Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged bannon

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Video reveals Steve Bannon links to Boris Johnson | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-bannon-links-to-boris-johnson

cooperation international Bannon UK Brexit alt-right politics history crisis

shared by Javier E on 23 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • On the day that article 50 was triggered, Nigel Farage was filmed with a pint of beer thanking them both. “Well done Bannon. Well done Breitbart. You helped with this. Hugely
  • Alison Klayman, the film-maker, said that Bannon had been “unequivocal” about his communications with Johnson. She also said that Bannon had met Farage, a close associate, several times during the same visit.
  • Klayman asks him if they’ve been speaking on the phone and he says: “Talked to him initially over the phone then it’s just easier to go back and forth on text. It’s just easier. I’ve been telling him one of my recommendations is that he gave one of the most important political speeches of 2016. Was his closing speech, a three-to-five-minute speech in June 2016, his closing argument on national TV for the Leave campaign ... And it was magnificent. “And all I was telling him all weekend was just to incorporate those themes. Those same themes. Basically, he was saying that June 23 was independence day for Great Britain. Their independence day being like our July 4.” Bannon adds: “This is the tee up, right. He’s back.” He then describes Johnson’s career, saying: “He wrote a really great book on Churchill. That’s one of the things I told him over the weekend.” Bannon says he got to know Johnson after the US presidential election when he was working as Donald Trump’s chief strategist. “Right after we won, Boris flew over. Because their victory was as unexpected as ours. I got to know him quite well in the transition period,” he said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The video is bound to raise further questions about Johnson’s openness and the extent to which he has relied on Bannon for advice at key stages in his bid for Downing Street
  • Bannon has described the far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – known as Tommy Robinson – as the “backbone” of Britain.
cartergramiak

Their First Try Backfired, but Giuliani and Allies Keep Aiming at Biden - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...rudy-giuliani-biden.html

biden trump election us gop

shared by cartergramiak on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • The former New York mayor’s dirt-digging effort on Hunter Biden in 2019 ended with President Trump’s impeachment. Now he is back with new associates. So far it is not going exactly as planned.282
  • On the weekend of Oct. 10, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon and a prominent new ally, a Chinese billionaire and Mar-a-Lago member named Guo Wengui, gathered at Mr. Guo’s luxury apartment overlooking Central Park for dinner and cigars.
  • Now Mr. Giuliani, undaunted and surrounded by a new cast of characters after some of his wingmen in the Ukraine caper were indicted, is trying again.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Mr. Giuliani expressed frustration with the way the news media was keeping its distance, and said he would have preferred to have pushed out the materials earlier.“I would have loved to have had this six months ago,” he said in a recent interview. “It would have solved a lot of my problems.”
  • Mr. Guo and Mr. Bannon began working together after Mr. Bannon left the White House in 2017, quickly bonding over their mutual antipathy toward the Chinese Communist Party.
  • Mr. Guo, who is also known as Miles Kwok, left China in 2014, as the government there began leveling corruption allegations against his business associates and eventually Mr. Guo. He moved to New York, buying a $67.5 million apartment along Central Park and spending time aboard the Lady May.
  • Mr. Bannon asserted that the effort to limit the spread of the New York Post’s articles on social media had backfired, drawing more attention to them. “Social media overplayed this and did us a favor,” Mr. Bannon said.
  • At the same time Mr. Bannon and Mr. Giuliani were shopping the purported hard drive, two other efforts were afoot to disseminate related information on Hunter Biden.
Javier E

Steve Bannon: 'We're going to war in the South China Sea ... no doubt' | US news | The ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...p-war-south-china-sea-no-doubt

china islam foreign policy war

shared by Javier E on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The United States and China will fight a war within the next 10 years over islands in the South China Sea, and “there’s no doubt about that”.
  • At the same time, the US will be in another “major” war in the Middle East.
  • Those are the views – nine months ago at least – of one of the most powerful men in Donald Trump’s administration, Steve Bannon,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • in radio shows Bannon hosted for Breitbart he makes plain the two largest threats to America: China and Islam.
  • Bannon’s sentiments and his position in Trump’s inner circle add to fears of a military confrontation with China, after secretary of state Rex Tillerson said that the US would deny China access to the seven artificial islands. Experts warned any blockade would lead to war.
  • “You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China. Right? They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian west is on the retreat,” Bannon said during a February 2016 radio show.
  • China’s military warned that war between the two countries was a real possibility. “A ‘war within the president’s term’ or ‘war breaking out tonight’ are not just slogans, they are becoming a practical reality,” an official wrote on the website of the People’s Liberation Army.
  • Bannon focused heavily on China’s oppression of Christian groups. “The one thing the Chinese fear more than America … they fear Christianity more than anything,” he said.
  • “Some of these situations may get a little unpleasant,” Bannon said in November 2015. “But you know what, we’re in a war. We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.”
Javier E

Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ican-julius-evola-fascism.html

