Hillary Clinton plays a rich white woman’s version of the race card By Thomas Lifson
Hillary Clinton may regret her attempt to tar Donald Trump as a racist by linking him to the alt right movement (whatever that is – no such formal organization exists). She went full Southern Poverty Law Center on the Trump campaign, tarring people she disagrees with as racists. (As AT readers know, the SPLC has made a lot of money soliciting contributions from well-meaning people, but has been running out of racists to fight (because racists on the left are invisible to it). So it has resorted to tarring Dr. Ben Carson on its “extremist watch list,” an allegation so absurd that it was forced to issue a totally unconvincing apology.)
In Hillary’s judgment, she use the tactic of guilt-by-association to connect Trump to Steve Bannon to articles published by the website Bannon headed, and those headlines back to Trump. Normally, guilt-by-association is a tactic the left decries as unfair – for instance making any connection between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers.
The problem Hillary faces is she is giving the al right exactly what it wants: attention. And once the alt right gets attention, it starts raising questions in the minds of people that Hillary and the left would prefer remain unspoken.
If there is anyone who can be seen as a spokesman for the alt right, it would be Milo Yiannopoulos, two of whose headlines on Breitbart articles she quoted in her Reno, NV (interesting choice of venue: the city that first gained fame as “America’s divorce capital”).
Milo has fired back in characteristic fashion:
This is precisely what the alt-right is responding to. They post offensive memes because they know it’ll wind up boring, grouchy grannies like Hillary. The speech codes and political correctness of the Left are what has given rise to this vibrant new movement, what has given rise to Donald Trump’s extraordinary popularity, and what gives rise to me — and my fabulous headlines!
They were, by the way: “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive And Crazy” (sorry, no offense, but it’s true!) and “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism Or Cancer?” (no prizes for guessing which readers chose). Little did I realise when I coined the #FeminismIsCancer hashtag that it would end up in the mouth of the Democratic nominee for President.
But there’s something else that Clinton represents. While she obsesses over the ironic memes of dissident youths on the internet, there are Black Lives Matter activists calling for the deaths of white police officers, and there are teaching assistants in American universities hosting courses on “how to stop white males.”
If there’s genuine, noxious and damaging racism in the United States, it isn’t coming from the alt-right, who are responding to it. Much of the alt-right’s rhetoric is designed to illuminate the absurdity of identitarian politics and the blatant hypocrisy and cruelty of the progressive Left. It’s working – and that’s why the Left is so scared.
Hillary is using the same old failed leftist tactics of name-calling, vague allegations and guilt-by-association, but hoping for a different result this time. In other words, she is complaining about a phenomenon she helped to create, thinking she can beat it with the bad habits and lazy smears that fostered it in the first place. Good luck with that!
Milo, if you have never seen or heard him, is openly, flamboyantly gay, smart, articulate, Brit-accented, fast-talking, funny, and could talk rings around Hillary. He, and many on the alt right, are provocateurs, absolutely childish in their revelry at violating taboos, which leads them to do very regrettable things, like resurrecting antisemitic imagery, and creating outrage. Milo openly admits this.
If I were to compare them to BlackLivesMatter, which Hillary has more or less embraced, they have equally disturbing rhetoric, but bigger vocabularies, and absolutely no riots, assassinations, or other actual physical consequences for their rhetoric.
The big danger Hillary faces is that there are serious question which political correctness has repressed that linger in the minds of a large majority of Americans. Starting with this: If it is good for black Americans, Asian Americans and every other group of Americans to celebrate the accomplishments of their culture and seek to preserve them, why is it bad for white people to do this?
Does Hillary really want to give Milo a platform?
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