The media waited in breathless anticipation for Hillary Clinton to appear in Reno on Thursday. Her campaign had promised reporters a speech that would pull back the curtain on the so-called “alt right” movement, show the country Donald Trump’s true racist colors, and flush his candidacy down the toilet once and for all. So when Hillary finally delivered her message, the media was ready and willing to take it and spread it like the gospel.
Or manure, as the case may be.
“From the start,” Hillary said, “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia.”
That set the tone for the speech, which lived up to all the media’s expectations. In it, Hillary methodically fed her listeners everything they already believe. That he was a career racist. That he aligned himself with tabloids like the National Enquirer and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of InfoWars. And most importantly, that he had assumed control of a dangerous and frightening subset of American conservatism: the “alt-right.”
“He hired Stephen Bannon, the head of a right-wing website called Breitbart.com, as campaign CEO,” she said ominously before relating a few of the site’s colorful headlines. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, she said, Breitbart was ground zero for the alt-right. “A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party.”
“No one should have any illusions about what’s really going on here,” she said. “The names may have changed…racists now call themselves ‘racialists.’ White supremacists now call themselves ‘white nationalists.’ The paranoid fringe now calls itself ‘alt-right.’ But the hate burns just as bright.”
Oh yes, yes it does.
Not for brown people or gays or Muslims or any other minority, mind you. But for lying Democrats like Hillary Clinton? Oh yes, that hate burns as brightly as it ever has.
It’s no wonder the media was salivating over the prospect of Hillary’s speech. It was the cherry on top of the shit sundae they’ve been making for the last 13 months. Clinton’s speech could have been written using only the front page of the Washington Post as a source. Or, failing that, the Rachel Maddow Show. Or, if not that, then virtually any other liberal news outlet in the Western hemisphere. To her (and not a few of her supporters), the narrative has become fact. The fiction is now reality.
But it wasn’t Breitbart or David Duke or “white nationalists” that pushed Trump to victory in the primaries. Trump won thanks to disgruntled conservatives who have watched the Republican Party go to the dogs. He may be a billionaire, but he has reached out to working-class Americans in a way that no Republican has done in years.
The way those Americans have been vilified in the media – and in Hillary’s speech – is beyond repugnant. Only now are we seeing how little respect the Washington establishment really has for its “subjects.”
