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."

Right-Wing Snowflakes

Laura and Milo

Ever hear of Milo Yiannopoulos? Don't worry, no one else has either... unless they watch Fox News commentators as a lifestyle. Last week Talia Lavin wrote a piece about Milo for the Village Voice (I've written about him too so I won't remark on what a waste of time it is.) The adventures of Milo-ism, she pointed out, include how he finds it "impossible... to go out for lunch in most major cities," which, she continued "speaks to an intellectual barrenness at the core of Trump-era conservatism. Having found themselves in political power, but nonetheless without complete cultural dominance, these conservatives must manufacture a sense of powerlessness."

Milo Yiannopoulos would like you to know that he is “Dangerous”-- that was the title of his abortive nonfiction debut. Milo Yiannopoulos is selling T-shirts that say, “Everyone who hates me is ugly,” and, “Guantanamo Bay Waterboard Instructor.” A Milo Yiannopoulos fan once shot a protestor at one of his speaking engagements in the stomach, causing a critical injury. Milo Yiannopoulos would like you to be very indignant that he was recently heckled at a Manhattan bar.

I'll bet even fewer people have ever heard of Kevin Williamson, although maybe they know another Kevin Williamson from elementary school. This one helps highlight "the hollow core of Trump-era conservatism" Talia is portraying. Early in April "Williamson lost a columnist gig at the Atlantic after less than two weeks on the job, when certain of his past inflammatory comments resurfaced. He’s managed to parlay this tribulation into thousands of published words about his own silencing. Thus far, by my calculation, his columns this week alone make up a substantial portion of the word count of the Book of Job. Right wing publicists Ross Douthat, Conor Friedersdorf, Erick Erickson, Noah Rothman, et al share "an insistent refrain: this is, if not authoritarianism, then its prelude; it is 'chilling'; it is a flexing of the muscles of a fledgling despotism; it is a Soviet-style censorship regime." Don't be sorry you've never heard of Williamson or his tempest in a teapot.

You could be forgiven, amid all this furor, for forgetting that Williamson was fired for stating-- publicly, repeatedly, and emphatically-- that women who have abortions should be punished by execution. That is, women who have had abortions-- fully one-quarter of American women-- are a criminal class, and some portion of them, after being convicted, should be publicly hung by the neck until dead.

There are, of course, a multiplicity of ironies here-- that a man so blithely willing to strip women of their rights is so avid in defense of his own; that the inventors of the terms snowflake and triggered overheat so easily at a professional slight; etc.-- but at its heart, what arises when one surveys a media landscape pitted with Williamson hot takes is an emptiness at the heart of conservative rhetoric, and an attendant need to create victimization where none, in fact, exists.

In the absence of material oppression of any kind, one wonders what motivates conservatives to cant toward martyrdom-- to seek, perpetually, a marginalization that cannot be measured. Recent research suggests that the Trump-era right suffers from “status anxiety”: to wit, a fear not of losing their ability to speak, but rather that their speech will become part of a chorus of equals. In expressing a groundless fear of being silenced, they reveal their true fear-- that of no longer being in a position to dominate the national conversation.

To an extent I empathize: It is difficult to maintain a sense of utter righteousness, difficult to feel the great maw of the white page, without a real claim to struggle. There are those who say that creative generation only comes through struggle; that forward momentum is possible only when obstacles arise to be smashed; that only a rough road can lengthen one’s stride, and straighten one’s back, and lead one forward to brighter lands. So it is not without some sympathy that I look to the nation’s conservatives who, finding themselves in possession of all three branches of government, and a plurality of state governments too, find themselves so bereft of struggle that they must invent it. What I cannot forgive is the laziness of the central metaphors, which return again and again to the well of twentieth-century authoritarianism, without ever pausing to consider how transparently ridiculous these metaphors become.

Thus we find Laura Ingraham called a Twitter boycott of her prime-time cable news show "Stalinist." One need not be a student of Russian history to recognize that Stalin's primary methods of punishment were not bitchy tweets, and the Soviet Union did not, historically speaking, have much of an advertising industry to boycott in the first place. Stalin tended to line his opponents up and shoot them. He tended to exile them to Siberia, or confiscate their grain, under the guise of “dekulakization,” until they starved to death. Laura Ingraham lives in what the Washington Post described as a “gated Northern Virginia mansion.” But it is entirely possible that she avoids eating grain (too many carbs).

There have been so many column inches in the New York Times and the Washington Post excoriating college students for protesting speakers that one might justifiably think this is the most pressing problem facing the United States educational system. (Never mind that many of these speakers were invited precisely to attract such a response, and the concomitant editorials, an ouroborous of specious victimization. And please, ignore the teachers’ strikes erupting in multiple states, and the fact that many public school students cannot even afford pencils.)

Talia reminds her gentle readers that there is no "lacuna of genuine problems to address in the United States of 2018. We are a country of patriarchal domination, of appalling racial injustice, of rising seas and falling wages. The problem with the Williamsons (and newspaper conservative columnists) of the world is that they have willingly chosen to turn a blind eye to what exists. Faced with the proverbial widow and orphan, conservative ideology posits stripping them of food aid. Faced with injustice in the courts, the conservative instinct is to embrace a status quo that perpetuates it. In an era in which conservatives find themselves winning-- with officials like Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos stripping this country of onerous regulations that do things like protect the air, or transgender students-- I am almost disappointed to find these would-be heralds unable to trumpet their success. It turns out that the rhetoric of celebration, of triumph, is too one-note for these wordsmiths. In service of obscuring the oppression they ignore, they must create one of their own.

And this is mirrored in right-wing members of Congress as well, of course. Katie Porter, who's running for the Orange County seat occupied by garden variety Republican Mimi Walters told us that "Rep. Walters is spending her millions of corporate PAC money dollars to convince her constituents that she is standing up for women in DC. Rep. Walters may claim to be standing up for women, but in her 20+ years in elected office, Mimi Walters has repeatedly stood with Paul Ryan and Donald Trump in their efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and ban a woman's right to choose."

Lillian Salerno has her runoff on May 22 before she'll have to face GOP robot Pete Sessions in Dallas. "And deep in the heart of Texas is a worst-case offender in Pete Sessions, operating with a seemingly mindless loyalty to party over constituents in a state that many argue is a non-voting blue state that presents as red when it's represented in DC. Arguably one of their most powerful representatives doesn't even reside in the state, only coming in and out to chastise its citizens for not knowing how to listen as he rubber stamps on behalf of special interests that prop up the systems of oppression that the state can't seem to maneuver its way out of with these cronies like these at the helm."

Paul Clements is the progressive opposition to Fred Upton in southwest Michigan this cycle. "The fundamental political issue for America," he offered, "is increasing economic inequality-- most of the benefits of our economic growth going to the wealthy, due to a corrupt political system creating a rigged economy. The second issue is we are moving in the wrong direction on rights-- to live without hunger, for fair pay, for women to control their bodies, to equal treatment under the law (not policemen shooting you) … voting rights, equality for LGBTQ persons, and immigrant rights. The third issue is care for the environment, particularly major action on climate change, but also against despoliation for profit, and so all can enjoy nature. While Trump avidly promotes backsliding, the standard conservative response, which Fred Upton exemplifies, is in public to narrow all issues to minor steps and bland sentiments, and then to vote to enable Trump, corporate donors, and more backsliding. As long as Republicans can divert attention from the big questions they can win. Let’s not let that happen."

Jenny Marshall is taking on Trump rubber stamp Virginia Foxx in northwest North Carolina. "Foxx," she said, "is the epitome of right wing conservatism. Her world view is so narrow and selfish that I am truly shocked that she gets re-elected over and over again. She has voted against every pro-environmental bill that has come up, vowed to abolish the Department of Education and wants to get rid of the free lunch program yet she claims her values are American values. I disagree. To truly live up to American values we must ensure that everyone has the opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This means building equity into a system that lacks it, empowering communities that have been silenced and investing in our future now.

