Steve Bannon, the former editor of the infamous Breitbart who is widely rumored to be an anti-Semite and white supremacist, has just been appointed Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist. What this means, basically, is that Bannon is going to have Trump’s ear as he goes about his White House duties, deals with the press, and makes his political decisions.
Steve Bannon has insinuated that “there are some people who are naturally aggressive and violent” in a discussion on black “hoodlums.” As the Southern Poverty Law Center states, under his direction Breitbart became, explicitly, a source of news for the alt-right movement, and a propaganda mill for the most racist anti-semitic conservative element in the nation. They are literally the propaganda tool for the white nationalist movement of the United States — which is why the movement is overjoyed that Bannon has such a key role in Trump’s administration.
You may think I am exaggerating.
I wish this were true. But I am not exaggerating. Steve Bannon is a professional propaganda producer who is fitting with Trump, who lies more than any other politician in recent history. According to Steve Bannon’s own words, he is the alt-right’s champion, as Mother Jones states:
Last week, when Donald Trump tapped the chairman of Breitbart Media to lead his campaign, he wasn’t simply turning to a trusted ally and veteran propagandist. By bringing on Stephen Bannon, Trump was signaling a wholehearted embrace of the “alt-right,” a once-motley assemblage of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, ethno-nationalistic provocateurs who have coalesced behind Trump and curried the GOP nominee’s favor on social media. In short, Trump has embraced the core readership of Breitbart News.
“We’re the platform for the alt-right,” Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon’s target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon’s leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an “eclectic mix of renegades,” accusing President Barack Obama of importing “more hating Muslims,” and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of “political correctness.”
Steve Bannon is such a poisonous figure that Republicans are either keeping quiet or lashing out at Bannon’s appointment — nobody is really doing any congratulating.
Why would he choose someone who specializes in targeting white nationalists through propaganda as his chief strategist and top advisor?
Well, as we saw with Hitler and Goebbels (yes, I just broke “Godwin’s law,” but I’m sorry, this shit applies here, clearly), if you are intending to lie to the nation, you need someone close to your side, who has intimate knowledge of your affairs and the message you want to send, who is really, really good at spreading disinformation. You need to underline his message as the truth and the other messages as lies.
It’s not just me, either. Back in February Glenn Beck was saying that Steve Bannon was gunning to be Donald Trump’s Goebbels. Beck’s argument is that he was serving in this position during Trump’s campaign as editor of Breitbart. And now Donald Trump literally just gave him the job formally. As Beck said in February:
By taking orders from a political candidate and reworking your entire site to promote the lies of a specific candidate without any kind of truth behind these things, and just spinning all of–doing what you’ve [Bannon] done to Breitbart (and anybody who reads Breitbart knows exactly what’s going on). If that is what your idea of being Roger Ailes is, you are so sadly mistaken. That doesn’t make you Roger Ailes. That makes you Goebbels. So, let’s leave it at that.
And you’ll hear many on the left saying the same thing — but even Glenn Beck, who is no liberal, sees this clearly. This is not a drill folks. This is the real deal.
And on the other side, the white nationalists are beside themselves. One states:
Stephen Bannon: racist, anti-homo, anti-immigrant, anti-jewish, anti-establishment. Declared war on (((Paul Ryan))) Sounds perfect. Muhahahaha. The man who will have Trump’s ear more than anyone else. Being anti-jewish is not illegal. Nothing you dirty stinking jews can do to keep him out.
Former employee Kurt Burdella, who used to be Breitbart’s spokesperson and is also a conservative, states this in March 2016 about Bannon’s conference calls at Breitbart:
“If anyone sat there and listened to that call, you’d think that you were attending a white supremacist rally,” said Bardella, citing what he called Bannon’s “nationalism and hatred for immigrants, people coming into this country to try to get a better life for themselves.”
“This is someone who has a very low moral compass,” he said of Bannon, “and the idea that this is the type of person that Donald Trump, as the Republican nominee, as president, would have closest to him is very disturbing.”
This is it, guys. Goebbels, similarly, was a minister of disinformation for white nationalists, with disturbing results. The lesson we learned there MUST keep us vigilant.
In the news, you may see that Trump is attempting to play nice for now, and think it’s not that bad. But there are signals that this is situational — that he’s attempting to ease into the presidency. As he stated in his 60 minutes interview last Friday:
You know, I’ll conduct myself– in a very good manner, but depends on what the situation is, sometimes you have to be rougher.
As soon as we let up, as soon as we let down our guard — we may be headed towards a nightmare.
I’m not exaggerating. We’ve already seen what “rough” means. As he said back in March:
We had some people, some rough guys like we have right in here. And they started punching back. It was a beautiful thing. I mean, they started punching back. … In the good old days, this doesn’t happen because they used to treat them very, very rough. And when they protested once, you know, they would not do it again so easily. But today, they walk in and they put their hand up and put the wrong finger in the air at everybody, and they get away with murder, because we’ve become weak.
But Trump is not going to stop us. We’ll keep marching and fighting. We have to, or we will see a roughness, protected by an army and lack of freedom of the press, as we have never seen before.
You’ve been warned. Now let’s fight.
Thanks for reading.
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