The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

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The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:12 pm

continuance of General Discussion thread

The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon
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UH OH
Complaint: Bannon, Mercer Dodged California Taxes
A legal watchdog group has filed a complaint alleging Steve Bannon and Rebekah Mercer failed to properly register groups in California, avoiding corporate taxes as well as disclosure laws.
LACHLAN MARKAY
04.14.17 12:05 AM ET
A network of political groups tied to Donald Trump’s chief strategist may have dodged corporate taxes and shielded information about its executives by using Delaware shell companies to surreptitiously conduct business in another state.
The allegations involve a constellation of groups financed by the wealthy Trump-backing Mercer family: a super PAC called Make America Number 1 and two Delaware-incorporated political vendors, film production company Glittering Steel, and data firm Cambridge Analytica.
The super PAC has steered large sums to the two companies, which have in turn paid consulting fees to chief White House strategist Steve Bannon. The payments to and from Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel were sent to a single Beverly Hills address.
That indicates that the companies were engaged in intrastate commerce in California, according to a complaint filed with the state’s attorney general and secretary of State on Wednesday by the Campaign Legal Center, a legal watchdog group.
Out-of-state companies engaged in intrastate business in California must register as foreign corporations with the secretary of State, but that office has no incorporation records on file for either company.
Foreign corporate registration in California is designed to ensure that companies doing business in the state pay taxes on the income they earn there and disclose specific information about their corporate structures.
By failing to register with the California secretary of State, Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel may have escaped taxes on income derived in California and disclosure requirements that are far greater than those levied on corporations in Delaware, a state known for its corporate friendly business climate.
Out-of-state corporations and limited liability companies in California are required to disclose the names of their officers or managers. In Delaware, according to the Financial Transparency Coalition, “you need to provide more identification to obtain a library card than you do to create a company.”
Cambridge Analytica’s and Glittering Steel’s incorporation in Delaware adds another layer of opacity to the operations of a network of advocacy groups and political vendors backed by hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah that helped propel Trump to victory last year.
That opacity persists despite extensive business activities in California—activities that should, CLC says, force more information about the Mercer political network into public view.
Cambridge Analytica did not respond to questions about its corporate structure. Efforts to reach a representative for Glittering Steel were not successful. Bannon and his private spokesperson also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Bannon has been deeply involved with both companies, according to recently released financial disclosure filings. Until August 2016, when he signed on as the Trump campaign’s chief executive, he was Glittering Steel’s chairman and Cambridge Analytica’s vice president and secretary.

As of January, Bannon had significant financial stakes in both companies. He reported holdings of as much as $5 million and $250,000 in Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel, respectively. Together, the two companies paid him nearly $300,000 in consulting fees last year.
The companies’ monthly payments to Bannon came by way of Bannon Strategic Advisors, a registered California corporation.
That corporation was headquartered at 8383 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 1000, in Beverly Hills until late last year. Make America Number 1’s FEC filings show more than $2.1 million in payments to Glittering Steel and Cambridge Analytica sent to the same address.
CLC says that is evidence of a commercial domicile in the state.
On the same day that CLC filed a legal complaint last year alleging that the super PAC’s payments to the two companies were in effect illegal disbursements to the Trump campaign’s top operative, Bannon Strategic Advisors quietly filed amended incorporation documents (PDF) changing its address to a mailbox at a nearby UPS Store.
Make America Number 1’s FEC filings indicate that Cambridge Analytica and Glittering Steel maintained physical presences in California. Their payments to Bannon Strategic Advisors, which is incorporated in the state, may therefore have constituted intrastate commerce and required that both firms register with California’s secretary of State.
CLC’s complaint focused solely on Glittering Steel, but the same circumstances also apply to Cambridge Analytica, which shares the same incorporation structure and Beverly Hills address in FEC filings.
Public records indicate that in addition to their failure to register with the California secretary of State, both companies may have also improperly failed to file tax returns in the state.
Payments to the companies at their California address and their disbursements to Bannon’s consulting company both exceed the thresholds for officially “doing business” in California, a designation that requires out-of-state companies to file California tax returns.
CLC is asking state authorities to investigate the matter. It also pointed to additional information on Bannon’s relationship with both companies, revealed by his financial disclosure statement last month, to supplement an FEC complaint alleging that Make America Number 1 violated federal election laws by steering money to entities in which Bannon was invested while he ran the Trump campaign.
Information gleaned from incorporation documents in California would shed additional light on those alleged violations, according to Brendan Fischer, the director of CLC’s FEC reform program.
“Bannon’s company appears to have dodged the California disclosure requirements that would provide more public information that could inform whether it broke federal campaign finance law,” Fischer said in a statement.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... taxes.html



#KEEPBANNON?
Alt-Right Ringleader Mike Cernovich Threatens to Drop ‘Motherlode’ If Steve Bannon Is Ousted
The Pizzagate conspiracy theorist claims to have a cache of dirty secrets that he’s willing to deploy.
Ben Collins

04.14.17 4:20 PM ET
A week after President Donald Trump began to publicly distance himself from White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich threatened to release a “motherlode” of stories that could “destroy marriages” if Bannon is formally let go from the administration.
Cernovich made the claims that he’d release a series of “scoops” if Bannon is officially pushed out of the White House on an eleven-minute, self-recorded Periscope Thursday night.
“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.
“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships—it’s gonna get personal.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Cernovich, asking who he meant by “they” and if he had documentation for the claims. He was on InfoWars’ radio show and livestream most of Friday afternoon, and did not respond at press time.
Alt-right leaders have spent the week pushing a #KeepBannon hashtag on Twitter, less than a week after a #FireKushner hashtag prominently amplified by Cernovich became the No. 1 trend in the United States on Twitter.
The hashtags refer to the falling out between Bannon and Jared Kushner that played out through planted quotes in websites like Breitbart, where Bannon previously worked as its CEO, after Trump’s son-in-law began to take over more responsibilities inside the Trump White House.
The proxy quote war led Trump to tell the New York Post on Tuesday that, “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”
The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted just last week that Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer for his recent coverage of Susan Rice’s efforts to better identify Trump campaign officials in intelligence reports.
“Congrats to @Cernovich for breaking the #SusanRice story,” Trump Jr. tweeted. “In a long gone time of unbiased journalism he’d win the Pulitzer, but not today!”
Cernovich cited the Rice story and another piece about Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which were both scoops later picked up by Bloomberg’s Eli Lake, as proof of his sourcing inside the White House.
“I have more stories that I haven’t released. I haven’t released every scoop that I have. I release my scoops strategically. I’m sitting on way more stories,” he said on his Periscope.

Cernovich and many other alt-right leaders famously split from the Trump administration’s party line last week when Trump signed off on a 59-missile strike on a Syrian airbase. Alt-right and conspiracy websites like InfoWars echoed both Russian public officials and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claim that the attack was a “false flag.” On Thursday, Assad floated to state media that the attack was entirely staged.
“I will go TMZ on the globalists. I will go Gossip Girl on the globalists. I will go Gawker on the globalists. So you mother-effers going after Bannon, just know I broke two of the biggest stories before anybody else,” Cernovich said on his Periscope. “If you think I don’t know the pills people are popping, the mistresses, the sugar babies—I know all of it. So you better be smart. Because the mother of all stories will be dropped because I don’t care.”
Cernovich has a long history of floating conspiracy theories about alt-right opponents and people he deems to be “globalists”. He was one of the leading peddlers of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which claimed Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were central figures in a fictitious child sex ring run out of the basement of a pizza shop. He also repeatedly claimed throughout the campaign that Clinton was dying of a litany of diseases, from syphilis to Parkinson’s.
Fox News ran an article on Friday commending Cernovich's recent stories, however, saying his "two recent scoops have been anything but fake."
“Hire public relations firms. Pay off (Trump supporting radio host) Bill Mitchell to call me names. Fabricate things about me. I don’t care,” said Cernovich. “You can’t kill what is already dead. What is dead cannot die.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... usted.html


Rebekah Mercer Joins Board of Anti-Muslim Think Tank
by Eli Clifton

Earlier this month, Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer, was listed as a member of the “Board of Governors,” of the Gatestone Institute, a New York City-based anti-Muslim organization that has long opposed the immigration of Muslims to the West.

Gatestone promptly scrubbed its website of any mention of its board members after LobeLog reached out to it on April 11 for comment. But an archived version of the website captured by Archive.org on April 9 shows Mercer’s name. A March 24 capture shows the list without her name, suggesting that she was added to the board at some point between March 24 and April 9.

Gatestone has served as a reliable source of anti-Muslim immigration hysteria. The Intercept’s Lee Fang catalogued some of Gatestone’s more outlandish claims in an article published in February in which he profiled the group’s president, Sears’ heiress Nina Rosenwald. Fang wrote:

Gatestone Institute produces a regular drumbeat of articles and punditry. The institute claimed that the Obama administration refugee policy “exposes Americans to the jihad.” Muslim refugees in Western countries are depicted in Gatestone Institute posts as rapists and hosts of “highly infectious diseases” that threaten the health of the German people.
Fang detailed how Gatestone senior fellow Salim Mansur attacked Barack Obama for “coddling Muslims” and praised Trump’s campaign pledge to ban Muslim immigrants. Another blogger, Nonie Darwish, wrote, “citizens from Islamic nations” should be allowed into the U.S. “only when the war on Islamic terrorism is won and when Islamic governments prove to the world that they have fundamentally changed.”