Tom Guild is running for the Oklahoma City centered 5th congressional district. He told us that "Steve Russell received word of the first two females qualifying as Army Rangers with a call for an investigation into whether the test requirements had been watered down to unfairly help the women pass the required tests to become Rangers. He remained silent when Donald Trump equated demonstrators in Charlottesville who protested the Nazis and White Supremacists and their taunts of 'no Jew will take my place' accompanied by many ugly virulent racists acts and rhetoric, with the Nazis and Klan members. We heard only the sound of crickets from Russell when Mr. Trump said there were “good people” in the group protesting racism and those promoting racism in the Nazi and KKK contingents in Virginia. He supports and votes for budget cuts for the SNAP program that feeds millions of children and low income single parents. His campaign scoops up hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate, special interest, and PAC contributions. His only relevant audience are those with God’s unlisted phone number who can give big bucks to his campaign. He is in the pocket of fossil fuels companies who pollute our air and water, and do permanent continuous damage to our planet. He supports oil company puppet Scott Pruitt who has the ethics of a snake and never misses an opportunity to visit great damage on our planet. He follows a policy of benign neglect regarding public education, enabling Betsy DeVos to further her quest to make education available only to those born with a platinum spoon in their mouths. Clearly as Mark Twain quipped long ago, “No man’s life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” Certainly Twain hit the mark, particularly if Russell is a member of the legislature. The top .01% is coddled and catered to by Russell. His cut, cut, cut…no matter what philosophy regarding programs that help working people, the middle class, and those who need a hand up, is designed to favor the overlords at every juncture. Despite his claims of charitable Christianity, he missed the part of the Bible where Jesus said, as you do unto the least of these, you do unto me. His actions and rhetoric are tragic for the people of Oklahoma and our beloved America."

Kara Eastman is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in Omaha for the seat conservative Don Bacon is sitting in. "The current representative for the Nebraska Second," she told us with specificity, "has voted 97.1%  of the time with Trump. As a member of the climate caucus, he has said he does not believe that climate change is caused by humans. He is in favor of taking away healthcare from his constituents. He also supports big government regulations for women’s reproductive health. It is time for a leader in NE-02 who will stand up for the residents in the district. We need someone who has seen the positive impact that environmental protections have on children here. We deserve to have leaders who protect women, children and working families. We need someone who is listening to residents in the district and fighting for them."

Lisa Brown is the progressive Democrat running in eastern Washington in the district occupied by 4th highest-ranking Republican in the House, a Ryan rubber stamp. "She told its this morning that "so-called 'fiscal conservatives,' like Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, vote for a 1.5 trillion dollar tax plan for the top 1% , then brazenly call for balanced budget amendments and cuts to food assistance and the social safety net programs. She lauds 'work requirements' for food stamps though 3 counties in her district have double digit rates of unemployment."

Gee, What's So Wrong With Milo That's Not Just As Wrong With Señor Trumpanzee?

I was skipping around the HBO channels the other night, looking for something to watch before going to sleep. Bill Maher popped up on the screen-- with neo-Nazi publicity hound Milo Yiannopoulos and I quickly moved on to Alien vs. Predator. Until the last few weeks not many Americans knew who Milo Yiannopoulos was. Essentially a social media troll, he tries, tries, tries to be outrageous enough to get famous. It finally worked-- and he was kicked off this year's CPAC program, had his book deal with Simon and Schuster cancelled and was forced to resign as a senior editor from crazy Long Island billionaire Robert Mercer's on-line fascist propaganda sheet, Breibart. I guess he can go back to harassing Brianna Wu full-time now, although he does still have his Trump white House press accreditation.

Some Americans already knew him as the aging-but-flamboyent gay guy who was permanently banned by Twitter for harassing women and blacks-- particularly black women-- under various pseudonyms. But until a film of an interview he did embracing pedophilia and extolling the virtues of the statutory rape of 13 year old boys by old men, he was just another faceless Nazi buzzing around the Trump presidency-- who he refers to as "Daddy," while referring to himself as a "Trump-sexual." Needless to say, he's a close friend of Señor Trumpanzee's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. Ryan Lizza, in the article linked below, noted that "While working for Bannon, Yiannopoulos did more than anyone else at Breitbart to explain and build bridges to the so-called alt-right, the amorphous collection of neo-nationalist activists."

The son of a Greek gangster and thug living in England, Milo was chucked out by his parents' home at an early age-- leaving him an emotional cripple, intensely angry at the world-- and was raised by his Jewish grandmother, something that has been problematic for his Nazi allies. He was exposed for starting a phony charity for Nazi youth and then pocketing all of the money. He's also a serial plagiarizer who was caught using other peoples' work in his books.

As bizarrely obsessed with his own version of outrageous sexuality as he is, he is infamous among normal gay people for insisting that gays "get back in the closet" and assumes his own unhappiness and abhorrent behavior is something he has in common with the LGBT community, which completely rejects him on every level. Much of Milo's money comes from tubby little quasi-billionaire and racist Palmer Luckey (the Trump-crazed founder of Oculus who put up the "too big to jail" billboards with Hillary's picture on them during the election). Yiannopoulos publicly brags about being expert at fellatio. The Nazi movement in Germany started out with certain gay overtones. Milo, who made this video recently, may fancy himself a kind of modern day Ernst Röhm:



Tuesday Ryan Lizza tried making sense out of Yiannopoulos for New Yorker readers:

“Things sometimes tumble out of your mouth on these long late-night live streams, when everyone is spitballing and had a couple of drinks, that are not completely expressed and not exactly what you intend. Obviously, if I had known I was going to have the media profile I have now, I would have been cautious about this stuff. I never imagined that I would become famous,” Yiannopoulos told me. He is usually brash and outrageous, leaning on his partly Jewish background and the fact that he is gay as a shield to justify his insults. A recent short music video [the clip above] that he posted on YouTube showed him and some shirtless men building a wall on what purported to be the Mexican border. But yesterday afternoon he was sorrowful and self-pitying as he tried to explain himself. “Everything I say in there is completely defensible with proper context and explanation. It just takes nuance and close attention to understand what I’m really getting at.”

...[Before CPAC booted Milo] Conservatives scheduled to speak at the event also started to grow uncomfortable. “I’ve always thought Milo was pointlessly provocative and that he added nearly nothing in terms of conservative or libertarian ideas,” Tim Carney, the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, said. “cpac never should have invited him to give a major speech, because his ‘provocativeness’ is often bigoted or licentious.”

In the face of the growing outrage, Schlapp at first stood by his decision. Then, over the weekend, the videos of Yiannopoulos began to circulate. In one clip, he cavalierly approves of sex with thirteen-year-olds and suggests that he once attended a party at which minors were sexually assaulted. In another, he talks about the “statistical fact” that “Jews own most of the banks” and “completely dominate the media.”

...[T]he damage to the conservative movement had already been done. In a previous era, there was an élite conservative establishment that could police the movement and cast aside its fringe adherents. William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review, famously did this in the early sixties, when he attacked the conspiracists and racists of the John Birch Society, the alt-right of the day.

“The invitation strikes me as more important than the disinvitation,” Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, said of the cpac conference. “The invite said, ‘We are welcoming an alt-right (or alt-right-fellow-travelling) provocateur into the big tent.’ The disinvite said, ‘Well, O.K., since you’ve advocated pederasty, we’ll back off.’ cpac hasn’t set out a principled position here, and absent the tapes presumably would have forged ahead.”

[American Conservative Union head Matt] Schlapp stood by his original decision and dismissed critics like Lowry. “Last year around this time, there was the creation of the Never Trump movement, and there were a lot of these very same journalists who were attacking us for inviting Donald Trump,” he told me. “There are journalists in the conservative world that use cpac as a piñata once a year, and they attack us for inviting, for not inviting. The fact is this: politics is messy and it’s complicated. And we can try to sanitize it for our stage or we can decide to not avoid the controversies, but simply put them on the stage in an appropriate way for our attendees to listen to.”

But even one of Schlapp’s own board members did not buy that argument. “So we were cool with the Anti Semitic, racist, vile stuff, but we drew the line at pedophilia?” Ryun wrote to me via text, echoing Lowry’s complaints. “My argument from the minute I heard about it was to reject the alt-right ASAP.”

As for Yiannopoulos, when I spoke to him at one p.m. yesterday, he said that he was still consulting with his team about what to do next. Asked if he might still show up in Washington this week, he responded, “Probably.”

Whether or not he attends, cpac promises to be a rowdy forum for debate about the future of conservatism and the alt-right. Fans of Yiannopoulos won’t be too disappointed. Yesterday, before announcing that Yiannopoulos was disinvited, cpac organizers revealed that they had a new speaker who was even more beloved by the alt-right: Donald Trump.

