I was called out on Facebook after I posted a message urging my fellow citizens to call their senators and congresspersons speaking out against Trump’s appointment of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist. A portion of my comment was this:
I just called Senator Maria Cantwell's office and asked her staff if she was planning on making a public statement condemning Trump's appointment of Steve Bannon, a known white supremacist, racist and bigot, as Chief Strategist in the White House.
One of my followers (a customer of my small beekeeping business) replied:
Steve Bannon is not that at all. You need to get your information from more reliable, truthful sources, not the evening news.
Okay, fair enough. I should put a little more heft behind my comments since I am so beside myself knowing that people who voted for Trump don’t seem to know very much about him or the people he is appointing. After all, misinformation, obfuscation, obstruction, lies and hate are many of the reasons we’re in this mess to begin with. It is only fair that I cite some sources.
By conjuring up the ghosts in the Google machine with the search query of "Steve Bannon Quotes", you get a plethora of links(as always). About 7 links down, there is a New York Times article that cites some of his quotes about his goals about government, but more to my assertion on Facebook were the headlines and content from the website of the company he is head of, Breitbart.com. Needless to say, this is where a lot of the backlash is coming from. If you go to the second page of the search query, you also nd CBS News’s link to an article that offers up a shorter list of the in-common quotes as the NYT. That covers the nightly news reference, I suppose, but CBSs only crime is not getting more quotes and citations.
To be honest, I only looked at 3 articles from the returned list, so did not find a direct quote from Bannon that was racist, Islamophobic(plenty of unflattering things about women, though, so I guess he’s got that going for him). But, the most damning indictment of Steve Bannon is Breitbart.com itself. He is the Chairman of a website that publishes these ideas for the world to see. And, according to a former employee, he also writes articles himself. He is culpable. In all fairness, though, I admit, it does not mean he is a white supremacist, despite the fact that he panders to white supremacists by allowing their surrogates and representatives to write for Breitbart.com. We can not know his actual views and I bet he’d not let them be fully known anyway.
Read that site if you will. It is lousy with opinion pieces that represent the worst things about what our media has turned into in the past 30+ years. Bannon has been complicit in the degradation of journalism through is post as chairman of Breitbart.com at the expense of the readers. My assertion was that Bannon is a “known white supremacist, racist and bigot”. So now, I will turn the title phrase from “Steve Bannon is not that at all.”, to “Steve Bannon is not all that.” His actions/inactions and words add credence to most of my assertion. Since we can add that he is also a misogynist and an Islamophobe and runs a site that panders to white supremacists, amongst other things, he is not all that. He’s much more, and that’s not good.
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