The Mercers must have liked what they were seeing from Gatestone. The family opened its pockets to support the Gatestone Institute over the past two years. In 2014, the Mercer Family Foundation contributed $50,000 to Gatestone.

Gatestone donor rolls acquired by LobeLog (viewable here) show that the Mercer family doubled its funding level in 2015, contributing $100,000.

Rebekah Mercer is known for her close involvements in projects funded by her family. An Atlantic profile of the Mercers, published in January, highlighted Rebekah’s interest in the family’s philanthropic activities. Rosie Gray wrote:

Whatever her actual beliefs, there’s one thing upon which people who have worked with Rebekah Mercer agree: She has a keen understanding of politics and likes to be involved in the day-to-day running of projects she’s involved in. Many donors like to play strategist, much to the annoyance of the actual strategists in their employ. But Mercer appears to be more successful at it than most.
Gatestone did not respond to an inquiry about whether the Mercers’ support and Rebekah Mercer’s role on the board of governors is connected to any new programs or initiatives at the organization.

This isn’t the first time that the Mercer family has aligned itself with fringe members of the right who advocate ethno-nationalism. White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon previously headed up Breitbart, of which the Mercer family were co-owners. The publication regularly published anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant articles under Bannon’s leadership.

When the controversial deputy assistant to the president, Sebastian Gorka, immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary, Gatestone published a series of articles by him as “Sebastian L. v. Gorka,” the initial “v” signifying his membership in the ultra-nationalist and historically anti-Semitic Hungarian order, Vitezi Rend. Bannon later hired Gorka as a national security editor at Breitbart.

Praise for Trump and a track record of opposing Muslim immigration to the West suggest that Mercer found Rosenwald and her colleagues, who include Gatestone chairman and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton as well as fellow board member and retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, to be friendly to the Mercer family’s blend of libertarian economic policies and social conservatism.

Rebekah Mercer, who served on Trump’s transition team, pushed unsuccessfully for Bolton to be named secretary of state.

On Wednesday, The New York Times reported “Mr. Bannon’s main political patron, the financier Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of Robert Mercer, a major Trump donor, holed up in her office at Cambridge Analytica in New York, discussing possibilities for Mr. Bannon should he leave, according to two people briefed on the meeting.”

Although serving in no official capacity with the Trump campaign or the White House, Alan Dershowitz has emerged as an apologist for the administration and a willing adviser for Trump. Dershowitz publicly defended Trump’s reference to a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, acknowledged speaking with Trump about the administration’s efforts to ban immigrants from majority-Muslim countries, and slammed the Anne Frank Center for its recent call for White House press secretary Sean Spicer to be fired for his backhanded praise of Adolf Hitler in comparison to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Spicer said that even Adolf Hitler didn’t “sink to using chemical weapons,” apparently overlooking the use of poison gas to murder millions of Jews, as well as Roma and others, in concentration camps.

Dershowitz said, “I’m prepared to give a pass” to Spicer. But he bashed Anne Frank Center executive director Steven Goldstein as a “total phony” and described the Anne Frank Center as “a minor institution, no credibility within the Jewish community.”

With Mercer’s funding and membership on the organization’s board, the Gatestone Institute appears to be positioning itself as a hub for far-right anti-Muslim advocates and apologists for the Trump administration’s missteps in Middle East diplomacy, ant-Muslim discrimination, and casual adoption of Holocaust denial rhetoric.

http://lobelog.com/rebekah-mercer-joins ... hink-tank/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:40 am

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Did Gorka Really Wear A Medal Linked To Nazi Ally To Trump Inaugural Ball?...YES

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FTR #950 Shock to the System: Further Reflections on the Breitbart Axis
POSTED BY DAVE EMORY ⋅ MARCH 17, 2017

CampOfSaintsIntroduction: This broadcast updates coverage of key aspects of the Nazi/fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right” milieu that moved into government courtesy of the Trumpenkampfverbande and Breitbart.

Further developing the terrifying reality of what Artificial Intellligence (AI) can accomplish for the dedicated fascist, oops, we mean “alt-right,” adherent, we note an important address given at SXSW. Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford gave a speech titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism.” The presentation highlighted the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems. The take home message? By delegating powers to Bid Data-driven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incredible power over the lives of others with minimal accountability: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Power without accountability.’ . . . .”

Turning next to the political philosophy of Steve Bannon and the seminal influences on its development, we refresh our acquaintance with Curtis Yarvin, aka “Mencius Moldbug,” a herald of the Dark Enlightment.

Curtis Yarvin has actually opened a backchannel advisory connection to the White House.

Note that the Bannon influences all seem to agree that what is needed is “a shock to the system.” We may very well experience just that. ” . . . . . . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. . . . “

Fascist philosopher Julius Evola is another of the key influences on Bannon. Evola was an early occult fascist, with strong connections with Mussolini’s Italy. Eventually Evola established strong, lasting connections with the Nazi SS, both operationally and ideologically.

He is another advocate of the “shock to the system”/“blow it up” approach to the status quo. ” . . . Changing the system, Evola argued, was ‘not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.’ . . . .”

A revealing influence on Bannon is a French novel The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. “. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, ‘is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . “

In FTR #947, we highlighted Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart alumnus and Hungarian fascist. Gorka is now the Trump administration’s point man working against Islamic terrorism. His view (and Bannon’s) that we are engaged in an historic clash of civilizations. That is precisely the point of view expressed by ISIS (and The Camp of the Saints) and will play into their hands.

That, in turn, will help propel the U.S. into more endless wars on the periphery of our empire, ultimately sapping the nation’s vitality and leading to the fall of the U.S. in a manner delineated in FTR #944.

After reviewing Gorka’s anti-Semitism, his profound connections to three generations of Hungarian fascism dating to the pre-World War II period and confirmation of his allegiance to the Order of Vitezi Rend, we highlight the fact that Gorka is part of the Strategic Initiatives Group, something of a parallel NSC formed by Steve Bannon. It reminds us of Hitler’s creation of a parallel general staff, born of a mistrust of his own senior officers and a desire to have a trusted cadre to obey his orders.

” . . . . In the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group. The newly formed group consists of figures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president. . . .”

The conclusion of the program foreshadows discussion in our next broadcast, which will critically examine Bernie Sanders campaign and disturbing indications that his candidacy may have been generated by the Underground Reich as a vehicle for infiltrating and destabilizing the Democratic Party.

In FTR #941, we highlighted the push by Bernie Sanders and his prominent backer Tulsi Gabbard to have Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim to be head of the DNC. He was not elected head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the position formerly held by Gabbard.

Ellison is networked with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Nation of Islam as well. ” . . . . Indeed, the June 21, 1998 article states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Ellison was a member of the Nation of Islam: ‘Ellison has been active in the community, but not within the established DFL party [the Democratic Party in Minnesota]. A member of the Nation of Islam, Ellison was the coordinator of the Minnesota participants in the Million Man March and the subsequent community group that formed.’ . . . .”

In a point of discussion that will be conducted at greater length in our next program, we conclude by noting that another of Keith Ellison’s supporters to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist protege whom we covered in FTR #467.

Program Highlights Include:

Review of Gorka’s formation of a fascist party in Hungary in the last decade.
Review of Gorka’s doctrinaire anti-Semitism.
Review of Gorka’s networking with members of the Jobbik Party in Hungary.
Review of Gorka’s supportive attitude toward the Arrow Cross Party, which allied with Hitler.
Review of Jobbik’s affinity with Julius Evola.
Review of Karl Rove’s and Grover Norquist’s seminal support for the creation of a Muslim Brotherhood branch of the GOP.
1a. At the SXSW event, Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford gave a speech about her work titled “Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism,” the presentation highlighted the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems. The take home message? By delegating powers to Bid Data-driven AIs, those AIs could become fascist’s dream: Incredible power over the lives of others with minimal accountability: ” . . . .‘This is a fascist’s dream,’ she said. ‘Power without accountability.’ . . . .”

“Artificial Intelligence Is Ripe for Abuse, Tech Researcher Warns: ‘A Fascist’s Dream’” by Olivia Solon; The Guardian; 3/13/2017.

Microsoft’s Kate Crawford tells SXSW that society must prepare for authoritarian movements to test the ‘power without accountability’ of AI

As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, people need to make sure it’s not used by authoritarian regimes to centralize power and target certain populations, Microsoft Research’s Kate Crawford warned on Sunday.

In her SXSW session, titled Dark Days: AI and the Rise of Fascism, Crawford, who studies the social impact of machine learning and large-scale data systems, explained ways that automated systems and their encoded biases can be misused, particularly when they fall into the wrong hands.

“Just as we are seeing a step function increase in the spread of AI, something else is happening: the rise of ultra-nationalism, rightwing authoritarianism and fascism,” she said.