white supremacy fascist traditionalist crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 11 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.
  • Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.
  • They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.
  • “It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.
  • A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found.
  • The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses.
  • The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion.”
  • Mussolini so liked Evola’s 1941 book, “Synthesis on the Doctrine of Race,” which advocated a form of spiritual, and not merely biological, racism, that he invited Evola to meet him in September of that year.
  • Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.
  • A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.
  • Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”
  • Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.
  • It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.
  • Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”
  • “When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”
  • Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise. Instead he preferred the Nazi SS officers, seeing in them something closer to a mythic ideal. They also shared his anti-Semitism.
  • As Mr. Bannon expounded on the intellectual motivations of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, he mentioned “Julius Evola and different writers of the early 20th century who are really the supporters of what’s called the Traditionalist movement, which really eventually metastasized into Italian Fascism.”
  • In his Vatican talk, Mr. Bannon suggested that although Mr. Putin represented a “kleptocracy,” the Russian president understood the existential danger posed by “a potential new caliphate” and the importance of using nationalism to stand up for traditional institutions.
  • “We, the Judeo-Christian West,” Mr. Bannon added, “really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism.”
  • As Mr. Bannon suggested in his speech, Mr. Putin’s most influential thinker is Aleksandr Dugin, the ultranationalist Russian Traditionalist and anti-liberal writer sometimes called “Putin’s Rasputin.”
  • An intellectual descendant of Evola, Mr. Dugin has called for a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary, and consistent fascist fascism” and advocated a geography-based theory of “Eurasianism” — which has provided a philosophical framework for Mr. Putin’s expansionism and meddling in Western European politics.
  • Mr. Dugin sees European Traditionalists as needing Russia, and Mr. Putin, to defend them from the onslaught of Western liberal democracy, individual liberty, and materialism — all Evolian bêtes noires.
  • This appeal of traditional values on populist voters and against out-of-touch elites, the “Pan-European Union” and “centralized government in the United States,” as Mr. Bannon put it, was not lost on Mr. Trump’s ideological guru.“A lot of people that are Traditionalists,” he said in his Vatican remarks, “are attracted to that.”
knudsenlu

Steve Bannon tells French far-right 'history is on our side' | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-right-history-is-on-our-side

bannon national front conservatism france history politics

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Steve Bannon tells French far-right 'history is on our side' Former Trump adviser addresses Front National as Marine Le Pen attempts to relaunch her party
  • Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon has told France’s far-right Front National that, “history is on our side and will bring us victory” in an address to the party’s conference.
  • At the two-day conference in the northern city of Lille, FN president Marine Le Pen’s is attempting to “re-found” her rightwing party, announcing a change of name – to be revealed on Sunday and validated by a members’ vote – to show the FN has come of age, shaken off its controversial past and is ready to govern.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “Today’s politics cannot be summed up by the left-right divide. During the 2008 financial crisis, the governments and banks looked after themselves above all, they saved themselves and not the people.”
  • Jean-Marie Le Pen said: “It’s the big boss’s surprise. I think Bannon’s OK … but it’s not exactly the definition of de-demonising [the party] and it’s a bit of a paradox given that Steve Bannon was supposed to be Trump’s most radical adviser,” he said. “But who knows. She [Marine] may end up coming round to my way of thinking.”
  • “He has also been the architect of a victory, that of Donald Trump, on whom nobody would have bet, particularly European media and politicians. So he can explain how victory is possible and how to bring it about. I find it’s always interesting to hear from someone who has won an election.”
ecfruchtman

How Bannon turned on Trump … and how their bromance may not be over | US news... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...reitbart-fire-fury-roger-stone

shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Despite a recent falling out that made headlines around the world, the former White House chief strategist repeatedly praised Donald Trump and spoke of “the everyman” in America who believes “the world is stacked against them”.
  • “The guy loves history,” the website Axios noted. “Well, this political suicide is historic. Bannon still thinks of himself as a revolutionary. That self-perception won’t change. It’s just that now he has no vehicle, no staff, no platform, and no major donors funding his ambitions.”
  • ‘Mr Bannon has shot himself in the foot’
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “America First” and “American carnage”.
  • Soon he was adorning magazine covers and there were whispers of “President Bannon”.
  • Far from humbled, Bannon returned to Breitbart as executive chairman and became more politically active.
  • he called Donald Trump Jr’s decision to meet Russians during the election campaign “treasonous”.
  • The Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, who owns a stake in Breitbart, issued a rare statement, distancing herself from Bannon.
Javier E

Steve Bannon's Coalition of Christian Traditionalists - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...519900

traditionalist populism christian history politics culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.
  • Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.
  • In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
  • Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”
  • Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.
  • While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.
  • previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.
  • Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.
  • The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.
  • the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.
  • In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.
millerco

Steve Bannon Vows 'War' on His Own Party. It Didn't Work So Well for F.D.R. - The New Y... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...teve-bannon-roosevelt-fdr.html

FDR steve bannon history Us politics Trump

shared by millerco on 23 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Steve Bannon Vows ‘War’ on His Own Party.
  • By the summer of 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had had enough. His own party controlled both houses of Congress, yet the latest elements of his New Deal were stalled. Exasperated by fellow Democrats standing in the way, Roosevelt resolved to push some of them out of office.
  • Whether Mr. Bannon’s purge will be more successful has become the consuming question in Washington these days.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • But Roosevelt’s purge backfired. Not only did he fail to take out his targets, but he also emboldened them, all but dooming his domestic program for much of the rest of his presidency.
  • Nearly 80 years later, President Trump’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, has declared a “season of war” to push out problematic Republicans in midterm elections, just as Roosevelt tried to do to balky Democrats.
  • Fresh off his victory backing Roy S. Moore over an incumbent Republican senator in a special primary election in Alabama, Mr. Bannon vowed last week to support challengers in 2018 to every Senate Republican except Ted Cruz of Texas.
  • Over the weekend, he took aim at Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, pledging to find someone “to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar.”
  • “Some of the people that he may be looking at, I’m going to see if we talk him out of that, because, frankly, they’re great people,” Mr. Trump said.
clairemann

