Following Donald Trump’s appointment of Stephen K. Bannon, the head of Breitbart News, as his new campaign chairman, the Clinton campaign has begun attacks on the conservative news website.
Yesterday, the Clinton campaign sent out an email describing Breitbart as “a fringe website where there’s no opinion too ugly, too divisive, or too outright crazy to be worth breathless promotion.”
The email didn’t just condemn the site’s reporting, but claimed Breitbart doesn’t have the right to exist at all.
“Now, we’ve had a conservative media in this country for a while. I don’t always like what they have to say, but I respect their role and their right to exist,” said the email from Clinton’s deputy communications director Christina Reynolds.
“Breitbart is something different. They make Fox News look like a Democratic Party pamphlet. They’re a different breed altogether — not just conservative but radical, bigoted, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic conspiracy peddlers who never have been and never should be anywhere near the levels of power in this country.”
The email continues, “It goes without saying that we have to beat these people. But I want to beat them so decisively that their kind never rises again.”
Allum Bokhari, a co-editor at Breitbart Tech, told Red Alert Politics:
“Over the past few days, we’ve seen an orgy of hand-wringing from commentators about Peter Thiel’s role in the demise of Gawker, despite the fact that the blog clearly broke privacy laws. The same commentators argue that Donald Trump is a threat to freedom of the press because he wants a stronger libel regime. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, wants to destroy Breitbart not because of libel or privacy, but because she doesn’t like our politics. Yet, I expect there will be only silence from the new self-proclaimed defenders of press freedom.”
Reynolds’ email concludes with a request for donations to “send Donald Trump and Steve Bannon back to the fringes where they belong.”