All of these movements have shared characteristics, including the desire to centralize power, track populations, demonize outsiders and claim authority and neutrality without being accountable. Machine intelligence can be a powerful part of the power playbook, she said.

One of the key problems with artificial intelligence is that it is often invisibly coded with human biases. She described a controversial piece of research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where authors claimed to have developed a system that could predict criminality based on someone’s facial features. The machine was trained on Chinese government ID photos, analyzing the faces of criminals and non-criminals to identify predictive features. The researchers claimed it was free from bias.

“We should always be suspicious when machine learning systems are described as free from bias if it’s been trained on human-generated data,” Crawford said. “Our biases are built into that training data.”

In the Chinese research it turned out that the faces of criminals were more unusual than those of law-abiding citizens. “People who had dissimilar faces were more likely to be seen as untrustworthy by police and judges. That’s encoding bias,” Crawford said. “This would be a terrifying system for an autocrat to get his hand on.”

Crawford then outlined the “nasty history” of people using facial features to “justify the unjustifiable”. The principles of phrenology, a pseudoscience that developed across Europe and the US in the 19th century, were used as part of the justification of both slavery and the Nazi persecution of Jews.

With AI this type of discrimination can be masked in a black box of algorithms, as appears to be the case with a company called Faceception, for instance, a firm that promises to profile people’s personalities based on their faces. In its ownmarketing material, the company suggests that Middle Eastern-looking people with beards are “terrorists”, while white looking women with trendy haircuts are “brand promoters”.

Another area where AI can be misused is in building registries, which can then be used to target certain population groups. Crawford noted historical cases of registry abuse, including IBM’s role in enabling Nazi Germany to track Jewish, Roma and other ethnic groups with the Hollerith Machine, and the Book of Life used in South Africa during apartheid. [We note in passing that Robert Mercer, who developed the core programs used by Cambridge Analytica did so while working for IBM. We discussed the profound relationship between IBM and the Third Reich in FTR #279–D.E.]

Donald Trump has floated the idea of creating a Muslim registry. “We already have that. Facebook has become the default Muslim registry of the world,” Crawford said, mentioning research from Cambridge University that showed it is possible to predict people’s religious beliefs based on what they “like” on the social network. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and similar results were achieved for Democrats and Republicans (85%). That study was concluded in 2013, since when AI has made huge leaps.

Crawford was concerned about the potential use of AI in predictive policing systems, which already gather the kind of data necessary to train an AI system. Such systems are flawed, as shown by a Rand Corporation study of Chicago’s program. The predictive policing did not reduce crime, but did increase harassment of people in “hotspot” areas. Earlier this year the justice department concluded that Chicago’s police had for years regularly used “unlawful force”, and that black and Hispanic neighborhoods were most affected.

Another worry related to the manipulation of political beliefs or shifting voters, something Facebook and Cambridge Analytica claim they can already do. Crawford was skeptical about giving Cambridge Analytica credit for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, but thinks what the firm promises – using thousands of data points on people to work out how to manipulate their views – will be possible “in the next few years”.

“This is a fascist’s dream,” she said. “Power without accountability.”

Such black box systems are starting to creep into government. Palantir is building an intelligence system to assist Donald Trump in deporting immigrants.

“It’s the most powerful engine of mass deportation this country has ever seen,” she said. . . .

1b. One of the influences on Bannon is Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, who has actually opened a backchannel advisory connection to the White House.

Note that the Bannon influences all seem to agree that what is needed is “a shock to the system.” We may very well experience just that. ” . . . . . . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. . . . “

“What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read” by Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols; Politico; 2/07/2017.

. . . . Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years—a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history. His ascendant presence in the West Wing is giving once-obscure intellectuals unexpected influence over the highest echelons of government. . . .

. . . . Before he emerged on the political scene, an obscure Silicon Valley computer programmer with ties to Trump backer and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel was explaining his behavior. Curtis Yarvin, the self-proclaimed ‘neoreactionary’ who blogs under the name ‘Mencius Moldbug,’ attracted a following in 2008 when he published a wordy treatise asserting, among other things, that ‘nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.’ When the organizer of a computer science conference canceled Yarvin’s appearance following an outcry over his blogging under his nom de web, Bannon took note: Breitbart News decried the act of censorship in an article about the programmer-blogger’s dismissal.

Moldbug’s dense, discursive musings on history—’What’s so bad about the Nazis?’ he asks in one 2008 post that condemns the Holocaust but questions the moral superiority of the Allies—include a belief in the utility of spreading misinformation that now looks like a template for Trump’s approach to truth. ‘To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army,’ he writes in a May 2008 post.‘It’s been a while since I posted anything really controversial and offensive here,’ he begins in a July 25, 2007, post explaining why he associates democracy with ‘war, tyranny, destruction and poverty.’

Moldbug, who does not do interviews and could not be reached for this story, has reportedly opened up a line to the White House, communicating with Bannon and his aides through an intermediary, according to a source. . . .

1c. Fascist philosopher Julius Evola is another of the key influences on Bannon. Evola was an early occult fascist, with strong connections with Mussolini’s Italy. Eventually Evola established strong, lasting connections with the Nazi SS, both operationally and ideologically.

Evola has also influenced Alexander Dugin, a prominent Russian ideologue and politician.

He is another advocate of the “shock to the system”/”blow it up” approach to the status quo. ” . . . Changing the system, Evola argued, was ‘not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.’ . . . .”

“Fascists Too Lax For a Philosopher Cited by Bannon” by Jason Horowitz; The New York Times; 2/12/2017.

Those trying to divine the roots of Stephen K. Bannon’s dark and at times apocalyptic worldview have repeatedly combed over a speech that Mr. Bannon, President Trump’s ideological guru, made in 2014 to a Vatican conference, where he expounded on Islam, populism and capitalism.

But for all the examination of those remarks, a passing reference by Mr. Bannon to an esoteric Italian philosopher has gone little noticed, except perhaps by scholars and followers of the deeply taboo, Nazi-affiliated thinker, Julius Evola.

“The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.

They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.

More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump.

“Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the alt-right movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and anti-immigrant elements.

In the days after the election, Mr. Spencer led a Washington alt-right conference in chants of “Hail Trump!” But he also invoked Evola’s idea of a prehistoric and pre-Christian spirituality — referring to the awakening of whites, whom he called the Children of the Sun.

Mr. Spencer said “it means a tremendous amount” that Mr. Bannon was aware of Evola and other Traditionalist thinkers.

“Even if he hasn’t fully imbibed them and been changed by them, he is at least open to them,” he said. “He at least recognizes that they are there. That is a stark difference to the American conservative movement that either was ignorant of them or attempted to suppress them.”

Mr. Bannon, who did not return a request for comment for this article, is an avid and wide-ranging reader. He has spoken enthusiastically about everything from Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” to “The Fourth Turning” by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which sees history in cycles of cataclysmic and order-obliterating change. His awareness of and reference to Evola in itself only reflects that reading. But some on the alt-right consider Mr. Bannon a door through which Evola’s ideas of a hierarchical society run by a spiritually superior caste can enter in a period of crisis.

“Evolists view his ship as coming in,” said Prof. Richard Drake at the University of Montana, who wrote about Evola in his book “The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy.”

For some of them, it has been a long time coming.

“It’s the first time that an adviser to the American president knows Evola, or maybe has a Traditionalist formation,” said Gianfranco De Turris, an Evola biographer and apologist based in Rome who runs the Evola Foundation out of his apartment.

“If Bannon has these ideas, we have to see how he influences the politics of Trump,” he said.

A March article titled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right” in Breitbart, the website then run by Mr. Bannon, included Evola as one of the thinkers in whose writings the “origins of the alternative right” could be found.

The article was co-written by Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur who is wildly popular with conservatives on college campuses. Mr. Trump recently defended Mr. Yiannopoulos as a symbol of free speech after demonstrators violently protested his planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley.

The article celebrated the youthful internet trolls who give the alt-right movement its energy and who, motivated by a common and questionable sense of humor, use anti-Semitic and racially charged memes “in typically juvenile but undeniably hysterical fashion.”

“It’s hard to imagine them reading Evola,” the article continued. “They may be inclined to sympathize to those causes, but mainly because it annoys the right people.”

Evola, who has more than annoyed people for nearly a century, seems to be having a moment.

“When I started working on Evola, you had to plow through Italian,” said Mr. Sedgwick, who keeps track of Traditionalist movements and thought on his blog, Traditionalists. “Now he’s available in English, German, Russian, Serbian, Greek, Hungarian. First I saw Evola boom, and then I realized the number of people interested in that sort of idea was booming.”

Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.

A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.

Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”

Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.

It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.

Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.” . . . .

1d. With the Trump administration rolling out the presumably-less-unconstitutional revised version of its ‘Muslim ban’ today, it’s probably a good time for another peek into Steve Bannon’s psyche. Which unfortunately means we have to take another peek into far-right hate literature.

“. . . . The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. ‘The Fall of Constantinople,’ Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, ‘is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.’ . . . . “

“This Stunningly Racist French Novel Is How Steve Bannon Explains The World” by Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger; The Huffington Post; 3/04/2017.