How Will We Know The Moment We Go From Not Fascist To Fascist? Like Canaries In A Coal Mine, Gays Will Be Among The First To Know

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at UC, Berkeley. He was the token progressive in Bill Clinton's very centrist cabinet, where he served as Secretary of Labor. In 2002, he ran for governor of Massachusetts-- Clinton, angered by his book, Locked in the Cabinet, endorsed one of his primary rivals, someone who won less than 1% of the vote-- and came in second in a 5-way race. Reich, the unabashed, cutting-edge progressive in the race, lost out to an uninspiring, unelectable establishment hack, state Treasurer Shannon O'Brien, who took 243,039 votes to his 185,315. She had nothing to offer anyone and went on to lose to Mitt Romney by over 5 points, quite an accomplishment in a deep blue state.

Reich was a strong Bernie Sanders proponent during the presidential primary but got behind Clinton after Bernie conceded. He's a regular on the cable talking heads shows and Thursday he was on CNN with Don Lemon to address Trump's inflammatory tweet about UC, Berkeley. Reich offered the possibility the whole thing could just be more alt-facts-- but alt-facts in action. His premise is that the rioters were not left-wingers but right-wingers impersonating left-wingers. Sounds plausible; the Nazi types always do that kind of thing. But the far right is incensed and the mainstream media hasn't risen to the bait.

Reich: "I know what I saw. They weren’t Berkeley students. They were outside agitators... I saw these people. They all looked almost paramilitary, not from the campus. And I’ve heard-- again I don’t want to say factually-- but heard there’s some relationship there between these people and the right wing. And the movement that is affiliated with Breitbart news." The whole incident has certainly been good for advance orders for neo-fascist Milo Yiannopoulos’ new book, Dangerous (which went to #1 on Amazon).

[T]he controversy that has driven pre-orders for Dangerous has also made promotion unusually complicated. The 32-year-old Breitbart editor, born in Greece and raised in England, is a walking challenge to free speech principles. A vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, Yiannopoulos has made vicious comments about Muslims, women and others, and on his website offers such products as "Feminism is Cancer" T-shirts and "Fat Shaming Works" hoodies. His harassment campaign last summer against Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones led to his banishment from Twitter.

Yiannopoulos' talks have sparked protests, shouting matches and occasional violence at stops around the country. On Wednesday, the University of California, Berkeley cancelled a scheduled talk by Milo after violent protests broke out. A man was shot and wounded at protests outside his Jan. 21 talk at the University of Washington.

Rowdy protests at UC Davis on Jan. 13 prompted campus Republicans to cancel his appearance at the last minute. His final stop was supposed to be UCLA on Thursday, but the invitation was rescinded, making Berkeley his grand finale.

Yiannopoulos' book deal was greeted with immediate anger when announced in late December. Hundreds of authors have objected and one writer, Roxane Gay, withdrew a book she had planned for Simon & Schuster. Many independent sellers have expressed uneasiness, saying they will make the book available if asked for, but will not promote it. One store, The Booksmith in San Francisco, has announced it will neither stock the book nor order a copy upon customer request. Booksmith also said it was cutting orders for Simon & Schuster books by 50 percent.

There have always been fascists who were gay too

The book hasn't been sent to reviewers and not much is known about it, other than it's supposed to be kind of autobiographical and that Yiannopoulos, a modern-day self-loathing gay (something like we'd imagine Ernst Röhm was) is a particularly odious character and previous books were filled with other peoples' work used without attribution. Thinking about the little Nazi shit today, brought to mind a New Yorker column by Andrew Solomon, Fear And Loathing In Trump's America, specifically fear and loathing from the perspective of being gay in America under the new fascistic regime.

It’s different being gay now than it was in, say, October. In October, the progress we’d made as a movement seemed relatively secure, and our view was set on how we might better secure our freedoms. Now whatever we’ve achieved feels fragile, and our energies are occupied with trying to prevent a slide backward. We have had to give up on the future in attempting to save the past.

It was both unsurprising and traumatic to learn on Monday about a pending executive order that would take away our basic rights, and though it was a relief to learn, the next morning, that that executive order would not be issued, the stir of vulnerability will not soon quiet down. Donald Trump was contemplating rescinding President Barack Obama’s executive order granting protections to L.G.B.T.Q. Americans working for federal agencies. That Trump did not, that day, expose us to legal discrimination by our own government does not mitigate this Administration’s dark view of those who deviate from its narrow definition of normality-- white, U.S.-born, heterosexual, able-bodied, and Christian-- which excludes the majority of Americans.

On Wednesday, The Nation published a draft of a new executive order that would allow anyone to enact prejudice against L.G.B.T.Q. people on the basis of personal religious beliefs. Many medical services, elder-care services, and disability services are administered through religious organizations that could refuse help to those of whom they disapprove. One in five of the four hundred thousand kids in foster care identifies as L.G.B.T.Q., and under the order placement agencies would not be obliged to take care of them. The daily roller coaster of rights tenuously sustained or completely undermined is dizzying.

The problems surfaced before Trump took office. Following the election, in Sarasota, Florida, a seventy-five-year-old gay man was pulled from his car, assaulted, and told, “You know, my new President says we can kill all you faggots now.” In Austin, Texas, vandals spray-painted “dyke,” “trump,” and a swastika on the front door of a lesbian couple’s home. In North Canton, Ohio, a lesbian couple who had lived in their home peacefully for years found their car door and hood defaced with the slur “dyke.” In Bean Blossom, Indiana, vandals painted “heil trump,” “fag church,” and a swastika on the side of St. David’s Episcopal, a church that had welcomed L.G.B.T.Q. congregants. A North Carolina couple received a chilling message on their windshield: “Can’t wait until your ‘marriage’ is overturned by a real president. Gay families = burn in hell. #Trump2016.” A similarly hateful note appeared on the car of a Burlington, Iowa, minister: “So father homo, how does it feel to have Trump as your president? At least he’s got a set of balls. They’ll put marriage back where God wants it and take your’s away. America’s gonna take care of your faggity ass.”

All of this was in keeping with the publicly expressed views of the new Administration. During his tenure in Congress, Mike Pence, as head of the Republican Study Committee, supported a constitutional amendment against gay marriage, opposed the repeal of the military ban on openly gay soldiers, and averred that “societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family,” suggesting that gay families would operationalize such a disruption of the social order. He believed that being gay was a choice and said that keeping gays from marrying was simply “God’s idea.” He later proposed cutting funding for aids research and diverting the money to “ex-gay” therapy programs. As governor of Indiana, he championed and signed the anti-L.G.B.T.Q. Religious Restoration Freedom Act, which he softened only after considerable pressure from big business.

Trump himself opposes gay marriage, and has nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. In response, Lambda Legal has, for the first time, declared pre-hearing opposition to a nomination, announcing, “Judge Gorsuch’s judicial record is hostile toward LGBT people and his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is unacceptable.” Rea Carey, the executive director of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force (I serve on the board of the National L.G.B.T.Q. Task Force Action Fund), observed that Trump “has been playing deeply harmful games with L.G.B.T.Q. people’s lives throughout his campaign and every single day of his days-old presidency. The problem for him is we are everywhere-- so when he signs executive orders designed to demonize and dehumanize anyone-- Muslims, women, refugees, people of color, immigrants-- he is attacking us all. President Trump does not get bonus points for discriminating a little. Not on our watch, not in our name.”

...During the height of the aids crisis, gay activism sprang from despair; during the Obama years, it reflected idealism; and now it is fuelled by paralyzing anxiety. It’s hard to live with what is going wrong right now without anticipating everything else that could go wrong shortly. There have been waves of anti-gay prejudice for centuries, of course. But one crucial difference now is that many of us have children. My husband and I have tried to explain to our children what is going on, but I would, at the same time, like to protect them from the reality that the people who now run the show would invalidate our kind of family. My life with my children seems nonthreatening enough; it includes taking them to school, cooking dinner together on weekends, sitting through tennis matches and swim meets, helping with homework. Prejudice against an ordinariness that the movement has only so recently achieved feels newly shocking.

When I was twenty-three, I went with my parents to the Dachau concentration camp. There was a display of photographs, including many grotesque images showing emaciated prisoners in tattered stripes, mounds of discarded clothing, slave crews working on pointless exercises. I found my mother, who was not given to public displays of emotion, weeping quietly in front of a photo of a woman walking with a child whose hand she was holding. It was an innocent-looking picture, but it was captioned, “On the way to the gas chambers.” My mother felt dissociated from the prisoner photos, but in that one she saw herself and me. We wondered what that mother had told her child about their destination. My children live in a world that suddenly requires a surrender of their innocence, as I try to explain why we may be less than other families in the eyes of the changing law. We are nowhere near a holocaust in the U.S., but, amid all the nationalistic frenzy of the past few weeks, I have found myself more than once wondering how to tell my son about the people who hate us, from whom I will be able to protect him only imperfectly.

