Trump appointed Stephen Bannon to be his Chief Counselor to the President, and I am seeing a lot of passing references to him now not just as a white supremacist, but as an open white supremacist. I am just wondering what is being referred to here. I would love to be able to pull out some very clear, very direct, very reliable quotes to show my Trump supporter friends who on FB have said they think Trump was just “saying what it takes to get elected” but won’t actually do anything racist or w/e.
I don’t know that he’s ever acknowledged being a white supremacist in so many words. However, he is very open about being a member of and media facilitator (through Breitbart) for the “alt-right”, which is safe (at the moment) code for the same thing. With the kind of publicity he and Breitbart have been getting from being involved in Trump’s campaign, though, it probably won’t be safe code for long.
Here’s what the NY Times says the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/us/politics/reince-priebus-chief-of-staff-donald-trump.html):
Stephen Bannon is a high-functioning, sociopathic Donald Trump.
Anyone smaller than him he will steamroll. Anyone he perceives as equal in status he will co-opt, ridicule, sue or defame. He will insinuate himself into the company of anyone larger than him, in order to hollow them out from the inside and turn them into mouthpieces of his own particular brand of nihilism.
Stephen Bannon has no intent of building any conservative movement for anything at all, except as a vehicle to chaffeur him to his next peak.
See: His takeover of Breitbart, which has become Trump’s personal mouthpiece. (And which Andrew Breitbart would have bitterly hated.) His eager support for the Tea Party movement, which he has now started to tear down as it has outlived its’ usefullness. His careful cultivation of the alt-right, which is the Tea Party of 2016.
It’s hard to tell if Bannon has any policies or principles of his own. I have spent literally hours reading about this man - who Bloomberg already in 2015 called the “most dangerous political operative in America” - and I still can’t find hint, trace or smell of any personal agenda beyond improving his own ability and position to influence the public perception.
I’d be extremely chary of classifying him as a white supremacist. He would use white supremacists without a heartbeat of hesitation, if it suited his purposes. But to attribute their views to him for that reason strikes me as a simplistic misrepresentation of a very complex man. And I suspect he’d adore that.
Yeah I have been reading about him as well and I am still confused about what he really believes. He is obviously very smart and ambitious and has an interesting resume: Navy, Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, his own investment bank, Hollywood producer, Breitbart and now the mastermind behind Trump.
I am especially intrigued by his roleas acting director of Biosphere 2 where he apparently focused on pollution and climate change.
Honestly he sounds like a character from spy fiction…
Incidentally if you were to write a spy novel about a finance/technology/media cabal out to take over the world, Bannon and Thiel would make great characters and Trump would be the perfect front man. I just hope Elon Musk is on the good side and has our back.