Trump’s racist brain trust exposed: it’s not just Bannon!

Salon takes a look at the racists “white nationalists” who have Donald Trump’s ear:

Among the men who have President Trump’s ear, we find White House strategist Steve Bannon, senior adviser Stephen Miller, deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka and newly installed Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Until recently Bannon ran the right-wing website Breitbart News, which has a well-known white nationalist tilt and loves to publish stories about “black crime” and “Muslim hordes” beating down the gates of “Western civilization.” As Bannon has said, Breitbart functions as a mouthpiece for the “alt-right,” which largely serves as a rebranding label for various white nationalists and white supremacists.

Miller, who made headlines over the weekend defending Trump’s false claims of “voter fraud,” is a fierce advocate of “ethno-nationalism,” meaning the racist belief that Europe and America must protect their culture and civilization (which are white by default) from outsiders who do not share their “Judeo-Christian values.” Miller echoed those talking points on Sunday talk shows, claiming that “millions” of “illegal aliens” voted against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

As a college student, Miller worked on political projects, according to news reports, alongside his classmate Richard Spencer, one of America’s most prominent white supremacists.

Sessions has been viewed as a racist in his home state of Alabama for decades. He has said that the NAACP is an “un-American” organization, is said to have insulted a black attorney calling him “boy,” has backed laws that make it more difficult for African-Americans to vote, and once joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “all right” until he learned that some of its members smoked pot. Sessions’ racial views are so extreme that he was earlier denied a federal judgeship by his fellow Republicans in 1986.

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Perhaps it is no coincidence then that Gorka — who was born in London to Hungarian émigré parents — has repeatedly been photographed wearing a medal associated with the Order of Vitéz, an overtly anti-Semitic chivalric organization that collaborated with the Nazi regime during World War II.

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Gorka is also hostile to Muslims and served in a senior role at the website Breitbart.

Michael Anton, a former George W. Bush speechwriter, is the newest addition to Trump’s white nationalist brain trust. Now a policy aide at the National Security Council, Anton is best known under his nom de plume, Publius Decius Mus, for writing the pro-Trump manifesto “The Flight 93 Election.”

Before that article went viral, Anton published an earlier essay called “Toward a Sensible, Coherent Trumpism.” In it, he defended the anti-Semitic America First movement of the pre-World War II years, with an obvious eye toward Trump’s repurposing of the phrase. Anton elaborated further on that theme:

[One] source of Trump’s appeal is his willingness — eagerness — gleefulness! — to mock the ridiculous lies we’ve been incessantly force-fed for the past 15 years (at least) and tell the truth. “Diversity” is not “our strength”; it’s a source of weakness, tension and disunion. America is not a “nation of immigrants”; we are originally a nation of settlers, who later chose to admit immigrants, and later still not to, and who may justly open or close our doors solely at our own discretion, without deference to forced pieties. Immigration today is not “good for the economy”; it undercuts American wages, costs Americans jobs, and reduces Americans’ standard of living. Islam is not a “religion of peace”; it’s a militant faith that exalts conversion by the sword and inspires thousands to acts of terror — and millions more to support and sympathize with terror.

This is a crystallization of the political worldview that drives Donald Trump’s fascist and authoritarian movement as well as conservatives more generally.

Of course, Anton’s analysis is factually challenged.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.