Color of Change, an activist group co-founded by former White House adviser Van Jones, has unveiled a new target: “racism” at The Huffington Post.
Conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart, who authored two recent entries for The Huffington Post, is the cause of Color of Change’s outrage.
The first entry by Breitbart was featured prominently on the site. The March 11 post, titled “NPR Is Collateral Damage in Battle to Brand Tea Party,” addressed tension between the mainstream media and the Tea Party. It also stated that there was no evidence that the Tea Party was racist.
The other post by Breitbart, from March 22, criticized the White House for being insufficiently transparent in the posting of visitor logs.
Breitbart’s post about NPR and the Tea Party infuriated Color of Change. In a Wednesday alert to supporters, the organization said that its prominent placement on The Huffington Post “shows a lack of journalistic integrity, and it’s frankly an insult to our communities.”
“Andrew Breitbart is a liar and a race-baiter,” wrote the organization. “Breitbart targets key people and institutions within our community, in particular those who have dared talk about the reality of racism and race in this country — Shirley Sherrod, the NAACP, President Obama, the Congressional Black Caucus. And he targets those that seek to increase Black political participation, like ACORN.”
The activist group launched an online letter-writing campaign targeting Arianna Huffington. The form letter reads: “I urge you to stop promoting his work immediately, and publicly explain why Breitbart’s work was promoted to the front page.”
Color of Change warned that if The Huffington Post does not respond favorably to their campaign, “then Black America and our allies should abandon The Huffington Post and get our information elsewhere.”
In a phone interview with The Daily Caller, Breitbart responded to the Color of Change campaign, saying, “Bring it on, punks.”
“Van Jones is a commie punk,” Breitbart told TheDC. “He was exposed to a great extent because of the hard journalism that was done at my website, that exposed him as a guy who was an unvetted liability to the Obama administration. He was forced to step down because of my journalistic work.”
Breitbart said that he wasn’t surprised by the campaign. “This is what the left does, they don’t believe in free speech. They want to shut up Fox News, they want to shut up people that disagree with them, they want to shut up the Tea Party,” Breitbart said. “The number one reason why they want to bring up race is because I am the one who exposed the lie that the ‘N’ word was hurled at [Democratic] Congressmen [Andrew] Carson [of Indiana] and [John] Lewis” of Georgia at a Tea Party rally in front of the Capitol.
Breitbart told TheDC that he is a strong supporter of black conservatives, naming Florida Republican Rep. Allen West as “the best possible candidate for the conservative movement.” He also made the point that he exposed racist speech against African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at a recent anti-Koch brothers protest.
“The Tea Party movement is filled with the strongest voices from the conservative black movement in this country. I am their number one proponent,” Breitbart said. “My goal is to eradicate the term ‘Uncle Tom’ that the left and the media use to frame conservative blacks.”
“I believe that Van Jones, and Color of Change, and ACORN poison the black community with propaganda that divides this country. Van Jones is a human toxin, ACORN was a human toxin. These are poisonous, venomous forces within the American experience,” Breitbart said. He added, “I will expose them like the cockroaches that they are.”
Breitbart expressed doubt that Arianna Huffington would give in to the demands of the Color of Change campaign.
“Arianna can do whatever she wants. But Arianna Huffington has known me for close to 15 years, I have worked in her house around her children,” Breitbart told TheDC. “She knows that I’m not what they are accusing me of. And she knows that these are the tactics of many on the left, because when she was on the right she was the object of this type of Alinskyan attack as well.”
“My prediction is that she’s not going to be threatened by this,” Breitbart said. “I don’t think that she is going to acquiesce to the obnoxious and transparent tactics to shut up dissent.”
Breitbart noted that he had a long history with The Huffington Post, despite the recent attention drawn to his articles. “I was one of the co-founders and co-creators of The Huffington Post. My stated mantra at the time was that I believe in more voices, not less,” Breitbart said.
“I have the exact opposite view on free speech that these left-wing freaks at Color of Change have: More voices, not less,” Breitbart added. “They’re totalitarians, and they don’t like that I call them for what they are: totalitarians.” He said that the campaign organizers adhered to an ideology of “free speech for me, not for thee.”
“Van Jones is a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak. And a commie. And an eco-fraudster,” Breitbart said. A few kind words were volunteered for Jones: praise for being “spectacularly well-dressed.”
Mario Ruiz, The Huffington Post’s senior vice president for media relations, told TheDC that Breitbart will not be censored in response to the campaign.
“From the beginning, The Huffington Post has welcomed voices from all sides of the political spectrum, including conservatives,” Ruiz wrote in an email. “The idea being that dialogue — from a wide range of perspectives — is preferable to silence.”
“The fact that Andrew Breitbart’s first post on our site drew over 1,635 comments, conducted in a civil manner, seems to validate the premise and the decision to publish his blog post,” Ruiz wrote.