Steve Bannon criminal probe in N.Y. includes embedded investigators from state attorney... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-a730-1b4ed9656258_story.html

trump gop US culture policy

shared by clairemann on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The New York attorney general's office has partnered with Manhattan's district attorney to investigate Stephen K. Bannon for the alleged fundraising scam that prompted his federal pardon in the waning hours of Donald Trump's presidency, according to people familiar with the matter. The move adds prosecutorial firepower to a criminal case widely seen as an attempted end-run around the former president's bid to protect a political ally.
  • James has built a reputation, in part, around her promises to hold Trump and his associates accountable for alleged misdeeds, and she sued his administration several times over policy decisions that affected New Yorkers.
  • White House strategist, goes beyond his alleged role in what federal prosecutors characterized last summer as a lucrative ploy to defraud donors of a private effort to expand the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Trump’s pardon, a one-page document bearing a Justice Department seal, clears Bannon of “offenses charged” in the border-wall donation drive and “for any other offenses” that could be charged in connection to it.
  • Presidential pardons do not apply to state investigations.
  • Such collaboration between the attorney general and the district attorney is rare. The two law enforcement officials are overseeing separate inquiries into Trump and his business dealings, investigations focused on whether the values of certain assets were manipulated to gain tax benefits and favorable loan rates in violation of the state law, but it is not believed the two agencies are coordinating.
  • As state attorney general, James has original jurisdiction over money laundering cases in New York, one person familiar with the collaboration between her office and Vance’s said, while the district attorney can prosecute any criminal offense suspected of occurring in Manhattan. It is possible Bannon could face criminal prosecution and potential civil action, although it is not clear whether such a consideration has been discussed.
Javier E

The danger of Steve Bannon on the National Security Council - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-bf6f-301b6b443624_story.html

NSC trump foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • The NSC is effectively the central nervous system of the U.S. foreign policy and national security apparatus.
  • Trump’s memorandum described the structure of his NSC — not unusual given that the exact composition shifts in modest ways from administration to administration. The problem lies in the changes that he made.
  • First, he essentially demoted the highest-ranking military officer in the United States, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the highest-ranking intelligence officer in the United States, the director of national intelligence.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • In previous administrations, those positions or their equivalent (before the creation of the director of national intelligence, the CIA director occupied that role) held permanent positions on the NSC.
  • Now, those key officials will be invited only when their specific expertise is seen to be required. Hard as it is to imagine any situation in which their views would not add value, this demotion is even harder to countenance given the threats the United States currently faces and the frayed state of the president’s relations with the intelligence community
  • A president who has no national security experience and can use all the advice he can get has decided to limit the input he receives from two of the most important advisers any president could have.
  • Even as he pushed away professional security advice, Trump decided to make his top political advisor, Stephen K. Bannon, a permanent member of the NSC.
  • The executive order on immigration and refugees was un-American, counterproductive and possibly illegal.
  • Worse still, it is a sign of other problems to come. Organizing the NSC this way does not reflect well on national security advisor Michael Flynn — whether the bad decision is a result of his lack of understanding of what the NSC should do or because he is giving in to pressure from his boss.
  • Moreover, elevating Bannon is a sign that there will be more than one senior official in Trump’s inner circle with top-level national security responsibility, an arrangement nearly certain to create confusion going forward.
  • rumors are already circulating that Bannon and senior adviser Jared Kushner are the go-to people on national security issues for the administration, again despite the lack of experience, temperament or institutional support for either.
  • Combine all this with the president’s own shoot-from-the-lip impulses, his flair for improvisation and his well-known thin skin. You end up with a bad NSC structure being compromised by a kitchen cabinet-type superstructure and the whole thing likely being made even more dysfunctional by a president who, according to multiple reports, does not welcome advice in the first place — especially when it contradicts his own views.
  • Bannon’s role as chairman of Breitbart.com, with its racist, misogynist and Islamophobic perspectives, and his avowed desire to blow up our system of government, suggests this is someone who not only has no business being a permanent member of the most powerful consultative body in the world — he has no business being in a position of responsibility in any government.
  • The restructuring of the NSC, and the way in which this White House is threatening to operate outside the formal NSC structure, all but guarantees that it will not be the last bad decision to emerge from the Trump administration.
Javier E

Bannon and Trump are out for revenge - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-and-trump-are-out-for-revenge

revenge trump crisis culture democracy liberal democracy

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • From an economic standpoint, Bannon is talking mumbo jumbo. Protectionism and immigration exclusion retard growth; they do not promote it. We do not lose “sovereignty” when our consumers enjoy a higher standard of living thanks to imported goods. And in the regulations department, what could be more of a regulatory burden than cutting legal immigration, trying to influence which suppliers to use via a border adjustment tax or bullying companies about where they set up their plants?
  • This is not about sovereignty; it is about creating an even more powerful government, one that is oblivious to economic reality and ignores the political and economic upheavals that the policies create.
  • If he has been listening to U.S. business leaders, allies, informed members of Congress or the Federal Reserve chairman, he must have figured out how counterproductive his nationalist ideas are. (We’ve tried this before in the 1930s — with poor results.) And yet the appetite to decimate liberal Western democracies and shred an international system that has maintained relative peace and prosperity is unabated.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The conclusion one is drawn to over and over is that Bannon and Trump are living out a cultural revenge fantasy. Bannon-Trump remain bonded to their base not because of ideology or agenda, but because they desire the downfall of coastal and urban elites (personified by the media), detest the ethnic and racial demographic trends that continue to make the country more diverse and hold fast to various myths and an exaggerated sense of victimhood (e.g. climate change is a hoax, minorities all live in violent and poverty-stricken cities, Christians are “persecuted”).
  • When Trump cannot achieve his aims (e.g. replacing Obamacare with a nonexistent superior system that costs less) or when his rhetoric embroils the country in political and economic conflict, members of his base may notice that their lives are not improving one iota. Perhaps some will stick to him until the bitter end
  • In the meantime, an impressive coalition of rationalists from right and left is developing. From both sides of the political perspective we see Americans amassing who understand that globalism is both desirable and irreversible and that democratic norms are worth preserving. They’ve decided that what Trump wants to destroy — not just Obamacare but also international liberal structures and democracy itself — is worth preserving.
Javier E

