U.S. Senate candidate Gary Chambers Jr. keeps it real about while gun reform isn’t cut and dry for Black citizens.
On Tuesday, the Louisianianreleased his third campaign ad, and this time he’s tackled gun rights.
In the one-minute ad, titled ‘Stuck in the Middle,’ the Democratic candidate grapples with his second amendment right amidst the disturbing uptick of mass shootings in the country. The ad was released the day before the House passed a sweeping gun reform bill.
Chambers explained his confliction by noting his home state of Louisiana ranks 18th for gun ownership, 50th in crime, and 48th in education. “Owning a firearm isn’t just a right; sometimes it’s a necessity,” he said.
Chambers loaded his firearm and said, “White supremacy is still being taught in America.”
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The camera pans out to show Chambers in what is likely the Louisiana woods. Then, the viewer can finally see his target: a life-size cut-out of three hooded Ku Klux Klan members. He cited the Buffalo Shooting that took place last month at a Tops Friendly Supermarket, where accused gunman Payton Gendron, live streamed the killing of 10 Black people, as proof of White Supremacy.
He also referred to the school shooting in Uvalde, where another 18-year-old man armed with an assault rifle killed 19 children and two teachers.
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He empathized with both incidents, seeing both his own mother and daughter as potential victims to gun violence.
Chambers’ powerful message is that he’s a gunowner because “America refuses to protect all of us.”
The senatorial hopeful’s website says that he is committed to passing common sense gun control policies. His solution to protecting both citizens and their second amendment right: background checks, safe storage laws, and raising the age for gun ownership.
‘Stuck in the Middle’ our third campaign ad.
I believe gun safety is about public safety. Back ground checks, safe gun storage, and raising the age benefit us all.
I’m running for the U.S. Senate so our parents can make it home from the store & our children from school. pic.twitter.com/SlJ2UvB3rh
Chambers is no stranger to controversial campaign ads. His first ad went viral as it opened with Chambers smoking a blunt—a cigarette with marijuana and tobacco—to drive home his stance on the legalization of marijuana. He stated, “Every 37 seconds someone is arrested for possession of marijuana. Since 2010, state and local police have arrested an estimated 7.2 mil Americans for violating marijuana laws.”
In the other, Chambers brazenly burned a Confederate flag and said racism has forced too many Black people to live in poverty, go without health insurance and not have the right to vote.
The 36-year-old’s campaign priorities include access to healthcare, education, job training programs, criminal justice reform, reproductive freedom, the Green New Deal and immigration.
While Louisiana has historically been conservative and hasn’t seen a Black candidate win statewide office since the Reconstruction era, Chambers unrepentant, liberal approach might be exactly what Louisiana needs.
Since taking office about three weeks ago, Donald Trump has issued a blizzard of 200+ executive orders. Among them are two key anti-diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) directives that threaten to roll back decades of progress in expanding opportunities for people of color, women and other historically marginalized groups.
The first executive order eliminates DEI enacted under President Biden, who required all federal agencies to create plans to “address unequal barriers to opportunity” and ensure workplace equity. Trump’s order terminates all DEI, DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility), and environmental justice jobs as well as any programs, grants, or contracts related to its implementation, calling them “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs.”
The second executive order eliminates all DEI orders from previous administrations, including one by President Lyndon Johnson from 1965, which required federal contractors to provide equal opportunity measures. In rolling back the policies, Trump called DEI “immoral” and “illegal” and painted it as a “corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system” that robbed “hardworking Americans”—implicitly white men—“of opportunities because of their race or sex.”
President Trump also warned of “adverse consequences” for those federal workers who fail to report colleagues who refuse to dismantle DEI policies.
While the order is limited to the federal government, it directs federal agencies to find ways, including potential litigation, to pressure the private sector also to abandon its DEI policies. This threatens to accelerate a corporate anti-DEI trend that has already been in the works. Walmart, which back in 2020 announced a $100 million investment in a center for racial equity, announced several days after Trump’s election that it was dropping the center and would no longer use the terms DEI and Latinx in official communications. McDonald’s, Meta and Target have also dropped their DEI initiatives as reported by Axios.
After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, which deemed affirmative action in university admissions unconstitutional, attacks on DEI proliferated, and the term became a right-wing bogeyman blamed for almost anything that goes wrong in any workplace. For example, just one day after the tragic plane and helicopter collision over the Potomac River which claimed 67 lives, Trump baselessly blamed DEI policies for the crash—while the investigation into the crash’s cause had barely begun. Language in President Trump’s executive order also portrays DEI policies as inherently dangerous declaring they “threaten the safety of American men, women and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society.”
These statements seem to suggest that DEI exists in opposition to excellence and hard work—and that providing opportunities to non-white people automatically lowers standards.This is false. DEI requires the same standards for everyone and only hires those who fulfill the requirements of a given job, a point echoed by Everett Kelly, National President of the 800,000-member American Federation of Government Employees “The federal government already hires and promotes exclusively on the basis of merit. The results are clear: a diverse federal workforce that looks like the nation it serves, with the lowest gender and racial pay gaps in the country. We should all be proud of that.”
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Black people make up a larger share of the federal workforce (18.6%) than they do of the civilian workforce (12.8%),according to Pew Research. It’s unclear how many people will be affected by the order. Still, the federal government is the biggest employer in the US and Black people, who have the highest unemployment rates, risk greater job loss as a result.
The vagueness of President Trump’s orders have also left agencies struggling to comply and erasing Black history in the process. For example, the Air Force recently removed the Tuskegee Airmen from their training videos, and it was only reinstated after public outcry.
The anti-DEI trend is part of a larger attack on anti-discrimination efforts, sparked by the push for racial progress after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. Now that DEI is under fire, the question is—how do we keep these policies alive?
Despite mounting political pressure, companies like Apple, Costco and JPMorgan Chase remain steadfast in their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, refusing to bow to conservative attacks. Additionally, most Fortune 500 companies have not abandoned their DEI policies.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-partisan group that fights “government abuse” primarily through lawsuits, counters President Trump’s claim that DEI or DEIA is illegal, saying, “The executive orders attempt to conflate these lawful efforts with discrimination, weaponizing enforcement to bully institutions into abandoning critical programs.” “However, no court has declared DEIA efforts inherently illegal, and President Trump cannot override decades of legal precedent.” The ACLU supported and launched numerous lawsuits against the rollback of DEI during Trump’s first term and have vowed to do so again.
In the meantime, the Civil Rights Act is still the law of the land, and it remains illegal to discriminate against anyone based on race, gender, and other protected characteristics.