Last night Andrew Breitbart had a confrontation with AFL-CIO Chief on the Harvard University Campus about Tea Party racism. Byron York wrote up the exchange at the Washington Examiner:
There was a confrontation last night at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government between AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka and web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart. Trumka was giving a speech entitled “Why Working People are Angry — and Why Politicians Should Listen” in which he made a number of by-now familiar Democratic criticisms of the Tea Party movement and of opponents of Obamacare. Trumka discussed allegations that protesters spat on Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and hurled racial epithets at Rep. John Lewis as they and other lawmakers walked across Capitol Hill shortly before passage of the Democratic health care bill.
In the question-and-answer session, Breitbart said there is no video or audio evidence of either event happening. Breitbart has, in fact, offered a $100,000 award to anyone who produces evidence that the racial insult actually occurred, and so far he has had no takers.
Until now. As Breitbart spoke, Trumka said he himself had seen the events in question. “I watched them spit at people, I watched them call John Lewis the n-word,” Trumka said. “I witnessed it, I witnessed it. I saw it in person. That’s real evidence.” Here is the exchange between the two men, from the Kennedy School video of the event. (The exchange begins with Breitbart’s question at 38:33.
Read the rest of the article here.
As Ben Smith points out in Politico, a focal point of Trumka’s speech was the increasingly popular liberal talking point that the right’s anger with the ever-expanding role of government has turned into dangerous hate… in the “hate crimes” sense of the word.