What’s wrong with this Steve Bannon guy?

by philg

My Facebook feed is lit up with hatred for a person I had not previously heard of: Steve Bannon.

The “Government Official” “U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren” Facebook page contains a denunciation from Ms. Warren:

Donald Trump just made one of his first big decisions as President-Elect: appointing Steve Bannon as his Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor. … He told his ex-wife that he didn’t want their daughters going to school with Jewish children … Bannon’s appointment shows that so far President-Elect Trump is embracing the same kind of ugliness and divisiveness as he did throughout his campaign.

Warren, an attorney by training, states as fact that Bannon said this to his plaintiff. Yet the only evidence of this purported anti-Jewish statement seems to be an affidavit filed by the plaintiff herself back in 2007 when seeking custody and associated child support profits (i.e., potentially tens of millions of dollars at stake in California). See New York Daily News story, which also seems to assume as true whatever the cash-seeking plaintiff had to say. Given that there is no practical possibility of a perjury conviction based on a statement in an American family court, the fact that a typical high-$$ child support plaintiff alleges a lot worse (see the Domestic Violence Parallel Track chapter), and that this was apparently never corroborated by anyone else at the time or more recently when reporters sought to interview the plaintiff, this doesn’t seem like credible evidence of Jew-hatred.

[Elizabeth Warren was herself a divorce, custody, and child support plaintiff, having sued Jim Warren, the father of her two children (source), so she has at least some experience with family court.]

A professor friend writes

An avowed white supremacist and antisemite–Stephen Bannon–is now essentially second-in-command. Do what you can to #stopbannon … Call Jared Kushner’s NYC office and you can talk with a real live human being about his father-in-law’s appointment of an anti-semite white supremacist to a White House staff position! It’s fun! 212-527-7000! I think I will call several times!

But where did Mr. Bannon take these vows? The professor didn’t cite any statements by the guy. Her friends commented approvingly and/or with additional ideas for action. They all seemed to accept as true that Mr. Bannon has taken these vows. Certainly nobody asked “How do you know he hates Jews and non-whites?” In a comment on How do MIT students cope with the Trumpenfuhrer? one of our readers here found a couple of Breitbart articles (out of thousands? or tens of thousands?) with sensational headlines, but neither was written by Bannon and one of the Jew-hatred examples was authored by someone who says “I am a Jew who has never been to Israel and has never been a Zionist in the sense of believing that Jews can rid themselves of Jew hatred by having their own nation state. But half of world Jewry now lives in Israel, and the enemies whom Obama and Hillary have empowered — Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, ISIS, and Hamas — have openly sworn to exterminate the Jews.”

Readers: Please help me understand what is wrong with Steve Bannon and whether his hiring signals that it is time for American Jews to escape to Israel (maybe Donald Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law will give us a ride on the family B757?).

[Note that Israel’s corporate tax rate was just reduced to 25 percent. Capital gains tax rates are lower than here in the U.S. due to inflation-adjustment, the lack of a state tax, and the lack of the Obamacare supplemental tax. Thus an entrepreneur might be better off financially following forced expatriation by Steve Bannon.]

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30 thoughts on “What’s wrong with this Steve Bannon guy?”

  1. Trump’s sons Donald Jr’s wife had a a Jewish father(Haydon was Hochberg) and Danish mother and his son Eric’s wife is Jewish.

  2. I am reading that until joining the Trump campaign, Bannon was (still is?) Chairman of Breitbart News so some accountability for all of its content is appropriate. It isn’t difficult to find some pretty scummy content on that website. For example:

    http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/05/solution-online-harassment-simple-women-log-off

    IIRC the author of that piece was kicked off of Twitter for leading a group harassing a black woman actress. I understand the harassment included a fair bit of racist and sexist hate speech.

    I’m not suggesting you or I will need to pull the trigger on that emergency evacuation plan, but I’m definitely unhappy that someone who thinks it’s a good idea to publish an article like the one I linked to is in the White House advising the President.

  3. Can’t see anything on breitbart.com except advertising, but it’s easy to imagine how anything with the word “bart” in it could contain the scummiest content in the world.

    The Yellen economic boom being what it is, dot com news sources are a big part of all our mutual funds. Are we all accountable for the twitter scandal of the week because our 401k’s all have their shares?

  6. Near as I can tell, by observing it as it happened, the links between Trump and the KKK and Trump and the “alt-right” came above through Breitbart cheerleading. And Breitbart wrote at least one hagiography of the alt-right as just a bunch of edgy young men who aren’t racist or anti-semitic, they just like to make racist and anti-semitic jokes to show how wrong political correctness is.

