With the Bannon hire, is DT doubling-down on the ‘Let Trump be Trump’ camp (e.g., Corey Lewandowski) or is it something else?
In any event, it’s a rejection of the ‘pivot’ strategy (which I favored, as its all about optics and getting new voters from among the jellyfish at this point; he already has his base locked up) that Manafort tried unsuccessfully to get DT on board with.
“Alt Right Rejoices At Trump’s Steve Bannon Hire” screams the lead story at The Daily Beast.
As Breitbart’s chief Steve Bannon did a lot to normalize the racist, anti-semitic world of the Alt-Right, they couldn’t be happier he has now joined the campaign of their king, Donald Trump.
Okay.
Donald Trump’s campaign is under new management—and his white nationalist fanboys love it.
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.
You get the idea.
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.
“Breitbart has elective affinities with the Alt Right, and the Alt Right has clearly influenced Breitbart,” he said. “In this way, Breitbart has acted as a ‘gateway’ to Alt Right ideas and writers. I don’t think it has done this deliberately; again, it’s a matter of elective affinities.”
Let’s see how this goes. Fingers crossed.
