How Did The Republican Party Allow Itself To Be Taken Over By A Wack Bunch Of Neo-Nazis?

A gathering Of American Neo-Nazis-- a powerful fringe of Trump's Republican Party-- will feature their newest heroes: Bannon and Roy Moore.

In less than two weeks-- October 13-15-- the extreme right of the Republican Party will gather for their annual bund rally at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in DC. Announced speakers include hate mongers and racists like Michele Bachmann, Sebastian Gorka, Laura Ingraham, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, a couple of Duck Dynasty guys, Jerry Boykin, Frank Gaffney, Mat Staver, Dana Loesch, Mark Meadows (R-NC), Oliver North, Paul Ryan (R-WI), Mark Walker (R-NC), Jeff Sessions and, as a human piñata and target for derision, Miss McConnell (R-KY). Oh and Señor Trumpanzee will be making an appearance as well. But, according to Breitbart News, the keynote speeches won't be given by Trumpanzee or Speaker Ryan or Sessions but by American neo-Nazi strategist Steven Bannon and his Alabama candidate for Senate, ex-Judge Roy Moore.

The far right hate group, Family Research Council, hosts the annual event, which bills itself as "the single largest gathering" of... well they call themselves "social conservatives," but it is basically a neo-Nazi gathering in the nation's capital. Too harsh? Nope. Let's look at Joseph Bernstein's report this week for BuzzFeed on how the Mercer and Bannon run Breitbart News smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist ideas into the heart of the Republican Party.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right-- the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

The Breitbart employee closest to the alt-right was Milo Yiannopoulos, the site’s former tech editor known best for his outrageous public provocations, such as last year’s Dangerous Faggot speaking tour and September’s canceled Free Speech Week in Berkeley. For more than a year, Yiannopoulos led the site in a coy dance around the movement’s nastier edges, writing stories that minimized the role of neo-Nazis and white nationalists while giving its politer voices “a fair hearing.” In March, Breitbart editor Alex Marlow insisted “we’re not a hate site.” Breitbart’s media relations staff repeatedly threatened to sue outlets that described Yiannopoulos as racist. And after the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Breitbart published an article explaining that when Bannon said the site welcomed the alt-right, he was merely referring to “computer gamers and blue-collar voters who hated the GOP brand.”

These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum-- and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website-- and, in particular, Yiannopoulos-- links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.

And the cache of emails-- some of the most newsworthy of which BuzzFeed News is now making public-- expose the extent to which this machine depended on Yiannopoulos, who channeled voices both inside and outside the establishment into a clear narrative about the threat liberal discourse posed to America. The emails tell the story of Steve Bannon’s grand plan for Yiannopoulos, whom the Breitbart executive chairman transformed from a charismatic young editor into a conservative media star capable of magnetizing a new generation of reactionary anger. Often, the documents reveal, this anger came from a legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between.

...Now Bannon is back at the controls of the machine, which he has said he is “revving up.” The Mercers have funded Yiannopoulos's post-Breitbart venture. And these documents present the clearest look at what these people may have in store for America.

...Early in the morning of August 17, 2016, as news began to break that Steve Bannon would leave Breitbart to run the Trump campaign, Milo Yiannopoulos emailed the man who had turned him into a star. “Congrats chief,” he wrote.

“u mean ‘condolences,’” Bannon wrote back.

“I admire your sense of duty (seriously).”

“u get it.”

In the month after the convention, Yiannopoulos and Bannon continued to work closely. Bannon and Marlow encouraged a barrage of stories about Yiannopoulos’s late July ban from Twitter. Bannon and Yiannopoulos worked to distance themselves from Charles Johnson’s plans to sue Twitter. (“Charles is PR poison,” Yiannopoulos wrote. “Charles is well intentioned--but he is wack,” Bannon responded.) And the two went back and forth over how hard to hit Paul Ryan in an August story defending the alt-right. (“Only the headline mocks him correct,” Bannon wrote. “We never actually say he is a cuck in the body of the piece?”)

But once Bannon left Breitbart, his email correspondence with Yiannopoulos dried up, with a few exceptions. On August 25, after Hillary Clinton’s alt-right speech, Yiannopoulos emailed Bannon, “I’ve never laughed so hard.”

“Dude: we r inside her fucking head,” Bannon wrote back.

And on September 15, Sebastian Gorka, then an adviser to the Trump campaign, sent Yiannopoulos, Bannon, and Michael Flynn Jr., the son of Trump’s future national security adviser, a meme “as found on Twitter.” Watermarked by a conservative satire site called the Patriot Retort, the image was titled “The Deplorables,” and had superimposed various TrumpWorld faces on top of the all-star action movie heroes of the 2010 Sylvester Stallone vehicle The Expendables.

“I presume you Gents approved of this,” Gorka wrote.

“THIS IS BRILLIANT. CC’ing LTG Flynn,” Flynn, Jr. wrote back, referring to his father.

“LOL!” Bannon responded.

“Yes. I’m jealous!!” Gorka replied.

Still, as the campaign progressed into the fall, there were clues that Bannon continued to run aspects of Breitbart and guide the career of his burgeoning alt-right star. On September 1, Bannon forwarded Yiannopoulos a story about a new Rutgers speech code; Yiannopoulos forwarded it to Bokhari and asked for a story. On the 3rd, Bannon emailed to tell Yiannopoulos he was “trying to set up DJT interview.” (The interview with Trump never happened.) And on September 11, Bannon introduced Yiannopoulos over email to the digital strategist and Trump supporter Oz Sultan and instructed the men to meet.

