News site favored by president has big plans
A few days after Stephen K. Bannon was named President Trump’s chief strategist, one of his best-known proteges praised him on British television.
“I am a gay Jew and he made me a star,” Milo Yiannopoulos, the profane Breitbart.com columnist and cyber provocateur, told an interviewer.
While Bannon oversaw the Breitbart News Network, Yiannopoulos built an enthusiastic fan base for his caustic writings and drew unwavering support from his boss.
“Bannon believes in Milo,” said the site’s editor in chief, Alexander Marlow. “He dedicated time and resources — both personally and with his businesses — to expanding Milo’s brand.”
Bannon’s new White House prominence, including his recent appointment to the National Security Council’s principals committee, makes him one of the country’s most powerful men.
But it also uniquely positions his former website as a potential force in the Trump era.
“Generally, we have been fighting for the idea of nationalism, with a twopronged approach,” said Marlow. “One, we believe in upholding American values; they are to be respected. And two, we believe in strong countries and strong neighbors. We are deeply opposed to the corruption in international bodies and organizations.”
Already there have been indications that Bannon’s former organization might enjoy something akin to most-favored media status, even as the White House wages a verbal war with mainstream media. In January, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle got the only reserved seat at Trump’s first news conference in more than five months. This month, Trump defended Yiannopoulos after violent protests prompted the University of California at Berkeley to cancel an appearance on the Breitbart celebrity’s self-proclaimed “Dangerous Faggot” campus speaking tour.
“If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - NO FEDERAL FUNDS?” Trump tweeted on Feb. 2.
Breitbart’s homepage focuses on a few themes: praise for President Trump; attacks on his critics and on the news media’s coverage of Trump; praise for likeminded nationalist politicians such as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen; stories critical of left-leaning political figures such as Michael Moore, Lena Dunham and George Soros; and random reports about immigrants and refugees causing trouble in their adopted lands, especially Europe and the United States.
When Trump imposed a travel ban on refugees from seven predominantly Muslim nations, many news organizations focused on mass airport protests and legal criticisms. Breitbart’s lead story blamed a Muslim rights group with supposed links to terrorist organizations for “promoting protests & lawsuits as Trump protects nation.”
The framing of the piece sent a possible signal about what the president’s enemies might expect from the site. And so, from Capitol Hill to the lobby shops on K Street, a single question is being asked about Breitbart in tones ranging from glee to sheer terror: “Do they weaponize Breitbart to go after anyone who opposes Trump?”
Bannon and others involved with the site have bristled at critics’ claims that it foments prejudice.“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club,’ ” Bannon told the Washington Post. “You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class.”
Breitbart editors dispute accusations of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. Joel Pollak, an editor-at-large at
Breitbart who describes himself as an Orthodox Jew, said on CNN: “Steve Bannon does not have a bone of prejudice in his body.” Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor-at-large who has been critical of the site, described Bannon as “an old-school nationalist” who believes in restricting immigration as a way of preserving Western civilization, but not as a racist.
But the website’s editorial decisions, including its many barbs aimed at former president Barack Obama, have made it a frequent target of criticism from the left. The site was blasted for using the tag “black crime” amid the national controversy over police shootings of African Americans and the surge in attention for the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I think President Obama helped to make Breitbart what it was because they tried to be a tip of the spear in opposition to him in the most bombastic of ways,” said Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary in the Obama White House. “When they tagged black crime as something to search for on their website, that was not an accident.”
Breitbart has laid out an ambitious expansion blueprint, announcing plans to hire more U.S.-based staff and open operations in Europe. Breitbart’s editorial thrust in favor of national sovereignty and against open borders and mass immigration are likely to sync with the populist movements sweeping the European continent.
Breitbart will embark on its new chapter with a growing number of its alums in positions of government power. Bannon has been joined in the White House by two prominent Breitbart staffers: Julia Hahn, who has frequently written critical pieces about House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), and Sebastian Gorka, who served as Breitbart’s national security editor.
Marlow, the executive editor, said he has had “very little communication with Bannon since the election,” and he cited Breitbart’s criticism of the rollout of Trump’s immigration order and the site’s tracking of Trump’s “broken promises” as evidence of Breitbart’s independence.
Shapiro, the former Breitbart editor who now runs a rival site, predicted: “They’re still going to be the house organ for Trump, the in-house tool of Bannon. They will never go against the Bannon line.”
In the hours after the president announced financing plans for an expanded U.S.-Mexico border wall, Breitbart. com was offering to sell a special product to its readers on its homepage: a “Breitbart Border Construction Co.” Tshirt.
As a private entity, Breitbart News’s corporate records are not public. Politico reported that the site receives significant financial backing from Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, and his daughter, Rebekah. Bannon, a former staffer said, portrayed himself internally as a bridge between the site and the Mercers.
The Mercers did not respond to interview requests.
While running Breitbart, Bannon also received a total of $376,000 in salary from 2012 to 2015 from a small nonprofit group, the Government Accountability Institute or GAI, that received a large amount of its funding from the Mercers, according to a Washington Post investigation.