Another must read:

Another must read:

In these dark days for Democrats, Bannon has become the blackest hole.

“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they” — I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster — “get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”

“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he tells me. “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” he 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. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

This is definitely the best thing I’ve read this month.

This is definitely the best thing I’ve read this month. Matthew Phelin gives an exhaustive account of the origins of Breitbart, Bannon, the nexus of small time media entrepreneurism, reactionary billionaire funders, the demise of journalism and its new social media environment.

Most of the hysterical reaction pieces you’ve read from the mainstream media about Bannon and his nefarious Alt-Right allies are missing significant amounts of the context that this article tries to provide.

Progressives need to get a bit more level-headed about what’s going on and get up to speed quickly. The Trump victory has demonstrated the power but also the extreme fragility of this tiny band of influencers. 

The Left shouldn’t worry about this movement’s pitiful attempt to seize the pole position from the American avant-garde. The real danger is that, by raising up the alt-right as not only significant, but emblematic of Trump’s odious constituency, mainstream Democrats only help Bannon and Yiannopoulos provide aspiring demagogues with an bigger platform from which to court disaffected middle-class whites on a national scale.

Unable and unwilling to erode Trump’s populist base with meaningful economic reforms, the Democratic Party has resorted to tarring that base as a deplorable, white-nationalist hoard. They hope that the specter of fascism will scare enough decent conservatives away from the party of Trump. But it’s equally possible that this tactic will encourage a redefinition of the still murky alt-right/alt-lite boundary around the broadest possible substrata of the conservative base.

The Clinton team facing up to reality: it was the Bernie Bros!

The Clinton team facing up to reality: it was the Bernie Bros! Sexist, abusive Bernie-loving misogynists made it too hard for their pro-Clinton girlfriends.

“We learned about during the primary, there were a number of these secret Facebook groups of young progressive women who were supporting Hillary, but frankly they didn’t want to deal with the backlash online from some of the Bernie Bros.”

What else could it have been? Maybe Clinton’s strategy was wrong? Surely a Clinton strategist would know.