Ta-Nehisi Coates: How Breitbart Conquered the Media
This is what Andrew Breitbart, and his progeny, ultimately understood. What Shirley Sherrod did or did not do really didn’t matter. White racial grievance enjoys automatic credibility, and even when disproven, it is never disqualifying of its bearers. It is very difficult to imagine, for instance, a 9/11 truther, who happened to be black, becoming even a governor. And yet we live in an era in which the country’s leading birther might well be president. This fact certainly horrifies some of the same journalists who attacked Clinton this weekend. But what they have yet to come to grips with is that Donald Trump is a democratic phenomenon, and that there are actual people–not trolls under a bridge–whom he, and his prejudices against Latinos, Muslims, and blacks, represent.
And how to deal with that is one of the political decisions that will be implicitly made this election season. And at the moment we look like we are lapsing into polite Coolidgism, with the media leading the way. That’s regardless or who wins the Presidency.