Marsha Blackburn has launched a new ad in the Tennessee governor’s race that turns a fortune cookie into a prop and a warning. Sitting in what looks like a Chinese restaurant, she crushes the cookie on camera after promising to “crack down” on the People’s Republic of China and “hunt down communists.”
The ad is already airing this week, and Blackburn’s campaign had spent about $112,000 on statewide airtime as of July 6. A Washington-based PAC, Tennessee Freedom Fund, had added more than $1 million in TV ads backing her, underscoring how much of the race is now being shaped by a hard-edged message on China rather than the usual talk of roads, schools or taxes.
The spot is built to be impossible to miss. Blackburn sits beside a menu, a bottle of soy sauce and a basket of fortune cookies, then says, “How hard am I going to crack down on China? Well, here’s a clue,” before smashing one of them. Another cookie carries the line, “Marsha Blackburn will fight to protect Tennessee land from China.” The narrator goes further, saying she worked with President Trump to take on communist China and that, as governor, she will fight to protect Tennessee land from Chinese-owned companies, close loopholes and hunt down every communist who tries to defy us. The ad closes with a cat figurine lifting a paw in a beckoning motion.
Blackburn has spent years making China a central part of her political identity. She has pushed legislation aimed at shutting down Confucius Institutes at American universities, backed a bipartisan measure to require an annual report on federal efforts to combat Chinese espionage inside the United States, and made a formal visit to Taiwan in 2022 to meet with Taiwanese leadership. Her new ad folds all of that into a sharper campaign pitch: that she is the candidate who will be toughest on Beijing and on Chinese-linked land ownership in Tennessee.
But the message also runs into a line Tennessee cannot erase with campaign theater. Communism is not illegal in the United States, and belief in communist ideology is protected by the First Amendment. Knoxville is home to a chapter of the Communist Party USA, a reminder that the ad’s promise to “hunt down communists” is as much a cultural provocation as a policy pledge. Blackburn is not only attacking a foreign government; she is using language that reaches into protected political belief at home.
That friction matters because Tennessee lawmakers have already banned foreign adversarial nations and their controlled entities from buying farmland, which means Blackburn is campaigning on ground the state has already fenced off. A federal registry maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows Chinese entities own 168 parcels of land nationwide, totaling 247,659 acres, and none of those parcels are in Tennessee. In 2024, Walton Tennessee LLC bought about 500 acres in Loudon County, and some parcels were reportedly deeded to Chinese investors, but no transfer of land has been reported to the Tennessee Secretary of State’s registry as required by state law.
The race around Blackburn has also turned into a contest over who can sound toughest on China. A PAC supporting her has attacked her primary opponent, John Rose, in ads claiming Chinese firms bought Tennessee land “on his watch,” while Rose has called to “outlaw China from buying land in Tennessee” in his own campaign. Blackburn’s new ad is meant to own that issue, not share it. For now, the answer to what it changes is straightforward: it makes China the loudest issue in her governor’s race, and it forces every rival to speak in her language or try to outrun it.