Surrounded by friends, married with children, I nonetheless feel very alone when my government turns against me. I had told Hasan that it wasn’t like that here. I had told my children that we were safe and lucky. I had told my husband that we would go on and on and on and on. Perhaps all of that will remain true, but perhaps it won’t, and that is an adjustment that sears itself into our most mundane activities. No, in October, our family felt very different from how it feels now. We were an open landscape, but now we are a citadel.

Gay For Trump?

Before we get into the poor delusional souls who are both gay and Trumpist, let me remind you of something notarially related-- basically that Trump's campaign is a pipsqueak operation that is better suited to win a city council seat than the White House. Jonathan Chait reported for New York that it's an absolute strategic and managerial garbage fire. He thinks we may not have to be as concerned that "Trump’s election as president of the United States would pose an unprecedented threat to the health of American democracy and possibly world stability" because he's running "the most organizationally and strategically inept campaign for a successful major-party nominee in recorded history... [and] Trump has absolutely no idea what he’s doing."

“Trump is reliant on information he garners himself, and can be swayed by the last person he talked to,” Parker and Haberman somewhat delicately put it. His campaign staff is far too small, and yet constantly at war with itself, already having gone through multiple shakeups and coups. In keeping with his general disdain for data, Trump has eschewed any use of analytics to target voters or competitive areas. Indeed, he has fixated bizarrely on plans to compete in New York and California, two states where any Republican faces hopeless odds against an entrenched Democratic electorate. He is currently in North Dakota for reasons nobody fully understands. He attacks fellow Republicans for no apparent reason. The super-pac donors who are supposed to be raising money on his behalf are disorganized and confused about basic questions like which super-pac they’re supposed to donate to.

To the extent that running a competent campaign matters, it will hurt Trump very badly. Yes, he won the Republican primary by relying on a massive imbalance of media coverage and exploiting a divided, extremely large field that failed to coalesce against him. Yes, he tapped into deep strains of anger in the conservative base that fellow Republicans ignored. But he’s not a political savant, and he hasn’t abolished the rules of politics. He's a reality-television performer who tapped into a deep vein of cultural resentment that appeals to a decided minority of the electorate. Fortunately, many of the same qualities that would make Trump epically dangerous in the presidency-- his impulsive ignorance, blustering arrogance, and contempt for data-- also make him unlikely to obtain it.

So what's this got to do with a gay person pulling the lever for the candidate of the angry, white, largely male, largely bigoted and hate-filled working class yahoos-- what we call, with sadness, "life's losers"-- who took the Republican nomination away from Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz and all the incompetents in between and gave it to Herr Trumpf? Are there angry, white, bigoted males among gays? You tell me; I haven't been in a gay bar in 2 or 3 decades. Luke Brinker writes that "among the Trump Train's passengers is a fiercely committed corps of gay supporters, enamored of the brash billionaire's anti-establishment message and unimpressed by likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton." Some, like Chris Barron, have been kicking around on the fringes of gay politics and are well known for being borderline psychotic, bigoted and twisted. "Donald Trump is the most pro-gay Republican nominee ever," Barron, the former national political director of the Log Cabin Republicans and a co-founder of the now-defunct group GOProud, insisted. He says the LGBT community shouldn't worry about gay issues-- "we've won the day," he declared-- but should "look at the totality of issues that impact them," (jobs, the economy, foreign policy and terrorism). Barron himself is a hater who detests immigrants and has a similar mindset to Trump's.

That may seem difficult to square with Trump's support from evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr., his avowed opposition to same-sex marriage and his promise to appoint Supreme Court justices in the mold of the late archconservative Antonin Scalia. But while early polling shows Clinton a lock to win gay voters, the billionaire's boosters in the community cheer his history of supporting gay rights, his business acumen and his brash, thoroughly unapologetic persona.

After all, Trump went to Elton John's gay wedding and had a gay employee. Barron: "Trump was pro-gay long before it was politically trendy-- unlike Hillary Clinton." Besides, among crazy, usually self-loathing right-wing gays who spend their lives hating (immigrants included) Trump is a dream candidate.

[F]or Trump's gay supporters, his positions on traditional LGBTQ issues are of tertiary interest at best.

Journalist and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos (the crackpot on the right), among Trump's most fervent backers in conservative media, pointed to the candidate's hardline immigration policy-- a stance, Yiannopoulos said, that ultimately bolsters gay rights.

"Think of where most immigrants come from: war-torn, socially conservative countries in the Middle East, or violent South and Central American backwaters," Yiannopoulos said in an email. "Neither environment breeds a culture that's particularly interested in or friendly to gay rights. Much as the left likes to bash it, it's western culture that's done the most for queers."

...Many LGBTQ Americans confront a host of economic challenges-- including workplace discrimination and disproportionate rates of homelessness-- but compared to heterosexuals, gays earn higher median incomes, enjoy higher personal savings and are less likely to be unemployed, according to a 2012 study by Prudential.

More affluent voters are more likely to vote Republican, and should Trump lead a deescalation of the right's culture war on LGBTQ issues, many well-to-do gays-- to say nothing of non-gays turned off by the party's social conservatism-- may give the GOP a second look.

Jimmy LaSalvia, who co-founded GOProud with Barron but bolted from the GOP in 2014, citing its persistent "tolerance of bigotry," isn't convinced.

Even if Trump dials back the party's hardline stance on LGBTQ issues, LaSalvia said in a recent interview, gays will recoil from the candidate's rhetoric targeting immigrants, women and Muslims.

"Gay people have been used as political pawns our entire lives. It's personal to us and everyone who's ever been marginalized for political gain," LaSalvia, who endorsed Clinton in December, said.

But Barron is unswayed by such appeals.

"It's what the left is now relying on to try to keep LGBT voters on the Democratic plantation," he said. "Where were all the Muslim groups when it came to the fight for marriage equality? Forgive me if I'm not totally and completely feeling the kinship there."

There is a natural kinship, Yiannopoulos contended, between gays and the onetime Manhattan playboy, to whom he regularly refers to as "Daddy" in tweets cheering Trump's campaign.

"The man built a gold-plated tower with his name on it!" Yiannopoulos said, referring to Trump's home base on Fifth Avenue. "Gay men have a deep, if sometimes brash, sense of the aesthetic, and Trump's is hard to ignore. It's flashy, it's in-your-face, it's fabulous."

"Then there's Trump himself," Yiannopoulos added. "Raw, masculine energy. He's just so much more exciting than normal presidential candidates with their drab expressions and teleprompter speeches."

It's difficult to evade a sense of campiness in the Trump shtick: The remarks about his opponents' (male and female) physical appearances, the flashiness of his campaign rallies (complete with a playlist featuring the Broadway classic "Music of the Night," from Phantom of the Opera) and the carefully-cultivated histrionics ("I do whine because I want to win and I'm not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.")

But Trump may nevertheless confront significant hurdles in winning over LGBTQ voters. A May poll conducted by the firm Whitman Insight Strategies found Trump winning only 16% of the LGBTQ vote to Clinton's 84%. That was worse than the 76% to 22% difference between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, although the survey featured a small sample of only 338 likely voters nationwide.

"He'll definitely do better," Yiannopoulos predicted. "While I doubt many progressive, Democrat-supporting gays will switch over, he'll bring in a huge number who have never voted before in their lives. He's just that compelling."

Wow... things have changed a lot since gays were in the forefront on expanding the boundaries, not just for themselves, but for everyone-- from the time of the French Revolution, the 1848 uprisings across Europe, the Russian Revolution and, more recently, the punk rock revolution. Self-respecting gays I know are all for Bernie. Low-info gays who gravitate towards pop culture defined by Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli, Judy Garland... that kind of stuff, tend to support Hillary. Are you gay? It doesn't matter, as long as you're #NeverTrump:

Steve Bannon, Breitbart, Lenin, the Alt-right, White Supremacy, Donald Trump & Dave Brat: The Mainstreaming of Hate. VA-07

-by James Newton

By now you’ve heard the story, but a quick recap — two years ago, a little known college professor named Dave Brat pulled off a stunning upset in Virginia, defeating then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican Congressional primary in the Virginia 7th District — a defeat of a high-ranking party leader the kind of which hadn’t often been seen before in the history of American politics. Brat went on to win the general election, and now is up for re-election against a Richmond Attorney, Eileen Bedell. Brat is also closely linked to Donald Trump, having received campaign money from Trump, endorsed him, and is serving on the leadership of Donald Trump’s campaign in Virginia.