    If it’s a rotten frame on Breitbart and Bannon that they are anti-semitic or encourage anti-semites, well, so sad, too bad, because by the behavior I’ve seen, the frame fits perfectly and looks good on them.

    Is Bannon anti-semitic? I don’t know. Over the past six to nine months, did Breitbart serve a ton of ads and make a lot of money by encouraging the worst behavior from anti-semitic readers? Yeah. They did.

    So I’m not going to grieve for Bannon’s reputation and I do think his place in the White House is one more cause for concern.

    On the other hand, clarifying Neal’s point, Milo did not “lead” harassment against Jones, and if one looks at the actual tweets, Jones was more guilty than Milo in terms of actively siccing her followers on a person who had mean tweeted. And she was first. Now, one can forgive Jones a bit, perhaps she’s a newbie, perhaps she doesn’t understand the negative attitude people *now* hold towards group attacks like that on social media, but it didn’t help that Jones’ attack was against a real asshole while the attack Milo kicked off in response was done by assholes and directed towards Jones.

    And responding to H Nguyen, the splc has zero no integrity in this matter. They recently listed Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz on their list of anti-muslim extremists

    https://www.splcenter.org/20161025/journalists-manual-field-guide-anti-muslim-extremists#nawaz

    Wiki on Nawaz: Nawaz is a British activist, author, columnist, radio host and politician. He was the Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for London’s Hampstead and Kilburn constituency in the 2015 general election.[2] He is also the founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank that seeks to challenge the narratives of Islamist extremists

    Nawaz’s crimes according to the SPLC:

    + called for criminalizing the wearing of the veil, or niqab, in many public places, saying: “It is not only reasonable, but our duty to insist individuals remove the veil when they enter identity-sensitive environments such as banks, airports, courts and schools.”

    + tweeted out a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad — despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous to draw Muhammad.

    [(This is the tweet obfuscated a bit in case this blog has a link count spam filter) twitter.com maajidnawaz/status/422342223460855809?lang=en
    CHECK THAT TWEET OUT
    ]

    + described himself as a “feminist,” was “filmed repeatedly trying to touch a naked lap dancer,”

    the splc simply cannot be trusted… for anything.

    For more on what a racket the splc is, and how they make their money, and how little of their money goes to anti-discrimination efforts, and what the splc really does to society, google ken silverstein splc, he’s been covering them for harpers, and counterpunch since 2000.

  7. I’m really not ok with a guy who thinks it’s a great idea for his internet pals to tweet “big lipped coon” at a black woman and then expects that woman (or me) to “log off” if we don’t want to hear it.

  9. Neal – As I understand it then, it’s not so much the article that Brietbart published (seemingly in jest as I read it – I didn’t take it that Milo was serious about two separate internets), but that the author had some twitter friends (?maybe his other accounts) who posted some offensive/insulting tweets?

  11. Neal: Your source for Bannon expecting women to “log off” is http://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/05/solution-online-harassment-simple-women-log-off/ ? It seems to have been written by a person named “Milo”, not by Bannon. (And, separately, it seems to be satirical rather than a serious proposal to exclude, e.g., the co-founder of Cisco https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Lerner )

    Would you say that the publisher of the New York Times has the same opinions as the people who write for the New York Times (see http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2011/01/19/stupid-white-man-criticizes-smart-chinese-woman/ for a link to one example where I hope the publisher doesn’t adopt the reasoning of David Brooks!)? If not, why is this Bannon guy assumed to agree with everything that is published on the Breitbart web site?

    Personally all that I would infer about his beliefs from an article such as the above is that he thinks (a) people will want to read it, and (b) advertisers will want to buy ads in it.

  12. Neal: And you don’t like what “his internet pals” say? Suppose that you have a friend who loves guns and posts on Twitter to that effect. Maybe this is someone from your elementary school or a cousin. Would it be reasonable to say that you’re a gun nut? (Certainly I hope that I am not responsible for everything that my friends have to say on Facebook!)

  13. In the McCarthy era, there were various right wing organizations such as the John Birch Society that promulgated blacklists intended to make people with alleged left wing connections unemployable in Hollywood, in academia, in government service, etc. While some of the people on their blacklists really were or had been hard core Communists, some of the people were put on the lists based upon tenuous evidence or sometimes even in error.

