Republican Madison Cawthorn has a lot of people who don’t like him. Then again, when you’re running for Congress, you’re going to get hammered on general principle.

However, when Vote Vets decided to take aim at him in an ad rolled out this week, they cross the line from attacking just him and try to label a good chunk of the gun community as racist as well.

First, let’s take a look at the ad:

Now, Cawthorn has addressed many of these claims. For example, he said that at the time of the accident that left him in a wheelchair, he didn’t know he’d been rejected from Annapolis, hence his statement about the accident sidelining his plans.

However, a politicians potentially phrasing something in a way that’s misleading isn’t anything new. You kind of expect spin from anyone running for office. Honesty isn’t really appreciated.

Yet there are two claims that are problematic as hell.

One is that Cawthorn’s visit to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest was somehow evidence of his racism. After all, he called the visit a bucket list item, which is apparently not allowed.  Yet a zoom in of a screenshot in the video shows Cawthorn commenting on people laughing and having a good time where, decades earlier “a supreme evil” did the same thing.

Even some from the Anti-Defamation League found little to get worked up about.

Not many neo-Nazis refer to Hitler as a supreme evil. Just saying.

Yet, for the gun community, the worst part is labeling Cawthorn as using “symbols that signal white supremacist groups” and then pointing out a Spartan helmet.

The truth of the matter is that the Spartan helmet is popular not just with the gun crowd in general, but with many military service members who have found they relate to the Spartan mythos immortalized in the move 300. The idea of a warrior culture standing against the greatest assault western civilization had ever seen kind of strikes a cord with a lot of people.

Yet the group running this ad, Vote Vets approved of and ran this add. Vote Vets claims to be a group of progressive veterans who “focus on matters including, but not limited to, foreign policy, energy security, veterans’ unemployment, and opening military service to life-long Americans born to undocumented immigrants, as well as continued investment in care for veterans.” However, from what I can see, they’re also willing to expend time and treasure vilifying countless fellow veterans who wear and use symbols similar to what Cawthorn is wearing in that picture, yet have zero ties to any racist group.

It’s one thing to attack a candidate. Cawthorn signed up for that when he decided to run for office. The veterans and gun owners who are disparaged by this demonizing and outright false attack? They didn’t.

Vote Vets should be ashamed of themselves.

Millions upon millions of honest, hardworking, decent Americans from all ethnicities have worn symbols relating to Sparta, the film 300, and many others without any interest in pursuing a racist ideology. The fact that progressives can’t understand that also tells you why they can’t understand why so many oppose their policies.

They just label everything as racism and heaven forbid facts play into anything.