I once heard an amusing anecdote about late F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover. He came out of his front door one morning to find to his horror some kind of animal droppings on his doorstep. Instead of moving on to more pressing matters, Hoover ordered the F.B.I. forensics lab to drop everything else they were working on, and pour all their manpower into finding out what the culprit was.
We saw similar megalomaniacal behaviour from Hillary Clinton in her soon to be infamous ‘Alt-Right Address’. She may think that Trump is Hitler, but with this speech it was clearly Hillary who more resembled a navel-gazing dictator obsessing over imagined enemies of the State in her televised address.
In a clear-cut example of oxymoron, the Democratic Presidential nominee indicated how laughably insignificant a couple of alt-right news sites are, and how they have no place in the U.S national debate by MENTIONING THEM BY NAME in a televised address to the nation that apparently was originally supposed to be about other stuff (swiftly dropped, of course, to prioritise establishing which animals have been s—-ing on her doorstep), and effectively making them very much part of the national debate for millions of less tech-savvy U.S voters who may have otherwise been blissfully unaware of them.
Good job, Hillary. You really showed them. Remember how Megyn Kelly’s stock went through the roof after her very public spat with Donald Trump? Ever wonder why Kelly seems to harbour no ill feelings whatsoever toward him? Because aside from being the first on the scene to cover a disaster or scandal, being attacked by a politician is the best thing that could possibly happen to a journalist or a news organisation. Being part of a scandal is manna from heaven for an Alex Jones or Milo Yiannopoulos. They thrive on it.
I like Breitbart and Infowars as much as the next guy, but it felt completely cringeworthy that a potential leader of the free world has so easily taken the bait from a couple of sites that are as preoccupied with s—stirring as these news organisations are. Clinton claims that Trump has his buttons pushed easily. Pot kettle much?
Hillary’s speech was delusional in many ways. It was a cavalcade of politically-correct nonsense, and she can’t even pull it off with any degree of sincerity. Her pandering to minorities was brimming with the bigotry of low expectations, and everything comes across as a shameless way to get a cheap pop from the crowd (and even then it falls flat).
At a time when even many non-conservatives are tired of political correctness, pay for play and establishment politics, and cringeworthy identity politics, Hillary inexplicably has doubled down on all these tired cliches while ridiculing the innovation of the Trump campaign.
And she’s just so lacking in self-awareness. She thinks that almost choking on a mouthful of SJW cliches (this may explain the frequent coughing fits) will distract people from pulling her up on all of the hypocrisy with some of these awkward questions:
If Trump is so bad for refusing to disavow David Duke, a man who he has never met, what does that make you for having a KKK Grand Wizard as a mentor and attending his funeral?
If Trump is the worst person in the world for supporting and being supported by the alt-right, who to the best of our knowledge have never called for, committed, or inspired a racially-motivated murder (or any other murder or act of violence for that matter, most of them seem to be pacifist, libertarian-leaning computer geeks) what does enabling and supporting the pathologically violent BLM movement make you?
If every political decision is potentially about life or death and in need of a cool head, how do you rate your own performance and involvement in voting to go into Iraq and Libya on a whim, in the destabilisation of Syria, and nurturing the rise of ISIS? Are these the result of a cool head? If so, perhaps someone hotheaded is exactly what the world needs.
How is Trump’s plea to African Americans to give him a shot outrageous or racist in any way, shape, or form, when Democrats have actively kept blacks in their place and actually increased black poverty through the allure of multi-generational welfare dependence, actively encouraging the destruction of the family unit, promoting a kind of genocide through family planning, and the bigotry of low expectations. You people have constructed nothing less than a plantation with a smile. You prevent people from saying mean things even as you whip those they are saying them about. You expect blacks to be grateful as you navel-gaze about micro-aggressions and agitate for division, while their neighbourhoods burn.
The whole appearance was disastrous for the Clinton campaign. How do we know? CNN, Yahoo, and other prominent Clinton donors aren’t reporting on it. Some less-paid-off left media are begrudgingly acknowledging it as a farce and a victory for ‘right wing trolls’. Of course it is. If it had been anything resembling a gotcha moment for her, they’d all be leading with the story.
Hillary just validated Infowars and Breitbart while invalidating herself in an embarrassingly spectacular fashion. Milo couldn’t get accredited with a blue tick from Twitter, but he was just accredited by the former First Lady, and potential leader of the free world, rattling off his headlines.
Likewise, Alex Jones’ sales pitch that a globalist one world government is out to get him just became similarly validated. His Sandy Hook theories may be crazy, but guess what? The Presidential nominee trying to discredit him, when she should be addressing the economy and other matters, just got Alex invited to the big media table.
The only way this could have been any more glorious for critics of Crooked Hillary is if she’d mentioned how crazy David Icke is for saying she has a reptilian tongue while consciously covering her mouth. This entire speech was one long unbecoming regressive left hissy fit. A half hour gaffe. A gamble that didn’t pay off (rather apt given that it was delivered in Reno, Nevada).
For all intents and purposes, she even telegraphed that dealing with micro-aggressions is more of a priority than the small business and employment initiatives that she had originally intended to speak about. Exactly the sort of nonsensical regressive left prioritising that is seeing workers desert the Democrats (and Labor in Australia) in droves.
Again, I like Breitbart and Infowars as much as the next guy. But if I ran a struggling business in Reno, Nevada and had come along specifically to learn more about Democrat business initiatives, I’d be pretty angry that it was put on the back burner in favour of essentially an internet flame war between a bunch of trolls and a childish Presidential nominee who just validated them, and everything they say about her.
I’ve been to the States a few times. The last time, the gap between rich and poor and their domestic industry crisis was more pronounced than ever. The place felt ready to explode. Traditionally wages had been low, but everything was cheap so it all worked. Now wages were still low, but everything was the same price as here, and the homeless are everywhere. It’s an economy in crisis with bigger fish to fry than clutching one’s pearls about a non-PC headline from Breitbart. It’s a nation staring into the abyss.
Any way you look at it, wading into an online battlefield that she has little or no understanding about was a massive misstep for Clinton. Even her most ardent supporters will see this as an awkward ‘parent trying to keep up with all the cool kids’ moment, and worse, as a canyon-sized disconnect between Hillary and reality.
Nothing that she said hurt her opponents in any way. They were merely validated and emboldened in ways they never dreamed were possible. Worse still, she has provided easy fodder for the millions of trolls around the planet that she obviously didn’t consider. These trolls may not even support or agree with Infowars or Breitbart, but will be unable to resist the allure of crapping on the front doorstep of such a high-profile figure who seems so easily preoccupied with them.