If you had to boil it down to one issue, Brat won in 2014 by pushing anti-immigrant sentiments, a strategy that Trump has co-opted in the Presidential campaign. For Brat in 2014, other factors played a roll as well, as he was largely ignored by the political press prior to the primary, Eric Cantor didn’t take him seriously until too late, and Tea Party support Brat received helped push him to victory. His win shook the Republican establishment, moving them further right, and toward the hatefulness that has permeated this presidential campaign.

Helping Dave Brat then and now, and now Chief Executive of the Trump campaign, is Steve Bannon. Immediately prior to joining the Trump campaign, Bannon was the Chief Executive at Breitbart News, the best known mouthpiece of the so-called “alt-right,” the Republican party and conservative movement’s far right, if not extremist, wing. As is the modus operandi of extremists in the internet era, the alt-right sows seeds of racism without using traditional and obvious racist language or tactics, and instead it motivates its support and provides places to discuss via the web.

That Donald Trump is full of hate is a statement beyond reproach. But what isn’t as well known is Mr. Bannon’s hatefulness, as he prefers to let other people speak for him. Nonetheless, as time passes, a more complete picture begins to come into focus: that the mission of at least segments of the alt-right and Breibart news, and Steve Bannon, himself, is to further and make mainstream racism, and do so through stooges such as Donald Trump and Dave Brat. That Donald Trump is going to lose to Hillary Clinton seems likely. The same fate should befall Dave Brat. Hate, fear, and racism must be repudiated.

Recently released court documents discuss charges and the investigation of domestic violence and battery and witness intimidation filed against Bannon in 1996. The allegations related to altercations with his now-ex-wife, Mary-Louise Piccard, charges that were later dismissed when, according to the court documents:

[Ms. Piccard] skipped the trial after Bannon and his lawyer arranged for her to leave town. She said Bannon had told her the lawyer would make her look like the guilty party if she testified and the attorney told her she'd be broke if Bannon went to jail.

Next, in those same court documents, Ms. Piccard describes examples of Mr. Bannon’s anti-semitism, saying that Bannon did not want his children going to school with Jews, because they are “whiny.” Other Examples of anti-semitism follow Bannon, through those close to him. For example, one of Breibart News and the alt-right’s most public faces, Milo Yiannopoulos, has said that most anti-semitism is just for show-- trolls on the internet, if you will, having fun-- so it’s nothing to worry about; it’s just free speech.

That Mr. Bannon’s first foray into political campaigns was to prop up his friend, Dave Brat, against the highest-ranking Jewish member, ever, of Congress seems like too convenient a coincidence. Moreover, it’s not just persons of Jewish faith that seem to bother Bannon, as he is on record speaking poorly of Catholics and lesbians as well.

These examples, alone, perhaps don’t make the case, but there is ample other evidence to choose from. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that Bannon and Kelley-Ann Conway, another member of the Trump campaign’s leadership, are members of the Council for National Policy, an influential conservative group whose membership includes numerous persons reported to be racial extremists.

As for Bannon’s media arm, Breitbart.com, he calls it the mouthpiece for the so-called “alt-right.” Inoccous sounding, the term “alt-right” was coined by Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader. His organization, the National Policy Institute, is an organization that publishes articles with statements such as:

Much of the debate on the decline of Whites in their traditional homelands centers on “immigration,” and specifically the continuing arrival in the West of large numbers of colored “immigrants” from the poorest regions of the world

which is an obvious corrollary to Trump’s, and Brat’s, rhetoric on immigration.



Milo Yiannopoulos, when describing the alt-right, has said:

“’White identity’ and ‘white nationalism’ is a little misleading [in decrbing the alt-right]. I think it’s more accurate to say that the alt-right cares about ‘western supremacy’ rather than ‘white supremacy’.”

Such word parsing, while not without some validity, stills shows that underlying whatever is used as the title is nonetheless still riven with racism. Moreover, as recent article from the Washington Post has explained, white supremacists have adjusted their language and tactics to be less obvious, but they are still no less hateful. And Bannon has proudly provided them a microphone.

And now he is providing them with candidates for high office.

By way of review, there is evidence that Steve Bannon, who helped elect Dave Brat to Congress, and now runs Donald Trump’s campaign, has been accused of beating his wife and keeping her from testifying against him, doesn’t think well of Jews and other minorities, and has assisted persons who publicly-stated mission is to further divisions among the races, i.e. what is called racism, by providing them a media outlet, and at least two candidates for national office.

While those things paint a difficult picture to reconcile, perhaps even more fundamentally frightening, is Bannon, himself. He has said that he wants nothing less than to destroy America. How? By channeling the spirit of a person he admires, the Russian revolutionary, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, founder of the Russian communist movement, first leader of the Soviet Union, and creator of a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat that murdered and oppressed millions during the 20th century.

“Lenin,” [Bannon] answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” 

Moreover, Bannon subscribes to using fear as a tactic. Quite simply, he seeks to employ the same chief tactic of terrorists. 

“Fear is a good thing,” he said in a 2010 interview, “Fear is going to lead you to take action.”

To further these ideas, Bannon found a willing stooge in Dave Brat two years ago, a friend he convinced to run on a platform that is summed up by recognizing the simple fact that Brat, during that campaign, sought the endorsement and money of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, an anti-immigrant hate group.

That Steve Bannon succeeded with Dave Brat two years ago was a confluence of good fortune-- the swelling of the Tea Party movement as well as an incumbent and press corps that missed the story. It provided him an important step toward moving racism, by whatever name, into the mainstream of not just American politics but American culture.

That Bannon’s message is now failing in the guise of Donald Trump is, one the hand, a testament to the American people, that we cannot be so easily swayed by manipulation and fear. On the other hand, Donald Trump is clearly a flawed candidate by all definitions, and there is no reason to believe that Bannon will not try again, perhaps next time with someone more savvy.

It is incumbent upon us all, however, to ensure that Bannon’s politics of fear-mongering is not only rejected in the person of Donald Trump, but also repudiated with the defeat of Dave Brat. Who knows, it could be that Brat is merely a stooge who was excited to tapped by Bannon, as hate doesn’t seem to flow through Brat like it does Trump. Nonetheless, his allegiances are clear and they must be rejected. It is no less than a battle over what it means to be American.

Thankfully the Virginia 7th District has a choice, a good one. Eileen Bedell is a lawyer, a small-business owner, a mother, and a spouse. In other words, she is real and understands how things work in the real world, not an ivory-tower, out of touch, academic propped up by Steve Bannon. Please support her if you can.

Does Anyone Ever Win When They Make A Deal With The Devil?

I got stuck in some kind of a traffic jam in the Valley yesterday. The freeway just stopped. It wasn't moving slowly; it wasn't moving at all. And it was humid and around 90 degrees and I hate A/C. The one redeeming part of this little adventure was that Terry Gross had Joshua Green as her guest on Fresh Air and I could concentrate on that. Green's book, Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, And The Storming Of The Presidency had just come out and you can probably imagine what Gross and he talked about. But you don't have to. NPR posted the transcript online. "[L]ife in Trump's inner circle is a constant roller coaster," he told her. "You're either going up or you're going down. Earlier, Bannon fell out of favor when Trump decided that he was getting too much attention. And Jared Kushner kind of rose in his place. But now with the Russia scandal that's embroiled so many members of the Trump family and inner circle, Bannon, almost by default, is kind of back in good standing.

And, in fact, Trump sent him back from Saudi Arabia on the foreign trip that he took in May to go and set up the outside legal organization that was meant to hive off the Russia scandal and try and keep Trump himself as separated from that as possible." Gross asked him to describe Bannon's nationalist vision.

GREEN: So Bannon's nationalism is something, I think, that grew out of both his Catholic upbringing, his blue-collar background but especially the financial crisis, the rise of the Tea Party. That is when he went from being a Goldman Sachs banker, a Hollywood guy to really moving over into the political sphere. He was one of Sarah Palin's early champions.

