The mainstream media, having failed to derail or even anticipate Donald Trump’s victory, have now seized on discrediting one of the architects of his victory, calling Navy veteran, entrepreneur, and Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon a “white nationalist”. They cite as evidence some Breitbart headlines designed to provoke and attract readers as being beyond the pale. Compared to what? The New York Times, perhaps?
Publishers don’t necessarily control every jot and tittle of content in their publications, but if one concedes the point of Bannon’s critics, those who have problems with Bannon advising Trump had no problem with race-baiter Al Sharpton serving as adviser to President Obama on, of all things, race relations: As Politico magazine reported:
A few days after 18-year-old Mike Brown was gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, White House officials enlisted an unusual source for on-the-ground intelligence amid the chaos and tear gas: the Rev. Al Sharpton, a fiery activist who became a household name by provoking rather than pacifying….
In Ferguson, Sharpton established himself as a de facto contact and conduit for a jittery White House seeking to negotiate a middle ground between meddling and disengagement. “There’s a trust factor with The Rev from the Oval Office on down,” a White House official familiar with their dealings told me. “He gets it, and he’s got credibility in the community that nobody else has got. There’s really no one else out there who does what he does.”
Let us be grateful for that. If one wanted to send a sane message about justice and peace, Al Sharpton is arguably the worst person to call. He is an instigator, not a peacemaker, someone who rose out of obscurity by propagating the false Tawana Brawley rape case in which New York city cops were accused of raping a black teenager. As Investor’s Business Daily noted, Tawana Brawley paid for her part in that big lie. Al Sharpton never has.
Sharpton embraced the “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra meant to indict racist cops and police departments after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri after he committed a strongarm robbery on his way to assaulting Officer Darren Wilson. Blessed are the peacemakers, but Al Sharpton is not one of them.
The Sharptons of the world don’t want to solve the real problems of the black community, preferring to exploit back unrest with clueless race-baiting such as when Sharpton and his National Action Network organized the “Justice for All” March in Washington, D.C. last December:
“You thought you’d sweep it under the rug. You thought there’d be no limelight,” he said. “We are going to keep the light on Michael Brown, on Eric Garner, on Tamir Rice, on all of these victims because the only way — I’m sorry, I come out of the ‘hood — the only way you make roaches run, you got to cut the light on.”
As IBD notes, Al Sharpton has made career of anti-Semitic and racial agitation:
Sharpton has made a career of racial incitement. He once called Jews “diamond merchants” and described whites moving businesses into Harlem as “interlopers.”
