The RNC rolled out a new ad aimed at bolstering Donald Trump’s standing, and it has … not a single frame or mention of Trump at all. Instead, the ad asks viewers to contemplate the alternative, in the alternative’s own words. It focuses on the frosh “Squad” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez most of all, but also her pals Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib — and their incendiary rhetoric. And, the ad strongly implies, the violence that their rhetoric incites (via Twitchy):

Those who immerse themselves in the daily political cycle won’t find anything new in the ad except for the slick packaging. But this ad isn’t meant for insiders; it takes aim at those who are either completely disengaged with politics or only paying scant attention. It’s effective, especially at the end when three of the four refuse to provide a condemnation of Antifa and its violent tactics.

By the way, did Tlaib not get asked the question? Or did she actually respond with a condemnation when asked? Her absence from that montage is intriguing, at the least.

Expect to hear plenty of griping from the Left about the RNC’s attempts to tie political speech from the Squad to Antifa violence. Fifteen years ago, I might have had some sympathy for that complaint, but the same people who will make those complaints now have been declaring for years that conservative speech is violence, while excusing actual violence by their allies as free speech and punishment for it as political.  This is a response in kind, which doesn’t exactly make it correct, but it certainly evens the playing field.

The ad falls short in one respect. The Squad’s ultimate goal isn’t anarchy, just as it isn’t for the anarchists, either. Their ultimate goal is a totalitarian system which they run and impose their agenda on everyone else by force. Anarchy is just a means to that end, a strategy that we have seen play out over and over again for the past century or more.

By the way, expect ads like this to be a Republican genre of 2020 for a couple of reasons. First, Donald Trump isn’t popular enough to conduct a blanket ad campaign focusing solely on him. Second and most importantly, Democrats have become so unhinged that the most effective way to elect Republicans is to amplify what Democrats are actually saying and doing. In this cycle, the cliché “the ads write themselves” might be closer to the truth than ever.