They’re still attacking Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News with lies. They’re trying to undermine President-elect Donald Trump. But their real target is: You.
You, the Breitbart News reader. You, the Donald Trump voter. And you, the American people — because they want to send a message to anyone who would dare stand up to the media, or the establishment of either party: If you dare to fight back, you will be destroyed.
You took your country back. And they will never forgive you for it.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been forced to walk back false claims that Bannon — now the incoming White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor — is an antisemite. It has also dropped the false claim that Breitbart is the “premier” alt-right website.
But the ADL launched those defamatory claims and let them fester for days, while journalists busied themselves scaring the American public and slandering Breitbart readers as “white supremacists and anti-Semites.”
The bigger issue is that they cannot accept that Bannon, and Breitbart, understand the American public better than they do. They are seeking their revenge — not just against Breitbart News itself, but against our growing audience.
That is an audience of 45 million unique visitors to Breitbart.com over the past 30 days. That is an audience that likely includes many of Trump’s 61 million voters. And it is an audience that includes Democrats, too — those who demand reform within their own party.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — the victim of Democrats’ election-rigging — tweeted before the election: “I do not believe that most of the people who are thinking about voting for Mr. Trump are racist or sexist … most are people who are hurting.”
Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, who warned Democrats about Trump’s appeal in the Upper Midwest, told MSNBC after the election: “They’re not racists. They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America we live in.”
Liberal intellectual Thomas Frank laid the blame for Trump’s victory at the feet of the media, who pretended “[w]orking-class people weren’t supporting Trump. And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.”
Frank added: “The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them.”
The media have learned nothing from their defeat. They are recycling the exact same false allegations that were used against Bannon, and Trump, during the election — and which voters ignored at the polls.
On Sunday morning, CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of Reliable Sources, called for “serious media soul-searching” because viewers were “having a very hard time trusting this channel.” Yet by Sunday evening, he was claiming, falsely, that Breitbart is “a website that thrives with white nationalist rhetoric.”
They simply cannot help themselves. Blinded by hatred, they will lie about anything, and anyone, to reverse Election Day.
Hillary Clinton called Trump voters “the basket of deplorables … the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Voters answered with their ballots.
Some leftists understood the message. But the media refused to listen. They have indulged the riots in American cities. They will destroy the country to spite you.
You, the deplorables. We, the people.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.