The Alt-Right Is All Wrong
RENO, Nev. — HILLARY didn’t hang her head and cry, after she shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
She went outside with a big smile and sampled chocolate truffles served on silver and gold trays by a local sweets shop.
After getting steadily bolder at rallies about puncturing her former friend Donald Trump, Clinton channeled Johnny Cash’s song and delivered a coup de grâce so devastating that commentators predicted it will be known simply as the Reno speech. A senior citizen in the crowd raised his fist as he passed the press pen at Truckee Meadows Community College and used a vulgarism to brag that Hillary had kicked Trump in a highly sensitive place.
“Of course there’s always been a paranoid fringe in our politics, steeped in racial resentment,” Clinton said. “But it’s never had the nominee of a major party stoking it, encouraging it, and giving it a national megaphone. Until now.”
In this insane campaign year, Hillary doesn’t even need an oppo-research team digging up nasty stuff about her opponent’s record. She just has to stand there and wait for Trump to open his mouth. Or to wait for his wacky entourage to weigh in. Asked on CNN about his undulating immigration position, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson offered this classic bit of spin: “He hasn’t changed his position on immigration. He’s changed the words that he’s saying.”
In Reno, Hillary simply pointed out the obvious: Trump, who has no fixed ideology of his own except winning, has let himself become a host body for an ugly mélange of people and groups that spew poison, from Breitbart News — its chief, Stephen Bannon, is now helping run Trump’s campaign — to white supremacist David Duke to radio host Alex Jones.
When Anderson Cooper asked Trump on Thursday if he was embracing the alt-right movement, Trump replied like a perfectly oblivious vessel: “I don’t even know — nobody even knows what it is.”
In the same way that the neocons used the uninformed W. as a host body to instigate the Iraq war, the alt-right has staged an Occupy Trump movement, purloining his unmoored campaign as brazenly as cat burglars.
“Racists now call themselves ‘racialists,’” Clinton said. “White supremacists now call themselves ‘white nationalists.’ The paranoid fringe now calls itself alt-right. But the hate burns just as bright.”
The Alt-Right Is All Wrong - NYTimes.com
