Bannon. Photo–Flickr.
Steve Bannon, currently exiled from the White House, may not be a Donald Trump favorite these days, but he is nonetheless doing his best to ingratiate himself with the president. Far from exiled when it comes to the mainstream press, Bannon told the BBC’s “Newsnight” that Martin Luther King Jr. “would be proud of” Trump for creating jobs for Black and Latino people.
“If you look at the policies of Donald Trump, anybody — Martin Luther King — would be proud of him, what he’s done for the Black and Hispanic community for jobs,” he said. Don’t be surprised if, after an extended apology tour, Bannon is welcomed back into the fold.
Further still, if anyone is going to help bring a version of Benito Mussolini’s fascism back to Italy, it may very well be Bannon. The disheveled-looking butt of late-night jokes who was forced out of the White House, unceremoniously dropped by his biggest financial backers and dumped by Breitbart News, has taken on a new role: pied piper for international white nationalism. He’s here, he’s there; on any given day, he might be anywhere.
According to Vanity Fair’s Isobel Thompson, Bannon has recently been hanging around the disaster that is the Italian government, propping up its newfound right-wing nationalism. With its government in disarray and talk about pulling out of the European Union on some political leader’s agendas, “Bannon’s valedictory yawp is reverberating across Europe.” Further, Bannon told The Daily Beast that if his brand of white nationalism works in Italy, “it is going to work everywhere,” and “is going to break the backs of the globalists.”
Thompson reported that, a few months back, Bannon “met with [far-right] League leader Matteo Salvini, whose rise to power has been motored by racism, and urged him to partner with [Italy’s Five Star Movement far-right populist political party], whose catchphrase ‘vaffanculo’ means ‘fuck off’.” Bannon told Salvini, “You are the first guys who can really break the left and right paradigm. You can show that populism is the new organizing principle.”
Italy’s March election “failed to deliver a governing majority to a single party or a coalition, but voters awarded the largest amount of seats to the Five Star Movement (M5S), rejecting traditional centrist parties,” Newsweek’s Sofia Lotto Persio recently reported. “The M5S was created by the comedian Beppe Grillo in 2009 as an anti-establishment platform promoting direct democracy and transparency, but it eventually encompassed conspiracy theories about vaccines, euroskepticism and anti-immigration sentiments.”
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Exiled From DC, Steve Bannon Is Stoking the Racist Right in Europe
