How Dare Woke Media Criticize Black KY AG Daniel Cameron’s Hardworking Blackness!
How Dare Woke Media Criticize Black KY AG Daniel Cameron’s Hardworking Blackness!
Oh, so he’s Black now?
Journalists are fairly equal opportunity in their exposes on politicians who care more about campaigning for their next job than performing their current one. However, Kentucky attorney general and Republican nominee for governor Daniel Cameron protested most bitterly when the Huffington Post suggested in a story last week that Cameron doesn’t show up for work that often.
Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost writes, “There is no record of [Cameron] using his key fob or any other kind of security card to get into the state Capitol building for the last three years, and his office is repeatedly refusing to say why.”
During a press conference introducing his “rock-ribbed conservative” (for no one’s pleasure) running mate, Cameron claimed the HuffPost article was nothing more than “a racist trope about Black folks and how they work.” First off, does he really want to remind Kentucky voters that he’s Black this close to the election? He’s worked so hard on making them see the preppy villain from a 1980s John Hughes movie.
Also, why is he making this about race? When he spoke at the 2020 Republican National Convention, he declared, “[Democrats] believe your skin color must dictate your politics. And if you fail to conform while exercising your God-given right to speak and think freely, they will cut you down.”
Actually, Cameron brings up his race quite often when deflecting criticism. He whined in 2019 about an editorial cartoon that condemned him for willing supporting Donald Trump, who has a documented history of racism from the Central Park Five to the “very fine people” in Charlottesville. Cameron suggested that cartoon was somehow racist and insensitive to his apparently protected class as a Black Republican. However, the cartoon doesn’t even directly reference his race.
Mitt Romney’s campaign co-chair John Sununu called Barack Obama “babbling,” “lazy,” and “disengaged” toward the end of the 2012 campaign. That is far more egregious racial dog whistling than simply wondering why Cameron is never in the office.
HuffPost submitted a series of open records requests for Cameron’s key fob and security card logs at the Capitol building. They all came back blanker than his soul. The last time Cameron was registered using his key fob to enter the building was in January 2020.
An open records request for key fob records for that office, from September 2022 through March 2023, resulted in a 4,195-page report showing lots of staff members going in. But no Cameron. HuffPost even searched the Associated Press and Reuters photo database for images of Cameron inside the Capitol building, presumably operating under the assumption that his image turns up in photographs. They found little evidence from the Capitol backing up that theory.
But here’s the thing: The “woke” media wasn’t just checking up on the Black guy. The Lexington Herald-Leader ran a story last Tuesday about how both Cameron and incumbent Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear — who’s white — “rarely if ever use the Kentucky Capitol key fob swipe system to get into the Capitol building.”
The Herald-Leader was slightly more generous than HuffPost, stating that “fob swipes are an imperfect measure of attendance for both elected officials.” Beshear’s Finance and Administration Cabinet issued a prompt, simple response: The governor’s Kentucky State Police detail use their own security badges when he enters the building, which makes sense although it seems like an obvious security gap.
The Huffpost and Herald-Leader stories aren’t that big a deal. At their worst, they’re the sort of “scandal” that a competent politician could just swat away like an annoying gnat. Instead, Cameron got needlessly defensive. His office insists that he “regularly” comes into the Capitol for work and even if he stretches the definition of “regularly,” that doesn’t matter because “key fob records do not accurately reflect the comings and goings of General Cameron or any elected official, nor can any conclusions be drawn from them.” You can almost see him sweating under hot lights in an interrogation room.
In fairness to someone who deserves none, Cameron reportedly received death threats in 2020 in response to how his office handled the investigation into the botched police raid that killed Breonna Taylor. Cameron had 24/7 armed security for a while, and auditor Mike Harmon suggests that his security detail was swiping in for him, as well.
“I would assume that, since Daniel Cameron has had security all this time that they probably swap in and open the door for him,” Harmon said. “I would assume the same for Beshear.”
These are all fair assumptions — although Cameron was MIA at the Capitol for weeks prior to Taylor’s fatal shooting in March 2020. Cameron could’ve left it at this, while reminding voters that his life was at risk from the “woke mob” or whatever. However, he’s not particularly good at crisis management. He’d rather cry “racism” like a common Alan Keyes when also asked inconvenient questions.
But it says everything that Cameron thinks there’s more racism in the HuffPost’s reporting than the Louisville police’s corrupt choices that resulted in Breonna Taylor’s death. That’s sickening, but it probably makes his MAGA supporters swoon.
[Lexington Herald-Ledger / Huffington Post]
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A note about having others swipe for you. During the pandemic (the time period we are mainly discussing) my school used the proximity card system to track who was in the building for contact tracing purposes. Even if you got to the door with other people, you were all expected to swipe individually.
Are we to believe they did not enact this simple measure in KY?
The guards should certainly be able to identify the governor and let him in themselves without forcing him to resort to his own key. Unless they've never seen him before for some reason.