When I met him in 2011, he was already espousing this kind of populist-nationalist politics that was different from anything you were hearing back then on the left or the right. It was not quite a third way, but it was a different sort of Republicanism than we in Washington were accustomed to hearing about.

GROSS: During the campaign, Donald Trump hammered Hillary Clinton for having connections to Goldman Sachs. Bannon used to work for Goldman Sachs. He specialized in mergers and acquisitions. He started doing that in their Hollywood office, then started his own boutique bank dealing with TV and movies. And then he took over an internet gaming company.

And you write about how that gaming company helped shape his vision of how to create a base of support for his vision. He saw people there, disaffected young men, who he wanted to mobilize for his cause. Would you describe this untapped group that he came across-- politically untapped group that he came across through internet gaming?

GREEN: Yeah, this is a fascinating story about what is the rise of what's known today as the alt-right. And Bannon, who has a fascinating and varied career after Goldman Sachs, wound up as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong that didn't actually produce video games. But what it did was to try and formalize a process called gold farming.

And what that is is, literally, they would hire people to play video games and win gold and prizes in the game that they would then turn around and sell to people in the real world so they could be more powerful, more successful in these what were called massive multiplayer online games, like "World Of Warcraft."

This was a serious business. It had backing from Goldman Sachs. And right out of the gate, it made a lot of money. But what happened next was interesting. The players in the actual games, who tended to be young males, bridled at the idea that people were essentially cheating, that they were buying these weapons and things to get ahead in the game. And the players themselves tended to congregate on these message boards that were devoted to MMO games, to the massive multiplayer games.

And they organized themselves, and they basically went after the videogame companies and said, you know, you need to stop this. You need to push out these gold farmers. And they had enough power that they basically ruined Bannon's business. But the lesson he took away from that was that these rootless white males who spend all their time online actually had what he told me was, quote, "monster power," to go out there and affect change and that they operated at a kind of sub rosa level that most people didn't see.

So when he moved over to Breitbart News a couple of years later, one of his goals, he told me, was to try and attract these people and radicalize them in a political sense, which is basically what wound up happening.

GROSS: So did Bannon see Breitbart News as his connection to those disaffected white men that he'd discovered through the gaming industry and that he wanted to mobilize?

GREEN: In a word, yes. He thought when he took over Breitbart News that one of the things they wanted to do was kind of grow this audience and really become a kind of locus for the populist nationalism, that's what Bannon calls it, that he thought was so important and needed to be injected into the American political debate.

And one of the ways he did that was by hiring a very controversial figure named Milo Yiannopoulos, a British provocateur who Bannon hired as his tech editor. And as he explains to me in the book, essentially, he thought that Milo could be the bridge between these rootless, disaffected white gamers and the Breitbart world of populist politics that he was trying to build up. Milo came into Breitbart News and began to publish the kind of screaming offensive headlines that have gotten so much attention over the last year or two.

He was part of this gamergate scandal that attacked females in the gaming industry and did all sorts of things to attract this crowd from the world of gaming and message boards like Reddit and 4chan over into the Breitbart universe where a lot of them became enamored with Trump, I think some of them in an ironic, nonpolitical way.

But this sort of gave rise to what we know of as the alt-right, this very active, aggressive group of online people who attacked journalists, who attacked other politicians, who attacked Trump's adversaries during the campaign and have kind of become a fixture of our digital political life ever since.

GROSS: So how did Steve Bannon first get connected to Donald Trump? You said they were introduced through David Bossie?

GREEN: They were introduced by David Bossie, who as some listeners may know, is a longtime Republican operative whose specialty really is taking on the Clintons. Bossie first came on the scenes as an investigator for Dan Burton, the chairman of the Government Oversight Committee in the '90s, who was the main figure trying to take down Bill Clinton at the time.

Bossie was fired from his job for doctoring tapes that were meant to incriminate Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he wound up becoming the head of a group called Citizens United, which is probably most famous today for having sued the FEC and won the Citizens United Supreme Court case that was built around a movie that Bossie and Citizens United had produced, an anti-Hillary Clinton movie that was supposed to run on the eve of the 2008 election.

So Trump met Bossie through Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul. And they were at a fundraiser. He brought the two of them together. Trump was thinking about getting more seriously involved in politics, started turning to Bossie for advice. And one day in 2010, Bossie asked his friend Steve Bannon to come along. And that's how they all met.

...GROSS: So one of the key things behind Steve Bannon becoming Donald Trump's chief strategist during the campaign was the Mercer family-- Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer, who were big funders on the right.

You call them the kind of alt-Koch brothers. So they'd already been funding Breitbart News. So they already knew Steve Bannon through Breitbart. What was Rebekah Mercer's role in getting Trump to hire Bannon as his chief campaign strategist?

GREEN: Well, I think Rebekah Mercer, who is Robert Mercer's daughter, is really the more politically active of the two. But Mercer himself is a fascinating guy, a self-made hedge fund billionaire, famous recluse, very conservative. And the Mercers are essentially the merchant bankers for Bannon and a lot of his political organizations, not only Breitbart News but also the Government Accountability Institute, which is the outfit that produced the Clinton Cash book.

They fund Cambridge Analytica, which is a data analysis firm that helped Trump get elected. And they were also big donors to Trump, both directly and in terms of funding various super PAC efforts that were meant to help his candidacy, including the Stop Crooked Hillary PAC that Bannon and Bossie briefly worked on before they joined the campaign.

Rebekah Mercer is, you know, very aggressive, very involved in politics and has clear ideas about what she wants to do. And so I describe a scene in the book in early August where she flies out to visit Trump at a fundraiser in East Hampton and essentially says, you need to make a change now in your campaign or you're going to lose badly.

And Trump says, well, what do you think I should do? And she says, I think you ought to hire Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway. I know them. They'll do it. And within a couple of days, that's exactly what happened.

GROSS: So she basically tells Trump, you have to fire Paul Manafort. But it's Jared Kushner who actually tells Manafort that Manafort has to resign. Donald Trump is known as Mr. You're-fired. Like, that's his catchphrase. But he's not the one who tells Manafort he's fired. He gets Jared Kushner to do it.

GREEN: I think he had long since lost faith in Paul Manafort as a campaign manager. When Manafort came in, it was after the tumultuous reign of Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager. And what Manafort was trying to do was to essentially sand the rough edges off Trump and make him a little more palatable to the Republican donor class because it was clear, you know, now he's the nominee, we need to kind of put our best foot forward.

And Trump is going to need to raise a lot of money from rich conservatives who are very skeptical of him and what he stands for. But that never really clicked. Manafort never clicked with Trump. Trump would tell his advisers that he thought Manafort was low-energy. And we all know that's the mark of death when Trump calls you low-energy.

But it was a New York Times story that really did Manafort in. And they reported in mid-August that Manafort's name appeared on a Ukrainian ledger as having been the recipient of cash payments from a pro-Russia political party, which caused a real firestorm, which upset Trump. He decided that Manafort needed to go.

And as the story was told to me, Kushner at breakfast said very politely to Manafort, listen, you know, you're really coming under a lot of heat. I don't think this is good for the campaign and we'd like to have your resignation. And Manafort protested and said, well, look, I don't - you know, I'll look guilty if I resign.

I don't want to do this. And Kushner looks at him and says, well, listen, we're sending out a press release in about 30 seconds that says you resigned from the campaign. And that was that. Manafort was out and Bannon was really the guy in charge for the homestretch of the campaign.

GROSS: So when Bannon took over the Trump campaign, was he still affiliated with Breitbart? And was he using Breitbart News to campaign for Trump?

GREEN: Formally, Bannon separated from Breitbart News when he joined the Trump campaign. But Breitbart, in a lot of ways, had really been the locus of pro-Trump Republican energy all through the primaries, both before and after Steve Bannon took over the campaign. One of the themes I get at in the book is the division in conservative media. We forget now because Fox lavishes so much positive attention on Donald Trump.

But in the beginning, Fox was not uniformly pro-Trump. There was Sean Hannity, who has always been a Trump fan. But there were also people like Megyn Kelly, who held Trump to account, who were very skeptical. And if you remember the first Republican debate, Kelly went after Trump. It caused a huge ruckus.

And it really caused a split in the Republican Party between people who were pro-Trump and people who were pro-Fox. And Breitbart, led by Bannon, really went to war with Fox News over the issue of, you know, why are you attacking Donald Trump? This is the guy that represents our base. This is who our voters want.