    The left sees the McCarthy era as being one of the worst times in all of American history. There have been endless movies depicting the brave martyrs of the left who were persecuted during the McCarty era. (The fact that these martyrs were often left wing Hollywood screenwriters and Hollywood movies are written by left wing Hollywood screenwriters may have something to do with this.)

    But, the SPLC and the left see no irony at all in maintaining their own blacklist, where all it takes to be blacklisted or “Watsoned” is the word of a disgruntled ex-spouse with a strong financial motive or one stray remark.

  14. Democrats must motivate their base to get out and vote next time. Bannon is a perfect target because when I see his picture, he looks like a bad or crazy right wing racist/sexist/bigot. Also, he is not well known and as such is a blank slate for the media to “brand” him as “KKK.” The fact that his Breitbart website has crazy stuff on it and racist/sexist comments from users is the evidence against him. (nevermind the craziness on facebook/twitter and other liberal media websites – they are run by liberals and can do whatever they want)

    Here is the “get out the vote” message:

    Trump/Republicans = Alt-Right = KKK and when we don’t get out and vote for Democrats then the KKK takes over the White House.

    (note that “Tea-Party” seems to have been replaced by Alt-Right – perhaps this is due to opinion research done for democrats)

    In the pre-Trump world, Trump would be forced to fire Bannon. But we’re in uncharted waters.

  15. Jewish actress Emmy Rossum has reported that she received tweets “threatening to send me and my ‘ilk’ to the gas chambers” with “hashtags like ‘#sieghiel’.” and “get ready for the trains”. According to the article I linked to in comment #2, published by Steve Bannon, the proper response is for her to “Log Off” if she doesn’t like it. I disagree. The proper response is for those tweeters to stop the hate speech and apologize. If they won’t do that, then the proper response is for everyone (including Milo and Bannon) to denounce the hate speech. If that doesn’t work, then private platforms like Twitter can and should ban the authors of hate speech.

    Yes, parts of that article were satirical. However, the underlying message (women who don’t like being told there are gas chambers waiting for them should just leave) was not. Does Steve Bannon hate Jews? I don’t know (I haven’t looked hard but I haven’t seen any compelling evidence that he does), but that bar is way too low. Clearly he is willing to provide a platform for people who encourage the voices of others that do. It is not a good idea to give state power to a person who acts that way. I am unhappy that our President-Elect thinks it is.

    philg: You are not responsible for everything that your friends say on Facebook, but yet we all know what you do think of it. It is not unreasonable to know the same for people who will be serving in the White House. Your analogy of “a friend who…posts on twitter” does not accurately capture what Milo did. I’ll defer to Jerry that Milo did not “lead” a twitter attack on Leslie Jones, but he clearly participated in one. He contemporaneously tweeted pretty obnoxious things while others tweeted extremely vile things. If you were surrounded by a group of people calling you a “dirty kike”, would you really give a pass to the person who said “how do you like them apples?”.

  16. <>

    Oh that’s rich. So, if he *just* knowingly makes money off articles that single out [Jewish] writers for their religion, and stokes bigots to attack their families (including portraying them as lampshades). And does it again and again.

    You could’ve said similar things about Leni Riefenstahl

  18. “If that doesn’t work, then private platforms like Twitter can and should ban the authors of hate speech.”

    It’s funny that the left used to be in favor of free speech. One of the most important moments in the birth of the New Left was the “Free Speech Movement” at Berkeley. They were opposed to the idea that before someone could teach at Berkeley they would have to first sign an oath professing loyalty to the reigning ideology of the time . Now the left demands that people in effect sign a loyalty oath professing their loyalty to reigning ideology of our time (political correctness) without a trace of irony.

    I realize that as a private platform, Twitter can ban whomever they want – they are not subject to the 1st Amendment. But can’t the left play the checkers game even one move ahead (it’s not even chess)? If we establish the idea that Twitter can and SHOULD ban certain speech that certain people deem hateful, how long before this idea is flipped around and used to bite you on the behind? Recently, I have been reading some opinion pieces to the effect that maybe, before Obama took it upon himself to enlarge the power of the Presidency through executive orders, he should have thought how that might work out in the hands of someone less wonderful than himself.

    The left has this notion that the Overton Window can only shift to the left (this is the direction or arc of “progress”) and never the other way, so there is no need to consider what might happen if their are hoisted on their own petard – this just can’t happen. This is in part why they were so stunned by Hillary’s loss – it violated their basic notion of how the world works.

  21. Jackie: Did Twitter make a mistake when they banned the user who called Leslie Jones a “big lipped coon” (something which would also not be permitted in this forum)?

