The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West
Europeans are starting to worry that Steve Bannon has the EU in his cross hairs. Heres how the White House could genuinely help pull it apart.
By MICHAEL CROWLEY March/April 2017
It was the day after Britain voted to leave the European Union in June, and the Western world was still absorbing the shock. With no clear plan for what would come next, the globes fifth-biggest economy had abruptly announced a divorce from the neighbors it had been trading with for nearly 45 years. Markets plunged. A calamity, declared the New York Times. Global panic, proclaimed one London headline.
Steve Bannon had a different reaction. He booked the calamitys chief architect as a guest on his radio show to celebrate.
This was then still weeks before Bannon emerged into the national spotlight as CEO of Donald Trumps struggling presidential campaign. Bannon was an executive at Breitbart News, an activist-editor-gadfly known mostly on the far right, and the Brexit campaign was something of a pet project. He hitched onto the Tea Party movement early in Barack Obamas presidency and noticed a similar right-populist wave rising across the Atlantic, where fed-up rural, white Britons were anxious about immigration and resentful of EU bureaucrats. The cause touched on some of Bannons deepest beliefs, including nationalism, Judeo-Christian identity and the evils of Big Government. In early 2014, Bannon launched a London outpost of Breitbart, opening what he called a new front in our current cultural and political war. The site promptly began pointing its knives at the EU, with headlines like The EU Is Dead, It Just Refuses to Lie Down; The European Unions Response to Terrorism Is a Massive Privacy Power Grab; Pressure on Member States to Embrace Trans Ideology. One 2014 article invited readers to vote in a poll among the most annoying European Union rules.
Bannons site quickly became tightly entangled with the United Kingdom Independence Party, a fringe movement with the then-outlandish goal of Britains exit from the EU. In October 2014, UKIPs leader, Nigel Farage, poached a Breitbart London editor to work for him. That September, Bannon hosted a dinner for Farage at his Capitol Hill townhouse. Standing under a large oil painting by the fireplace, Farage delivered a speech that left the dozens of conservative leaders in attendance blown away, as Bannon later recalled.
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/trump-steve-bannon-destroy-eu-european-union-214889
dalton99a
(81,472 posts)MBS
(9,688 posts)He is one bizarre dude, bent on destruction of our democracy, and of the West, and enthusiastically building alliances with right-wing thugs around the world.
Also a shady character all around. (The three wives, the strange games he's been playing in his personal life with residency, voting registration, taxes and more. . is he in Florida, California (and which county?), DC?) .
Creepy and very dangerous.
is one of the principle reasons that we have had peace for the past seventy years in Europe (relatively speaking). The elimination or destruction of the EU will result in a return to the Europe nation-state issues and conflicts. This is no longer the days of pre-WWII or pre-nuclear capabilities. This is a whole new world - with the potential for nation-state conflicts to rapidly escalate to nuclear conflicts. I am sure that Mr. Bannon may perceive that these types of conflicts can be localized - but he disregards the influence and impact of other people like him. Ones that will start shit for the purpose of starting shit. These small localized conflicts with small strategic nukes would have a way of leading to a potential World War Conflagration.
my opinion.
pansypoo53219
(20,975 posts)and civilization. who needs that.
somebody needs to be deported to somalia.