And there was a very ugly scene between Roger Ailes and Steve Bannon where they're swearing at each other about whether Breitbart is being too negative to Megyn Kelly and so on. But eventually, Trump and Bannon seem to have won that side of the fight. And by the end of the campaign, you really do see the conservative media with a few never-Trumpers, but most of the media is more or less united behind Trump.

GROSS: It's interesting. You point out that Steve Bannon thought of Fox News as just being old-- that old people watched it, whereas Breitbart was like the young white men who were paying attention to that. So he saw Fox News for a while as just being like out of date.

GREEN: Bannon used to say that Fox News is the establishment wing of the conservative media. And establishment and Steve Bannon's mind is the great pejorative. He saw Fox viewers as, you know, an older, graying, doddering group of people who didn't really matter and that the readers of Breitbart were younger and more aggressive and more populist and represented a rising generation of conservative voters. And so he was never very interested in TV. He-- Bannon thought that everything, you know, was going to happen on the Internet, online, that that was the future of politics and that that was the way to affect the Republican primary and really get Trump elected.

GROSS: Jeff Sessions, who is now president Trump's attorney general, was the first senator to endorse candidate Donald Trump. And according to your book, it was Steve Bannon who was behind getting Sessions to endorse Trump. How did he do it?

GREEN: Well, Bannon and Sessions had been allied for a long time. Sessions was one of the rare right-wing populists elected to Congress whose views more or less over overlap with Steve Bannon's and Breitbart's. And, you know, we forget just what a pariah Donald Trump was at the outset of the Republican primaries. I mean, he was kind of considered, you know, a punchline, an offensive figure. No one in polite Republican company would endorse him. They were-- most of them were afraid to attack him, but nobody really wanted to endorse him. And I think Bannon understood how important it was to get just that one first endorsement in hopes that that would break a dam and that he could really bring in some institutional support for Trump. And so he talked to Sessions, who he had previously tried to talk into running for president three years earlier, simply to advance his ideas of trade and opposition to immigration. Sessions didn't want to do it, but Bannon basically talked him into coming out and endorsing Trump and said, look, this is the way to advance the issues we care about. This is the guy who will elevate them to the top of the list of issues that Republicans have to talk about. And even if Donald Trump doesn't win, this will advance our cause. And ultimately, Sessions was persuaded.

GROSS: And Bannon also thought it was really important to mobilize the South. And Sessions from the South. Why was he seeing the future being in the South?

GREEN: This is one fascinating aspect to me of Bannon's politics. For the last 20 or 30 years, it's been a belief among Republican strategists that the party's biggest problem is that it is captive to this Southern mindset. Christopher Caldwell wrote a wonderful series of articles in The Atlantic in the mid-'90s that was called "The Southern Captivity Of The GOP." And Caldwell's thesis, which I agreed with, was basically that the Republican Party is in danger of becoming a regional party that only represents the interests of white people in the South-- conservative white people in the South. And then in order to survive, it needs to broaden its appeal to other generations, to other demographics. It's the same idea that was at the heart of the 2013 GOP autopsy that the Republican National Committee came out with. But Bannon's belief was just the opposite, that the South was the motherland of American populism, that that was really what we needed, that the establishments in both parties had become captured by a Wall Street globalist elite that cared more about tax cuts for its high-end donors and free trade than it did about representing the interests of working people. And that turned out to be a very powerful message that was really the key, I think, to Trump's ability to defeat all the people that he did in the Republican primary because he was really the only person who espoused that kind of Southern populism.

...GROSS: Now, you describe how Steve Bannon brought on board a group that epitomized what Hillary Clinton in 1998 described as the vast right-wing conspiracy, the vast right-wing conspiracy that had mobilized against the Clintons when he was president. So let's talk about the people you're talking about there as actually epitomizing that vast right-wing conspiracy. We've talked about David Bossie, the person who is behind Citizens United. Kellyanne Conway and her husband, George Conway, what are their connections to early anti-Hillary work and anti-Bill Clinton work?

GREEN: Early on, Conway-- Kellyanne Conway was one of three women that were kind of known colloquially in Washington as the pundettes (ph). They were all blonde conservative outspoken anti-Clinton pundits who rose to fame during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. There was Kellyanne Conway. There was Laura Ingraham, who's now a conservative radio host. And there's Ann Coulter, who needs no introduction, was also a big Trump supporter. And what was so interesting to me about the fact that Bannon and this group wound up in charge of Trump's campaign come mid-August was that they had really spent the previous 20, 25 years as professional anti-Clinton operatives, which believe it or not is a distinct professional category within Republican politics.

There's no real analog on the left. You can't make a living anymore as an anti-Obama operative or as an anti-George W. Bush operative, but there's always an appetite among conservative donors, among conservative activists for anti-Clinton stuff. And so you literally had people who had spent 20, 25 years thinking and plotting about how to stop Hillary Clinton suddenly in charge of a half-billion-dollar presidential campaign led by a candidate who is more than willing to carry out those attacks.

GROSS: And I just want to mention that Kellyanne Conway's husband George worked on the Paula Jones lawsuit against Clinton and helped prepare the brief on her behalf before the Supreme Court. So he was very much involved in the anti-Bill Clinton effort. And continuing with the anti-Clinton theme here, Robert Mercer, the father of Rebekah Mercer-- and they're both very big funders on the right-- during the Clinton presidency-- I think it was then-- he had this theory or supported the theory that Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas had been involved in a CIA-backed drug-running scheme based out of an Arkansas airport.

GREEN: This was-- yes, this was a conspiracy theory that had some prominence on the far-right fringes. You don't encounter a lot of conservative donors, especially not successful businessmen, who are willing to believe things quite that extreme even if they intensely dislike the Clintons. But I think that gives a flavor of Mercer's animus and paranoia about the Clintons and helps explain why he was so determined to stop Hillary Clinton from becoming president.

GROSS: So you write that Steve Bannon's plan to stop Hillary Clinton-- once Bannon joined the Trump campaign-- the plan was built on four organizations funded by the Mercer family, organizations that they had a stake in in some way. One of them was Breitbart News. We've talked about that. One of them was the Government Accountability Institute. Would you describe what that is?

GREEN: Sure the Government Accountability Institute is formerly a nonprofit research organization. But what it did in this case was it became a research center to conduct a kind of forensic examination of the Clinton's finances especially as they pertain to the Clinton Foundation. And the research that this organization did became the best-selling book that was written by GAI's president, a guy named Peter Schweizer.

That book, Clinton Cash, came out just as Clinton was preparing to announce her presidential run and really did a lot to tarnish her image right out of the gate. All the stories about the Clinton Foundation kind of became interspersed with Clinton's email story and besmirched her in a way that I don't think she ever fully recovered from. And that was Bannon's goal from the outset.

GROSS: And it's interesting, like, although Steve Bannon had been the head of Breitbart News, which is famous for fake news, with the Government Accountability Institute, he wanted that Schweizer book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story Of How And Why Foreign Governments And Businesses Helped Make Bill And Hillary Rich, Bannon wanted that book to be fact-based in the hopes that the mainstream press would pick up on it and would publish facts from there and that that would work against Hillary. And that's in fact what happened.

GREEN: That's exactly right. In fact, that's what drew my interest in Bannon originally. He had what I thought was a very shrewd analysis of why conservatives in the 1990s had failed to stop Bill Clinton. And Bannon's analysis was that conservatives had become so wrapped up in their own rumors and silly scandals-- what today we would call fake news-- that they didn't realize that they had kind of lost the general public and did not have credibility. And so they went ahead and impeached Bill Clinton. And then they looked up and nobody really went along with them. It didn't hurt Clinton politically. It didn't hurt the Democrats politically.

And Bannon's analysis of that failure went as follows. He decided that in order to really stop the Clintons, you had to rely on facts and not rumors. And so what he wanted to do was to go in and dig into all the foreign contributors who'd given money to the Clinton Foundation. He wanted to try and get the speeches-- the private speeches I should call them - that Hillary Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs and others and really fan this idea that there was just something nefarious or disreputable going on at the heart of this.

And the idea was, look, investigative reporters are legitimately interested in this stuff. So if we can marshal a bunch of facts-- not rumors, but facts-- hand them over to reporters at places like the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, then I am confident that they will look into these stories themselves, and they will drive this narrative that I think is going to be harmful to the Clintons. And as you say, that's exactly what happened.

GROSS: So another company funded by the Mercer family that was very helpful in the Trump campaign was Cambridge Analytica. They're a data company. But what do they do? And they do-- do they do anything different from other data companies?

