Steve Bannon, CEO of the Trump Campaign, has been invisible since his appointment. While smiling Gish Gallop expert KellyAnne Conway has been the face of the Campaign, Bannon has been in an undisclosed location, apparently sending out instructions to the candidate and KellyAnne via telegram.
The media had a bunch of one-day stories about Bannon when he was appointed, mentioning his takeover of Breitbart and giving some information about his far right website. But since then, it’s been Conway, Hope Hicks, Paris Dennard and a bunch of other ciphers speaking for Trump.
And the media has failed to track Bannon and Breitbart’s rampant racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. This is Part 1 of my effort (and I hope yours) to fill this gap.
Imagine the response to these headlines:
Hillary appoints Bill Ayers Campaign CEO.
Medea Benjamin named as HIllary Spokesperson.
Sean Penn appointed speechwriter for Hillary.
Michael Moore named appointed Hillary press secretary.
Would they last even a day? Wouldn’t the uproar be decibel-shattering? Yet --
Bannon is any of those leftists times 10 on the right — the heart of the alt-right, neo-fascist movement in the United States.
You don’t have to search far to find racism and xenophobia on Breitbart. Of course there was the headline attacking Bill Kristol as a “Renegade Jew.” And you don’t even have to go to the comment section (shudder). Take yesterday’s piece on Anne Applebaum: WaPo’s Anne Applebaum Embarks On Kremlin-Style Disinformation Offensive vs. the Anti-Globalist Right. For example:
The undermining of nation-state sovereignty by the likes of George Soros, the UN, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the Davos crowd, the City of London and Wall Street, and the Obama/Clinton/Kerry U.S. interventionist foreign policy groupthinkers has catalyzed the recent, revolutionary sea change in Western politics.
. . .
The blowback can be viewed in Hungary, via the Visegrad 4, at the Austrian elections, in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, and now in the biggest and most important political battlefield on the globe: the United States.
“Visegrad 4, at the Austrian elections, in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland” refer to far-right ascendant parties in Europe — role-models for “the biggest and most important political battlefield on the globe: the United States,” the Trump campaign.
The target of the cited article is writer Anne Applebaum, whose husband is a Polish centrist politician from the Civic Party, whose campaign was accused of corruption. Breitbart writes Civic’s
bid died with the exposure of the Civic Platform corruption. This turn of events ended Applebaum’s dream of being Poland’s first Jewish-American first lady.
And hell hath no fury like a Polish, Jewish, American elitist scorned. Following the fall from grace, Applebaum began utilizing her global media contacts, disbursing heavily curated and obfuscated “facts patterns” meant to construct an anti-democratic global news narrative depicting the new democratically elected Law & Justice government as far right fascists and illiberal anti-democrats.
The article is rife with right wing, anti-Semitic codes, like
“ platforms where the urban sophisticates congregate.”
“Ivory Tower fellow plutocratic elites”
”global media contacts”
”agenda-laden internationalist media platforms”
Trump’s embrace of Bannon as his right hand man should be a giant scandal. Instead, it’s ignored.
The Times didn’t even see fit to distance itself from this menace when it made a deal to collaborate with Breitbart’s Current Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash.”
Even in the debate, Trump was not asked to repudiate his most toxic racist supporters, including the prominent alt-right like Breitbart or even Duke.
Through Bannon, the Trump Campaign embraces alt-right, racist groups.
Pass it on.
