All the existential rage of the defeated and humiliated elites is now focused against Steve Bannon — the architect of Trump’s victory, the media genius who won the battle with less than a fifth of the financial resources at Hillary Clinton’s disposal.
I know Steve Bannon, and have had several long discussions with him about politics. Steve is fervently pro-Israel, and it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that he is anti-Semitic.
Other observant Jews who know Bannon — for example, Joel Pollak — attest to his support for Israel and his friendship for the Jewish people.
We have learned from the sewage-storm directed at Bannon that the Establishment plays dirty, and that the formerly Republican #NeverTrumpers aren’t just misguided ideologues, but also yellow-bellied, gutter-crawling, backstabbing, bushwhacking liars. Hell hath no fury like a self-designated elite scorned.
They hate Steve Bannon because he beat them, fair and square, on the battlefield of social media. He is the president-elect’s most effective general. Trump’s enemies can’t reverse the results of a national election, but they can try to cut the incoming president off from his popular base.
The charges against Steve Bannon are a tissue of lies without a modicum of merit.
Anyone can search the Breitbart Media archive for posts on Israel, Jews, and related topics, as I have, and determine that Steve Bannon’s hugely successful media platform is 100% pro-Israel.
Not only that: Breitbart consistently reports on the dangers of anti-Semitism around the world.
Not a single article appeared in Breitbart.com during the past two years that could not have appeared in Israel Hayom, the leading Israeli daily.
But that is not what one hears from Ian Tuttle at National Review, who complains that “in May, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol was labeled a ‘Renegade Jew.'”
He was, indeed — but by another Jew, David Horowitz. Horowitz argued that Kristol had betrayed Jewish interests by trying to torpedo Trump — a point Horowitz emphasizes here.
Tuttle knows this. But Tuttle chose to twist Horowitz’s headline into its opposite.
Tuttle’s colleague Jonah Goldberg also now inveighs against Bannon, but his post is too silly to quote.
Generously, Tuttle allows that Bannon is not Goebbels.
He isn’t. But the Establishment (including the conservative Establishment) media drumbeat against Bannon takes its cue from Goebbels’ doctrine of the Big Lie: repeat it often enough, and people will believe it — no matter how absurd it is.
NeverTrumper John Podhoretz penned an underhanded attack on Steve Bannon on the Commentary website yesterday. One has to read Podhoretz’s attack a couple of times to appreciate how sleazy it is:
The key moral problem with Steve Bannon is that as the CEO of Andrew Breitbart’s namesake organization, he is an aider and abetter of foul extremist views, including anti-Semitic ones. He used the site to promote the alt-right, which has retailed anti-Semitism as well as general outright racism and white nationalism. The distinction may seem like a minor one, but it isn’t; the hatred Breitbart has channeled is too general for it to be singled out for its anti-Semitic content.
Note the construction of Podhoretz’ sentence: Breitbart isn’t anti-Semitic, but in some vague, unnamed way, Breitbart has facilitated anti-Semitism from the alt-Right (whatever that is).
The man is an embarrassment to the venerable Jewish monthly. It’s time for Commentary to find a new editor.
These are facts about Breitbart’s content: indisputable, accessible, and easy to verify. Anyone can enter the terms “Jews” or “Israel” and “site:www.breitbart.com” into the Google search engine and obtain everything that Breitbart has published on the subjects.
I just looked through roughly a thousand articles and found nothing but pro-Israel, pro-Jewish content that might well have appeared in Israel Hayom.
There is not a shred of evidence — not a single article — that supports Podhoretz’s allegation that Bannon and Breitbart aid and abet anti-Semitic views.
In lieu of that evidence, the supposedly anti-Semitic David Horowitz piece has been cited dozens of times in the past 24 hours (including by the Times of Israel!).
Of course, one expects the Establishment media to lie at two hundred decibels. Yesterday’s email blast from the usually staid Financial Times began:
Donald Trump has chosen Reince Priebus, the establishment head of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, while naming Steve Bannon — his campaign chair who ran Breitbart News, a website associated with the alt-right and white supremacists — as his chief strategist and counsellor.
To claim that Breitbart is associated with white supremacists is a despicable lie. But the FT feels compelled to say such things, because polite opinion requires ritual anathemas of Trump.
The liberal Jewish website The Forward wrote:
Will Steve Bannon bring anti-Semitism into Trump’s inner circle?
The reaction was quick and furious from Jews and anti-hate groups. The Anti-Defamation League, which stays out of partisan politics and vowed to seek to work with Trump after his election, denounced Bannon as “hostile to American values.”
It is shameful that Jewish organizations would “cry wolf” on such an important topic, leveling unsupportable charges of anti-Semitism in pursuit of a patently political agenda.
“A world is collapsing before our eyes,” tweeted France’s ambassador to the United States as the returns came in early in the morning of Nov. 9. Yes, the “liberal world order” of elitist social engineering has come to an end. The Weekly Standard and Commentary have no more reason to publish than do the New York Times or The New Republic.
The world simply has moved away from them. And symbolizing their humiliation is one man who took on their vast media machine with seemingly insignificant resources, and won. They will stop at nothing to destroy him.
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