Bannon’s reported ties to nationalists come to forefront again after incident
Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist and former editor of Breitbart News, is often cited as the nexus between Trump and white nationalists.
In an interview yesterday on ABC “This Week,” former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, referred disparagingly to the influence of “Bannon-bart nonsense” in the White House.
But links between Bannon and the headlining speakers at the violence-plagued Charlottesville, Va., rally appear largely drawn from Bannon’s once declaring Breitbart a “platform for the alt-right,” with little actual involvement between him and the individuals involved.
Bannon has distanced himself from “ethno-nationalist” views, calling racists and antiSemites the “bad guys” of the movement.
The speakers advertised for this past weekend’s “Unite the Right” rally, while they all supported Trump’s candidacy, have had very little to say about Bannon, and vice-versa.
Richard Spencer, founder of the National Policy Institute and advocate for turning America into a home- land for what he calls the dispossessed white race, was cited in a 2016 Breitbart article as one of the “intellectuals” of alt-right thought. “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” stated, “Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore.”
Also falling under the altright umbrella is Augustus Sol Invictus, who ran for U.S. Senate in Florida as a libertarian. A lawyer who has called for a second Civil War to preserve “Western civilization.” In an interview in January, Invictus said he doesn’t “really know anything about Steve Bannon,” and is “not a big fan” of Breitbart. Invictus is listed as a speaker at this Saturday’s Boston Free Speech Rally on the Common. Other Charlottesville attendees included Michael “Enoch” Peinovich, founder of the influential altright blog The Right Stuff, an ally of Spencer’s who holds anti-Semitic views and said he wants to “save Europe, America and the white race,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.