Steve Bannon has a point - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-beb6-c8d48830c54d_story.html

populism trump

shared by Javier E on 12 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • behind all of that lies an important political development, one that explains the real rift between President Trump and his former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon. Trump seems to have abandoned populism.
  • Bannon must have watched with incredulity as the candidate who campaigned as a fiery outsider against the Republican establishment essentially handed over the reins of his government to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell is quoted in Wolff’s book as saying, “This president will sign whatever is put in front of him.”
  • Green points out that Trump originally had a mish-mash of political views that leaned in no particular direction. But he began going on talk radio and addressing conservative audiences and realized that it was not economics but social and cultural issues such as immigration that fired up crowds. Trump was initially “indifferent to the idea” of a wall, according to Green, but campaign aide Sam Nunberg is quoted as saying that when Trump tried out the idea for the first time at the Iowa Freedom Summit in
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Unencumbered by any deep ideology of his own or any ethical qualms — as demonstrated by his embrace of birtherism, for example — Trump was able to adopt these issues far more quickly than his 16 competitors in the Republican primaries. He distinguished himself by taking on the most hard-line positions, thus winning over the GOP base
  • That, in addition to his colorful, charismatic style, created a bond between him and a new bulwark of the Republican Party, the white working class, that appears, for now, unbreakable.
  • During the presidential transition, Bannon told Wolff that the Trump era would be like America in the 1930s, with a massive public works program that would get blue-collar workers back into shipyards, mills and mines. Instead we appear to have a return to the 1920s, an era of unrestrained capitalism, giddy market exuberance, a shrunken state and dramatically rising inequality. Is this what the laid-off steelworker in Ohio voted for?
Javier E

The Trump Debate Inside Conservative Citadels - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vative-think-tanks-bannon.html

conservativism thinktank trump politics Culture influence intellectual

shared by Javier E on 02 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Mr. Stern, who’s worked at the Manhattan Institute for more than two decades, tendered his resignation from its flagship publication, City Journal. “This is very important. It’s about the future of our country. It’s about the degradation of language and ideas,” Mr. Stern insisted. He, along with several others I spoke to, felt the think tank and City Journal were acting like Sweden in the face of the Trump threat.
  • “This now seems to be the only way for me to protest the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most urgent crisis facing the nation today: the election of an unfit, dangerous man to the presidency, plus the myriad ways in which the forces of Trumpism and Bannonism are tearing the country apart,” Mr. Stern wrote in a resignation letter
  • to one journalist previously published by City Journal, that doesn’t justify the way the publication has responded to the Trump presidency. “While City Journal’s desire to sit out the Republican civil war was perfectly understandable, it is not a viable long term option now that Donald Trump is president,” he wrote me. “A political journal in the Trump era” that hardly engages with the president “isn’t like ignoring a 900-pound elephant. It’s like ignoring an invasion from Mars.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • At The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, nearly every editor and writer of the “Never Trump” persuasion left the paper in the past year, this writer included. George Will did not have his contract renewed at Fox News after his anti-Trump views fell afoul of a network in thrall to the president.
  • At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump’s election. “The ability to criticize became very limited. We had to be more and more populist and right wing in our views and our analysis,” one former employee told me. He said that the reason was explained clearly by the leadership: “We were told time and time again that for eight years we’ve been out in the wilderness. Now we have an opportunity for access. We can’t pass it up.”
  • For a sense of what it looks like for the bomb throwers to run the joint, one needn’t look far. The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors
  • “Heritage has gotten away from its core function, which was to provide top-notch policy research to advise conservative lawmakers. It’s become the de facto arm of Bannonism,” one person close to Heritage told me. In recent weeks, the think tank has hosted the president. The home page of its website boasts: “Donald Trump and many newly elected Republican congressmen promised they’d drain the swamp. And Heritage is here to help them do just that!”
  • “Bannon and Trumpism is a definitive threat to the country. The ideology is a dramatic departure from a long American tradition of America being a global leader,” added Mr. Radosh. “Bannon has spoken of wanting an international alliance with all these emerging right-wing populists in Europe. It is a fundamental rejection of liberalism.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Senator Warning Democrats of a Crisis Unfolding Beneath Their Noses - The... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...chris-murphy-democrats.html

