Earlier this month Breitbart London received round condemnation from the press for deliberately publishing misleading news.
Writing on the site, Virginia Hale declared that a “mob” of “more than 1,000 men” attacked police officers and “set Germany’s oldest church alight” on New Year’s Eve.
These claims were quickly dispelled by the German press. Dortmund’s police force clarified that no “extraordinary or spectacular” incidents had occurred. The German news site Ruhr Nachrichten, which had been cited as a source for the Breitbart story, accused the site of “using our online reports for fake news, hate and propaganda”.
Breitbart News Network is no longer a fringe publication: the ultra-right outlet boasted 45 million unique readers in the immediate run up to and aftermath of Donald Trump’s election.
Hale has contributed almost 400 articles to Breitbart’s British arm since December 2014. Worryingly, even a cursory look at her Twitter account reveals both an obsessive preoccupation with race and an active dialogue with the white nationalist leaders of the so-called “alt-right”.
Until very recently, a pinned tweet immediately confronted you with a rant about “white genocide”, a term that has long been used in racist circles to refer to a deliberate campaign of mass immigration, integration and miscegenation conducted by sinister (and often Jewish) elites.
According to Hale, the end goal of such a ‘genocide’ is to turn whites “into hated minorities in our own homelands”.
In other tweets Hale alleges that there is an attack on “white men and Western civilisation in the pursuit of their destruction”. In one tweet she shares an infographic blaming an alleged drop in European IQ levels on immigration.
In yet another she posts a photo of racist abuse spray painted onto a UK mosque with the caption: “Going to call this one as genuine rather than the usual hoax,” alongside a smiling face.
Such poisonous views do not exist in a vacuum. Hale can be seen discussing the fine points of immigration with popular white supremacists such as “alt-right” founder Richard Spencer, of the National Policy Insititute (NPI), Julius Ebola and the self-described fascist Mike Peinovich (aka Mike Enoch) of ‘The Daily Shoah’ podcast and TheRightStuff, who was recently ‘doxxed’ (exposed) as having a Jewish wife.
Alongside Kevin MacDonald of the Occidental Observer and racist vlogger Colin Robertson (aka Millennial Woes, also recently doxxed and exposed) in Scotland, Hale has even made contact with Matthew Heimbach, considered by many to be the face of a new generation of neo-Nazis.
Spencer, credited with coining the term “alt-right” and an effective leader of the loose movement, asserts that there is a symbiotic relationship between the “alt-right” and Breitbart.
“Breitbart has elective affinities with the alt-right and the alt-right has clearly influenced Breitbart,” Spencer told The Daily Beast in 2016. “In this way, Breitbart has acted as a “gateway” to alt-right ideas and writers.”
It is alarming that Spencer, a man who believes forcibly sterilising minorities is a viable route to a white ethno-state, could make this claim about one of the most popular ‘conservative news’ sources on the net.
Unfortunately evidence of this rightwing feedback loop can be found in the content of Hale’s writing, much of which fits into white nationalist narratives.
Article titles include: “Whites Need Not Apply: BBC Advertises ‘Black, Asian Or Minority-Only Positions”, “Islamic Academic: Migrants Want Eurabia, Globalists Using Migrants to Destroy The West” and ‘African Migrants Riot Against ‘Racist’ Italians: ‘Allah Will Guide Us in Revenge’.
Hale’s relentless association of Islam and immigration with social degradation ensures the comment sections of her articles become a toxic sewer of race-baiting, Islamophobia, nativism and conspiracy, populated by the likes of Julius Ebola and Millennial Woes.
Selective and fake news is targeted to appeal to the biases of its audience, and “alt-right” racists are a section of the Breitbart readership that appear well-known to Hale.
It is therefore depressing but unsurprising that Hale would pen an article, as she did about New Year’s Eve in Dortmund, that exaggerates and obfuscates wildly in order, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paper, to create “an image of chaotic civil war-like conditions in Germany, caused by Islamist aggressors”.
The pernicious ideas of the “alt-right” have filtered into Breitbart and, in Hale’s case, so blurred the lines between the two that they end up looking one and the same.
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