Here's QAnon's First Political Ad — and It's Something

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Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) has been representing the 2nd congressional district of Mississippi for 27 years, but in Tuesday’s primary, he will face a new adversary: QAnon.

Late on Monday night, the QAnon-supporting Super PAC called Disarm the Deep State released its first video ad titled “Don't Reelect Bennie Thompson!”

The 30-second ad features a cartoon of Thompson and a musical jingle that opens with the line: “Can you trust Bennie Thompson? No, you can’t. Mississippi’s future is in your hands.”

The video then claims “there’s been so many scandals that it’s hard to keep track.”

To back up the claim, four headlines pop up around the cartoon image of Thompson, making it look like the Congressman has been engulfed in scandal.

But a closer look at the stories reveals that three of them date from 2009 — including two from Politico and the Washington Examiner, about Thompson’s denials that he obtained campaign contributions from credit card companies while he was chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The other story comes from 2018 and references the decision by the Citizens Against Government Waste — a nonprofit that claims to have a million members — to name Thompson as its June 2018 Porker of the Month “for attempting to create taxpayer-funded dorms for well-paid members of Congress.”

Disarm the Deep State was launched earlier this month and says its “dedicated to removing shadow government actors” and that its mission is to “mobilize a community of patriots in order to remove power from Deep State members.”

READ: QAnon Now Has Its Very Own Super PAC

The fund’s website lists more than two dozen candidates in upcoming primaries who have publicly expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory, but none of them is running against Thompson on Tuesday.

But Thompson is listed as one of Disarm the Deep State’s “Dirty Dozen,” a list that also includes the likes of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). In his entry, Thompson is described as having “consistently worked to injure citizens’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and expression.”

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It’s not clear where the ad will be shown, but to date, Disarm the Deep State has not run any Facebook ads, according to the social network’s ad library.

Jim Watkins, the owner of the hate-filled message board 8chan, which the QAnon conspiracy calls home, did not immediately respond to questions about how much money the committee has raised or why it picked Thompson for its first ad.

Cover: Disarm the Deep State/YouTube

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