  22. The most interesting comment I’ve seen on Steve Bannon is from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: It’s Steve Bannon’s World, We’re Just Living In It.

    Obviously, being Trump’s campaign chairman in itself is a very big deal. Kellyanne Conway is the nominal campaign manager. But Bannon seems to be the top executive in the operation. And to the surprise of many (including myself), rather than signaling Trump going finally totally off the rails, Bannon is the first of Trump’s three campaign chiefs to bring some level of discipline to the operation. Not a high bar. But it’s been real and important. So that’s point one.

    Bannon’s also the guy running the Breitbart media empire which, all the merited derision and lack of integrity aside, has had a massive impact on Republican base politics. This is one reason TPM has always focused so much on the far right and often what looks like the looney right. It is looney. But elites tend to think it doesn’t merit serious attention just because it’s crazy. That’s a big, big mistake, both journalistically and politically.

    But then there’s a part I’d forgotten about entirely. Bannon is the guy behind the ‘Government Accountability Institute’, which funded Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, the exposé which was the origin point of a huge amount of the coverage of the Clinton Foundation, Clinton speeches and all the rest.

    Schweizer and Bannon managed to set up exclusive agreements with The New York Times and The Washington Post in addition to the more predictable Fox News to publish major series of stories based on Schweizer’s findings. There’s simply no question, fair or not, that that project had a major effect on Clinton’s declining favorability numbers over the second half of 2015.

    So in addition to taking over the campaign late in the game, Bannon was working through what amounted to two separate channels. Breitbart served up antic and frequently racist red meat to base Republicans which has helped reshape the GOP. At the same time he was underwriting the much tighter and more rigorously researched Clinton Cash, written in a language and format aimed at getting buy-in from media elites who see Breitbart as a joke.

    Definitely a guy to take seriously. Bloomberg ran a long profile back in October 2015: This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America. The sub-head is: “Steve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy—and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.” Looks like he succeeded!

  23. But can’t the left play the checkers game even one move ahead (it’s not even chess)? If we establish the idea that Twitter can and SHOULD ban certain speech that certain people deem hateful, how long before this idea is flipped around and used to bite you on the behind.

    Over in the UK, the Labour Party (main party on the Left) has been accused of anti-Semitism over the past year or so. So such a ban could apply to people on the left immediately if Twitter were to implement it. However, your argument is like a slippery slope argument. If I know that my employer will fire me if I call me black co-worker a n—er or my Jewish co-worker a k–e, why then I may be so fearful that I don’t to talk to anybody at all! And if employees can’t talk to each other, the company will stop functioning altogether!

  24. Phil, I suppose if McDonalds became a chief advisor in the White House, and Nazis and KKK said McD was creating the ideological aspects of where they were going, and would push the President in the right direction, I would be suspicious of McDonalds. … Of course they could just innocently mean that McDonalds would actually shove the Prez to the right hand side when it passed him the hall.

  25. Bannon seems to have strong views on talented immigrants staying in America.

    From today’s Washington Post:

    During their conversations, there were some moments on-air when Trump and Bannon disagreed. Though not many.

    Last November, for instance, Trump said he was concerned that foreign students attending Ivy League schools have to return home because of U.S. immigration laws.

    “We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country,” Trump said. He paused. Bannon said, “Um.”

    “I think you agree with that,” Trump said. “Do you agree with that?”

    Bannon was hesitant.

    “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered-and-coaxed-trump-on-policies-key-to-the-alt-right/2016/11/15/53c66362-ab69-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html

  26. Patrick: The Post article that you cite says “Bannon was hesitant.” That’s not exactly a “strong view.” Bannon’s attitude is consistent with what selective U.S. universities actually do right now. Harvard and similar schools don’t run a pure meritocracy for admissions. If they did it would be nearly all foreign students (there are more of them; they went to better schools in many cases (Shanghai, Finland, Singapore, etc.), and they worked harder. Domestic students are favored by these schools to preserve their U.S. character. As it happens I don’t agree with Bannon on this one. But I wouldn’t say from what you’ve cited that having Bannon in a conference room discussion of immigration policy would blow up the discussion. Certainly his point that “a country is more than an economy” is not a racist or anti-Jewish point in my view.

  27. Patrick: On further reflection, as soon as I wrote “I don’t agree with Bannon” that actually does make him a racist! That’s the most important thing that I’ve learned on Facebook in the last year: “People who disagree with me are stupid, racist, and sexist.”