senator culture crisis US American idea reform ideological critique

shared by Javier E on 20 Aug 24 - No Cached
  • “The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical,” he told the crowd. “They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.”
  • The subject of the speech was what Mr. Murphy called the imminent “fall of American neoliberalism.
  • America’s leaders — from both parties — have long been guided by what’s often called the neoliberal consensus: the idea that “barrier-free international markets, rapidly advancing communications technology and automation, decreased regulation and empowered citizen-consumers would be the keys to prosperity, happiness and strong democracy,” as Mr. Murphy put it. More simply, it’s a shared assumption that what’s good for markets is good for society.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • This assumption shapes our politics so deeply that it’s almost invisible. But the idea that modern life is a story of constant economic and technological progress steadily making the world a better place has stopped lining up with how Americans feel.
  • no statistics really capture the feeling, shared by growing numbers of Americans, that the world is just getting worse.
  • It’s a “metaphysical” problem, as Mr. Murphy put it. And he began to think that the economic metrics used by economists and presidents to capture the state of the nation were masking a vast “spiritual crisis.”
  • he was homing in on a problem that Democrats have yet to figure out how to address. Donald Trump and the movement around him have tapped into a sense of deep alienation and national malaise. Democrats often have trouble even acknowledging those feelings are real.
  • Mr. Murphy has been warning for years that by failing to offer a clear vision of the future, Democrats risk losing to a “postdemocracy” Republican Party that might rig the electoral system “in order to make sure Democrats never win again.”
  • he is far from the only Democrat raising these concerns. Just a few days before the convention, Mr. Murphy’s good friend Ben Rhodes, a former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told me that in the age of Mr. Trump, Democrats have found themselves in a “trap”: How can they present themselves as the party of fundamental change when they spent the past eight years arguing that America’s institutions need to be shored up against the urgent threat of Trumpism?
  • “Can you reform that system so much that it ceases to be that and starts to be something else?” Mr. Rhodes asked me. “Or does it have to be blown up?
  • Many on the center-left worry that, absent a liberal vision for how this reform may work, Americans will opt to blow things up.
  • He has worked with Republicans like Mr. Vance, who share much of his criticism of our current order, and he has pushed for Democrats to listen to, learn from and try to win over social conservatives with a “pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism.
  • It has all rapidly built him into a singular figure in the party, someone who is being whispered about as a future presidential candidate.
  • “The postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end, and the survival of American democracy relies on how we respond.”
  • “What I discovered, much to my chagrin,” he told me when we met last fall in his Senate office, “was that the right — some really irresponsible corners of the right — were having a conversation about the spiritual state of America that was in ways much more relevant than conversations that were happening on the left.”
  • I had written the piece because I was interested in critiques like those from New Right-ish thinkers like the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, who had been arguing that the story we often tell ourselves — of a society constantly getting better through an inexorable process of economic growth and technological advancement — was too simple and benefited the powerful corporations and political elites that profit most from the status quo.
  • This story, they say, suggested that there was no possible alternative to the world where technological gadgets had colonized our brains and every aspect of our existence seemed to be reduced to a set of decisions determined by corporations in a market system. We were, after all, supposed to be richer and better off than any humans who lived before us. Why would anyone complain?
  • He was worried that the New Right was offering two things mainstream Democrats were not: a politics that spoke directly to feelings of alienation from America as we know it today and a political vision of what a rupture with that system might look like.
  • I recommended David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent best seller, “The Dawn of Everything,” which critiques the story of progress from the left, and Mr. Deneen’s book “Why Liberalism Failed.”
  • he began to engage with a small but increasingly influential political ecosystem of heterodox thinkers who write for magazines like the journal Compact or receive funding from networks like the Hewlett Foundation’s economy and society initiative, which advances a view that neoliberalism “has outlived its usefulness.
  • Julius Krein, the founder of the quarterly American Affairs, which publishes the work of many figures on the New Righ
  • the labor theorist Oren Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, who soured on pro-business policies and who has been the key figure in pushing Republicans toward a conservative vision of worker power.
  • Mr. Murphy emailed me a piece he’d just written for The Atlantic, titled “The Wreckage of Neoliberalism.” He said it was going to be the start of a public push to advance his new line of thinking. He argued that Democrats, facing the possibility of a “postdemocracy” Republican Party seizing the levers of state after the 2024 election, risked political extinction if they waved away the deep sense of malaise and resentment that brought Mr. Trump to power the first time
  • a program of “a pro-family platform of economic nationalism salted with a bit of healthy tech skepticism” and offered it as a salve for a deeper crisis of meaning and belief in our national project.
  • “Talking openly about spiritualism is true to the best traditions of the left,” Mr. Murphy told me. “So there’s no reason why this conversation about the emotional state of America and the good life has to be a conversation that only the right has. Some of the left’s most inspiring leaders have talked in these terms. But I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that you first have to diagnose why people are feeling so shitty and to really understand what you need to do next.”
  • he started a Substack. He began to post slightly searching thoughts on his journey and often drew bafflement or outrage from liberals who knew him best as a gun control advocate
  • “The Reason to Care About the Plight of Men,” a piece he later told me his teenage son had warned him might be too edgy for prime time.
