In a campaign appearance at a community college in Reno, NV, Hillary Clinton delivered a searing barn-burner of a speech denouncing moldy prawn burrito Donald Trump’s racism and how his campaign has stoked the raging fire of the alt-right movement to dangerous effect.
In a tight 31-minute speech delivered with a simmering anger, Clinton simply pointed to the facts: that Donald Trump is a bigot who courts extreme conservatives on the fringe of the Republican party by “reinforcing harmful stereotypes and offering a dog whistle to his most hateful supporters.”
Clinton didn’t directly acknowledge Trump’s sudden about-face and the great “softening” in his rhetoric towards immigrants and people of color, but by laying out in no uncertain terms the nature of his campaign, doing everything but calling him a racist directly. She called out the litany of “racist lies” Trump has claimed as fact during this campaign, from calling Mexican immigrants “rapists and criminals” to that old chestnut about President Obama not being an American citizen –“part of a sustained effort to delegitimize America’s first black President.”
Here’s a particularly stirring bit, from the transcript of the full speech at Fusion., describing Trump’s continued public wooing of white supremacists and the alt-right.
This is someone who retweets white supremacists online, like the user who goes by the name “white-genocide-TM.” Trump took this fringe bigot with a few dozen followers and spread his message to 11 million people.
His campaign famously posted an anti-Semitic image – a Star of David imposed over a sea of dollar bills – that first appeared on a white supremacist website.
The Trump campaign also selected a prominent white nationalist leader as a delegate in California. They only dropped him under pressure.
The speech really hit its stride when Clinton brought Trump’s latest hire, Stephen Bannon of Breitbart, who was brought on to be the Trump campaign’s CEO. Echoing this very effective DNC ad released Tuesday, Clinton read a few headlines, from “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” to “Hoist It High And Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims A Glorious Heritage.”
This served as a nice lead-in to Clinton addressing the alt-right movement, which has grown horrible leathery wings and taken flight in this election year, encouraged by Trump’s support. “The de facto merger between Breitbart and the Trump Campaign represents a landmark achievement for the ‘Alt-Right,’” she said. “A fringe element has taken over the Republican Party.”
Clinton paints an ominous picture of what could be under a Trump presidency: a nation run by a megalomaniacal racist who traffics in hate and white nationalism while only looking out for himself.
Watch the full speech below.