
Beto O’Rourke Kicks Breitbart Reporter Out of Event to Protect “People of Color”
Barely four months ago, Beto O’Rourke was on as MSNBC town hall show where he vowed to uphold the First Amendment.
“If we don’t have a free press,” O’Rourke said in May, “if we cannot make informed decisions at the ballot box, if we can’t hold people like me accountable, and make sure that we’re held honest to the promises that we made, to the job that we’re performing in these positions of public trust, we’ll lose the essence of our democracy. We need to vigorously defend the freedom of the press.”
Well, that’s easy enough to say in front of sympathetic MSNBC anchors and viewers, all of whom have been indoctrinated into this foolish narrative that says President Trump is trying to curb that freedom. But it’s quite another thing when you’re confronted with a not-so-favorable news outlet. Like, say, Breitbart. And when O’Rourke ejected a Breitbart reporter from his speech at historically black Benedict College this week, he proved that he’s much more thin-skinned than Trump when it comes to adversarial journalism.
According to a statement from the campaign on Wednesday, O’Rourke still believes in press freedom…buuuut Breitbart “walks the line between being news and a perpetrator of hate speech.”
“Given this particular Breitbart employee’s previous hateful reporting and the sensitivity of the topics being discussed with students at an HBCU, a campaign staffer made the call to ask him to leave to ensure that the students attending the event felt comfortable and safe while sharing their experiences as young people of color,” the statement explained.
Well, next time Trump ejects a Univision activist/reporter or any other left-wing fake news purveyor, he can just say that he did it to make the American people as a whole feel “comfortable and safe.” Since it is obviously up to candidates and politicians to now determine, by whatever metric they deem appropriate, which news outlets are REAL news and which ones are just propaganda for their political enemies. That’s really how you want to play this card, Beto?
Breitbart’s response was outstanding: “The false accusation that Breitbart is racist, or that its award-winning reporter — an Orthodox Jew, married to a black woman who serves in the military — is either racist or would make anyone at a black university uncomfortable is absurd. The irony of Mr. O’Rourke — who has stated himself that he is the beneficiary of ‘white privilege’ — purporting to decide for black students who should be banned from events that are open to the press, or what they should feel, is not lost on us.”
Oh well, rest assured that people will still be talking about Breitbart News in a year’s time.
Can the same be said for Beto O’Rourke?