Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart News and CEO of the presidential campaign of President-elect Donald Trump, is now being primed for the position of Chief Strategist in Donald Trump’s cabinet. This announcement, which was made by the Trump transition team on November 14, outraged liberals, who promptly fired back in the form of a media salvo smearing Bannon and claiming that he is both anti-Semitic and racist.
For Bannon, these charges are patently ridiculous, but the progressive forces of the Left have pushed this narrative mercilessly, in part because of Bannon’s association with Breitbart News but also because they are likely still smarting from the election loss of their candidate Hillary Clinton.
For liberals, Bannon represents the outward face of the “Alt Right” movement, despite the fact that Bannon did not originate that term nor embrace it in the wake of its creation. Instead, that name belongs to its creator Richard Spencer, who founded a website called Alternative Right in 2010.
In fact, in recent days, Breitbart News has clarified that it “is not an Alt Right publication,” and that “The only supposed ‘Alt-Right’ content on [Breitbart], among tens of thousands of articles, is one widely-cited journalistic article, ‘An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.'”
The accusations in question, which were initially hurled by well-known Jewish advocacy organization the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), are, like many of the Left’s most absurd charges, completely unfounded and based on the flimsiest of evidence.
Progressives point to an ADL tweet that stated that Bannon “presided over the premier website of the ‘Alt Right’ – a loose-knit group of white nationalists and anti-Semites” as evidence that Bannon is indeed an anti-Semite, despite the fact that it was Bannon who opened Breitbart’s Jerusalem Bureau, and many testimonials from Breitbart employees who happen to be Jewish hold that Bannon harbors no ill-will toward Jews.
Progressives also charged that Bannon is a racist, again using flimsy evidence and claiming that since many stories on Breitbart depict groups such as Muslims in a negative light, Breitbart must therefore be a racist news outlet.
But the fact remains that there are actually many terrorist crimes around the world perpetrated by Muslims in the name of their religion. Conveniently left out of progressives’ evidence is the fact that Breitbart actually has some of the best online coverage of the ongoing drug war in Mexico, a topic that would likely not be given attention if the outlet’s editorship were prejudiced against nonwhites.
In fact, it was Bannon who promoted the idea of alternative school vouchers for inner-city children to Donald Trump’s campaign when Trump was formulating his “New Deal for Black America.” In contrast to Democrats, who oppose vouchers and school choice for inner-city youth — preferring them to be taught in the same public schools that have failed them for decades — Bannon believes that kids need new and better choices for their education.
Democrats oppose choice because it would undermine teachers’ unions, which have long provided funds to their party through times both good and bad. But Bannon convinced Trump to make vouchers a centerpiece of his outreach to inner-city voters in addition to measures providing for better jobs and policing.
In an article on Breitbart News, David Horowitz, the originator of the voucher program that Bannon brought to Trump, gave credit to Bannon for “put[ting} himself on the line for black America in a way few others have.”
In Horowitz’s words, “The attempt by desperate, hysterical and malicious voices on the Left to isolate, stigmatize and silence Steve Bannon as a ‘white nationalist’ is despicable, not least because that is the very last thing he is.” Horowitz went on to say that:
“School choice is now a presidential priority. It could never have happened without Steve Bannon. It could never have happened without someone in a position like Steve’s who cared about what happened to inner city children and who was willing to put his weight behind a program this ambitious, which no other Republican would touch. When the history of the 21st-century civil rights movement is written, Steve Bannon’s name will have a special place in its pantheon of heroes.”
As for the ADL’s charges of anti-Semitism, highly focused media attention on that organization and its president Jonathan Greenblatt (who is a former aide to President Barack Obama) forced it to rescind its initial tweet several days later.
The ADL released statements which read in part, “We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from [Steve] Bannon” and “Jewish employees of Breitbart have challenged the characterization of him and defended him from charges of anti-Semitism.”
However, even those statements were not enough to deter hundreds of protesters from gathering at Los Angeles City Hall to stage a demonstration against Bannon, with some protesters carrying signs accusing Bannon of being a Nazi.
Online, thousands of people had signed a petition calling for Trump to remove Bannon from his cabinet. To a number of seasoned observers, it appeared that many of the social media outlets calling for Bannon’s removal had at least partial connections to billionaire George Soros.
The ADL, which had initially denied a press pass to a Breitbart reporter assigned to cover a conference on anti-Semitism in New York, later reversed its decision and issued the credentials to the writer in question.
~American Liberty Report
