Donald Trump has a problem. Day after day, activists show up and disrupt the would-be president from speaking in response to his calls for banning Muslims from entering the country and to demanding Mexico pay for a wall to keep Mexican immigrants out of the country. There is also a far too longstanding history of Trump bodyguards beating up African-American protestors.
The racial tension at Trump events are of his own creation, yet Breitbart’s John Nolte believes it is a media conspiracy coupled with a relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement. A relationship he says that though it is, “not direct-direct, it is still direct enough.”
In other words, he doesn’t know of a direct connection but wants readers to believe it exists anyway. And who does he blame for this connection? BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, for which Nolte accuses of running a “sleazebag operation.” Nolte thinks this marriage of activism and journalism is somehow a conspiracy to make Trump look bad for increased left-wing media coverage.
Nolte writes of his conspiracy theory:
Just one day after the New York Times compared Trump supporters to Nazis, at last night’s rally, a so-called “Trump supporter” yelled “Sieg Heil!” as a Black Lives Matter protester was hauled away by security.
And get this, BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins just happened to be nearby, not just to witness a different melee but to record a Trump supporter saying, “Light the motherf***er on fire!”
Nolte finds this too “neat” and runs a list of coincidences he finds too perfect to be true and then claims that NBC News and Vox Media must be in on the conspiracy too because they give attention to the protests and don’t focus enough on Trump’s actual speech.
The crux of his conspiracy relies on a report created by another right-wing site The Washington Examiner in which a reporter, Byron York, tells the story of how he believes the Black Lives Matter protestors create their own news story for sites like BuzzFeed.
The protesters who come to Trump’s events, many of them affiliated with some arm of the Black Lives Matter movement, have refined their techniques. It goes like this: They come to a rally, settle into the crowd, and then one of them begins yelling loudly, causing the crowd to react — usually with a chant of “Trump! Trump! Trump!” — and then the protester tries to make the inevitable security removal as long and as noisy as possible.
Nolte cannot seem to fathom that media outlets actually attend events and witness the rowdy and unruly crowds that show up to support Trump, a candidate praised by white supremacist groups and whose very words incite the kind of reaction that Nolte thinks needs media creation.
Trump does not need the media's help in bringing activists to his events. His words will accomplish this with no help from BuzzFeed, NBC, or Vox. When you tell an entire religious group you want to ban them from the country, when you tell an entire nation that are not welcome and will be forced to pay for the oppressive wall you think is needed to keep them out and when you continuously and violently harass people of color at your events, you can rest assured anger will ensue and activists will show up.
There is no conspiracy theory needed. Media outlets simply need to show up to find this kind of hatred at a Trump event. An even stronger argument stands to be made that Trump relishes in this kind of coverage because it does wonders for his poll numbers.
Nolte closes his piece by saying that, “Our media is made up almost entirely of desperate, dishonest left-wing activists, and there is no barrel bottom they will not scrape to elect Hillary Clinton.”
As dishonest as creating a link between the media and the Black Lives Matter movement by only saying the connection is “not direct-direct, it is still direct enough.”? Let’s not even begin to discuss the fact that Breitbart’s own staff believe Trump has paid the site for more than favorable coverage.
