“It’s so much easier just to discredit people and call them names,” said Bill Clinton at a North Carolina rally on Tuesday. And Hillary proved this just days later, calling roughly a quarter of the electorate a “basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it.”
Making her comments at a New York City “LGBT” fundraiser Friday night, Clinton was referring to half of Donald Trump’s supporters, who she also said were “irredeemable” and “not America.” This lies in contrast to the other “basket” of Trump supporters, said Clinton, “people who feel that government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures.”
Not surprisingly, Clinton’s attack “drew comparisons to President Barack Obama’s comments about clinging to ‘guns and religion’ at a 2008 campaign fundraiser and Mitt Romney’s ‘47 percent’ remark in 2012,” wrote CNN, the latter of which hurt Romney’s campaign because, unlike with Obama’s remark, the media made sure everyone knew about it. It also evoked a response from Trump, who tweeted Saturday, “Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!”
And as far as the weekly polls go, Clinton has already been bleeding support, with some recent surveys showing Trump leading the presidential race. And she did appear in damage-control mode Saturday, reacting to the criticism of her remarks by issuing a statement reading, in part, “Last night I was ‘grossly generalistic,’ and that’s never a good idea. I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong.” Of course, remembering that Clinton is married to a master dissembler once dubbed “the Wizard of Is,” critics may note that she did not say she regretted the sentiments — only her math. One could easily imagine her thinking, “Yeah, I regret saying ‘half’; the correct percentage is 49.5.”
As for intentions, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller spoke for many when saying that Friday night Clinton “ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.” But was it a lowered mask or Machiavellianism? Note that not only did Clinton’s Friday comments appear prepared, but she’d expressed the same sentiments in an interview with Channel 2 News Israel that aired the day before. It thus seems unlikely her remarks were unplanned.
To understand what the method to Clinton’s madness may be, we only need listen to former Clinton insider Larry Nichols. In an interview last year (video below; relevant portion begins at 3:02) with Kevin Gallagher, Nichols described how in the 1970s he was hired by the “kingmakers of Arkansas,” Witt and Jack Stephens of investment bank Stephens, Inc., to help get Bill Clinton elected governor. After meeting with Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham (she wouldn’t tolerate anyone calling her “Clinton” in those days), Nichols reported that the pair was thoroughly unpalatable: Bill was a liar and a womanizer and Hillary a grungy hippie who, Nichols says, would appear wearing a medal around her neck stating “Proud member of the Communist Party USA.” He could not, he told Mr. Witt Stephens, get people to like the Clintons — but he could get them to hate the couple. He explained the strategy: Every person who hates the Clintons will himself have people who hate him. So you rally the haters of the Clinton haters to your side. And thus was born, said Nichols, the political strategy known as “polarity.”
Nothing has changed. Hillary is a most unlikeable candidate who evokes no passion; thus, the only passion that can be used is that of hatred — of the Hillary haters. This is why Clinton is demonizing the “alt-right,” a move which itself is just an update of her 1990s rhetoric about a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to undermine her husband. It’s Polarity 3.0.
It’s important, however, to understand what Clinton is actually attacking in the “alt-right.” Few people knew the term before she made it Exhibit A in her polarity campaign; in fact, it’s so new there isn’t even an entry for it in the Online Etymology Dictionary. Clinton has called it “a hate movement” and sent out a fundraising e-mail describing alt-right news site Breitbart as comprising “radical, bigoted, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy peddlers.” Yet the liberal Associated Press states about the alt-right, “There’s no one way to define its ideology,” and this is for good reason: It contains disparate groups occupying a broad category whose boundaries are difficult to identify. But there is one thing for certain about it: Meaning “alternative right,” it offers an alternative to establishment conservatism and liberalism.
So it’s no surprise that Clinton — a quintessential establishment candidate — would attack it.
In Clinton’s book, no non-establishment individuals need apply. In fact, in the aforementioned fundraising e-mail she contrasted the alt-right media with establishment conservative media, saying about the latter, “I don’t always like what they have to say, but I respect their role and right to exist.” In other words, that’s one right the alt-right doesn’t have.
So strategy aside, Hillary’s statement is a lowered mask, too — one revealing something we’ve seen before. In 2014, for instance, New York governor Andrew Cuomo said that “extreme conservatives … have no place in the state of New York.”
“Not America”? “Right to exist”? “No place in the state of New York”? Does this intolerant leftist attitude explain anything?
Perhaps it explains why Christian businessmen are punished for not servicing faux weddings, why an Atlanta fire chief was sacked for writing a book expressing the Christian view of homosexuality, why the California Supreme Court had banned judges from being affiliated with the Boy Scouts of America, why Twitter permanently suspended the account of alt-right media figure Milo Yiannopoulos, and why a new Massachusetts law may force even churches to comply with “transgender” bathroom policies. When you believe people have “no place” in what you fancy your place, you remove them.
This not only illustrates who the true extremists in this situation are, but also, perhaps, why we don’t ever hear about an alt-left. With today’s liberals defending flesh-trading Planned Parenthood, pushing the unscientific “transgender” agenda, and with the Communist Party USA zealously supporting Clinton, it’s clear that an altered left took over the Democrat establishment a long time ago.
So the alt-right? Clinton & Co. misdirection masters are peddling an alt-candidate who, like Barack Obama, would give us the Altered States of America.
Photo: Hillary Clinton
