Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart revealed the links between then-President Barack Obama and Critical Race Theory guru Derrick Bell nine years ago, but the media tried to bury the story, writes Gabe Kaminsky of The Federalist.

Critical Race Theory is the idea that America’s institutions have been “systemically” racist since the Founding in a way that continues to shape society today, despite the progress made since the Civil War and the civil rights movement.

In a story published Thursday at the online conservative outlet, Kaminsky notes the similarity between the way the establishment media attempted to discredit reporting on Critical Race Theory in 2012, and the way it continues to do so:

After Andrew Breitbart indicated at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he had footage to substantiate that President Barack Obama maintained a relationship with a prominent critical race theorist, it led to a news storm.

…

Joel Pollak, the editor-in-chief at the time and now the current Breitbart editor-at-large, was implicitly called racist on CNN by host Soledad O’Brien, a “smear artist” in The New Yorker, and told in The Nation he was unreasonably rebuking “intellectual leaders in a long tradition of calling on America to address racial unfairness.”

…

Pollak told me, “It was like shouting into a dark room in the early years,” noting the difficulty in years past with getting media to adequately focus on CRT. Just as [journalist Christopher] Rufo recently credited himself and others with having “successfully frozen” the left’s CRT into the American psyche, the media in 2012 launched a campaign to instill the idea that Breitbart and the “right-wing radicals” were promoting nonsense.

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The only difference is that CRT is much more mainstream now than it was then. It’s ubiquitous. And the media is now faced with a reckoning. Can it truly hide something right in front of the people’s eyes like it did last time? Where will it end?

Read Kaminsky’s full article here.

Recently, Media Matters and Salon.com both noted that Breitbart launched the fight against Critical Race Theory in 2012, with Media Matters lamenting that Breitbart’s attack “appears to be working.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.