“The Camp of the Saints” tells a grotesque tale about a migrant invasion to destroy Western civilization.

Stephen Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist and the driving force behind the administration’s controversial ban on travelers, has a favorite metaphor he uses to describe the largest refugee crisis in human history.

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today — this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

Bannon has agitated for a host of anti-immigrant measures. In his previous role as executive chairman of the right-wing news site Breitbart — which he called a “platform for the alt-right,” the online movement of white nationalists — he made anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim news a focus.

But the top Trump aide’s repeated references to The Camp of the Saints, an obscure 1973 novel by French author Jean Raspail, reveal even more about how he understands the world. The book is a cult favorite on the far right, yet it’s never found a wider audience. There’s a good reason for that: It’s breathtakingly racist.

“[This book is] racist in the literal sense of the term. It uses race as the main characterization of characters,” said Cécile Alduy, professor of French at Stanford University and an expert on the contemporary French far right. “It describes the takeover of Europe by waves of immigrants that wash ashore like the plague.”

The book, she said, “reframes everything as the fight to death between races.”

Upon the novel’s release in the United States in 1975, the influential book review magazine Kirkus Reviews pulled no punches: “The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event, and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Linda Chavez, a Republican commentator who has worked for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush but opposed Trump’s election, also reviewed the book back then. Forty years later, she hasn’t forgotten it.

“It is really shockingly racist,” Chavez told The Huffington Post, “and to have the counselor to the president see this as one of his touchstones, I think, says volumes about his attitude.”

The plot of The Camp of the Saints follows a poor Indian demagogue, named “the turd-eater” because he literally eats sh it, and the deformed, apparently psychic child who sits on his shoulders. Together, they lead an “armada” of 800,000 impoverished Indians sailing to France. Dithering European politicians, bureaucrats and religious leaders, including a liberal pope from Latin America, debate whether to let the ships land and accept the Indians or to do the right thing — in the book’s vision — by recognizing the threat the migrants pose and killing them all.

The non-white people of Earth, meanwhile, wait silently for the Indians to reach shore. The landing will be the signal for them to rise up everywhere and overthrow white Western society.

The French government eventually gives the order to repel the armada by force, but by then the military has lost the will to fight. Troops battle among themselves as the Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them. Poor black and brown people literally overrun Western civilization. Chinese people pour into Russia; the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman; the mayor of New York must house an African-American family at Gracie Mansion. Raspail’s rogue heroes, the defenders of white Christian supremacy, attempt to defend their civilization with guns blazing but are killed in the process.

Calgues, the obvious Raspail stand-in, is one of those taking up arms against the migrants and their culturally “cuckolded” white supporters. Just before killing a radical hippie, Calgues compares his own actions to past heroic, sometimes mythical defenses of European Christendom. He harkens back to famous battles that fit the clash-of-civilizations narrative — the defense of Rhodes against the Ottoman Empire, the fall of Constantinople to the same — and glorifies colonial wars of conquest and the formation of the Ku Klux Klan.

Only white Europeans like Calgues are portrayed as truly human in The Camp of the Saints. The Indian armada brings “thousands of wretched creatures” whose very bodies arouse disgust: “Scraggy branches, brown and black … All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms.” Poor brown children are spoiled fruit “starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold.”

The ship’s inhabitants are also sexual deviants who turn the voyage into a grotesque orgy. “Everywhere, rivers of sperm,” Raspail writes. “Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”

The white Christian world is on the brink of destruction, the novel suggests, because these black and brown people are more fertile and more numerous, while the West has lost that necessary belief in its own cultural and racial superiority. As he talks to the hippie he will soon kill, Calgues explains how the youth went so wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”

The Camp of the Saints — which draws its title from Revelation 20:9 — is nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within. The novel’s last line links past humiliations tightly to its own grim parable about modern migration. “The Fall of Constantinople,” Raspail’s unnamed narrator says, “is a personal misfortune that happened to all of us only last week.”

Raspail wrote The Camp of the Saints in 1972 and 1973, after a stay at his aunt’s house near Cannes on the southern coast of France. Looking out across the Mediterranean, he had an epiphany: “And what if they came?” he thought to himself. “This ‘they’ was not clearly defined at first,” he told the conservative publication Le Point in 2015. “Then I imagined that the Third World would rush into this blessed country that is France.”

Raspail’s novel has been published in the U.S. several times, each time with the backing of the anti-immigration movement.

The U.S. publishing house Scribner was the first to translate the book into English in 1975, but it failed to reach a wide audience amid withering reviews by critics. A rare favorable take appeared in National Review. “Raspail brings his reader to the surprising conclusion that killing a million or so starving refugees from India would be a supreme act of individual sanity and cultural health,” then-Dartmouth professor Jeffrey Hart wrote in 1975. “Raspail is to genocide what [D.H. Lawrence] was to sex.” Hart added that “a great fuss” was being made over “Raspail’s supposed racism,” but that the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.”

The book received a second life in 1983 when Cordelia Scaife May, heiress to the Mellon fortune and sister to right-wing benefactor Richard Mellon Scaife, funded its republication and distribution. This time it gained a cult following among immigration opponents.

May’s money has also been instrumental in funding the efforts of John Tanton, the godfather of the anti-immigration movement in the U.S. Tanton, who began as an environmentalist and population control proponent, founded a host of groups focused on restricting immigration, including the Federation of American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies, NumbersUSA and U.S. English. May’s fortune has fueled these groups with tens of millions of dollars in contributions over the years.

Linda Chavez was recruited in 1987 to head U.S. English, which advocates for English to be designated the country’s official language. But then a series of disturbing stories painted Tanton’s motives in a racial light. Among other issues, Chavez said she learned that his funding came from the pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and from May, who Chavez knew had helped publish The Camp of the Saints. Chavez recalled seeing Tanton’s staffers carrying the book around their offices. She quit the group.

Tanton, who insists his opposition to immigration is not connected to race at all, told The Washington Post in 2006 that his mind “became focused” on the issue after reading The Camp of the Saints. In 1995, his small publishing house, Social Contract Press, brought the book back into print for a third time in the U.S., again with funding from May. Historians Paul Kennedy and Matt Connelly tied the book to then-current concerns about global demographic trends in a cover story for The Atlantic.

“Over the years the American public has absorbed a great number of books, articles, poems and films which exalt the immigrant experience,” Tanton wrote in 1994. “It is easy for the feelings evoked by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty to obscure the fact that we are currently receiving too many immigrants (and receiving them too fast) for the health of our environment and of our common culture. Raspail evokes different feelings and that may help to pave the way for policy changes.”

In 2001, the book was republished one more time, again by Tanton, and again gained a cult following among opponents of immigration like the border-patrolling Minutemen and eventually the online “alt-right.”

Bannon’s alt-right-loving Breitbart has run multiple articles over the past three years referencing the novel. When Pope Francis told a joint session of Congress that the U.S. should open its arms to refugees in September 2015, Breitbart’s Julia Hahn, now an aide to Bannon in the White House, compared his admonition to Raspail’s liberal Latin American pontiff. And the novel’s thesis that migration is invasion in disguise is often reflected in Bannon’s public comments.

The refugee crisis “didn’t just happen by happenstance,” Bannon said in an April 2016 radio interview with Sebastian Gorka, who now works for the National Security Council. “These are not war refugees. It’s something much more insidious going on.”

Bannon has also echoed the novel’s theory that secular liberals who favor immigration and diversity weaken the West.



Now Bannon sits at the right hand of the U.S. president, working to beat back what Bannon calls “this Muslim invasion.” And Trump is all in on the project. During the campaign, he called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country. His Jan. 28 executive order, since blocked in the courts, turned this campaign idea into executive policy.

Trump has continued to defend the executive order as a life-or-death national security issue. “We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America,” he said in his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

Five days earlier, Trump had called his immigration enforcement efforts a “military operation.”

Although Department of Homeland Security officials walked back that statement, the president’s conflation of immigration with warfare did not go unnoticed.

“They see this as a war,” Chavez said.

Chavez, who supports some of Trump’s economic policy proposals, called the direction the White House is taking on immigration and race “extremely dangerous.” She said Trump’s immigration moves are “a kind of purging of America of anything but our Northern European roots.” Bannon, she added, “wants to make America white again.”

1e. In FTR #947, we highlighted Sebastian Gorka, a Breitbart alumnus and Hungarian fascist. Gorka is now the Trump administration’s point man working against terrorism. His view (and Bannon’s) that we are engaged in an historic clash of civilizations. That is precisely the point of view expressed by ISIS (and The Camp of the Saints) and will play into their hands.

That, in turn, will help propel the U.S. into more endless wars on the periphery of our empire, ultimately sapping the nation’s vitality and leading to the fall of the U.S. in a manner delineated in FTR #944.

“The Islamophobic Huckster in the White House” by Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin; The New York Times; 2/24/2017.

The new point man for the Trump administration’s counter­jihadist team is Sebastian Gorka, an itinerant instructor in the doctrine of irregular warfare and former national security editor at Breitbart. Stephen K. Bannon and Stephen Miller, the chief commissars of the Trump White House, have framed Islam as an enemy ideology and predicted a historic clash of civilizations.

