by George Rasley, ConservativeHQ Editor
February 7, 2017
Reprinted with permission from ConservativeHQ.com
“I want you to quote this,” President Trump’s senior White House strategist Steve Bannon told The New York Times. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
Mr. Bannon is right about the establishment media – in ways that range from minor to profound they don’t understand the country, particularly the parts of it that elected Donald Trump President of the United States.
As our friend, Ralph Benko wrote for a recent article in The American Spectator:
Steve Bannon has furnished an impromptu manifesto for the movement that, with the help of Bannon and others, propelled Donald Trump into the presidency. Those who wish for a framework to better understand what a Trump presidency portends — and the nature of the underlying movement — need look no further than Steve Bannon’s remarks to the Human Dignity Institute.
In this proto-Manifesto — all the more authentic for being extemporaneous — Bannon displays breathtaking erudition. And he convincingly lays to rest the unfounded fears that he sympathizes with the “white nationalist” movement:
By the way, even in the tea party, we have a broad movement like this, and we’ve been criticized, and they try to make the tea party as being racist, etc., which it’s not. But there’s always elements who turn up at these things, whether it’s militia guys or whatever. Some that are fringe organizations. My point is that over time it all gets kind of washed out, right? People understand what pulls them together, and the people on the margins I think get marginalized more and more….
I think when you look at any kind of revolution — and this is a revolution — you always have some groups that are disparate. I think that will all burn away over time and you’ll see more of a mainstream center-right populist movement.
This “mainstream center-right populist movement” that Bannon describes and Ralph Benko seems to support is what we called “relevant conservatism” in our column “In Defense of Steve Bannon and Relevant Conservatism.”
Serious journalists, says Benko, are obligated to confront what Steve Bannon told Michael Wolff in an exclusive interview published in the Hollywood Reporter:
“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Steve Bannon told Wolff. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver” — by “we” Bannon means the Trump White House — “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed.”
And Mr. Bannon should have added, what the Republican and DC conservative establishments missed as well.
Steve Bannon is right: “The issue now is about Americans looking to not get *—ed over.”
And so far, President Trump and Steve Bannon are delivering, especially on President Trump’s promise to make America safe again.
All of this has brought on a predictable Alinsky-style attack on Steve Bannon, challenging not only his positions on the issues, but his character and motivations.
Personalize the attack to freeze and delegitimize your target said Saul Alinsky, the Far-Left Chicago agitator and mentor of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and that is the playbook Bannon’s vile critics are following.
President Trump, with Steve Bannon at his side, is building a new movement of people who believe in American sovereignty and American exceptionalism and believe Western culture, the Western Enlightenment and Judeo-Christian values made the great human progress of the modern era possible.
Whatever this new movement is called – relevant conservatism or center-right populism – please sign us up.
[…] their presence, let alone the same room. And God forbid he be allowed the opportunity to share his otherwise non-controversial views and have them be challenged in an intellectual debate. Oh, the […]