WND EXCLUSIVE
IT’S BA-A-ACK! HILLARY’S ‘VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY’
Now campaign claiming conservative media don’t have ‘right to exist’
Bob Unruh
WND.com
Hillary Clinton lashed out at the new phenomena of Internet-driven, alternative media in 1998 when the Drudge Report introduced the world to Monica Lewinsky.
She blamed a “vast right-wing conspiracy” for the scandal before evidence emerged that led to her husband’s impeachment and his infamous explanation, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
It’s a grudge she’s apparently never been able to leave behind, as her campaign’s fundraising email blast this week demonstrates.
In the dispatch, Christina Reynolds, wrote: “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.”
However, that “right to exist” apparently doesn’t include all conservative media.
“Breitbart is something different,” Reynolds wrote. “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 levers of power in this country.”
The email came immediately after GOP nominee Donald Trump named Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News and a former investment banker, to the post of chief executive of his campaign.
The Daily Caller reported Reynolds confirmed that one of the goals of Clinton’s campaign is to “ensure Breitbart is destroyed.”
A pioneer of Internet news in the 1990s, WND cofounder and CEO Joseph Farah recalled that Hillary Clinton has been at odds with the new media since the beginning.
“Hillary Clinton has a long history of intimidation against the alternative media – which simply means those in the press she can’t control,” Farah said.
“I have a lot of experience with this going back more than 20 years,” he explained. “I was targeted by her as one of the founding fathers of the alternative media going back more than two decades. I was a victim of a politically motivated IRS audit back then. And I was the journalist who exposed the broad pattern of the Clinton administration’s use of the IRS as its political attack dog.”
Farah said that what Hillary Clinton is doing now “is just what the Clintons have always done – smear, attack, intimidate, bully, shakedown, punish – without any regard for the First Amendment and their constitutional limitations on power.’
“God forbid the American people give the Clintons another chance after what that wrought on liberty in the 1990s,” he said.
NBC News described the attack on Breitbart as “Clinton’s ‘Right-Wing Conspiracy’ Comes Full Circle With Trump Shake Up.”
The network said the Clintons “have long maintained that a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’ is out to get them” and believe “conservative media outlets, and the donors and political operatives behind them, are responsible for creating what Bill Clinton called a ‘cartoon’ version of his wife: A corrupt, venal, bloodstained – and now sickly – strawman that bares (sic) little resemblance to reality.”
Hillary Clinton trotted out the “conspiracy” claims again only a few months ago, telling a New Hampshire audience it was alive and well although, “At this point it’s probably not correct to say it’s a conspiracy because it’s out in the open,” NBC reported.
VIDEO: House of Clinton
Breitbart opened the throttle on the issue when the Clinton campaign comments appeared, noting that Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook had referred to the site as a “so-called news site.”
He even, according to Breitbart, quoted the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center’s blast at Breitbart in his diatribe.
The Clinton campaign’s Reynolds’ said of Breitbart: “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.”
The campaign also claimed Breitbart was a “fringe website.”
In a statement, Breitbart News CEO Larry Solov and Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow responded.
“Today, the Hillary Clinton campaign has decided to name-call and character assassinate Breitbart News Network and its 31+ million monthly readers,” they wrote. “They say that we are ‘anti-Semitic,’ though our company was founded by Jews, is largely staffed by Jews, and has an entire section (Breitbart Jerusalem) dedicated to reporting on and defending the Jewish state of Israel.
“They call us ‘racist,’ even though her husband’s law enforcement policies led to mass incarceration of blacks. And they call us ‘conspiracy theorists,’ even though Clinton herself was the original ‘birther!’ Yet, according to her team, it’s Breitbart News that is ‘divisive.’
“Fending off charges of hatred and bigotry is nothing new for those who oppose the political and media establishment, but Hillary Clinton is cheapening the meaning of these once-powerful words – and she believes the American people are too stupid to see what she is doing. No wonder only 11% find her honest and trustworthy.”
WND reported only two years ago on the release of the dossiers the Clinton White House kept on its media enemies, including “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” originally some 331 pages.
It was reduced to only 28 pages in the sanitized and heavily redacted version posted by the presidential library.
“The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce refers to the mode of communication employed by the right wing to convey their fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media,” explained the report. “This is how the stream works: Well-funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the Internet where they are bounced into the mainstream media through one of two ways: 1) the story will be picked up by the British tabloids and covered as a major story, from which the American right-of-center mainstream media, (i.e. the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and New York Post) will then pick the story up; or 2) The story will be bounced directly from the Internet to the right-of-center mainstream American media. After the mainstream right-of-center media covers the story, congressional committees will look into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a ‘real’ story.”
The records reveal how the Clinton administration tried to prevent so-called “mainstream media” from picking up such stories. That effort came in several parts:
- The original 331-page report was distributed by the White House and the Democratic National Committee to select reporters in an effort to discredit those behind the critical reports on the Clinton White House – namely billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, journalist Joseph Farah, political activist Floyd Brown and the American Spectator.
- Hillary Clinton’s public relations effort to vilify what she called “the vast right-wing conspiracy.”
- A pattern of politically motivated audits of individuals and organizations by the Internal Revenue Service.
“It’s quite an amazing story,” said Farah at the time the document was released.
In the 1990s, Farah ran the Western Journalism Center, which was audited after the White House sent the IRS a letter from a constituent calling for an investigation.
“It may all have a familiar ring to the tea-party groups of the 21st century. Clinton got away with it, so it was bound to happen again – and it most assuredly has,” Farah said.
The Clinton document stated: “The Internet has become one of the major and most dynamic modes of communication. The Internet can link people, groups and organizations together instantly. Moreover, it allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all. The right wing has seized upon the Internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people. Moreover, evidence exists that Republican staffers surf the Internet, interacting with extremists in order to exchange ideas and information.”
Four of the 28 pages in the redacted report focused on Farah, his history running daily newspapers, his religious views and his investigations into official corruption.
Farah noted the concern expressed in the report about “unregulated data.”
“That’s Hillary, right there,” he said of the report. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she wrote that section herself. A few years later she deplored the fact that the Internet lacks ‘any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function.’”
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http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/its-ba-a-ack-hillarys-vast-right-wing-conspiracy/#dG8lJlimr17xZ2OA.99