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| DATE | 2016-11-14 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] new chief advisor
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/politics/stephen-bannon.html?mtrref=duckduckgo.com&gwh=8DEDC3D7821982A5608B3B326AC0F1E8&gwt=pay
Politics
Stephen Bannon, a Rookie Campaign Chief Who ‘Loves the Fight’
By MICHAEL BARBARO and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUMAUG. 17, 2016
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Trump’s New Campaign Chief
Donald J. Trump shook up his presidential campaign for the second time
in two months, hiring Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of
Breitbart News, as the Republican campaign’s chief executive. By AINARA
TIEFENTHÄLER on Publish Date August 17, 2016. Photo by Carlo
Allegri/Reuters.. Watch in Times Video »
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As the American financial system collapsed in the fall of 2008, Stephen
K. Bannon began to fantasize about destroying something else: the elite
economic and political establishment that he believed had created the
crisis.
Mr. Bannon, who was named Donald J. Trump’s campaign chief on Wednesday,
was at the time a highly improbable revolutionary, a wealthy former
Goldman Sachs banker and a budding filmmaker. But his blue-collar
Southern roots tugged at him: panicked by the swooning market, his
father, a telephone company lineman with no college degree, had sold
much of the stock in his retirement account.
“Steve felt it was outrageous,” said Scot Vorse, his former business
partner and a longtime friend.
It was the start of a remarkable reinvention that turned a polished
corporate dealmaker who once devised $10 billion mergers on Wall Street
into a purveyor of scorched-earth right-wing media who dwells in the
darker corners of American politics.
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The website he runs, Breitbart News, recently accused President Obama of
“importing more hating Muslims”; compared Planned Parenthood’s work to
the Holocaust; called Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator, a
“renegade Jew”; and advised female victims of online harassment to “just
log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that
point with a picture of a crying child.
With its provocative content, bare-knuckle style and populist message,
Breitbart is, in many ways, a mirror of Mr. Trump’s presidential
campaign — which explains why the Republican nominee was so drawn to Mr.
Bannon, Breitbart’s chairman.
“Steve is a fighter. He loves the fight. He loves the scrum,” said
Andrew Marcus, who met Mr. Bannon, a Navy veteran, while making a
documentary about Breitbart’s founding editor, Andrew Breitbart, who
died in 2012.
Mr. Bannon, 62, who grew up in a Democratic family in Virginia that fled
the party in favor of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order Republicanism, has
quietly advised Mr. Trump throughout his campaign, according to friends
and colleagues. But as Mr. Trump’s candidacy has started to sputter and
flail, Mr. Bannon’s role has intensified, so much so that Mr. Trump
asked to meet with him over the weekend and offered him the position of
chief executive.
That vaunted post, which makes Mr. Bannon the single most influential
figure in the Trump campaign, is a leap of faith by a candidate who has
long eschewed political professionals: Mr. Bannon has never before
worked on a national campaign, let alone overseen one. But his résumé is
thick with the kind of experience Mr. Trump covets: a deep understanding
of how the news media works and how public perceptions are molded.
Over the past decade, Mr. Bannon has built a small but potent media
empire designed to directly challenge the country’s cultural and
political elite, whom he sees as incorrigibly detached from
working-class America and responsible for dismantling its backbone — an
industrial economy that employed its families and the secure borders
that protected them.
He made movies that lionized Sarah Palin and vilified the Occupy Wall
Street movement as fraudulent rebels backed by well-off liberals.
A trailer for that film, called “Occupy Unmasked,” is a fevered
compilation of rioting, profanity, a burning American flag and a man
appearing to brush his bare behind against a police car.
“We are finally telling you the true story of the radicals behind the
Occupy movement,” Mr. Breitbart, the film’s star, says grimly into the
camera.
Mr. Bannon, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has made
little secret of his desire to frighten Americans out of complacency,
fusing relentless provocation and a hodgepodge of conservative ideas to
make the case for rebellion against the political order.
“Fear is a good thing,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Fear is going to
lead you to take action.”
