"China People" & "Cocaine Mitch": Campaign Ad Goes Full West Virginia

Oh God… that was good.

Where do I even begin? The ad is at 60K+ views and rising rapidly. First let me assure you – I’ve scrutinized the crap outta this & it’s 100% real, even though nearly everything this guy does seems carefully designed to make anyone bearing witness go, “wat?”

For a quick backstory on how much he sucks, Don Blankenship is one of the top 3 candidates in the upcoming Republican Senate primary in West Virginia. Before this, he was the CEO of Massey Energy, infamous for the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster in Montcoal, WV that killed 29 of his employees in 2010.

In recovered conversations that took place before the disaster, he could be heard admitting that he cut costly safety corners for profit, and ultimately, personal gain.

Convicted of Federal workplace safety crimes, he was sentenced to a year in prison. Six months after getting released in May of 2017, he decided it was a good time to run for Senate.

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Let’s break that video down:

-Immediate note of pro life & NRA alignment / (Ok, not that unusual. Go on…)

-Banjo twang background music / (Huh. I wouldn’t have picked it but I mean…)

-Accent that sounds like Wilford Brimley with peanut butter stuck to the roof of his mouth / (Starting to realize this is going to be a super bizarre ad…)

-“China people” / (Oh, here we go, folks)

-“Swamp people” / (Sorry, still thinking about how you call them “China People”)

-“Cocaine Mitch” /  (who wants to join my band, Cocaine Mitch & the Swamp People?)

-“They are calling me mentally ill” / (If self-awareness was represented as light, this guy & his team are somewhere deep in a crevice of the Marianas Trench)

On his campaign site he links to articles by “journalists” who post photos with captions like this:

(Among many of his odd beefs, he has this big hangup with fellow Republican, Mitch McConnell & his wife, involving a lot of theories about “China people” & drug smuggling, thus “Cocaine Mitch”.)

And he believes he went to jail because of Obama’s war on coal & not for his documented, deliberate failures to enforce safety codes.

::cue the played out ‘wat’ meme::

Worth noting, Donald Trump Jr. & other Republicans have urged people to reject Blankenship. I’ll spare you any further rambling but if you want to feel a little creeped out for reasons you can’t quite articulate, check out his campaign page.

Alright, one more for the road – just to sum up the general feel of this campaign, and the vibe I got from my internet searches, I think that he’ll actually fare better in the election than most would think.

To start your Friday off right here’s one more classic, weird campaign ad. The ‘ol Herman Cain Smoking Ad: