Blue State Blues: Fact-Check Top 20 Lies in Hillary’s ‘Alt-Right’ Speech
Andrew Breitbart would have been proud: on Thursday, his website became Hillary Clinton’s number one target.
In his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!, Andrew recalled how he warned the Tea Party what lay ahead for them: “I said that they’d be labeled racists and hate mongers and violent criminals, that they’d be depicted as the dregs of society, people to be excluded from dinner parties because of their made-up closet KKK status. They were about to be targeted.”
Andrew added: “They need to marginalize and demonize those that would stand up to their hardball, toxic, and antidemocratic tactics … But it won’t work. Given a fair hearing, given just the slightest exposure — and the American people will rise to the occasion. They see these tactics for what they are.”
Conservatives will never be “given” a fair hearing. But I made sure I was personally on hand in Reno to hear Hillary Clinton’s lies, wearing my Breitbart shirt.
Here are the 20 worst lies in her speech, in chronological order.
1. [Trump’s rhetoric] is like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for President of the United States. On the contrary, Barack Obama has specialized in divisive rhetoric, both as a candidate (“bitter clingers,” “typical white person“) and as president. And, of course, Hillary Clinton often uses racist language. In 2008, she pandered to “hard-working … white Americans”; in 2016, she borrows from Black Lives Matter, talking about “white privilege” and “systemic racism.”
2. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties. Donald Trump has nothing to do with hate groups, but a “radical fringe” has been in charge of the Democratic Party for a decade — and she was its first victim, in the 2008 primaries. Since then, the party’s leaders have embraced the Occupy Wall Street protests and the Black Lives Matter movement — which she still supports despite its incitement against police.
3. In just the past week, under the guise of “outreach” to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of largely white audiences and described black communities in insulting and ignorant terms: “Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership. Crime at levels nobody has seen… Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.” Ironically, Clinton said that in front of a “largely white” audience in Reno. But consider what she is saying: if you speak honestly about problems in the black community, you are racist. That is how political correctness has imprisoned blacks for 50 years, ever since (Democrat) Pat Moynihan tried to talk about the crisis in the black family.
4. A man with a long history of racial discrimination. Trump has no history whatsoever of racial discrimination. At the Democratic National Convention last month, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley fled from the camera rather than cite one single example of anything Trump had said about black people, much less done. Clinton cited a handful of lawsuits by the Department of Justice — a department which recently tried suing Louisiana school districts for helping black students.
5. And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.” The “Birther” movement started among Hillary Clinton’s own supporters in 2008, encouraged by a candidate with a deliberate strategy of painting her opponent as not fully American. Her campaign also encouraged suspicions that Obama is a secret Muslim. If Trump is a racist for asking for Obama’s birth certificate, then Hillary Clinton is an even bigger racist than he.
6. In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Trump’s statement was over-broad, but he was not describing “immigrants.” He was describing illegal aliens. He did specifically add: “And some, I assume, are good people.” What the Clinton campaign does not want to acknowledge, in its push for open borders and total amnesty, is that some illegal aliens from Mexico do rape and murder.
7. This is someone who retweets white supremacists online. Trump is constantly on Twitter, and retweets many people. If he were interested in retweeting white supremacists, we would see many examples — not one or two inadvertent retweets among thousands. If you want to find extremism on Twitter, visit Hillary Clinton’s own Twitter feed, tweeting and retweeting Black Lives Matter. The day after police officers were murdered in Dallas, she was tweeting about white racism. Appalling.
8. His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website. The Trump campaign didn’t realize the image was antisemitic, and did not know its origins. It changed the image after complaints. But look at the overt antisemitism in the Clinton campaign: a plan discussed by party officials to use Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ religion against him, for example, which Clinton never condemned.
9. When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack. What Clinton leaves out, of course, is that Trump had already denounced Duke and the KKK several times — including the day before that CNN interview. She falsely paints his repeated denunciation, in the days after the interview, as backtracking.
10. Trump said thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t. “Thousands” did not, but a handful did. Breitbart News did much of the legwork uncovering the truth behind what actually happened in New Jersey, and it was clear that a minority of American Muslims celebrated the attack. Clinton can barely bring herself even to acknowledge radical Islamic terror, so it is no surprise she would persist in her denial. But she has to lie in order to do so.
11. Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS. And then he repeated that nonsense over and over. This complaint might be taken seriously were it not a response to Clinton’s lie that Trump is the “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS. Trump’s claim that Obama (and Clinton) “founded” ISIS, by allowing a vacuum in Iraq, is an exaggeration of what happened, but Clinton’s claim that Americans are to blame for terror by criticizing Islam actually does the terrorists’ work for them.
12. It’s another reason why Donald Trump is simply temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States. This is a lie for the simple reason that it is what Democrats say about nearly every Republican presidential nominee, regardless. In 2008, Obama constantly claimed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) lacked the temperament to be President of the United States.
