VDH: For Elizabeth Heng

After John noted the suppression of Elizabeth Heng’s Facebook ad for her congressional campaign yesterday (video embedded below), Victor Davis Hanson wrote us to enlist the support of Power Line readers for Ms. Heng. Alexandra DeSanctis profiled her here for NR and Jack Fowler updated the story with the Facebook angle yesterday here. Heng’s campaign site is here; contribute to her campaign here. Dr. Hanson writes:

Elizabeth Heng is the Republican challenger seeking to represent California’s 16th congressional district. She just had a Facebook ad blocked, apparently because the genocide practiced by the former communist regime of Cambodia is either considered too controversial or hurtful to read about. The ad touches on her family’s nightmarish escape from the Cambodian Holocaust. It must be unacceptably dissonant with the current mania for socialism sweeping the Democratic Party.

In California’s June 2018 primary Heng came within a few thousand votes of beating the well-funded 7-term incumbent congressman Jim Costa in a district that went heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016. The 16th congressional district is considered a safe blue seat in the usual midterm election surveys. So her stunning near primary win against overwhelming odds should have been a national wake-up story for lots of reasons. Yet only National Review (kudos to Alexandra DeSanctis and the indomitable Jack Fowler) has sought to give Heng the national attention she deserves given her unique background, profile, and qualifications.

Elizabeth Heng is a sort of un-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Like her, she is a minority, female, young and charismatic and a first-time congressional candidate. But after that all comparisons end—and end dramatically in Heng’s favor.

Elizabeth grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Fresno, was a product of the Fresno public schools, and then went directly to Stanford where she became student body president. She later earned a MBA from Yale—all the while working on the Hill.

Unlike Ocasio-Cortez’s progressive complaints against the United States, Heng’s conservatism comes out of a deep appreciation for the sanctuary the United States offered her family and herself in overly regulated California to run T-mobile franchises with her siblings.

In sum, Heng is a highly-educated, well-informed conservative. Had she been a progressive, she would have received national attention as the “new face” of the next generation of congressional office-seekers, and courted by talk shows and the media. Yet she is running neck and neck with a seasoned Democrat pro in a year of the supposed “blue wave.”

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