House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made a stir today when she said the obvious in public.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has added her name to a growing list of Democrats to denounce Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump's chief strategist, as a "white supremacist"—a label she repeatedly used on Thursday to criticize Bannon's recent appointment to the National Security Council.
"What's making America less safe is to have a white supremacist named to the National Security Council as a permanent member, while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Director of National Intelligence are told, 'Don't call us we'll call you,'" Pelosi said during her weekly press conference.
There should be nothing controversial about pointing this out. If anything, it might be possible to bicker around the edges of whether Bannon is a white supremacist or “merely” a white nationalist—but even that distinction would be a tough slog, in Bannon’s case. Because Steve Bannon doesn’t just have a history of supporting the racist right, he has a history of proclaiming those white nationalist and white supremacist views himself.
And unlike the recent conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Steve Bannon’s views were quite frequently caught on tape.
Most Americans by now know that Steve Bannon moved to Trump's campaign from his prior job transforming the arch-conservative "Breitbart News" hub from merely arch-conservative into a platform for the "alt-right," the self-rebranding of many of the nation's most notorious white nationalist groups. Under Bannon's leadership the site embraced open misogyny, racist trolling efforts, infamous white nationalist "thinkers,” far-right European nationalists, and the rest of the toxic far-right cesspool.
But Steve Bannon himself has always been cagey as to whether he counted himself among the white nationalists his site worked so diligently to cater to, and that has led the press to be similarly waffling in their own descriptions of him. They shouldn't. Throughout his Breitbart tenure he repeatedly advocated for white nationalist policy ideas and demanded Republican leaders adapt those positions. Steve Bannon is, indeed, an advocate for white nationalism.
That worldview, which Bannon laid out in interviews and speeches over the past several years, hinges largely on Bannon’s belief in American “sovereignty.” Bannon said that countries should protect their citizens and their essence by reducing immigration, legal and illegal, and pulling back from multinational agreements.
Of key concern to Bannon has been Muslim immigration—and, indeed, the presence of non-white, non-European, non-Christian influences in America to begin with.
“Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.” [...]
“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.
Beyond Bannon's consuming hostility towards immigrants, his public statements have regularly ticked through the conspiracy theories, prejudices, and invocations of cultural dominance or submission that characterize the most racist elements of the far right. He is a believer in the overtly racist theory that Muslim culture is secretly "infiltrating" America and undermining it:
In dozens of hours of audio recordings reviewed by USA TODAY of his Breitbart News Daily radio show in 2015 and 2016, Bannon told his listeners that the United States and the Western world are engaged in a “global existential war,” and he entertained claims that a “fifth column” of Islamist sympathizers had infiltrated the U.S. government and news media.
And in the white supremacist theory that Muslim immigrants lack the proper "DNA" to uphold American democracy—an odd position to have, given Bannon's own hostility toward constitutional government:
“These are not Jeffersonian democrats,” he said of immigrants to Europe from Muslim majority countries in April of last year. “These are not people with thousands of years of democracy in their DNA coming up here.”
This statement is why Nancy Pelosi can consider herself accurate in her assertion that Bannon isn’t merely a white nationalist, but a white supremacist. The notion that Muslims are, “in their DNA”, incapable of or hostile to democracy is a white supremacist belief, not merely a nationalistic one. By many orders of magnitude, there are more Muslims fighting for democracy in the Middle East than there are Americans fighting for democracy on the pages of Breitbart.
Bannon has been especially clear and aggressive in proclaiming the white nationalist/supremacist belief that America is threatened not, in fact, by violent extremists, but specifically by Islam as a religion. And that it is therefore Islam, not extremism, that must be eradicated.
“[The media] will not criticize Islam, the president of the United States will not criticize Islam. Mrs. Clinton will not criticize Islam. Do you get a sense that the media in the West — and I mean in London and in the United States — is almost working under the precepts of sharia law right now?”
More than any other single declaration, this is the one that Bannon keeps going back to, in interviews and in his other pronouncements. That we are in an existential war between white Christian Americans and the Muslim faith itself, and that either one or the other will be destroyed. He believes we are on the cusp of a catastrophic “Fourth Turning” in which an authoritarian-minded American government will at long last erase those enemies from the world stage. This isn’t a secretly held belief, but one he has publicly promoted as a “central organizing principle” of the re-shaped Breitbart.
In other words, Steve Bannon has been advocating for the installation of a white nationalist American government for years now—specifically, one willing to open a shooting war against Islam itself. He is now in charge of executive policies, and it should be of no great surprise that within the first week of government, the Trump administration adopted an anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-Muslim policy order that directly mirrored the proposals of the white nationalist movement. David Duke has no unkind words to say about the order; the leaders who crafted the "alt-right" label to rebrand their own white nationalist and white supremacist organizations have made celebratory remarks.
As private figure, Steve Bannon espoused the tenets of white nationalism and supremacy. As top Trump adviser, he is implementing them. Nancy Pelosi is absolutely correct in calling it what it is. The Trump regime is casting aside both ethical considerations and constitutional ones at a steady clip. While we should all be cheered that media outlets are (finally) probing the fringe notions being brought to bear in this administration, it is still diplomatically trying to dodge naming where those beliefs originated or which radical groups espouse them.
It's white nationalism. It’s white supremacy. That's where the Trump campaign and administration’s most extremist ideas come from—from the notion of barring non-white immigrants to "cultural genocide" to the supposition that a war on "white," "Christian" America by both internal and external forces invalidates normal constitutional norms and requires a militaristic, authoritarian response.
That's what Steve Bannon espouses. That's what the White House policy team has, already this week, swiftly moved to adopt. Pelosi is right, and pundits and other media figures better get on the ball quickly if they are going to accurately describe the intents and origins of Bannon-crafted policies.