Jawando decries ad from GOP council candidate as ‘racist’

Montgomery County Council member Will Jawando said an ad taken out by a Republican candidate in a local news publication is “racist.”

The ad, which appears to have been created using artificial intelligence, depicts Jawando, who is running for county executive, taking cookies out of a jar labeled “Taxpayers Pockets.”

“It harkens back to those minstrel era caricatures used to denigrate African Americans,” Jawando, who is Black, told The Banner in an interview.

The “hands in the cookie jar” expression is used to convey that someone has stolen or done something wrong.

“I think it pretty clearly is a racist trope, the caricature of African Americans as stealing things, sneaking food,” Jawando said of the ad.

The ad was purchased by Reardon Sullivan, first vice chair of the county Republican Party and a candidate for the District 1 County Council seat. It ran in the May 1 edition of local news publication Bethesda Today’s daily newsletter.

Sullivan dismissed Jawando’s accusation and said it frustrates him as another Black man.

“I don’t consider it racist,” Sullivan told The Banner. “I consider it to be humor. We use literally the same software on all of the caricatures and cartoons,” pointing to similar critical ads that he has made of white officials, including County Executive Marc Elrich.

Sullivan told the Banner that he designed, purchased and took out the ad because he is frustrated with Jawando’s fiscal policies. He said he thinks he will rerun the ad but change the text “to show additional fallacies” of Jawando’s economic plans.

Sulllivan also said that it’s unfair that Jawando, as a council member, “gets all this free airtime and nobody ever challenges him.”

Most of the criticism he’s received in phone calls and emails about the ad, Sullivan continued, is from “white liberals.”

Jawando said he did not reach out to Sullivan about the ad because he “did not feel it would be productive” and that he did not reach out to Bethesda Today, either.

A representative for Bethesda Today did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This reporter is a former Bethesda Today employee.

The use of AI and doctored images in political campaigns has increased nationally and locally in recent years.

Last month, Baltimore Inspector General Isabel Mercedes Cumming came under fire for posting an AI-generated image of Mayor Brandon Scott chomping on a cigar, clutching a glass of brown liquor and holding a fistful of luxury shopping bags. It intensified a simmering dispute between Scott and Cumming over access to city records.

A campaign against Gov. Wes Moore has used AI-generated “deepfakes” to create videos of a digital Moore making fabricated remarks. Moore’s team has called the posts racist.

Jawando tied Sullivan’s ad to last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision weakening the Voting Rights Act, which critics argue will disenfranchise minority voters.

“That will decimate Black political representation in much of the South and here we are with ads targeting the only Black man on the council,” he said.