Mr. Gorka, who has been appointed deputy assistant to the president, is the expert they have empowered to translate their prediction into national strategy. Mr. Gorka was born and raised in Britain, the son of Hungarian émigrés. As a political consultant in post ­Communist Hungary, he acquired a doctorate and involved himself with ultranationalist politics. He later moved to the United States and became a citizen five years ago, while building a career moderating military seminars and establishing a reputation as an ill-­informed Islamophobe. (He has responded to such claims by stating that he has read the Quran in translation.) . . .

2a. Supplementing information about Sebastian Gorka presented in FTR #948, we note that he is, indeed a member of the Order of Vitezi Rend, a reconstituted Hungarian fascist order.

“EXCLUSIVE: Nazi-Allied Group Claims Top Aide Sebastian Gorka as Member” by Lily Bayer and Larry Cohler-Esses; Forward; 3/16/2017.

Sebastian Gorka, President Trump’s top counter-terrorism adviser, is a formal member of a Hungarian far-right group that is listed by the U.S. State Department as having been “under the direction of the Nazi Government of Germany” during World War II, leaders of the organization have told the Forward.

The elite order, known as the Vitézi Rend, was established as a loyalist group by Admiral Miklos Horthy, who ruled Hungary as a staunch nationalist from 1920 to October 1944. A self-confessed anti-Semite, Horthy imposed restrictive Jewish laws prior to World War II and collaborated with Hitler during the conflict. His cooperation with the Nazi regime included the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews into Nazi hands.

Gorka’s membership in the organization — if these Vitézi Rend leaders are correct, and if Gorka did not disclose this when he entered the United States as an immigrant — could have implications for his immigration status. The State Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual specifies that members of the Vitézi Rend “are presumed to be inadmissible” to the country under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

Gorka — who Vitézi Rend leaders say took a lifelong oath of loyalty to their group — did not respond to multiple emails sent to his work and personal accounts, asking whether he is a member of the Vitézi Rend and, if so, whether he disclosed this on his immigration application and on his application to be naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2012. The White House also did not respond to a request for comment.

But Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches nationality law at Pepperdine University, said of this, “His silence speaks volumes.”

The group to which Gorka reportedly belongs is a reconstitution of the original group on the State Department list, which was banned in Hungary until the fall of Communism in 1989. There are now two organizations in Hungary that claim to be the heirs of the original Vitézi Rend, with Gorka, according to fellow members, belonging to the so-called “Historical Vitézi Rend.” Though it is not known to engage in violence, the Historical Vitézi Rend upholds all the nationalist and oftentimes racial principles of the original group as established by Horthy. . . .

2b. It should surprise no one to learn that Sebastian Gorka has a long and extensive relationship with the Hungarian far-right, including founding a Hungarian political party with two prominent members of Jobbik. In FTR #947, we noted that a member of Jobbik had written a glowing preface to a volume authored by fascist ideologue Julius Evola, one of the philosophical ifluences on Stephen Bannon.

We note that Gorka is a member of what appears to be a parallel NSC, The Strategic Initiatives Group. They may well be in a position to implement the shock to the system hoped for by Bannon, Evola, Yarvin et al.

“Exclusive: Senior Trump Aide Forged Key Ties To Anti-Semitic Groups In Hungary” by Lili Bayer; Forward; 2/24/2017.

When photographs recently emerged showing Sebastian Gorka, President Donald Trump’s high-profile deputy assistant, wearing a medal associated with the Nazi collaborationist regime that ruled Hungary during World War II, the controversial security strategist was unapologetic.

“I’m a proud American now and I wear that medal now and again,” Gorka told Breitbart News. Gorka, 46, who was born in Britain to Hungarian parents and is now an American citizen, asked rhetorically, “Why? To remind myself of where I came from, what my parents suffered under both the Nazis and the Communists, and to help me in my work today.”

But an investigation by the Forward into Gorka’s activities from 2002 to 2007, while he was active in Hungarian politics and journalism, found that he had close ties then to Hungarian far-right circles, and has in the past chosen to work with openly racist and anti-Semitic groups and public figures.

Gorka’s involvement with the far right includes co-founding a political party with former prominent members of Jobbik, a political party with a well-known history of anti-Semitism; repeatedly publishing articles in a newspaper known for its anti-Semitic and racist content; and attending events with some of Hungary’s most notorious extreme-right figures.

When Gorka was asked — in an email exchange with the Forward — about the anti-Semitic records of some of the groups and individuals he has worked with, he instead pivoted to talk about his family’s history.

“My parents, as children, lived through the nightmare of WWII and the horrors of the Nyilas puppet fascist regime,” he said, referring to the Arrow Cross regime that took over Hungary near the very end of World War II and murdered thousands of Jews.

In the United States, Gorka, who was appointed deputy assistant to the president on January 20, is known as a television commentator, a professor and an “alt-right” writer who describes himself as a counterterrorism expert. A close associate of Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, Gorka is now part of Bannon’s key in-house White House think tank, the Strategic Initiatives Group. The newly formed group consists of figures close to Trump and is seen by some as a rival to the National Security Council in formulating policies for the president.

Gorka, who views Islam as a religion with an inherent predilection for militancy, has strong supporters among some right-leaning think tanks in Washington. “Dr. Gorka is one of the most knowledgeable, well-read and studied experts on national security that I’ve ever met,” Joseph Humire, executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society, told the Forward. Humire has known Gorka for nearly a decade, and considers him “top-notch.”

Born in London to parents who fled Hungary’s post-World War II Communist regime, Gorka has had a career that’s marked by frequent job changes and shifting national allegiances. The U.S. government is the third sovereign state to hire him in a national security role. As a young man, he was a member of the United Kingdom’s Territorial Army reserves, where he served in the Intelligence Corps. Then, following the fall of Communism in Hungary, he was employed in 1992 by the country’s Ministry of Defense. He worked there for five years, apparently on issues related to Hungary’s accession to NATO.

Gorka’s marriage in 1996 to an American, Katharine Cornell, an heir to Pennsylvania-based Cornell Iron Works, helped him become a U.S. citizen in 2012.

A Web of Deep Ties to Hungary’s Far Right

It was during his time in Hungary that Gorka developed ties to the country’s anti-Semitic and ultranationalist far right.

During large-scale anti-government demonstrations in Hungary in 2006, Gorka took on an active role, becoming closely involved with a protest group called the Hungarian National Committee (Magyar Nemzeti Bizottság). Gorka took on the roles of translator, press coordinator and adviser for the group.

Among the four Committee members named as the group’s political representatives was László Toroczkai, then head of the 64 Counties Youth Movement. Toroczkai founded that group in 2001 to advocate for the return of parts of modern-day Serbia, Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine to form a Greater Hungary, restoring the country’s pre-World War I borders.

In 2004, two years before the Movement’s involvement in the 2006 protests, Hungarian authorities opened an investigation into the Movement’s newspaper, Magyar Jelen, when an article referred to Jews as “Galician upstarts” and went on to argue: “We should get them out. In fact, we need to take back our country from them, take back our stolen fortunes. After all, these upstarts are sucking on our blood, getting rich off our blood.” At the time of the article’s publication, Toroczkai was both an editor at the paper and the Movement’s official leader.
Gorka co-founded his political party with three other politicians. Two of his co-founders, Tamás Molnár and Attila Bégány, were former members of Jobbik. Molnár, a senior Jobbik politician, served as the party’s vice president until shortly before joining Gorka’s new initiative, and was also a member of the Hungarian National Committee during the 2006 protests, issuing statements together with extremist militant figures such as Toroczkai.
Toroczkai currently serves as vice president of Jobbik and is the mayor of a village near the border Hungary shares with Serbia. Last year, he gained notoriety in the West for declaring a goal of banning Muslims and gays from his town.

In January 2007, inspired by the 2006 protests and his experience with the Hungarian National Committee, Gorka announced plans to form a new political party, to be known as the New Democratic Coalition. Gorka had previously served as an adviser to Viktor Orbán, now Hungary’s right-wing nationalist prime minister. But following Orbán’s failed attempts to bring down Hungary’s then-Socialist government, Gorka grew disenchanted with Orbán’s Fidesz party.

In his email exchange with the Forward for this article, Gorka explained: “The Coalition was established in direct response to the unhealthy patterns visible at the time in Hungarian conservative politics. It became apparent to me that the effect of decades of Communist dictatorship had taken a deeper toll on civil society than was expected.”

Gorka co-founded his political party with three other politicians. Two of his co-founders, Tamás Molnár and Attila Bégány, were former members of Jobbik. Molnár, a senior Jobbik politician, served as the party’s vice president until shortly before joining Gorka’s new initiative, and was also a member of the Hungarian National Committee during the 2006 protests, issuing statements together with extremist militant figures such as Toroczkai.

Jobbik has a long history of anti-Semitism. In 2006, when Gorka’s political allies were still members of Jobbik, the party’s official online blog included articles such as “The Roots of Jewish Terrorism” and “Where Were the Jews in 1956?”, a reference to the country’s revolution against Soviet rule. In one speech in 2010, Jobbik leader Gabor Vona said that “under communism we licked Moscow’s boots, now we lick Brussels’ and Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s.”

