election, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured $3 million into the race to unseat Squad member Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.
AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, has gone on to spend a total of $7 million so far to oust Bush. Its recent mailers, reviewed by The Intercept, show images of Bush with distorted features that make her forehead look bigger and elongate her features.
Bush condemned the ads as part of a trope of using racist caricatures to target candidates based on their ethnicity.
“It is shameful that, in 2024, our communities are still being targeted with such blatant racism from political campaigns, let alone in a Democratic primary,” Bush said in a statement to The Intercept. “The people of St. Louis deserve better than to see their first Black Congresswoman racistly distorted into a caricature — I shouldn’t have to ask my opponent to condemn his biggest funders for putting out an ad like this and to apologize to the people of this district.”
AIPAC, the leading pro-Israel lobbying group, has been one of the single largest outside spenders in an election cycle that’s broken records for the most expensive House primaries in history. According to Sludge, AIPAC helped raise two-thirds of the campaign funding for Bush’s Democratic opponent, St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell. (Neither United Democracy Project nor Bell’s campaign responded to requests for comment.) READ MORE…