There were also signs that Bannon was using his proximity to the Republican nominee to promote the culture war pet causes that he and Yiannopoulos shared. On October 13, Saucier emailed Yiannopoulos a tweet from the white nationalist leader Nathan Damigo, who went on to punch a woman in the face at a Berkeley rally in April of this year and led marchers in Charlottesville: “@realDonaldTrump just said he would protect free speech on college campus.”

“He used phrases extremely close to what I say-- Bannon is feeding him,” Yiannopoulos responded.

Yet, by the early days of the Trump presidency-- and as the harder and more explicitly bigoted elements within the alt-right fought to reclaim the term-- Bannon had clearly established a formal distance from Yiannopoulos. On February 14, Yiannopoulos, who months earlier had worked hand in glove with Bannon, asked their mutual PR rep for help reaching him. “Here’s the book manuscript, to be kept confidential of course… still hoping for a Bannon or Don Jr or Ivanka endorsement!”

The next week, video appeared in which Yiannopoulos appeared to condone pedophilia. He resigned from Breitbart under pressure two days later, but not before his attorney beseeched Solov and Marlow to keep him.

“We implore you not to discard this rising star over a 13 month old video that we all know does not reflect his true views,” the lawyer wrote.

Bannon, ensconced in the chaotic Trump White House, didn’t comment, nor did he reach out to Yiannopoulos on his main email. But the machine wasn’t broken, just running quietly. And it wouldn’t jettison such a valuable component altogether, even after seeming to endorse pedophilia.

After firing Yiannopoulos, Marlow accompanied him to the Mercers’ Palm Beach home to discuss a new venture: MILO INC. On February 27, not quite two weeks after the scandal erupted, Yiannopoulos received an email from a woman who described herself as “Robert Mercer’s accountant.” “We will be sending a wire payment today,” she wrote. Later that day, in an email to the accountant and Robert Mercer, Yiannopoulos personally thanked his patron. And as Yiannopoulos prepared to publish his book, he stayed close enough to Rebekah Mercer to ask her by text for a recommendation when he needed a periodontist in New York.

Since Bannon left the White House, there have been signs that the two men may be collaborating again. On August 18, Yiannopoulos posted to Instagram a black-and-white photo of Bannon with the caption “Winter is Coming.” Though he ultimately didn’t show, Bannon was originally scheduled to speak at Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week at UC Berkeley. (The event, which was supposed to feature an all-star lineup of far-right personalities, was canceled last month, reportedly after the student group sponsoring it failed to fill out necessary paperwork.) And Yiannopoulos has told those close to him that he expects to be back at Breitbart soon.

Steve Bannon’s actions are often analyzed through the lens of his professed ideology, that of an anti-Islam, anti-immigrant, anti-“Globalist” crusader bent on destroying prevailing liberal ideas about immigration, diversity, and economics. To be sure, much of that comes through in the documents obtained by BuzzFeed News. The Camp of the Saints Bannon is there, demanding Yiannopoulos change “refugee” to “migrant” in a February 2016 story, speaking of the #war for the West.

Still, it is less often we think about Bannon simply as a media executive in charge of a private company. Any successful media executive produces content to expand audience size. The Breitbart alt-right machine, embodied by Milo Yiannopoulos, may read most clearly in this context. It was a brilliant audience expansion machine, financed by billionaires, designed to draw in people disgusted by some combination of identity politics, Muslim and Hispanic immigration, and the idea of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the White House. And if expanding that audience meant involving white nationalists and neo-Nazis, their participation could always be laundered to hide their contributions.

Yiannopoulos’s brand is his ego. Yet his role within the media ecosystem-- building an audience around identity politics in the era of news organizations relying on social media for growth-- makes him far less unique than he might believe. More and more outlets are firing writers and dumping resources into video. Given that trend, and particularly after Charlottesville, when the alt-right has proved a troublesome audience to court, it’s possible that Yiannopoulos’s use to Bannon has dwindled.

Or perhaps it hasn’t. For Bannon, of course, Yiannopoulos’s future was always in video, in spectacle. 2017 has provided plenty of spectacles that have gotten great ratings. Before it imploded, Free Speech Week had the potential to be the latest.

And the two men know the value of making a scene. In June 2016, Yiannopoulos, with Bannon’s enthusiastic support, planned to lead a gay pride march through a “Muslim ghetto” in Stockholm. Though Breitbart would later cancel the event over security concerns-- Yiannopoulos expressed concern in private repeatedly-- the Breitbart tech editor was in joking good spirits on June 26 when he wrote to Bannon of a “killer plan.”

“If I die doing this I expect a blackout on Breitbart.com for AT LEAST this afternoon,” Yiannopoulos wrote.

A few hours later, Bannon responded.

“And miss all the traffic in condolences?”

UPDATE: Nazi Murders Back In Charlottesville

Saturday night, Richard Spencer-- the sick Nazi who likes being punched in the face-- led another Republican/Nazi Party tiki torch march through Charlottesville. Mike Signer, the city's mayor sent a tweet denouncing the march: "Another despicable visit by neo-Nazi cowards. You’re not welcome here! Go home! Meantime we’re looking at all our legal options. Stay tuned." But the Nazi leader responded "You will not erase us... We are about our heritage. Not just us Virginians. Not just as Southerners. But as white people . . . we’ll take a stand. You’ll have to get used to us. "We’re going to come back again and again and again." Then they began singing about Dixie and chanting "The South will rise again. Russia is our friend. The South will rise again. Woo-hoo! Wooo."