In founding the New Democratic Coalition, Gorka and the former Jobbik politicians aimed to represent “conservative values, decidedly standing up to corruption and bringing Christianity into the Constitution,” according to the party’s original policy program. At the time, Hungary’s constitution was secular.

The party’s founders did not see themselves as far right or anti-Semitic.

“I knew Gorka as a strongly Atlanticist, conservative person,” Molnár, the former Jobbik vice president and co-founder of Gorka’s party, told the Forward in a phone conversation. He added that he could not imagine Gorka having anti-Semitic views.

Molnár first met Gorka at a book launch event for Gorka’s father, Pál Gorka, in 2002. The younger Gorka and Molnár became friends, bonding over their shared interest in the history of Hungary’s 1956 revolution and the fact that both had parents who were jailed under the country’s Communist regime.

Molnár became involved with Jobbik in 2003, in the far-right party’s early days, and quit in 2006. In his words, “Jobbik went in a militant direction that I did not like.”

Gorka rejects the notion that he knew any of his political allies had connections to the far right.

“I only knew Molnár as an artist and Bégány as a former conservative local politician (MDF if I recall),” Gorka wrote in response to a question regarding the Jobbik affiliations of his former party co-founders. “What they did after I left Hungary is not something I followed.” (MDF is an acronym for the Hungarian Democratic Forum, a now-defunct center-right party.)

In fact, both Molnár and Bégány were members of Jobbik before, and not after, they founded the new party with Gorka. Molnár was Jobbik’s high-profile vice president until September 2006, before he, Gorka and Bégány launched the New Democratic Coalition in early 2007.

Gorka appeared at a press conference with Molnár on September 21, 2006 — one day after Molnár resigned his position as Jobbik’s vice president. Gorka was also photographed on September 23, 2006, wearing a badge with the Hungarian National Committee’s logo as he was standing next to Molnár at a podium while Molnár briefed the press on the Committee’s activities. At the time Gorka was making these public appearances with the Hungarian National Committee’s leadership, extreme-right leader Toroczkai was already a top member of the Committee.

Bégány, meanwhile, had indeed been a member of MDF for a time, but in 2005 he joined Jobbik and served formally as a member of Budapest’s District 5 Council representing the far-right party. Bégány’s formal party biography, posted on the Jobbik website in 2006, said it is his “belief that without belonging to the Hungarian nation or to God it is possible to live, but not worth it.” Like Molnár, Bégány left Jobbik only a few months before starting the new party with Gorka.

Molnár, Bégány and the Hungarian National Committee were not Gorka’s only connection to far-right circles. Between 2006 and 2007, Gorka wrote a series of articles in Magyar Demokrata, a newspaper known for publishing the writings of prominent anti-Semitic and racist Hungarian public figures.

The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, András Bencsik, is notorious in Hungary for his own long-standing anti-Semitic views. In 1995, the Hungarian Jewish publication Szombat criticized Bencsik for writing that “the solid capital, which the Jews got after Auschwitz, has run out.” That same year, Szombat noted, Bencsik wrote in Magyar Demokrata, “In Hungary the chief conflict is between national and cosmopolitan aspirations.” In Hungarian society, “cosmopolitan” is generally a code word for Jews.

In December 2004, the U.S. State Department reported bluntly to Congress that, “the weekly newspaper Magyar Demokrata published anti-Semitic articles and featured articles by authors who have denied the Holocaust.”

In the summer of 2007, Bencsik became one of the founders of the Hungarian Guard, a now-banned paramilitary organization known for assaulting and intimidating members of Hungary’s Roma community. The perpetrators in a spate of racially motivated murders of Roma in 2008 and 2009 were found to have connections to the Guard.

Gorka’s articles for Magyar Demokrata focused not only on decrying Hungary’s then-Socialist government, but also on highlighting the perceived injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, the post-World War I agreement that led to the loss of two-thirds of prewar Hungary’s territory.

“We fought on the wrong side of a war for which we were not responsible, and were punished to an extent that was likely even more unjust — with the exception of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire — than any other punishment in the modern age,” Gorka wrote in a 2006 article in Magyar Demokrata.

Asked about his choice of journalistic outlets, Gorka wrote, “I am […] unfamiliar with Bencsik. I believe it was one of his colleagues who asked me if I wanted to write some OpEds.” Gorka told the Forward that his writing at the time shows “how everything I did was in the interests of a more transparent and healthy democracy in Hungary. This included a rejection of all revanchist tendencies and xenophobic cliques.”

Gorka’s claim to be unfamiliar with Bencsik must be weighed against his deep immersion in Hungarian politics and Benscik’s status as a major figure in Hungary’s right-wing political scene. At the time, Gorka gave public interviews as an “expert” on the Hungarian Guard, which Bencsik helped to found. In one 2007 interview, Gorka clarified his own view of the Guard, saying, “It’s not worth talking about banning” the group. Despite its extreme rhetoric against minorities, Gorka said, “The government and media are inflating this question.”

An Affinity for Nationalist Symbols

It was in mid-February that Gorka’s affinity for Hungarian nationalist and far-right ideas first came to the American public’s attention. Eli Clifton of the news website Lobelog noticed from a photograph that the new deputy assistant to the president had appeared at an inauguration ball in January wearing a Hungarian medal known as Vitézi Rend. The medal signifies a knightly order of merit founded in 1920 by Admiral Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s longtime anti-Semitic ruler and Hitler’s ally during World War II. Notwithstanding this alliance, and the group’s designation as Nazi-collaborators by the U.S. State Department, many within Hungary’s right revere Horthy for his staunch nationalism during the overall course of his rule from 1920 to 1944.

Breitbart, the “alt-right” publication, where Gorka himself served as national security editor prior to joining the White House staff, defended his wardrobe choice, writing on February 14 that, “as any of his Breitbart News colleagues could testify, Gorka is not only pro-Israel but ‘pro-Jewish,’ and defends both against the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.”

“In 1979 my father was awarded a declaration for his resistance to a dictatorship, and although he passed away 14 years ago, I wear that medal in remembrance of what my family went through and what it represents today, to me, as an American,” Gorka told Breibart on February 15, as the controversy regarding his choice to wear a Horthy-era medal intensified.

But the medal was not the first time Gorka expressed appreciation for symbols that many associate with Hungary’s World War II-era Nazi sympathizers. In 2006, Gorka defended the use of the Arpad flag, which Hungary’s murderous Arrow Cross Party used as their symbol. The Hungarian Arrow Cross Party killed thousands of Jews during World War II, shooting many of them alongside the Danube River and throwing them into the water. Gorka told the news agency JTA at the time that “if you say eight centuries of history can be eradicated by 18 months of fascist distortion of symbols, you’re losing historic perspective.”

Gorka’s Unlikely Transformation

After the failure of his new party in 2007, Gorka moved to the United States and over the past 10 years has worked for the Department of Justice, Marine Corps University, National Defense University, and Joint Special Operations University.

Former colleagues in the States questioned the quality of Gorka’s work on Islam, and said that he shied away from publishing in peer-reviewed journals, according to the Washington Post.

Retired Lt. Col. Mike Lewis told the Post that when Gorka was lecturing to members of the armed forces, he “made a difficult and complex situation simple and confirmed the officers’ prejudices and assumptions.”

But Humire, of the Center for a Secure Free Society, defended Gorka’s worldview. “Since I’ve known him he has been emphasizing a point that is not properly understood by most conventional counterterrorism experts,” said Humire, “that the modern battlefield is fought with words, images, and ideas, not just bombs and bullets. If you study asymmetric war, this emphasizes the mental battle of attrition and the moral battle of legitimacy over the physical battle for the terrain. Dr. Gorka understands this at a very high level and has taught this to our war fighters for several years,” said Humire.



3a. In FTR #941, we highlighted the push by Bernie Sanders and his prominent backer Tulsi Gabbard to have Keith Ellison, an African-American Muslim to be head of the DNC. He was not elected head of the DNC, but is now deputy chair of the DNC, the position formerly held by Gabbard.

Ellison is networked with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Nation of Islam as well.

We have covered Farrakhan’s highly suspicious behavior in connection with the murder of Malcom X, whose mantle the then “Louis X” assumed, in FTR #21.

We have also covered Farrakhan’s outrageous defense of contemporary enslavement of Africans by Arabs.

“The Ellison Deception” by Jared Israel [edited by Samantha Criscione]; The Emperor’s New Clothes; 1/30/2017.

. . . . If you are like most people, you probably don’t know much about Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, but after you read what I have posted below, you will see that describing it as “radical black Muslims” trivializes the horror of an apparatus of fascists – photographic negative images of David Duke and company – thus supporting the impression, which David Corn and others wish to convey, that the Ellison controversy is nothing more than the politically motivated harassment of a progressive politician, exploiting some minor indiscretions, long, long ago. . . .

