A super PAC supporting Mehmet Oz has released an attack ad targeting Kathy Barnette that falsely accuses her of supporting BLM. Barnette has been surging down the stretch of Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate primary and now finds herself in a three-way tie with Oz and David McCormick as voters head to the polls on Tuesday.
The super PAC, American Leadership Action, tries to depict Barnette as a staunch advocate of leftist positions, including support for the far-left Black Lives Matter organization. The ad includes deceptively edited clips featuring Barnette’s past comments on race relations.
For example, the ad shows a clip of Kathy Barnette saying “black Americans feel disenfranchised.” It then cuts to another clip of Barnette saying, “systemic racism, specifically among police officers” without providing context.
One of the clips in question was lifted from a video statement Barnette put out during the George Floyd riots in 2020, in which she condemns the BLM organization and the violence it endorsed. She also rejected the notion of “systemic racism” in policing.
What Barnette actually said on the notion of systemic racism was:
“Listen, there is a reason why many Black Americans feel disenfranchised in America. And I will never try to minimize the reasons why many of them feel that way. And yet a lot of what we see is manipulation. It’s the stoking of the flame of the tensions of the history of this nation. For example, many are saying today that what we are experiencing — what happened to George, George Floyd — is systemic racism in our justice system, specifically among police officers. They would have us to believe that there is a police officer like Officer Chauvin, who had his knee on George Floyd’s neck, around every street corner. And that everywhere we go, there is a police officer waiting to shoot a Black man. I reject that. And I don’t reject it because I feel like that’s not true. I reject it because it is — statistically is not true.”
The GOP hopeful went on to cite numerous statistics that prove her point.
Barnette has also directly condemned the Black Lives Matter movement and organization, comparing it to a “bad case of herpes.”
While Kathy Barnette has never supported the BLM movement or endorsed its views on “systemic racism”, Dr. Mehmet Oz actually has. As the George Floyd riots were breaking out across the nation, Oz claimed that “systemic racism” in medicine leads to “disparities in the health outcomes of black people.”