  • He also published a piece he titled “What We Can Learn From Rich Men North of Richmond,” about the Oliver Anthony hit, arguing that the song resonated with more than just conservatives and that the left was making a mistake if it ignored the vein of alienation from and anger with the “new world” that Mr. Anthony sang about.
  • Mr. Murphy’s program of “pro-family, pro-community economic nationalism” is less one of social welfare than an attempt to give regular people agency in the face of the supersized corporations he believes wield far too much influence today
  • He calls for sectorwide collective bargaining of the kind that exists in some European countries, an expansion of antimonopoly efforts and something like a reimagining of our political value system: “We’re going to have to upset this cult of efficiency,” he told me recently, “establishing a clear preference for local ownership, local industry.”
  • Last fall, after working on the issue with Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, Mr. Murphy introduced the National Strategy for Social Connection Act, a bill to fight the epidemic of loneliness that he believes has been driven by the pervasive communications technology and malignant commercialization of American life.
  • It’s hard to believe that even Mr. Murphy thinks that a metaphysical crisis can be meaningfully addressed with a few million dollars for research or directives to federal agencies to address loneliness.
  • serve a calculated purpose: to push our politics toward a national discussion of the “emotional state of America” and to show that highly placed people in both parties are coming to believe that this presents a state of real crisis.
  • he has tried to work with Republicans on immigration. He was the lead Democratic negotiator on the bipartisan immigration bill that came very close to passage in February
  • Without much fanfare, the Biden administration has already embraced many of the policies Mr. Murphy is calling for: industrial policy, tariffs, a campaign against corporate monopolies
  • His vision of economic nationalism can look very similar to the one offered by “America First” Republicans, but the specifics reveal very different priorities; Mr. Murphy supports far higher levels of immigration and paid family leave over the child tax credits increasingly favored by conservatives
  • they have a common goal: to remake the incentive structure of our economy. “The core issue is that our economy became one based on extracting rents,” Mr. Krein told me, “rather than building things.” It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people
  • This is the simple explanation for why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.
  • “That’s what people are really complaining about when they talk about neoliberalism,” Mr. Krein said. “But that’s tough to fit on a bumper sticker.”
  • “Great leaders tell stories that fit within the cultural and religious contexts of nations,” the Bay Area representative Ro Khanna told me. He helped write the CHIPS and Science Act, but he thought that the Demo
  • crats had failed to explain what they wanted it to achieve
  • “Politics is not just about policy,” he said. “It’s about the vision of a nation. It’s about signaling that we’re heading somewhere.”
  • Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a vision for the future. It begins with plans to fire thousands of civil servants in an attempt to unmake the so-called administrative state, which they believe promotes liberal values and has enveloped America in bureaucracy. They seek to pull back from the internationalist foreign policy and free-trade policies that have guided both parties for decades. They hope to increase America’s birthrate and cut immigration and may pursue steps like reducing the value of the dollar, which they argue would help American-produced goods compete in an international marketplace
  • the people there represented a decent cross-section of American political views, from people keeping the Sanders-style left-wing populist faith to centrist civil servants to more or less avowed reactionaries.
  • I attended a dinner hosted by Sohrab Ahmari, a co-founder of Compact,
  • All the attendees seemed to take for granted that the neoliberal era was nearing its endpoint — a fact notable only because it reflected a consensus that has still barely filtered into our mainstream political conversations.
  • The problem, for any Democrat, is to find a way to turn this understanding into winning politics
  • Steve Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief White House strategist, late last year, he was very clear that he didn’t think Mr. Murphy’s vision went far enough. Mr. Bannon has frequently praised Mr. Khanna — jocularly accusing him of stealing “our” ideas in his proposals to rebuild America’s manufacturing capacity. But Mr. Bannon was savagely and profanely dismissive of Mr. Murphy
  • “He has a very tough road ahead, and here’s why,” Mr. Bannon said. “There’s no audience for what he’s saying on the Democratic side. Democratic voters like the system.”
  • Mr. Bannon called Mr. Murphy a “neoliberal neocon,” a double epithet Mr
  • Unlike many on both the right and left, he has shown little desire to unmake the complex military and financial systems that critics on both sides often describe as the American Empire.
  • The trouble is that orienting the American economy back toward producing things and building a strong middle class may mean reassessing those old ideas and asking tough questions about whether we can afford to maintain our military might or continue financing the federal government with deb
  • These are now common talking points on the right, and at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies hint at ideas like withdrawing from NATO and curtailing the independence of the Federal Reserve, even a critic of the globalized economic order like Mr. Murphy can end up looking like a milquetoast defender of the status quo.
  • I asked Mr. Murphy if I was right that his aim really was to unmake the neoliberal system as we knew it. “You are,” he said. He anticipated my next question, about whether it would ever be possible to translate this kind of big-picture conversation to mainstream politics. I mentioned
  • As if anticipating the Harris/Trump race, he described an electoral landscape where Democratic candidates who won a majority of the popular vote might still lose the presidency if they couldn’t win states in the Upper Midwest. “I think that our coalition is bound to lose if we don’t find a way to reach out to some element of the folks who have been hoodwinked by Donald Trump. We don’t have to win over 25 percent of his voters
  • “But I do believe,” he said, “that we have to tell a story about what makes America different. To make people proud of being American. And make them believe that that identity is more important than their individual political identity.”
  • “We have to build a uniquely American economy,” he said. “We have to convince people that there is a uniquely American identity while understanding that there are still important moments where you have to engage the rest of the world. That’s not a bumper sticker.” He paused. “That’s what makes this project really hard.”
Javier E

