Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who is running to be her state’s next governor, has crushed a pile of fortune cookies for her new campaign video to illustrate her intention to “stop Communist China.”
“How hard am I gonna crack down on China?” Blackburn, 74, asks, sitting alone in a Chinese restaurant. “Well, here’s a clue.”
She proceeds to crumble up the cookies between her palms, allowing their shards to accumulate on top of the laminated menu before her as a stentorian voiceover proclaims: “Marsha Blackburn worked with President Trump to take on Communist China.
“As governor, Marsha will fight to protect Tennessee land from Chinese front companies, close loopholes, and hunt down every Communist who tries to defy us.”
Those promises are then seen echoed on the paper fortune messages visible among the crumbs.
“It doesn’t take a fortune cookie to figure it out,” Blackburn concludes. “Here in Tennessee, we’re gonna stop Communist China and protect Tennessee land.”
The video then wraps with a shot of a maneki-neko, the popular waving cat figurine well-known around the world, which actually comes from Japan, not China.
Fortune cookies, although broadly associated with China, are also thought to have emerged elsewhere. One way was through the Asian restaurants of California, with some historians tracing them to San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden to which they were introduced by curator Makoto Hagiwara, a Japanese immigrant, in the early 1900s. Hagiwara took inspiration from his homeland’s traditional senpei (crackers), customarily served with tea.
Blackburn announced her run for the governor’s mansion last August with another video closely associating herself with Trump, although the president has so far withheld his endorsement from both her and her challenger, Tennessee Rep. John Rose, in this summer’s primary.
Should she win, Blackburn would become the first woman to serve as Tennessee governor.
She started her career in media and marketing before entering the Tennessee Senate in 1999, serving four years before winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2003, representing her adopted state’s 7th district.
She held that seat for 16 years before being elected senator in 2019, successfully winning re-election in 2024.
Blackburn is a former Tea Party conservative known for her anti-abortion and anti-LGBT+ sentiment.
She cut a memorable figure at the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee when she and several other GOP lawmakers physically pursued then-Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle around the venue, demanding answers about supposed security lapses during the attempt on Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, a month earlier.
Bizarrely, Trump entertained the idea of turning communist himself at this week’s NATO summit in Turkey, musing that, if he did: “I would be the greatest communist in history. I’d be right up there with Lenin.”
The remark was particularly puzzling from a president who has consistently used the word in his attempts to fearmonger against left-leaning political foes, referring to everyone from the moderate Kamala Harris to the genuinely progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani as communists.
