It's Breitbart's White House now: House organ of the alt-right builds a power base in the West Wing

Former Breitbart head Steve Bannon adds two staffers from his fringe news site to the Trump team. What's next?

GARY LEGUM

There are already almost too many tragedies to count that have already been set in motion by the nascent Donald Trump administration. But for anyone concerned about the country’s accelerated dash towards right-wing nationalism, the White House staffing up with former employees of Breitbart News, the far-right propaganda organ, has to rank high on the list.

On Monday, the White House announced that Breitbart reporter Julia Hahn would join the administration as an aide to her former boss, Steve Bannon, who left Breitbart last summer to oversee Trump’s campaign and now works in the West Wing as the new president’s chief strategist. Then on Tuesday came the announcement that Sebastian Gorka, who has served as Breitbart’s national-security editor since 2014, is also coming to work in the White House, most likely in some role on the National Security Council.

Media Matters has a rundown on some of Gorka’s greatest hits. The Fox News contributor has what sane people have long considered fringe views in the mode of noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Among other things, Gorka has pushed the idea that Barack Obama was “sympathetic to Islamic terrorists” and blamed incidents like last year’s Orlando nightclub massacre on the “political correctness” that Gorka thinks blinded the last administration to threats from radical Muslims.

Hahn, meanwhile, has spent much of her time at Breitbart chasing House Speaker Paul Ryan and any other Republican who has not shown sufficient fealty to the ravings published by the site’s stable of paranoid and terrified right-wing nationalists, in service of policies like cracking down on immigration and banning Muslims from entering the country. In doing so, she has used the usual buzzwords to viciously denigrate more mainstream Republicans (Eric Cantor is a “discredited globalist”) and once blatantly misstated math from a study to attack Ryan’s position on immigrant quotas. When challenged on her calculations by New York’s Ed Kilgore, she accused him of being an “apologist for female genital mutilation.”

All together now: “She sounds nice.”

more
http://www.salon.com/2017/01/25/its-breitbarts-white-house-now-house-organ-of-the-alt-right-builds-a-power-base-in-the-west-wing/