A political ad released by U.S. congressional candidate Nick Stella uses a photo of Jaywick Sands, a British village, to attack Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif). (Stella for Congress)
In a strange turn of events, a small British seaside village found itself at the center of a controversy in the upcoming Illinois midterm elections, after a Republican congressional candidate published a photo of Jaywick Sands in Essex and warned that it’s what the United States will look like if Democrats win next week.
The photo, which was published on the Facebook page of Republican Nick Stella’s campaign on Oct. 25, was an image of the town, which looked run-down. It features a billboard doctored to display a photo of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the words “Congratulations Madame Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”
“Only YOU can stop this from becoming reality,” text accompanying the photo, said, urging voters to “Help President Trump Keep America on Track and Thriving” and warning that a vote for Rep. Bill Foster (D) is a voter for Pelosi, the House minority leader.
“We can’t go back to foreclosures, unemployment, and economic recession!” it says.
Stella is running for Congress in Illinois’s 11th District, and The Post reached out to the campaign to ask whether it was aware that the photo used for the attack ad was that of a British village, not an American one.
Raquel Mitchell, a campaign spokeswoman, emailed back saying that the campaign didn’t know that the image was of England before publishing it. “A simple Google search of ‘deprived town’ will cover about 2 search pages,” she wrote. “We also never mentioned the name [of the] town.”
And Mitchell doesn’t seem to think it matters where the photo was taken. “If I tell you don’t forget to wear oven mitts or your hands will get burned, does it matter whose burned hand is depicted in the illustration?” she wrote. “A place suffering is a place suffering. Either people want good governance or they want to get burned.”
It may not have mattered to Stella’s campaign, but it seemed to matter to Jaywick Sands — a community the British government described as England’s most deprived in a 2015 report. The area was originally developed as a vacation spot but later suffered after more Brits started traveling abroad.
Still, things aren’t as bad as the photo makes it seem, residents told various news outlets this week.
City councilor Kevin Watson told the Associated Press that “there’s now fantastic drainage, people are taking pride in their area.”
“Things are looking very good in Jaywick, probably the best since it was a holiday destination,” he said.
One resident, Shirley Blok, told the BBC that “Jaywick people dare Donald Trump to visit us, come and feel the British love, see our heart.”
Credit:Washington Post
via USAHint.com
No comments:
Post a Comment