Almost ignored in the news that Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus would be becoming Donald Trump’s chief of staff: That Steve Bannon, the man who proudly boasted of his Breitbart.com for anti-Semitism, white nationalism, misogyny and conspiracy theories, has been given the post of White House chief strategist.
Among Bannon’s contributions to the media discourse: Declaring the Trump-opposing conservative Bill Kristol a “renegade Jew”; articles declaring that “birth control makes women unattractive and crazy”; advocating that women who receive online harassment should “log off”; support for public display of the confederate flag; multiple stories about “trannies” and “faggots”. During divorce proceedings against him, Gannon’s wife testified that he was aggressively anti-Semitic.
The site’s Bannon-led embrace of white nationalism—not merely under the “alt-right” banner, but of notorious white supremacists themselves, is unambiguous.
Breitbart recently published a lengthy defense of the Alt-Right, claiming the white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor who created the ideology “have been accused of racism,” choosing to ignore the well-documented openly-racist views. […]Breitbart has also organized conferences featuring nativist speakers and published op-eds and interviews with movement leaders. But since 2015, Breitbart began publishing more overtly racist diatribes about Muslims and immigrants. […]
In September 2015, a piece on the Breitbart website attacked Pope Francis for his comments about the United States welcoming more refugees by invoking the racist novel Camp of the Saints – a popular book in Alt-Right circles.
As a result of this advocacy, Bannon’s site became the dominant white nationalist outlet.
A Twitter analysis conducted by The Investigative Fund using Little Bird software found that these “elements” are more deeply connected to Breitbart News than more traditional conservative outlets. While only 5 percent of key influencers using the supremacist hashtag #whitegenocide follow the National Review, and 10 percent follow the Daily Caller, 31 percent follow Breitbart. The disparities are even starker for the anti-Muslim hashtag #counterjihad: National Review, 26 percent; the Daily Caller, 37 percent; Breitbart News, 62 percent.
In one of his now-duties as strategist, Bannon will apparently in part be seeking to better connect Trump’s nationalist movement to the European far-right, courting figures such as Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders.
That Donald Trump is elevating one of the dominant figures in moving white nationalism from the fringes into the conservative mainstream into his administration’s top strategist cannot be dismissed as happenstance. A white nationalist is now the Trump administration’s top adviser.
This is, or ought to be, astonishing. No pundit can credibly dismiss this—and no decent Republican could support or tolerate it. Unfortunately we are out of decent Republicans. Politicians were only recently deplored for speaking to racist groups or being caught saying racist things on the campaign trail: Now an architect of “alt-right” white nationalism holds the top strategic post in the Republican White House.
Originally posted at DailyKos