Anti-establishment conservatives of all stripes — from the nationalist “alt-right” at Breitbart to the liberty-minded anti-globalist Infowars media empire — were apparently delighted with Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her latest anti-Donald Trump screed. With her bizarre speech Thursday attempting to demonize huge swaths of the American public as racists and paranoid conspiracy theorists, Clinton sounded almost unhinged. But it may all backfire.
Ironically, the scandal-plagued Democrat candidate denounced what she called the “paranoid fringe” in American politics — even while sounding unusually paranoid by outlining an imagined global “right-wing” conspiracy of immense proportions apparently led by former KGB boss Vladimir Putin of Russia. Clinton also blamed Trump for everything from school bullying to making “hate” mainstream.
Unsurprisingly, critics were quick to ridicule Clinton and her campaign — not only for her own racism controversies, including her praise for a notorious KKK leader and racist Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, but also for unhinged paranoia. Her speech was praised by racists, though, because, at least according to Clinton, their hate is now becoming acceptable in mainstream society. At least that is what Clinton and the KKK want Americans to believe.
Speaking in Reno, Nevada, Clinton hammered Trump for alleged racism without ever citing a proper example or evidence to support her claim. Earlier this week, her campaign even released an advertisement equating the Republican nominee with the Ku Klux Klan. And in her speech, she kept hammering on that theme — doing precisely what she falsely accused Trump of doing.
“From the start, Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” Clinton argued. “He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.”
In particular, Clinton attacked Trump for highlighting problems he said were plaguing black communities, including poverty, “horrible education,” high crime levels, and more. “Trump is reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters,” she argued.
“A man with a long history of racial discrimination, who traffics in dark conspiracy theories drawn from the pages of supermarket tabloids and the far reaches of the internet, should never run our government or command our military,” Clinton continued as growing scandals threaten to crush her campaign and potentially send her to prison. “And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called ‘Birthers.’”
Clinton seized on Trump’s previous questions about Obama’s citizenship, too, bizarrely suggesting that questions about citizenship were somehow racist. “He promoted the racist lie that President Obama isn’t really an American citizen — part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black President,” the Democrat nominee said, without explaining why or how citizenship questions could be racist.
Ironically, it was Clinton’s 2008 campaign that did precisely that when it circulated a picture of Obama wearing an African Muslim outfit during a visit to Kenya. Obama’s campaign manager at the time, David Plouffe, was quoted in media reports describing the “dirty tricks operation” as “the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election.” Oops!
Clinton then continued to lie. “In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie,” she said. “He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals.” Of course, in the real world, Trump explicitly referred to a subset of immigrants, and even noted that there was some “good people” coming too. Even hardcore leftists and Bernie Sanders supporters have blasted the dishonesty of claiming Trump said Mexicans are rapists. He did not.
Then, Clinton, perhaps one of the world’s best known conspiracy theorists due to her infamous theory about a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” attacked Trump for allegedly pushing conspiracy theories. “Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS,” she said. “And then he repeated that nonsense over and over.”
First of all, Trump never said it was a conspiracy — conspiracies by definition require secrecy, and Obama and Clinton were openly showering support on jihadists in Syria for years. Secondly, it is not a theory, it is a fact. Clinton knows that well, considering the fact that she received a 2012 e-mail with a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report describing an ongoing Obama-backed plot to support al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood — with a goal of eventually creating a fundamentalist Islamic State in Eastern Syria.
“This is what happens when you treat the National Enquirer like Gospel,” Clinton continued. “It’s what happens when you listen to the radio host Alex Jones, who claims that 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombings were inside jobs…. Trump didn’t challenge those lies. He went on Jones’ show and said: ‘Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.’”
Of course, Alex Jones is one of the most popular radio hosts in America, pulling in huge and energetic audiences that dwarf the readership of the increasingly discredited establishment media. With millions of ardent followers, Trump would have been foolish not to seek out Jones and other figures to capitalize on their influence and supporters.
In a series of videos, Alex Jones and his news service Infowars struck back hard, making a mockery of Clinton, her hatred, her lies, and her bizarre conspiracy theories. In one video, Jones pointed to the Clinton family’s long history of friendship and support for late former KKK Grand Wizard Robert Byrd, a recruiter for the racist organization whom Clinton called her “friend and mentor.” Even the far-left Snopes “fact checking” website could not deny it. Separately, Clinton has lavished praise on racist eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who spoke to KKK gatherings about her efforts to “exterminate the Negro” and others she called “human weeds” from the gene pool.
In another video, Jones pointed out that Clinton used shady tactics to steal the Democrat Party nomination, as evidenced by hacked e-mails. The popular radio host also noted that Clinton was in major trouble as more evidence of her brazen criminal activity continues to emerge — not to mention the destruction of Libya, the illegal support for jihad terrorism, and more. Separately, he blasted Clinton for her “lies” about him, Trump, and more.
In another video, Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson featured an image of Clinton wearing a tin-foil hat. He said Clinton had “walked straight into a trap” that would end up boosting the very people she was attacking. “This has backfired more than any of us could ever dream of,” he said, adding that hundreds of thousands of new readers had been coming to their websites.
Clinton then tried dishonestly to link the “conspiracy theories” she does not approve of with racism. “Now, some people will say that his bluster and bigotry is just over-heated campaign rhetoric — an outrageous person saying outrageous things for attention,” Clinton said. “But look at the policies Trump has proposed. They would put prejudice into practice.”
