Isn’t it about time we cut the nonsense and stopped believing that something out there known as the alt-right really counts for anything serious at all? If Trump’s budget deal with the Democrats should tell us anything, it’s that he certainly doesn’t feel he has to worry about the power and influence of the alt-right, so why should we?
The fact that every racist who could walk crawled out from underneath their rocks during the Presidential campaign shouldn’t blind us to the fact that most of the people who voted for Trump were going to vote for whomever the Republicans nominated, regardless of how stupid, racist or crazy the nominee turned out to be. And how long did the alt-right contingent (Bannon, et. al.) last in the White House? Just long enough to get nothing done at all.
So now the whole bunch of alt-right leadership sickos have decamped into a DC town house where their titular leader, the vaunted ‘intellectual’ Steve Bannon is holding daily pow-wows to plan and execute a ‘war strategy’ that will shortly be fed to all the alt-right troops. But before I get to the order of battle, I just want to make a small corrective to the media efforts which pictured Bannon as some kind of deep thinker whose knowledge of political philosophy and culture made him some kind of intellectual guru for the alt-right. In fact, Bannon’s nothing more than a Wall Street huckster who figured out that people with alt-right sympathies make an identifiable and easily-reachable market for any type of product with some kind of conspiracy bent.
Exactly how big is this alt-right army? Probably the best way to answer that question is to look at metrics on website visits, insofar as so much of the current political environment is driven by what is loosely referred to as social media on the web. Let’s start with the traffic to Bannon’s own flagship, Breitbart, which is currently running at roughly 2,700,000 visits a day. Let’s add to that impressive number the daily visits to Tea Party Patriots whose President, Jenny Beth Martin, is a member of Bannon’s war council – her site racks up a whole, big 5,300 daily hits. So together, we have less than 2.8 million web visits and, in case you’re interested, The Huffington Post runs around 6 million daily visits of which 40% are unique; the unique percentage for Breitbart is around 25%.
Yesterday the leader of the Free World ‘war party’ sat down and gave his first, detailed interview on the 60 Minutes television show. Hey wait a minute! 60 Minutes? Isn’t this show produced by the television network which is a fount of ‘fake news?’ Why didn’t Bannon go on Infowars, or his own so-called communications network, a.k.a Breitbart, or Glenn Beck, or Rush? I’ll tell you why he didn’t. It’s because he’s a fraud and an ass-kisser to boot.
Trump won the election because the Democrats ran someone who may have been a good Secretary of State, a wonderful human being and everything else but didn’t know how to run a political campaign. I mean how do you let someone like Jill Stein get more votes in Michigan than the number of votes which you needed to win the entire state?
Bannon can say from today to next year that the ‘establishment’ didn’t want Trump to win but Bannon is part of the establishment, he’s always been part of it and he always will. And you might notice in the entire interview, that at no time did this ass-kisser say anything negative about Trump. So the establishment won’t let Trump enact a ‘nationalist’ (i.e., racist) agenda but we can’t blame him for making a deal with Nancy and Chuck, right?
Know what Bannon’s doing right now with his ‘war’ council? He’s figuring out how to huckster some movies or some other communication products like the Breitbart website that will sell to the alt-right. That’s why he joined Trump in the first place, and that’s all he’s ever done.