. . . . As Pioneer Press, the second highest circulation newspaper in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, reported in a June 21, 1998 article on Ellison’s campaign for the office of State representative, Ellison had been the Minnesota ‘coordinator’ [7] of the so-called Million Man March. Given that Farrakhan’s march was a Nation of Islam project, it follows that the Minnesota coordinator was either a member of the Nation of Islam or so close to the NOI as to be indistinguishable from a member. Indeed, the June 21, 1998 article states that at that time – that is, three years after Farrakhan’s march – Ellison was a member of the Nation of Islam:”Ellison has been active in the community, but not within the established DFL party [the Democratic Party in Minnesota]. A member of the Nation of Islam, Ellison was the coordinator of the Minnesota participants in the Million Man March and the subsequent community group that formed.” [See footnote 7]

In the next article in this series, I will present hard evidence that Ellison was already a member in 1995, when he was organizing for Farrakhan’s march.

(During the current debate over Ellison’s Nation of Islam ties, nobody else has mentioned the June 21, 1998 Pioneer Press article, let alone posted it on the Internet. You can read it in Appendix I, where we have copied it for Fair Use – very fair, since it contains information vital for assessing a key politician. Let’s get this information out to as many people as possible!) . . . .

3b. In a point of discussion that will be conducted at greater length in our next program, we note that another of Keith Ellison’s supporters to head the DNC was Faisal Gill, a Grover Norquist protege whom we covered in FTR #467.

“Vermont Elects First Muslim Party Chair, Sends ‘Strong Message’ to Trump” by Alex Seitz-Wald; NBC News ; 3/6/2017.

“To have a Muslim and immigrant to be the state party chair sends a really strong message to Trump and his type of politics that this is not where the country is at,” he told NBC News.

The White House released a new executive order Monday restricting travel from six Muslim-majority countries after a federal court halted an earlier version. Trump says the move is necessary for security, but Gill and other critics say it’s merely an attempt to legally discriminate against Muslims.

Gill is an outsider in ultra-white, ultra-liberal Vermont in more ways than one. In a state that is nearly 95 percent white, a Pakistani-born former Republican from Virginia stands out.

“Us and Wyoming keep going back and forth for least diverse,” Gill quipped.

After emigrating to the U.S. and going to law school, Gill served five years in the Navy’s JAG corps before entering Republican politics in Virginia. That led to a post in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush. . . .

http://spitfirelist.com/for-the-record/ ... bart-axis/
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:39 am

April 17, 2017

Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s ideological ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia
Owen Matthews

These days, having any sort of ties to Moscow is politically toxic in Washington. Recent reports indicate Donald Trump may have borrowed Russian money to keep his property empire afloat—while a congressional investigation looms into alleged Kremlin interference in the U.S. presidential election and a host of murky connections between Trump campaign officials and Russian hackers and spies.

Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, hasn't been implicated in any of the ongoing probes. And unlike former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page, he isn’t under investigation by the FBI for possible collusion with the Kremlin. But Bannon’s ties to Russia are ideological—and therefore, arguably, they’ve had a more profound impact on White House policy with Moscow.

At least until now. In early April, Bannon was booted off Trump’s National Security Council in a White House coup that was—among other factors—also a scuffle about whether to appease a resurgent Kremlin or confront it. Days later, he lost a heated debate inside the White House with Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, over whether to strike Syria after the Moscow-protected regime of Bashar al-Assad killed civilians in a chemical attack.

Bannon, a former banker turned film producer and right-wing polemicist, has praised not only Putin but also a brand of Russian mystical conservative nationalism known as Eurasianism, which is the closest the Kremlin has to a state ideology. Eurasianism proclaims that Russia’s destiny is to lead all Slavic and Turkic people in a grand empire to resist corrupt Western values. Its main proponent is Alexander Dugin. With his long beard and burning blue eyes, Dugin looks like a firebrand prophet. His philosophy glorifies the Russian Empire—while Bannon and the conservative website that he founded, Breitbart News, revived the slogan of “America first,” which Trump later adopted in his campaign.

Related: It's not Bannon vs. Kushner, it's Trump vs. common sense

Yet Bannon and Dugin have common cause in the idea that global elites have conspired against ordinary people—and the old order must be overthrown. “We have arrived at a moment where the world is discovering a new model of ideologies. The election of Trump shows that clearly,” Dugin tells Newsweek.

Bannon, in turn, seems to admire Dugin—as well as Putin’s Russia—for putting traditional values at the heart of a revival of national greatness. “We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what [Putin] is talking about as far as traditionalism goes, particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism,” Bannon said at a Vatican-organized conference in 2014. “When you really look at some of the underpinnings of some of [Putin’s] beliefs today, a lot of those come from what I call Eurasianism.” Bannon declined to respond to Newsweek’s questions about his position on Russia and Dugin.

Bannon and Dugin’s speeches and writings indicate that their common enemies are secularism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism—and what Dugin calls the “globalized and internationalist capitalist liberal elite.” In both Bannon’s and Dugin’s worldview, the true global ideological struggle is between culturally homogenous groups founded on Judeo-Christian values practicing humane capitalism on one side and, on the other, an international crony-capitalist network of bankers and big business.

Bannon’s fix for the world is to revive the nation-state—precisely what Putin’s Kremlin is promoting as it backs anti–European Union candidates from Hungary to France. “I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing,” Bannon told an audience of Catholic thinkers at the Vatican by video-link from the U.S. in 2014. “Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he’s trying to do it in a form of nationalism. [People] want to see the sovereignty for their country; they want to see nationalism for their country. They don’t believe in this kind of pan–European Union, or they don’t believe in the centralized government in the United States. They’d rather see more of a states-based entity that the founders originally set up, where freedoms were controlled at the local level.”

Dugin agrees. “We are unfairly described as nationalists—but this is not old-fashioned nationalism in the sense of ethnic chauvinism, but reflects the idea that we believe in many civilizations that are all equal and have the right to their own identity and decide their own course.”

Both men are also self-styled revolutionaries. Bannon—though he once worked at Goldman Sachs—reportedly described himself as a “Leninist” who wanted to “destroy the state.” And Dugin was the founder of the radical nationalist National Bolshevik Party, many of whose members have been imprisoned for attempting to foment armed uprisings among Russian minorities in former Soviet republics such as Kazakhstan.

Trump’s election was greeted with delight in Russia, encouraged by state television, which lionized the New York real estate mogul as a man who would finally give Russia the respect it was due. A group of St. Petersburg Cossacks even gave Trump the honorary title of “captain” (which they quickly withdrew after the Syria bombing). In the early days of the Trump administration, the Kremlin had high hopes of a grand bargain with Washington based on Trump’s promise that he would be able to make a deal with Putin and work with him to destroy the Islamic State group in Syria. Trump’s starting team gave the Kremlin even more hope. Bannon was head of strategy. Michael Flynn—who had accepted a $40,000 fee to appear at the Moscow anniversary party of the Kremlin-sponsored RT channel, where he sat next to Putin—was named national security adviser. Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon-Mobil CEO, who negotiated a $7 billion oil exploration deal in the Russian Arctic with close Putin ally Igor Sechin, was appointed secretary of state.

The love-in between Trump and the Kremlin proved brief. Bannon apparently made no move to lift U.S. sanctions on Russia imposed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014—or to lift a U.S. travel ban on Dugin, imposed after his vocal support for Moscow taking over not just Crimea but all of Ukraine. At the same time, damaging Russia allegations—from an unverified dossier alleging the Russian security services had compromising material on Trump to reports of contacts between Trump advisers and Russian spies—swarmed around the White House. In the wake of the resignation of Flynn in March after being untruthful about discussions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kisylak about the possible lifting of sanctions, Trump quickly took the opposite tack, tweeting that he would be “tough on Russia”—and the White House announced it would not lift sanctions against the Kremlin until Crimea was returned to Ukraine. At the same time, Flynn’s replacement, General H.R. McMaster, along with Secretary of Defense General James Mattis, seemed to gain power within the administration and take a harder, more mainstream Republican line against Russia.

Many factors contributed to Bannon’s ouster from the National Security Council: He was instrumental in two travel bans on Muslim countries that the courts struck down, he was one of the key architects of a failed health care bill, and he was embroiled in a high-profile row with Kushner. But it was also clear in the aftermath of Flynn’s fall that admiration for Putin—or any kind of appeasement of Moscow—has become politically impossible for fear of giving congressional and FBI investigations evidence of collusion.

Bannon and the alt-right’s admiration for Putin has come into direct conflict with the White House’s new policies. In mid-April, in the aftermath of the Syria attack, Trump described U.S. relations with Russia as at “an all-time low” and reversed his earlier position on NATO, saying the alliance was “no longer obsolete.” At a G-7 meeting in Italy, where Britain called for more sanctions against Russia over its support for Assad, Tillerson spoke out emphatically against the Kremlin. And when he reached Moscow to meet Putin, his reception was chilly. “The level of trust at the working level, especially at the military level, has...degraded,” Putin told Russian TV.

