The NYT has a piece titled “Breitbart Rises From Outlier to Potent Voice in Campaign”.
This is good news.
At this point in time, any press is good press for the Alt-Right.
The piece begins:
Breitbart News has arrived.
The opinion and news site, once a curiosity of the fringe right wing, is now an increasingly powerful voice, and virtual rallying spot, for millions of disaffected conservatives who propelled Donald J. Trump to the Republican nomination for president.
Known for gleefully bashing the old Republican establishment, Breitbart now finds itself at the center of the party’s presidential campaign. Its longtime chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, was named campaign chief by Mr. Trump, whose nationalist, conspiracy-minded message routinely mirrors the Breitbart worldview.
On Facebook, it rivals news organizations like The Washington Post and Yahoo, and it has challenged conservative favorites like Fox News in its influence on the campaign, if not in size of audience.
I honestly don’t understand why HC mentioned Breitbart News by name. She is (intentionally? unintentionally?) leading millions of individuals to check out the site. If truth has any chance of ultimately breaking through the concrete, like newly born blades of grass busting through a sidewalk, then this can only be (ultimately) good news for the cause.
The NYT piece answers the above conundrum: “We think it’s important that people understand what Trump stands for, and what these groups stand for, and what it means that he echoes them,” said Glen Caplin, a Clinton campaign spokesman.
The Hag’s team is essentially counting on the notion that the more new people visit Breitbart News, the more they will be horrified and turn against Trump. LOL!
On Thursday, the site received its biggest billing yet — in the form of a scathing condemnation. In a nationally televised speech, Hillary Clinton identified Breitbart as the Democratic Party’s media enemy No. 1, warning about a “de facto merger” between the Trump campaign and a news outlet that she described as racist, radical and offensive.
For Mrs. Clinton, it was a strategic attack that linked Mr. Trump to leading avatars of the hard-line right. But among Breitbart’s ideologically driven journalists, her remarks were taken as validation.
“I’ll play it cool, but not that cool: It was a big moment,” the site’s editor in chief, Alexander Marlow, 30, said in an interview on Friday. “A major presidential candidate engaging us like that, and calling us out directly, was quite thrilling.”
The rise of Breitbart News, founded a decade ago by the provocateur Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, is an unlikely outcome for a small, decentralized news outlet with a penchant for infighting. But it remains an outsize source of controversy — for liberals and even many traditional conservatives — over material that has been called misogynist, xenophobic and racist.
No NYT piece tangentially related to the Alt-Right would be complete without obligatory hand-wringing from America’s most well-funded hate group, the $PLC:
The lovely Heidi Beirich.
For those who track hate groups, Breitbart’s success is particularly alarming.
“Breitbart in the last year or so has consistently picked up themes coming from the alt-right,” said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, using a nickname for a loosely affiliated online movement that includes hard-line nationalists and many supporters of Mr. Trump.
Ms. Beirich said that Breitbart came to her attention because she found that white supremacist websites, like The Daily Stormer, were increasingly linking to its coverage. “To people in the alt-right, who have basically been maligned and haven’t been part of the political system at all, this is a big, big deal,” she said, adding: “Their views are finally in the mainstream.”
Yes, they are Heidi.
