Beto O’Rourke campaign admitted they kicked Breitbart reporter Joel Pollak out of a campaign event and said they did so because they believed the news site was “a perpetrator of hate speech.”
“Beto for America believes in the right to a free press and works hard to ensure the campaign reflects that,” campaign spokeswoman Aleigha Cavalier said Wednesday. “However, whether it’s dedicating an entire section of their website to ‘black crime,’ inferring that immigrants are terrorists, or using derogatory terms to refer to LGBTQ people, Breitbart News walks the line between being news and a perpetrator of hate speech.”
The campaign also told CNN they will not limit access to Breitbart again.
Pollack said that a campaign staffer “said that I was being ejected because I had been ‘disruptive’ at past events.” The reporter said he had only been to two different O’Rourke campaign events and only interacted with the candidate when asking a question during a press gaggle.
O’Rourke, 46, has previously said that we “need to vigorously defend the freedom of the press” and pushed back against President Trump’s statement that they are the “enemy of the people.”