The ideological honeymoon is over. The only question now is whether Bannon can survive the divorce.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/alexan ... ns-russia/
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 17, 2017 6:18 pm

SURGING
New Power Center in Trumpland: The ‘Axis of Adults’
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and other Trump administration ‘adults’ are meeting in private to hash out policy—and having a major impact on the president.
Kimberly Dozier
KIMBERLY DOZIER

04.16.17 8:30 PM ET
There’s a new band in town that’s guiding national security by quietly tutoring the most powerful man in America. Never-Trump Republicans who’d been apprehensive about President Donald Trump are celebrating the trio’s influence, calling Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Homeland Secretary John Kelly the “Axis of Adults.”
Through near daily contact with the trio, as well as Trump’s National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and CIA director Mike Pompeo, Trump’s world view appears to be morphing more closely to match hawkish conservatives of the Bush administration.
They point to the men’s influence in the Tomahawk strike in Syria—in contrast to Trump’s isolationist slogans on the campaign trail; the outreach to China, compared to Trump’s threats to launch a trade war; a possible escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and Trump’s hardening stance toward Russia.
None of these key national security chiefs were part of the Trump campaign, or movement. They are seen by those who work most closely with them as loyal to the office of the president but still getting to know the man himself, said a senior administration official, speaking anonymously to describe the interactions just 11 weeks into the fledgling presidency.
“They realize this is a tumultuous White House, and they are serving as a leveling influence over fractious personalities… responsibly protecting the country from enemies both foreign and domestic,” the official said, lumping Trump campaign veterans like embattled advisor Steve Bannon into the “domestic” enemy camp. Bannon’s removal from the official NSC roster by H.R. McMaster is seen as a sign the “adults” are winning.
“H.R. has been a steadying force,” a second senior administration official said. A third senior administration official described last week how there is now an efficient process to debate ideas, put them before the president and come to fairly swift decisions—a contrast to the chaos NSC staffers described in the early weeks under now-resigned National Security Advisor Mike Flynn.
Last week’s Marist poll shows the majority of Americans still disapprove of how Trump is handling foreign policy, but there’s a slight shift upward from the last time Marist measured. Trump’s behind-closed-doors, boardroom style of decision-making may not be winning over the bulk of the American people, who feel blindsided by the recent national security moves that come with little warning before, and scant explanation afterward. And even those supportive of the Trump administration’s recent actions aren’t sure there’s any sort of coherent policy behind them yet.
But many former staffers for President George W. Bush told The Daily Beast that they are now putting their names into the ring to work in one of the “safe zones” with Mattis, Tillerson or Kelly, according to three former Bush staffers who now all work for the administration or are interviewing for jobs there. (And it was actually a former Obama administration staffer, Colin Kahl, who was one of the first to publicly use the phrase “Axis of Adults” to describe the three national security chiefs.)
Mattis earned their trust during his military career as a Marine General who unsuccessfully pushed the Obama administration to challenge Iran, combined with his scholarship on civil-military relations. Kelly, also a retired Marine general, commanded in Iraq, ran the U.S. military’s Southern Command, and bears the heartbreaking distinction of having lost a son in combat. Tillerson has never served in combat, but has done high-stakes business in many conflict zones, and eschews the limelight as much as his counterparts.
“He’s consulting all these guys and they have a high degree of comfort among themselves,” said a senior administration official. “There is the band of military brothers—Mattis, Kelly and McMaster. Tillerson and [UN Ambassador] Nikki Haley are not military but play a big role.”
“What’s making this work for the president is the mix—not one or the other,” the official said, speaking anonymously to describe the president’s decision process.
All the administration officials interviewed say the key discussions happen not at the NSC, but at fairly regular informal dinners with Tillerson and the others.

“The president deserves credit for being incredibly flexible and listening,” said Michael Waltz, a former senior advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. “It’s his style—in The Art of the Deal, you see even in the late 80s he was on the phone and having dinners all the time. That’s how he learned,” Waltz said.
Trump had two dinners with Mattis only last week, a senior U.S. official confirmed, speaking anonymously to describe the president’s schedule.
“[President Barack] Obama was cerebral and consumed lots of written information and liked to have highly structured meetings,” said Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security and a former adviser to Republican Sen. John McCain. ”That clearly is not Donald Trump, who is more freewheeling and informal and responds with his gut.”
The chemistry that’s developed amongst Trump’s advisors is also key to their leveling influence on the president. Mattis and Tillerson have a standing breakfast once a week, where they share views to be able to present a more united front on defense and foreign policy at key White House meetings, two of the senior administration officials said.
Their low-key approach is materializing in the form of a blunt bat to rhetorical and incendiary pitches from North Korea, such as the Mattis’ weekend comment on Pyongyang’s failed medium-range missile launch: “The president and his military team are aware of North Korea’s most recent unsuccessful missile launch. The president has no further comment.”
That was matched by Tillerson’s 23-word comment about an earlier North Korean test: “North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment.”
And Mattis tamped down swirling anti-Russian sentiment last week after Moscow defended the Syrian regime’s suspected sarin gas attack last week and cut off military deconfliction communications with the U.S.-led coalition. “It will not spiral out of control,” Mattis insisted in a sober press conference, adding that he’s confident Russians will “act in their own best interests,” which means stand down on the panic.
Of the relationship between the two men, a Pentagon spokesman would only confirm they have a weekly breakfast, and State Department spokesman R.C. Hammond would only say that, “the Secretary is in daily contact with his Cabinet and NSC colleagues, and works to give the President information and options.”
U.N Ambassador Nikki Haley doesn’t work as closely with the group because of the simple fact of geography, being based at the U.N. in New York. But she told CNN that she talks regularly with the president, and one of the senior administration officials said her views are melded into the developing strategies for ISIS, Russia and North Korea.
Haley and Lt. Gen. McMaster are quickly becoming the face of the president’s national security strategy, praised for handling high-stakes television interviews, while Mattis, Kelly and Tillerson only make rare appearances.
McMaster has also won kudos internally for leaving his ego out of NSC debates, running efficient meetings that end with recommendations for the president (something that past NSC insiders say didn’t always happen in the last administration) and then translating the outcome of those meetings to Trump, even bringing his own NSC experts to the Oval Office for the president to question.
There’s one potential downside for the Bush-era influx the “axis of adults” is encouraging. One of the senior administration officials said as more Bush veterans join Team Trump, they are reconnecting with each other and the old relationships are facilitating getting things done, and they seldom see eye-to-eye with the less experienced true believers from the campaign. That’s adding to the friction, and the delays in hiring to fill a couple thousand still-empty posts. Hiring is still hamstrung by a “loyalty test,” which puts a black mark against any job applicant who once expressed #NeverTrump views.
“For a lot of people who put their name on the first #NeverTrump list, they did it on the basis of what they heard on the campaign trail and to be fair, I can see why they’d say that,” said former Trump transition official James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation. “Those of us briefing Trump saw more depth, maturity and responsibility there.”
“If you look at how he’s used his leadership team, they don’t look half bad, and people are a lot less risk averse in signing on now,” said Carafano, whose job was to line up potential hires for the new administration.
The so-called “adults” have also had some misfires. Kelly’s comments endorsing Trump’s tweeted accusations that the Obama administration wire-tapped him—and floating the idea of splitting up immigrant families—have drawn heavy criticism.
Tillerson is criticized for not engaging enough with his department’s experienced diplomats, engaging with the press as little as possible, and not objecting strongly enough to Trump’s proposed slashing of the State Department and USAID budgets.
And as for an overall defense strategy, it’s not yet clear that there is one. The Tomahawk strike in Syria seems to be a one-off, to signal Russia that it better rein its client state into line. The massive bomb dropped in Afghanistan seems to be just one more salvo in a never-ending war with no end. And Mattis said they are “fleshing out” an ISIS strategy, but early reports are that it’s much like the Obama administration’s longterm plan: manage the chaos with the minimum of U.S. troops, but don’t expect to intervene too heavily or change much.
Still foreign policy watchers say the direction they are going is largely positive, with the “axis” drawing praise from moderate national security watchers as well as the more conservative ranks.
“After more than two months of relative chaos and uncertainty surrounding U.S. foreign policy…when a lot of people have been questioning the administration’s basic competence, this looked like governing at its finest by a group of highly experienced professionals,” said former Bush official John Hannah, now at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He said the personalities involved “start from the basic premise that U.S. leadership, realistically applied, remains an essential bulwark for maintaining a minimally acceptable degree of international order and security.”
“All three understand very well civilian control of the military, among other core principles of our democracy, and all three are very serious men with their egos in check and no fascination with the maximization of personal power,” said Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution.
Some Republicans are still waiting to see what happens next before applying for jobs, stung by Trump’s tweet storms, the most recent seeming to goad North Korea into direct conflict.
McMaster, Haley, Pompeo, and the “Axis” are still in reactive mode when it comes to the president’s tweets, which often complicate their development of policy, such as Trump’s taunting tweets that “North Korea is looking for trouble.”
Their staff deeply wish they would have a heart-to-heart with POTUS and at least coordinate the messages.
“Even if you have adult supervision above you at the cabinet secretary level, is that enough? To work really hard on something, and then have the president roll in with a tweet, it doesn’t matter how much Mattis protects you, because the tweet just undercut your negotiations,” said Mieke Eoyang, a vice president at the Democratic think tank Third Way, of conversations she has had with would-be Trump staffers. “I have a lot of Republican friends really wrestling with this.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... dults.html
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