His timing was serendipitous: Mr. Bannon’s ventures in right-wing film
and news were perfectly timed to capture the emerging fury of the Tea
Party movement, which was still smarting from the federal bailout of
Wall Street banks like his former employer, Goldman Sachs, and the
growing sense that the nation’s top tier had sold out the working and
middle classes.
By 2014, Mr. Bannon had jumped from the political sidelines into the
arena. When a little-known Republican candidate named David Brat
challenged Eric Cantor, the House majority leader known for his close
ties to Wall Street, Breitbart News put its thumb on the scale,
publishing dozens of positive articles about the underdog’s bid. Mr.
Bannon was childhood friends with a top adviser to Mr. Brat, whose
victory stunned Republican elders. It was a foretaste of the white-hot
movement Mr. Trump would soon lead.
“He is somebody who puts his activism on par with his intellectual
work,” said David Bossie, president of the conservative group Citizens
United, who has collaborated on film projects with Mr. Bannon.
“A lot of intellectuals sit back and write columns and let other people
do the work,” Mr. Bossie said. “Steve is a believer in doing both.”
The credential that has earned Mr. Bannon a spot in the Trump campaign —
his stewardship of Breitbart News — was something of an accident. The
death of Mr. Breitbart, at age 43 of heart failure, was a shock to his
reporters and fans.
Mr. Bannon threw himself into the day-to-day management of the site,
opening branches in Los Angeles and London and leading twice-daily
conference calls during which he issued directives on what stories to
pursue.
His business acumen has paid off: Breitbart received 18.3 million unique
visitors in July, according to data from comScore, up about 40 percent
from the year prior. The site has outpaced conservative rivals like The
Daily Caller, and Breitbart executives say that monthly traffic has
increased by 16 times since the year Mr. Bannon took over.
But some inside Breitbart chafed at Mr. Bannon’s outspoken style of
management, complaining that he upbraided staff members and seemed to
embrace outright advocacy over journalistic principles.
In March, several top reporters and executives resigned, saying that Mr.
Bannon’s insistence on articles favorable to Mr. Trump had compromised
Mr. Breitbart’s ethos that nothing was sacred.
“He is someone who is prone to profanity-laced tirades at all hours of
the night,” said Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart, who
quit after complaining that the site had transformed into “Trump’s de
facto ‘super PAC.’”
Ben Shapiro, a former editor at Breitbart, said Mr. Bannon’s language
could be startling. “There are very few people who have dealt with Steve
Bannon who have not been cursed at,” he said.
Tensions spiked after Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter, accused Mr.
Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of shoving her at a rally.
(Battery charges against Mr. Lewandowski were later dropped.) To the
surprise of many on staff, Breitbart published an article that
questioned portions of Ms. Fields’s account, a rare case of a
publication publicly challenging its own reporter. She later quit.
Allies of Mr. Bannon say that he is simply a hard-charging manager with
high expectations — a description echoed on Wednesday by Breitbart’s
chief executive, Larry Solov, who in a memo to the staff described Mr.
Bannon as “a huge piece of manpower.”
Mr. Marcus, the documentary filmmaker, said that it frequently fell to
Mr. Bannon to rein in the excessive instincts of Breitbart News and its
staff in meetings. “He was a voice of reason,” Mr. Marcus said of the
time he spent inside the company, following Mr. Breitbart around. “Steve
was the one saying, hey, maybe you want to dial that back a bit.”
Like Mr. Trump, who remains closely involved with his real estate
business despite his candidacy, Mr. Bannon is not walking away from his
pastimes.
A new documentary he directed, “Torchbearer,” which follows the “Duck
Dynasty” star Phil Robertson to the Parthenon and other famed locations,
is scheduled to be released this fall.
The film may echo the bleaker themes of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “We
discuss how empires rise and fall, and how they lose God in their
societies,” said Mr. Bossie, of Citizens United, who is a producer.
Asked if Mr. Bannon could succeed as a campaign manager, typically the
ultimate insider role, Mr. Bossie said that Mr. Bannon’s outsider status
would be “a plus, not a minus.”
“This,” he added, “is the year of the outsider.”
Matt Flegenheimer, Jeremy W. Peters and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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