13. And he’d ban Muslims around the world – 1.5 billion men, women, and children -from entering our country just because of their religion. Trump has since refined his policy to target immigrants and visitors from regions of the world (predominantly Musilm) where terrorism is a problem. But note that the reason for his policy is not because of religion itself, but rather because extremist members of that religion have a horrifyingly frequent habit of terrorism against innocent people.
14. “Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.” Clinton singled out several Breitbart News headlines (among thousands) to claim that the site is racist. The irony of this particular headline, which comes from a guest op-ed, is that Clinton embraced the Confederate flag for decades — not just as First Lady of Arkansas, whose own state flag commemorates the Confederate flag (by her husband’s decree), but later on the campaign trail in 2008.
15. Trump – the only Presidential candidate ever to get into a public feud with the Pope. Every Catholic Democratic presidential candidate who supports abortion is opposed to the Pope. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated that politicians who support abortion should be denied communion. Pope Francis has softened that rhetoric but the conflict remains.
16. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” That is simply a lie, as anyone who reads Breitbart even occasionally would know. And the Southern Poverty Law Center has no credibility left — certainly since a would-be mass shooter used the center’s guide to “hate” groups to target the Family Research Council merely for supporting traditional marriage.
17. That one came shortly after the Charleston massacre, when Democrats and Republicans alike were doing everything they could to heal racial divides. Breitbart tried to enflame them further. On the contrary: as Democrats like Clinton were exploiting the Charleston attack to inflame racial division and push gun control, Breitbart News focused on healing. There are several examples, including Lee Stranahan’s moving account of the makeshift memorial in Charleston.
18. 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. Here Clinton repeats one of the most frequent — and self-defeating — delusions of the anti-Brexit campaign. (Farage has already responded.) The majority of British voters are not bigots; they simply chose sovereignty over foreign bureaucracy.
19. Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies. He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally. How rich this is, coming from a former Secretary of State who championed the Russian “reset” and ensured, after a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation, that a Russian firm controlled by Putin owned 20% of American uranium.
20. Parents and teachers are already worried about what they’re calling the “Trump Effect.” Bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants. There is little evidence to support this claim. But Americans have been bullied — by the Obama administration, which unleashed the IRS on its political enemies, and accused opponents of the Iran deal of making “common cause” with the regime — attacks that Clinton supports.
Andrew Breitbart would have been proud: on Thursday, his website became Hillary Clinton’s number one target.
In his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!, Andrew recalled how he warned the Tea Party what lay ahead for them: “I said that they’d be labeled racists and hate mongers and violent criminals, that they’d be depicted as the dregs of society, people to be excluded from dinner parties because of their made-up closet KKK status. They were about to be targeted.”
Andrew added: “They need to marginalize and demonize those that would stand up to their hardball, toxic, and antidemocratic tactics … But it won’t work. Given a fair hearing, given just the slightest exposure — and the American people will rise to the occasion. They see these tactics for what they are.”
Conservatives will never be “given” a fair hearing. But I made sure I was personally on hand in Reno to hear Hillary Clinton’s lies, wearing my Breitbart shirt.
Here are the 20 worst lies in her speech, in chronological order.
1. [Trump’s rhetoric] is like nothing we’ve heard before from a nominee for President of the United States. On the contrary, Barack Obama has specialized in divisive rhetoric, both as a candidate (“bitter clingers,” “typical white person“) and as president. And, of course, Hillary Clinton often uses racist language. In 2008, she pandered to “hard-working … white Americans”; in 2016, she borrows from Black Lives Matter, talking about “white privilege” and “systemic racism.”
2. He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties. Donald Trump has nothing to do with hate groups, but a “radical fringe” has been in charge of the Democratic Party for a decade — and she was its first victim, in the 2008 primaries. Since then, the party’s leaders have embraced the Occupy Wall Street protests and the Black Lives Matter movement — which she still supports despite its incitement against police.
3. In just the past week, under the guise of “outreach” to African Americans, Trump has stood up in front of largely white audiences and described black communities in insulting and ignorant terms: “Poverty. Rejection. Horrible education. No housing. No homes. No ownership. Crime at levels nobody has seen… Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.” Ironically, Clinton said that in front of a “largely white” audience in Reno. But consider what she is saying: if you speak honestly about problems in the black community, you are racist. That is how political correctness has imprisoned blacks for 50 years, ever since (Democrat) Pat Moynihan tried to talk about the crisis in the black family.
4. A man with a long history of racial discrimination. Trump has no history whatsoever of racial discrimination. At the Democratic National Convention last month, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley fled from the camera rather than cite one single example of anything Trump had said about black people, much less done. Clinton cited a handful of lawsuits by the Department of Justice — a department which recently tried suing Louisiana school districts for helping black students.
5. And let’s not forget Trump first gained political prominence leading the charge for the so-called “Birthers.” The “Birther” movement started among Hillary Clinton’s own supporters in 2008, encouraged by a candidate with a deliberate strategy of painting her opponent as not fully American. Her campaign also encouraged suspicions that Obama is a secret Muslim. If Trump is a racist for asking for Obama’s birth certificate, then Hillary Clinton is an even bigger racist than he.