What Gamergate should have taught us about the 'alt-right' | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump

post-truth disinformation fascism rationality far right social media manipulation press alt-right psychology culture

shared by Javier E on 02 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Gamergate
  • The 2014 hashtag campaign, ostensibly founded to protest about perceived ethical failures in games journalism, clearly thrived on hate – even though many of those who aligned themselves with the movement either denied there was a problem with harassment, or wrote it off as an unfortunate side effect
  • ure, women, minorities and progressive voices within the industry were suddenly living in fear. Sure, those who spoke out in their defence were quickly silenced through exhausting bursts of online abuse. But that wasn’t why people supported it, right? They were disenfranchised, felt ignored, and wanted to see a systematic change.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Is this all sounding rather familiar now? Does it remind you of something?
  • The similarities between Gamergate and the far-right online movement, the “alt-right”, are huge, startling and in no way a coincidence
  • fter all, the culture war that began in games now has a senior representative in The White House. As a founder member and former executive chair of Brietbart News, Steve Bannon had a hand in creating media monster Milo Yiannopoulos, who built his fame and Twitter following by supporting and cheerleading Gamergate. This hashtag was the canary in the coalmine, and we ignored it.
  • Gamergate was an online movement that effectively began because a man wanted to punish his ex girlfriend. Its most notable achievement was harassing a large number of progressive figures - mostly women – to the point where they felt unsafe or considered leaving the industry
  • The same voices moved into other geek communities, especially comics, where Marvel and DC were criticised for progressive storylines and decisions. They moved into science fiction with the controversy over the Hugo awards. They moved into cinema with the revolting kickback against the all-female Ghostbusters reboot.
  • no one in the movement was willing to be associated with the abuse being carried out in its name. Prominent supporters on Twitter, in subreddits and on forums like 8Chan, developed a range of pernicious rhetorical devices and defences to distance themselves from threats to women and minorities in the industry: the targets were lying or exaggerating, they were too precious; a language of dismissal and belittlement was formed against them. Safe spaces, snowflakes, unicorns, cry bullies. Even when abuse was proven, the usual response was that people on their side were being abused too. These techniques, forged in Gamergate, have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online
  • In 2016, new wave conservative media outlets like Breitbart have gained trust with their audience by painting traditional news sources as snooty and aloof. In 2014, video game YouTube stars, seeking to appear in touch with online gaming communities, unscrupulously proclaimed that traditional old-media sources were corrupt. Everything we’re seeing now, had its precedent two years ago.
  • With 2014’s Gamergate, Breitbart seized the opportunity to harness the pre-existing ignorance and anger among disaffected young white dudes. With Trump’s movement in 2016, the outlet was effectively running his campaign: Steve Bannon took leave of his role at the company in August 2016 when he was hired as chief executive of Trump’s presidential campaign
  • young men converted via 2014’s Gamergate, are being more widely courted now. By leveraging distrust and resentment towards women, minorities and progressives, many of Gamergate’s most prominent voices – characters like Mike Cernovich, Adam Baldwin, and Milo Yiannopoulos – drew power and influence from its chaos
  • These figures gave Gamergate a new sense of direction – generalising the rhetoric: this was now a wider war between “Social Justice Warriors” (SJWs) and everyday, normal, decent people. Games were simply the tip of the iceberg – progressive values, went the argument, were destroying everything
  • it quickly became clear that the GamerGate movement was a mess – an undefined mission to Make Video Games Great Again via undecided means.
  • Using 4chan (and then the more sympathetic offshoot 8Chan) to plan their subversions and attacks made Gamergate a terribly sloppy operation, leaving a trail of evidence that made it quite clear the whole thing was purposefully, plainly nasty. But the video game industry didn’t have the spine to react, and allowed the movement to coagulate – forming a mass of spiteful disappointment that Breitbart was only more than happy to coddle
  • Historically, that seems to be Breitbart’s trick - strongly represent a single issue in order to earn trust, and then gradually indoctrinate to suit wider purposes. With Gamergate, they purposefully went fishing for anti-feminists. 2016’s batch of fresh converts – the white extremists – came from enticing conspiracy theories about the global neoliberal elite secretly controlling the world.
  • The greatest strength of Gamergate, though, was that it actually appeared to represent many left-leaning ideals: stamping out corruption in the press, pushing for better ethical practices, battling for openness.
  • There are similarities here with many who support Trump because of his promises to put an end to broken neo-liberalism, to “drain the swamp” of establishment corruption. Many left-leaning supporters of Gamergate sought to intellectualise their alignment with the hashtag, adopting familiar and acceptable labels of dissent – identifying as libertarian, egalitarian, humanist.
  • At best they unknowingly facilitated abuse, defending their own freedom of expression while those who actually needed support were threatened and attacked.
  • Genuine discussions over criticism, identity and censorship were paralysed and waylaid by Twitter voices obsessed with rhetorical fallacies and pedantic debating practices. While the core of these movements make people’s lives hell, the outer shell – knowingly or otherwise – protect abusers by insisting that the real problem is that you don’t want to talk, or won’t provide the ever-shifting evidence they politely require.
  • In 2017, the tactics used to discredit progressive game critics and developers will be used to discredit Trump and Bannon’s critics. There will be gaslighting, there will be attempts to make victims look as though they are losing their grip on reality, to the point that they gradually even start to believe it. The “post-truth” reality is not simply an accident – it is a concerted assault on the rational psyche.
  • The strangest aspect of Gamergate is that it consistently didn’t make any sense: people chose to align with it, and yet refused responsibility. It was constantly demanded that we debate the issues, but explanations and facts were treated with scorn. Attempts to find common ground saw the specifics of the demands being shifted: we want you to listen to us; we want you to change your ways; we want you to close your publication down. This movement that ostensibly wanted to protect free speech from cry bully SJWs simultaneously did what it could to endanger sites it disagreed with, encouraging advertisers to abandon support for media outlets that published stories critical of the hashtag. The petulance of that movement is disturbingly echoed in Trump’s own Twitter feed.
  • Looking back, Gamergate really only made sense in one way: as an exemplar of what Umberto Eco called “eternal fascism”, a form of extremism he believed could flourish at any point in, in any place – a fascism that would extol traditional values, rally against diversity and cultural critics, believe in the value of action above thought and encourage a distrust of intellectuals or experts – a fascism built on frustration and machismo. The requirement of this formless fascism would – above all else – be to remain in an endless state of conflict, a fight against a foe who must always be portrayed as impossibly strong and laughably weak
  • 2016 has presented us with a world in which our reality is being wilfully manipulated. Fake news, divisive algorithms, misleading social media campaigns.
  • The majority of people who voted for Trump will never take responsibility for his racist, totalitarian policies, but they’ll provide useful cover and legitimacy for those who demand the very worst from the President Elect. Trump himself may have disavowed the “alt-right”, but his rhetoric has led to them feeling legitimised. As with Gamergate, the press risks being manipulated into a position where it has to tread a respectful middle ground that doesn’t really exist.
  • Perhaps the true lesson of Gamergate was that the media is culturally unequipped to deal with the forces actively driving these online movements. The situation was horrifying enough two years ago, it is many times more dangerous now.
marleymorton

With National Security Council Shakeup, Steve Bannon Gets A Seat At The Table - 0 views

www.npr.org/...annon-gets-a-seat-at-the-table

politics US

shared by marleymorton on 30 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 30 Jan 17
     
    President Trump has reorganized the National Security Council by elevating his chief strategist Steve Bannon and demoting the Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Now, Bannon will join the NSC's principals committee, the top inter-agency group for discussing national security.
millerco

Bannon's 'epic' defense of Trump doesn't extend to all his moves, or all his aides and ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html

Us history Trump republicans politics steve bannon

shared by millerco on 12 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • Bannon’s ‘epic’ defense of Trump doesn’t extend to all his moves, or all his aides and allies
  • Bannon did offer forceful praise — and, indeed, an epic defense — of Trump and much of his agenda
  • he also called Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James B. Comey the biggest mistake “maybe in modern political history”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • accused Republican congressional leaders of “trying to nullify the 2016 election”
  • warned that the president’s decision to give Congress six months to come up with a solution for “dreamer” immigrants brought to the country illegally as children could cause a “civil war” within the Republican Party
  • Sanders said that “the president was right in firing Director Comey,” and pushed back on some of Bannon’s other assertions. “I think that Steve always likes to speak in, kind of, the most extreme measures,”
  • Bannon has at times also treated Trump as an imperfect vehicle for his own nationalist agenda
  • “It’s difficult to make the case that you’re helping the president if you’re in the position where you’re actively opposing either him or his political agenda,”
Javier E