GREEN: Well, they do, and it's a little controversial. They do what's called psychographic modeling. They claim that they have deeper insight into voters' psyches than your run-of-the-mill political data firm. There's a lot of debate about whether or not they actually do. But the Mercers, and Robert Mercer in particular, who made his fortune as a hedge fund guy by obsessing and understanding data and patterns and algorithms better than anyone else, decided that the Republican Party wasn't doing a good enough job of leveraging, taking advantage of political data. So he was going to go buy a data firm and do a better job of it himself.

One of the things you saw happening is if Rebekah Mercer supported a political candidate or organization, there would be a lot of pressure sometimes from Steve Bannon to also hire Cambridge Analytica as a data vendor. And a lot of Republican-- mainstream Republican outlets felt very threatened by this. You have this company kind of elbowing their way in that controls this data that the party doesn't. But Cambridge Analytica has been a big part of the Trump story. And, in fact, they had their own data scientists embedded at the Trump campaign. They had very advanced models about who Trump was appealing to and who they needed to reach. It wasn't clear at the time that they really knew what they were doing, I think but in hindsight, it's clear that they did.

GROSS: So in terms of Cambridge Analytica's connection to Steve Bannon, Bannon had an ownership stake in the company and a seat on the board. What do you think Cambridge Analytica did to help Trump win?

GREEN: They went and spent a lot of time and money figuring out who Trump voters really are and how they differ from ordinary Republican voters. They're more rural. They're more populist. They care about different issues than your standard Republican does. And so the Trump campaign was able to go and find those voters in places like the Florida Panhandle and turn them out in numbers that nobody-- no mainstream political analyst expected. They figured out, you know, who these people are. And a lot of us-- and I include myself in this category-- thought Trump's promises in the closing weeks of the campaign that there was going to be this Brexit effect, that these hidden voters were going to come out of the woodwork was just absurd. And in the event, that's pretty much what happened.

GROSS: So do you think that the Hillary campaign and Cambridge Analytica were looking at swing voters in a totally different way?

GREEN: I do. Although what's so interesting to me is that they were really looking at the same group of voters. And the Cambridge-- or the Trump data scientists gave these voters a nickname that's wonderful. They call them double haters. And these were people who said that they didn't like Hillary Clinton and they didn't like Donald Trump. But their voting history suggested that they were going to turn up on Election Day and they were going to vote for one or the other. And so there was a real tug of war behind the scenes between Clinton's campaign and between Trump's campaign to try and win these voters over.

And what happened at the end of the race is that they broke to Trump. And one big debate which I cover in some detail is whether or not James Comey's announcement that he was reopening Hillary Clinton's email investigation tilted the race. What's clear from the data that I have-- I have some of the internal polling and some of the memos that were written in the Trump campaign around this time. It's clear that the Comey revelation had a deep, deep effect on these double haters and got them to come out not to support Trump but to essentially vote against Hillary, which in the end was the same thing.

...GROSS: Do you see Steve Bannon as a true believer?

GREEN: Absolutely. You know, early on when I first met him, I thought he was a typical Washington grifter who was kind of glomming on to the Tea Party-Palin thing as a way to make money. And it became clear pretty early on that, no, Bannon really believes this stuff to a degree that's almost scary. And he will keep fighting for this idea of an anti-immigrant nationalism come hell or high water.

GROSS: And what about President Trump? What drives him? Do you think he's a true believer?

GREEN: No, I don't. I think that Trump is driven mainly by opportunism, by a desire to pursue whatever is going to get Donald Trump positive coverage on cable news now. And during the campaign when nationalism-- when Bannon's nationalism seemed to work for him, that was what he would espouse. But when that stopped working for him in February after he became president, he was happy to bring in people who nationalists abhor, people like Gary Cohn from Goldman Sachs. He was willing to listen to Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka, who are the furthest you can get from nationalists. So I don't know that Trump really has any policy beliefs at all.

GROSS: I would love to know-- and I'm guessing you can't really answer this-- what Steve Bannon really thinks of Donald Trump.

GREEN: I can't imagine that Bannon really thinks all that much of Donald Trump. I mean the, you know, tragic, Shakespearean irony of the Donald Trump-Steve Bannon relationship is that Bannon finally did find a vessel for his ideas who'd get elected president, who had the kind of personal force to overcome all the other candidates, all the impediments, against all odds kind of got in there and now doesn't have the focus, the wherewithal, the self-control to even do the basic things that a president needs to do.

Bannon is a pretty self-aware guy and a pretty shrewd analyst. I'm sure he understands that no other president-- not Marco Rubio, not Jeb Bush, nobody-- would ever let anyone like Steve Bannon within 100 miles of his campaign or his White House. This is his one shot to institute his nationalist ideas. And the guy sitting in the White House doesn't seem capable of doing anything other than watching cable news and raging about it. And I think that would have to be very frustrating for a guy like Bannon who really does care about these ideas.

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens reviewed Green's book for the NY Times Tuesday. "If there’s a lesson to draw from Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s deeply reported and compulsively readable account of Bannon’s fateful political partnership with Trump, it is not to underestimate the honey badger. 'If I didn’t come along, the Republican Party had zero chance of winning the presidency,' Trump told Green, a senior national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek, in May 2016, and he was probably right. Only someone with his and Bannon’s transgressive instincts, along with their seeming incapacity for moral and intellectual embarrassment, could have defeated the well-oiled if soulless machine that was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign."

[W]hatever the pair lacked in conventional political experience, they made up for with other gifts. Both understood showmanship: slogans, narrative, put-downs and especially conflict. They knew the value of rage and outrage alike-- the first as fuel for a movement; the second as the indispensable foil for that movement.

They also grasped that much that was supposed to matter in politics no longer did-- detailed policy papers, for instance, or personal decorum. Trump, Green writes, “figured out that the norms forbidding such behavior were not inviolable rules that carried a harsh penalty but rather sentiments of a nobler, bygone era, gossamer-thin and needlessly adhered to by politicians who lacked his willingness to defy them.”

That’s why Trump’s birtherism-- the support he gave to the lie that Barack Obama was born abroad-- never disqualified his candidacy, even as it helped him “forge a powerful connection with party activists.” It’s a tactic he would repeat straight through the end of the campaign, when he took to denouncing “international banks” in terms that shaded into anti-Semitism.

“Darkness is good,” was Bannon’s advice for dealing with criticism from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League. “Don’t let up.” At another moment, when the campaign feared House Speaker Paul Ryan would try to steal the G.O.P. nomination from Trump, Bannon threatened to rally Breitbart’s army. “Pepe’s gonna stomp their ass,” he said-- “Pepe the Frog” being the alt-right’s white-supremacist cartoon mascot on Twitter.

...Bannon seemed to intuit that this digital world could be recreated for his political purposes, by designing an apocalyptic narrative of righteous warriors waging an end-of-days battle by all necessary means against assorted enemies: jihadists, progressives, Acela-corridor Republicans, the Clintons. Republican political operatives had spent the Obama years wondering about the “missing” white voters who had failed to show up for John McCain and Mitt Romney. Turns out, they (or others like them) were online, and Bannon-- whose own fantasies were suggested by a portrait he had of himself in his office, dressed as Napoleon-- was proposing to supply this army with the necessary ammunition.

Much of it would come from the bile factory at Breitbart News. Another part would be supplied by the Government Accountability Institute, a Tallahassee, Fla.-based nonprofit that mined the “deep Web” and dug up the dirt on the Clinton Foundation for Peter Schweizer’s 2015 blockbuster “Clinton Cash.” There was also a data-analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company “that advised foreign governments and militaries on influencing elections and public opinion using the tools of psychological warfare."

What all of this added up to was a kind of alt-G.O.P.-- agile and indifferent to norms and boundaries-- that could supply the Trump campaign with everything it needed to win. Bannon has described himself as a “Leninist” for wanting to “destroy the state.” Whether he will achieve that is doubtful, but he seems to share Lenin’s genius for building a secret party with radical designs, ready to pounce at the historically opportune time.

Now it has succeeded. To what end? As an electoral gambit, the honey badger approach was a good bet: Trump is president not in spite of the wretched things he said about Mexicans, women, John McCain, Megyn Kelly and so on, but because he said them. He sold his shamelessness as fearlessness and his charlatanism as charisma, and people believed. Lord save us when Democrats alight on a similar candidate.