6. In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. Trump’s statement was over-broad, but he was not describing “immigrants.” He was describing illegal aliens. He did specifically add: “And some, I assume, are good people.” What the Clinton campaign does not want to acknowledge, in its push for open borders and total amnesty, is that some illegal aliens from Mexico do rape and murder.
7. This is someone who retweets white supremacists online. Trump is constantly on Twitter, and retweets many people. If he were interested in retweeting white supremacists, we would see many examples — not one or two inadvertent retweets among thousands. If you want to find extremism on Twitter, visit Hillary Clinton’s own Twitter feed, tweeting and retweeting Black Lives Matter. The day after police officers were murdered in Dallas, she was tweeting about white racism. Appalling.
8. His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website. The Trump campaign didn’t realize the image was antisemitic, and did not know its origins. It changed the image after complaints. But look at the overt antisemitism in the Clinton campaign: a plan discussed by party officials to use Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ religion against him, for example, which Clinton never condemned.
9. When asked in a nationally televised interview whether he would disavow the support of David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump wouldn’t do it. Only later, again under mounting pressure, did he backtrack. What Clinton leaves out, of course, is that Trump had already denounced Duke and the KKK several times — including the day before that CNN interview. She falsely paints his repeated denunciation, in the days after the interview, as backtracking.
10. Trump said thousands of American Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 attacks. They didn’t. “Thousands” did not, but a handful did. Breitbart News did much of the legwork uncovering the truth behind what actually happened in New Jersey, and it was clear that a minority of American Muslims celebrated the attack. Clinton can barely bring herself even to acknowledge radical Islamic terror, so it is no surprise she would persist in her denial. But she has to lie in order to do so.
11. Just recently, Trump claimed President Obama founded ISIS. And then he repeated that nonsense over and over. This complaint might be taken seriously were it not a response to Clinton’s lie that Trump is the “recruiting sergeant” for ISIS. Trump’s claim that Obama (and Clinton) “founded” ISIS, by allowing a vacuum in Iraq, is an exaggeration of what happened, but Clinton’s claim that Americans are to blame for terror by criticizing Islam actually does the terrorists’ work for them.
12. It’s another reason why Donald Trump is simply temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States. This is a lie for the simple reason that it is what Democrats say about nearly every Republican presidential nominee, regardless. In 2008, Obama constantly claimed that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) lacked the temperament to be President of the United States.
13. And he’d ban Muslims around the world – 1.5 billion men, women, and children -from entering our country just because of their religion. Trump has since refined his policy to target immigrants and visitors from regions of the world (predominantly Musilm) where terrorism is a problem. But note that the reason for his policy is not because of religion itself, but rather because extremist members of that religion have a horrifyingly frequent habit of terrorism against innocent people.
14. “Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.” Clinton singled out several Breitbart News headlines (among thousands) to claim that the site is racist. The irony of this particular headline, which comes from a guest op-ed, is that Clinton embraced the Confederate flag for decades — not just as First Lady of Arkansas, whose own state flag commemorates the Confederate flag (by her husband’s decree), but later on the campaign trail in 2008.
15. Trump – the only Presidential candidate ever to get into a public feud with the Pope. Every Catholic Democratic presidential candidate who supports abortion is opposed to the Pope. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated that politicians who support abortion should be denied communion. Pope Francis has softened that rhetoric but the conflict remains.
16. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, Breitbart embraces “ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right.” That is simply a lie, as anyone who reads Breitbart even occasionally would know. And the Southern Poverty Law Center has no credibility left — certainly since a would-be mass shooter used the center’s guide to “hate” groups to target the Family Research Council merely for supporting traditional marriage.
17. That one came shortly after the Charleston massacre, when Democrats and Republicans alike were doing everything they could to heal racial divides. Breitbart tried to enflame them further. On the contrary: as Democrats like Clinton were exploiting the Charleston attack to inflame racial division and push gun control, Breitbart News focused on healing. There are several examples, including Lee Stranahan’s moving account of the makeshift memorial in Charleston.
18. 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. Here Clinton repeats one of the most frequent — and self-defeating — delusions of the anti-Brexit campaign. (Farage has already responded.) The majority of British voters are not bigots; they simply chose sovereignty over foreign bureaucracy.
19. Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embrace pro-Russian policies. He talks casually of abandoning our NATO allies, recognizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and of giving the Kremlin a free hand in Eastern Europe more generally. How rich this is, coming from a former Secretary of State who championed the Russian “reset” and ensured, after a hefty donation to the Clinton Foundation, that a Russian firm controlled by Putin owned 20% of American uranium.
20. Parents and teachers are already worried about what they’re calling the “Trump Effect.” Bullying and harassment are on the rise in our schools, especially targeting students of color, Muslims, and immigrants. There is little evidence to support this claim. But Americans have been bullied — by the Obama administration, which unleashed the IRS on its political enemies, and accused opponents of the Iran deal of making “common cause” with the regime — attacks that Clinton supports.