Among other examples, she cited his support for deporting illegal immigrants as required by federal law. Ironically, Clinton herself voted repeatedly to fund a wall on the border to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to America. She also cited Trump’s argument for temporarily stopping Islamic immigration into the United States, a policy supported by most Americans in polls.
Then Clinton took shots at what is known as the “alt-right,” or alternative right. The largely leaderless so-called “alt-right” is notoriously difficult to define. Leftists, globalists, and establishment “conservatives” often vilify the movement as racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, white nationalist, and so on. While some self-styled members of the “alt-right” might fall in one or more of those categories, those ideas do not define the emerging movement.
Indeed, for many in the movement, the alt-right’s defining characteristic is that it opposes the moldy and increasingly irrelevant “establishment conservatism,” or “cuckservatism” — basically the fake “conservative” wing of the establishment pushing globalism, statism, war-mongering, open borders, and cronyism. Instead, alt-right enthusiasts seem to favor nationalism as opposed to globalism, and, generally at least, limited government. Nationalism appears to be the main unifying theme: the idea that nation-states are good, and global government and “multiculturalism” are not.
Clinton also lashed out at Trump’s decision to hire as CEO of his presidential campaign former Breitbart.com chief Steven Bannon, who apparently told socialist magazine Mother Jones that his website was “the platform for the alt-right.” Among other headlines from the enormously popular site, which also has readership levels that dwarf most of the “establishment” media, Clinton highlighted several that criticized feminism, gun control, and anti-Confederate flag zealots.
“The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘Alt-Right’,” Clinton said. “A fringe element has effectively taken over the Republican Party…. The paranoid fringe now calls itself ‘alt-right.’ But the hate burns just as bright.” Comments about the “fringe” taking over are especially ironic considering the presence of multiple known communists and socialists this year on the Democrat Party Platform Committee.
Breitbart blasted the absurd idea that its 31 million readers last month are “racists, white supremacists, and members of the Ku Klux Klan.” The website also quoted a black pastor and Trump supporter, Mark Burns, lambasting Clinton over the “repulsive” and “revolting” rhetoric.
Ironically, to make her case, Clinton cited the notoriously discredited Southern Poverty Law Center, a radical outfit widely ridiculed as an anti-Christian hate group that celebrates admitted communist terrorists and has been denounced even by many major left-wing leaders. Citing the SPLC, which was cited in a federal investigation by a convicted anti-Christian terrorist as his inspiration, Clinton said Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” She also accused Breitbart of “race-baiting,” “anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas,” and more, all of which are apparently “key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”
The SPLC routinely attacks this magazine and the constitutionalist John Birch Society, which publishes it, as a “Patriot” group. (For the SPLC, “patriot,” while not quite racist or hateful, is also supposed to be a negative term.) Last year, the SPLC even outlined a Clinton-style conspiracy theory involving the JBS and conspiracy theorists, who are apparently all over and on the verge of taking over. Almost everyone to the right of Obama and Clinton seems to be involved in the imaginary conspiracy.
Before Clinton outlined her latest conspiracy theories, Jeet Heer, senior editor at the far-left New Republic, suggested that the John Birch Society was actually responsible for the rise of Trump and that “Trumpism” is basically “Bircherism,” In that article, Heer also libeled the Society with easily discredited falsehoods (for example he claimed JBS used to be anti-Semitic even though it has had Jewish leaders since its founding and anti-Semites have always been expelled) that will be addressed in an upcoming article. Heer has written some reasonably insightful commentary on these issues more recently, though. And since being made aware of the fact errors and libels in his original article, to his credit, he has not repeated them again.
Apparently Clinton’s global conspiracy of racists and conspiracy theorists is “part of a broader story — the rising tide of hardline, right-wing nationalism around the world,” she said. “Just yesterday, one of Britain’s most prominent right-wing leaders, Nigel Farage, who stoked anti-immigrant sentiments to win the referendum on leaving the European Union, campaigned with Donald Trump in Mississippi.” Of course, Farage won a historic victory when British voters rejected the constant lies about him — similar to the “racism” campaign deployed against Trump — and voted for Brexit to leave the European Union.
Then, Clinton’s conspiracy theory gets even more bizarre. “The godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism is Russian President Vladimir Putin,” Clinton said. “Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embraces pro-Russian policies.” While Trump has indeed made some dubious statements about Russia and Putin that sparked alarm among many segments of the conservative movement, the notion that Putin is leading a global conspiracy of right-wing nationalists, is, well, pretty wild, and has been widely ridiculed.
As Clinton becomes increasingly paranoid and detached from reality in her public statements, some analysts have suggested it is all a campaign tactic or evidence of senility. By demonizing tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of Americans as racists, though, Clinton is playing a dangerous game. She is also doing a major disservice to legitimate efforts to expose and oppose racism, because if everyone and everything is racist, then nothing is racist and the word becomes meaningless. Trump may not be perfect or ideal — and depending on one’s own political beliefs, he may or may not be a good candidate. But in criticizing him, critics and Clinton should at least remain within the bounds of reality.
Photo of Hillary Clinton: AP Images
Disclosure: This writer and others with The New American magazine regularly appear on the Alex Jones Show. Writers for this publication have also written for Breitbart.com.
The New American never endorses candidates. Our purpose is to inform the electorate and enable them to draw their own conclusions.
Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU.
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