  28. Philip:
    The title of that article was, in part, “How Bannon flattered and coaxed Trump on policies….”. Bannon was directly contradicting something Trump just said. I interpreted the hesitation you mentioned in that context. To immediately contradict someone like Trump while also desiring to stay on his good side to me implies that it might have been something pretty important to Bannon.

    The title of your post was “What’s wrong with this Steve Bannon guy?” In this case, I’m not sure what was gong on was evidence of racism – who knows – but perhaps “nativist” is another possibility? I wonder if there isn’t some similarity to an earlier period of American history when immigration was also a hot political topic, which culminated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924. During the beginning of the twentieth century there was mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe. That invoked opposition resulting in the 1924 legislation drastically restricting immigration from much of the world. Though some of those immigrants were Jewish, I believe that Catholic immigration aroused a lot of strong feelings and opposition at the time.

    A sentiment I sometimes hear expressed is that the intellectual, technological and economic vitality of the America is significantly due to its attractiveness to talented immigrants. At the same time, those same immigrants may be considered threatening by some native born citizens who feel that it’s unfair to have to compete with people who seem to be willing to work longer and harder for less. Those immigrants tend to be from non-European countries these days, but in 1920, they were mainly European. If there were waves of go-getting Icelandic immigrants crashing on America’s shores, there might well be “nativists” opposed to that.

    Economic issues aside, there are some people more comfortable with “people like us” than “people who are different” and prefer to live in a more homogeneous society. That homogeneity might be based on religion or ethnicity or class or culture or …
    Other people “celebrate diversity” and view people who don’t very negatively.
    These economic and noneconomic sentiments have combined to create the current volatile social and political climate. Or something.

  29. philg: Bannon is not on trial; he wants to serve in the White House. The burden of proof is on him to demonstrate he is qualified for the job. That job includes promoting the interests of all Americans including minorities. I’ve pointed out above that a man with a by-line at the website Bannon published was proudly involved in the on-line harassment of a black woman. That same website has promoted white supremacists (example below). Bannon himself has written on that website extremely inflammatory articles which, while not advocating race hatred, do not demonstrate any sensitivity around racial issues and in fact obfuscate the the role of racism in American society (example below). That’s a lot of smoke. Why does Bannon need to preserve ambiguity on this issue? He should clearly and forcefully repudiate the voices of hatred which swirl around the website he published. He should clearly state that while working in the White House he will promote the interests of all Americans including minorities. That is not an unreasonable demand.

    According to breitbart.com:

    “The media empire of the modern-day alternative right coalesced around Richard Spencer during his editorship of Taki’s Magazine. In 2010, Spencer founded AlternativeRight.com, which would become a center of alt-right thought.”

    Note that Bannon has been reported by SARAH POSNER as saying “We’re the platform for the alt-right,”

    Some quotes from alt-right thought leader Richard Spencer:

    “Breitbart has elective affinities with the Alt Right, and the Alt Right has clearly influenced Breitbart. In this way, Breitbarthas acted as a ‘gateway’ to Alt Right ideas and writers. I don’t think it has done this deliberately; again, it’s a matter of elective affinities.”

    “For us “immigration” is a proxy for race. In that way, immigration can be good or bad: it can be a conquest (as it seems now) . . . or a European in-gathering, something like White Zionism. It all depends on the immigrants. And we should open our minds to the positive possibilities of mass immigration from the White world.”

    “Today, in the public imagination, “ethnic-cleansing” has been associated with civil war and mass murder (understandably so). But this need not be the case. 1919 is a real example of successful ethnic redistribution—done by fiat, we should remember, but done peacefully.”

    “In the face of this, we need to remember something very important: the creation of a White Ethno-State on the American continent is perfectly feasible. ”

    http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

    http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/14/steve-bannon-accused-of-having-white-supremacist-views/

    http://www.npiamerica.org/the-national-policy-institute/blog/facing-the-future-as-a-minority

    http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/07/10/sympathy-devils-plot-roger-ailes-america/

    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-alt-right-breitbart-news

  30. Philip, you are a brave man for posing this question, because you will have to wade through a tremendous amount of squid ink to get even a tiny bit of useful information.

    I asked many many MANY times on Facebook for people to provide me with evidence that Bannon was anti-Semitic or white nationalist by linking to actual pages on Breitbart news. No one ever did, but it wasn’t enough for them to simply fail to respond to my query, they were just SO SURE that such evidence existed that they had to keep telling me over and over again what a bad person he was and how mean he was to women (not what I asked about) and how rude he was (not what I asked about) and how awful Trump was (not what I asked about) and Hitler Hitler Hitler.

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