The campaign’s new chief executive, Stephen Bannon, joins from Breitbart News—where he helped mainstream the ideas of white nationalists and resuscitate the reputations of anti-immigrant fear-mongers.
White nationalists today invest a lot of energy worrying about growing Hispanic and Muslim populations in the U.S. Turns out, Breitbart News spends a lot of time worrying about those things, too. And in Bannon, they see a media-friendly, ethno-nationalist fellow traveler.
“Latterly, Breitbart emerged as a nationalist site and done great stuff on immigration in particular,” VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow told The Daily Beast.
VDare is a white supremacist site. It’s named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born to British colonists in North America. Brimelow said he and Bannon met briefly last month and exchanged pleasantries about each other’s work.
“It’s irritating because VDARE.com is not used to competition,” Brimelow added. “I presume that is due to Bannon, so his appointment is great news.”
Brimelow isn’t the only prominent white nationalist to praise the Bannon hire. Richard Spencer, who heads the white supremacist think tank National Policy Institute, said he was also pleased. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart has given favorable coverage to the white supremacist Alt Right movement. And Spencer loves it.
If your plan is the lead a resurgent white supremacist movement, you couldn't ask for a better point man than Steve Bannon, which brings me to the point I've made several times around here: when Trump loses in November, his followers aren't going to quietly vanish.
Bannon's specialty is virulent white supremacist dog whistle politics, after all Breitbart has been attacking President Obama and his family, Black Lives Matter, and any Democratic black or Latino politician they can find for years now, from Cory Booker to Joaquin Castro to Shirley Sherrod (remember her?)
And hey, let's not forget the problem we have now with Trump's White Power campaign goes directly down the line drawn by Andrew Breitbart and the media monster he created before his death in March 2012.
For tomorrow, the fresh hell of the news cycle begins anew, and Breitbart's pervasive taint will be all over it and the many, many news cycles to come after. The dead racist guy gets the last laugh in this America. His replacement will invariably be worse.
His replacement was Steve Bannon. We can go straight from that point to here over the last 55 months.
So if avowed white supremacists are happy to see Steve Bannon in charge of Trump's campaign, that's something that we should all be worried about, along with the merger of Breitbart and Trump. Things are going to get a lot uglier, if that's even possible. As Charles Blow points out, it's a funny strategy to take for a guy so obviously trying to pander to black voters as he tried to do Tuesday in Wisconsin.
The speech was tone deaf, facile and nonsensical, much like the man who delivered it.
Then within hours of making that speech, Trump shook up his campaign in part by naming Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the campaign’s chief executive.
This is the same Breitbart that the Southern Poverty Law Center referred to in an April “Hatewatch” report:
“Over the past year however, the outlet has undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas — all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”
The report continued:
“The Alt-Right is a loose set of far-right ideologies at the core of which is a belief that “white identity” is under attack through policies prioritizing multiculturalism, political correctness and social justice and must be preserved, usually through white-identified online communities and physical ethno-states.”
How are you reaching out to the black community when you step on your own message with such an insulting hire?
All of black America is looking askance at Donald Trump. He has no credibility with black people, other than the handful of black staffers and surrogates who routinely embarrass themselves in their blind obsequiousness.
I mean on one hand I can see why Trump did this, you can't get worse with black voters than "fewer than one percent" so he doesn't have many other people to reach, and if you haven't been driven off your support of Trump by now, you're probably really jazzed by Bannon's hire.
On the other hand, I'm a human being with a soul and morals, so this is all awful nonsense to me that needs to be crushed brutally at the polls in November when Democrats run up the scoreboard.
We'll see. It's going to be a long 80-some days.
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