Hillary Clinton thinks Donald Trump is a racist, and said so in no uncertain terms to The Guardian, the leftist British newspaper that itself, like the American media, has repeatedly attacked Trump as a racist.
The woman who didn’t “believe women” who credibly accused her lubricious husband of rape thinks Trump’s accurate description of some immigrants as criminals is the mark of man who knows how to play upon the fear that many immigrants are, well, criminals.
And Clinton, who recently joked that all blacks look alike, said the media must wise up, drop neutrality, and attack Trump because he is an incipient fascist dictator.
Trump Is a Racist and a Fascist
In an interview published Friday, Clinton reiterated her attack on the Americans she called “deplorables” by offering “a stinging rebuke of the Republican party’s base, saying it had become enthralled by the president’s ‘insults and attacks and entertainment and spectacle.’”
Beyond that, she said, Trump is “tweeting and insulting and dominating the news cycles,” she told the anti-Trump newspaper, and it’s about time the media manned up: “I believe that where we are now in the political cycle is that the press does not know how to cover these candidates who are setting themselves on fire every day, who are masters of diversion and distraction.”
The days of press neutrality, she averred, must end: “If you’re into both-side-ism — so, you know, on the one hand this, and on the other hand that — really there’s no factual basis, there’s no evidence, there’s no record,” she said. “Everybody lies, everybody gilds the lily. It doesn’t really matter. That just opens a door to somebody like him.”
Clinton pointed to research into fascism by the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright. She said the analysis had shown “various populist, rightwing, fascist, authoritarian movements and leaders destroy a common base of fact and evidence, creating an ‘alternative reality.’”
“One of the ways you do that is by consistently attacking the press. Now [Trump] doesn’t attack Fox News, because they’re like a wholly owned subsidiary of Trump and the Republican party now. So he attacks the press and the broadcast media that raise questions about him, that don’t give him fidelity and loyalty.”
After the mandatory accusation of fascism came the mandatory accusation of racism.
In “his anti-immigrant tirades,” Clinton averred, “he characterises immigrants in very racially derogatory ways.” Even worse, “he was Islamophobic, he was anti-women, he really had the whole package of bigotry that he was putting on offer to those who were intrigued and attracted to him.”
But she didn’t stop there. Trump called in support from the Ku Kluxers with his patented dog whistle!
He was, from the very first day of his campaign, raising the spectre of criminal immigrants and the like. So the anti-immigrant piece coupled with things that he said, the kind of people who supported him, former Ku Klux Klan members and the like, the message that we called the dog whistle, was incredibly loud. It was: “I’m on your side because I don’t like the same people you don’t like. Or at least I’m going to say I don’t and that counts for something.”
The incongruity of the Klan claim, given that Trump’s son-in-law is Jewish, was apparently lost on Clinton. And for the record, the woman who famously called black youth “super predators” has not repudiated the support she received from the Communist Party, which is still apologizing for the mass murderers Lenin and Stalin. Nor has she called for her party to denounce that apologist for communist murderers in our own hemisphere, Bernie Sanders, her opponent in the Democratic primaries. She happily accepted Sanders’ support despite his checkered past.
New York TImes Writer Said What Hillary Said
Clinton’s unstated order that the press drop neutrality and wage war against Trump is not new. That’s just the position the New York Times adopted in August 2016 after Trump won the GOP nomination. Trump, its headline averred, was “testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.” The writer telegraphed what Trump’s deplorables should expect from the media:
If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?
Clinton’s claim that the press is not sufficiently anti-Trump is, of course, ludicrous.
Photo: AP Images