Let Bannon Be Bannon! - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...let-bannon-be-bannon.html

trump budget hard power testosterone

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The third possibility is that Donald Trump doesn’t really care about domestic policy; he mostly cares about testosterone.
  • He wants to cut any part of government that may seem soft and nurturing, like poverty programs. He wants to cut any program that might seem emotional and airy-fairy, like the National Endowment for the Arts. He wants to cut any program that might seem smart and nerdy, like the National Institutes of Health.
  • But he wants to increase funding for every program that seems manly, hard, muscular and ripped, like the military and armed antiterrorism programs.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Indeed, the Trump budget looks less like a political philosophy and more like a sexual fantasy. It lavishes attention on every aspect of hard power and slashes away at anything that isn’t.
  • We’re ending up with the worst of the new guard Trumpian populists and the old guard Republican libertarians. We’re building walls to close off the world while also shifting wealth from the poor to the rich.
  • The second possibility, raised by Rich Lowry in Politico, is that the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump won on populism, but congressional Republicans won on the standard cut-government script.
Javier E

Kellyanne Conway's Alternative Universe - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...517821

alternative facts trump communications campaign 2016 politics

shared by Javier E on 15 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • In 2014, Conway was part of a group of Republicans that produced a poll for FWD.us, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s immigration-advocacy nonprofit. It showed that immigration reform was a political necessity for the GOP—a finding at odds with the line Conway had been pushing since the 1990s.
  • Two months later, she produced a different poll, demonstrating that “enforcement of current law” and “encouraging illegal immigrants to return to their home countries” could be a winning message. She presented her findings to a group of Republican donors, who rebuffed her. But the poll found favor with opponents of immigration reform. The far-right website Breitbart .com (then headed by Bannon) hailed it as a “blockbuster.”
  • After she circulated her findings, Republicans began to embrace previously taboo positions. NumbersUSA’s executive director, Roy Beck, watched in amazement as one Republican presidential candidate after another—Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, even Jeb Bush—began parroting his group’s arguments. Trump was the most ardent convert.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Bannon told me Sean Trende’s “missing whites” theory and Conway’s polling on immigration formed “the intellectual infrastructure” of 2016’s populist revolt.
  • He added that Conway was part of a “cabal” he had started to build with Jeff Sessions and Sessions’s then-aide Stephen Miller, who is now a senior White House policy adviser. “This is her central thing,” he said, “the reason I got to know her.”
  • She quickly developed a reputation as the “Trump whisperer,” a perception she encouraged. It wasn’t that she was moderating him, or pushing him toward policies with mainstream appeal—she was taking his pugilistic instincts and funneling them in a more productive direction.
  • Bannon says it was Conway’s calm presence that led both wavering women and conservative voters to think, If she can still support Trump, I can, too. “If Kellyanne had not been there when the firestorm hit, I don’t know if we would have made it,” he told me. “She literally became a cult figure during that time period, just because of her relentless advocacy for Trump on TV.”
  • The idea that she was merely a spokeswoman rather than a true campaign manager misses the point, Bannon said: Communications was everything to Trump, an instinctive marketer who didn’t believe in much traditional campaign organization
  • “I would not have survived it; I’m impressed that she did,” he said. “In every possible sense, she won. I do not believe he would be president without her.”
  • When I asked Conway about the incident, she insisted that it was no big deal in Trumpworld—a blip, a trivial error, virtually a typo. “What I meant to say was alternative information,” she said, giving an example: Three plus one equals four, but so does two plus two.
  • Anyway, she contended, nobody cared about “alternative facts” except the elite, out-of-touch intelligentsia who spend all day winding one another up in the echo chamber of Twitter and cable news. “It was haters talking to each other and it was the media,”
  • insiders say Conway is largely untouchable. Jason Miller, who worked for the campaign and the transition team, told me he couldn’t imagine Conway losing her job: “One thing people don’t quite get is that she is a living, breathing folk hero for millions of people around the country.”
Javier E

Trump's January 6 Strategy and the Steve Bannon Indictment - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...620704

trump strategy law trial politics coalition

shared by Javier E on 14 Nov 21 - No Cached
  • At former President Trump’s direction, those partisans have adopted a no-cooperation strategy, pleading that the defeated ex-president should permanently enjoy the legal privileges of his former office.
  • That’s not a very smart legal strategy. But it’s not meant as a legal strategy. It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.
  • The Trump partisans start with huge advantages that the Chicago Seven lacked: They have a large and growing segment of the voting public in their corner, and they are backed by this country’s most powerful media institutions, including the para-media of Facebook and other social platforms.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Their argument doesn’t have to make sense, because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society. That’s the game, and that’s how Bannon & Co. will play the game.
  • Permission seeking and permission granting were exactly how January 6 happened in the first place. Trump supporters were gradually radicalized through a series of escalating claims:
  • Now, in 2021–22, the project is to repeat that kind of kaleidoscopic shift of denial and justification
  • Like the Chicago Seven, Bannon understands the political power of ridicule and contempt. He’s not coming to trial to play by somebody else’s rules. If he does eventually testify about the events of January 6, he won’t play by the rules then, either.
  • to prevent the strategy from working, it’s important to anticipate it and be ready for it.
  • always keep in mind the limits of criminal prosecution to deal with political wrongdoing. Many things are wrong without being illegal
  • The criminal law rightly demands overwhelming evidence. Convicting people unable to recognize they were doing wrong can be very difficult.
  • Mueller and the Trump Department of Justice had defined his job in a way that forbade him from looking at the stuff that mattered most: intelligence risks rather than criminal charges, and the financial transactions that cast light on the story, even if they did not break the law.
  • Michael Cohen testified a long time ago that Trump does not leave a paper trail. He does not speak direct orders. He signals what he wants, and then leaves it to his underlings to figure out for themselves how to please him. Trump likely followed those lifetime habits in the weeks leading to January 6.
  • Those trying to protect Trump from accountability for January 6 know what they are trying to accomplish and have built a large constituency in the country that supports them
  • The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested.
  • The fight ahead is an inescapably political fight, to be won by whichever side can assemble the larger and more mobilized coalition. The Trump side is very clear-eyed about that truth. The defenders of U.S. legality and democracy against Trump need to be equally aware.
1 - 20 of 116 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page