Stephen Bannon And Breitbart News
Spencer
said Breitbart News “has elective affinities with the Alt Right, and the Alt Right has clearly influenced Breitbart” and described the site as a “gateway” to that movement’s “ideas and writers.” He
described Bannon’s new role in the Trump campaign as “a good thing” for white nationalists.
Bannon
told Mother Jones that Breitbart News is “the platform for the alt-right.”
Bannon took over as chairman of Breitbart News after the death of founder Andrew Breitbart. The site has taken a rabidly anti-immigrant tone, often
hyping “reports about crime involving immigrants, with headlines that sound like they came from tabloids” and attacking Republicans who favor immigration reform. Vox
notes that “Breitbart essentially functioned as an anti-immigration pressure group, signaling to Republican leaders that any deviation on immigration would earn them the wrath of the base.”
The site has also pushed a white nationalist viewpoint in articles on race and religion. It
described the shooting of a white reporter and her white cameraman as a “race murder” and published an
article titled “Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture.”
Bannon wrote a column on the site
accusing the “left” of engaging in a “plot to take down America” by focusing on police shootings of African-Americans. Breitbart also
attacked Pope Francis for supporting refugee migration by invoking
Camp of the Saints, a book
described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as a novel that “depicts an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees, characterized as horrific and uncivilized ‘monsters’ who will stop at nothing to greedily and violently seize what rightfully belongs to the white man.” SPLC notes that the novel is “a popular book in Alt-Right circles.”