Audio: “Alt-Right” Steve Bannon, Who Said “Let them call you racist… Wear it as a badge of honor,” Endorses Right-Wing Radio Host for Trump 2020 Virginia Campaign Chair

Just a quick review of who former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is and why his endorsement of right-wing radio host John Fredericks for 2020 Virginia Trump for President chair (see audio, below) is so damning. Check out some of the things Bannon’s said and done over the years. Also note that Fredericks was co-chair, then chair, of Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia – which Trump lost by 5 points, by the way.

• “They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England. That drives the left insane and that’s why they hate these women.” Source
• “Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon on Saturday said that being labeled a racist should be a point of pride. Speaking at the annual meeting of the French far-right National Front party conference, Bannon told the crowd those who are called ‘racists,’ ‘misogynists,’ ‘homophobes,’ and ‘xenophobes’ by their critics are only given such labels because they’ve left their opponents stumped with provocative questions. ‘You argue for your freedom and they call you a xenophobe. You argue for your country and they call you a racist,’ Bannon said. ‘Let them call you racist… Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day we get stronger, they get weaker'” Source
• “Why far-right nationalists like Steve Bannon have embraced a Russian ideologue” Source
• “’We’re the platform for the alt-right,’ Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July. Though disavowed by every other major conservative news outlet, the alt-right has been Bannon’s target audience ever since he took over Breitbart News from its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, four years ago. Under Bannon’s leadership, the site has plunged into the fever swamps of conservatism, cheering white nationalist groups as an ‘eclectic mix of renegades,’ accusing President Barack Obama of importing ‘more hating Muslims,’ and waging an incessant war against the purveyors of ‘political correctness.’” Source
• “Bannon’s views often echo those of his devoted followers. He describes Islam as ‘a political ideology’ and Sharia law as ‘like Nazism, fascism, and communism.’ On his Sirius XM radio show, he heaped praise on Pamela Geller, whose American Freedom Defense Initiative has been labeled an anti-Muslim hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bannon called her ‘one of the leading experts in the country, if not the world,’ on Islam. And he basically endorsed House Speaker Paul Ryan’s primary challenger, businessman Paul Nehlen, who floated the idea of deporting all Muslims from the United States.”  Source
• “Bannon has stoked racist themes himself, notably in a lengthy July post accusing the ‘Left’ of a ‘plot to take down America’ by fixating on police shootings of black citizens. He argued that the five police officers slain in Dallas were murdered ‘by a #BlackLivesMatter-type activist-turned-sniper.’ And he accused the mainstream media of an Orwellian ‘bait-and-switch as reporters and their Democratic allies and mentors seek to twist the subject from topics they don’t like to discuss—murderers with evil motives—to topics they do like to discuss, such as gun control.’ Bannon added, ‘[H]ere’s a thought: What if the people getting shot by the cops did things to deserve it? There are, after all, in this world, some people who are naturally aggressive and violent.’” Source
• “In 2017, he supported Roy Moore, a controversial Republican candidate who ran for the U.S. Senate in Alabama.  Moore is known for putting a monument to the Ten Commandments in the state judicial building in Montgomery and for allegedly sexually assaulting a number of women and girls.”  Source

It goes on and on, but you get the idea.

Anyway, here’s what Bannon had to say this morning about John Fredericks:

“You could not pick a better a better person than John Fredericks…If we’re going to have a shot to win, we have to have people like you, John, in leadership positions…I put Virginia in the category of a very tough, you know, it’s a push…We need some tough people to do it so it’s you’ve always got my support endorsement…You have people on cable TV every day saying President Trump is a white supremacist president, Trump is a white nationalist; this is only going to get nastier.”