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Steve Bannon on Politics as War The Trump adviser talks about the winning campaign and says the political attacks against him and Breitbart News are ‘just nonsense.’ By Kimberley A. Strassel

It’s hard to think of Steve Bannon as a low-profile guy. He has garnered about as many headlines over the past week as Donald Trump—no small feat. He is the executive chairman of the hard-right Breitbart News, among the most aggressive voices online, its website an attack machine against Democrats and “establishment” conservatives. President-elect Trump chose Mr. Bannon this week as his chief strategist and senior counselor, a slot usually filed by someone eager to play a presidential surrogate on TV.

Yet Mr. Bannon—who joined the Trump campaign in mid-August to propel its thunderbolt victory—professes no interest in being the story. “It’s not important to be known,” he says in a telephone interview Thursday night, among his first public comments since the election. “It was Lao Tzu who said that with the best leaders, when the work is accomplished, the people will say ‘We have done this ourselves.’ That’s how I’ve led.”

Nor does he profess to care that Democrats and the media are portraying him as a “cloven-hoofed devil,” as he puts it. “I pride myself in doing things that matter. What mattered in the campaign was winning. We did. What matters now is pulling together the single best team we can to implement President-elect Trump’s vision.

He continues: “How can you take anything seriously from a media apparatus—paid the amount of money you people are paid—that systematically missed something that was so obvious, that missed Brexit, that missed the Trump revolution? You’d have thought they’d have learned their lesson on November 8.”

Slight pause. “They clearly haven’t.”

Here are a few things you’ve likely read about Steve Bannon this week: He’s a white supremacist, a bigot and anti-Semite. He’s a self-described Leninist who wants to “destroy the state.” He’s associated with the “alt-right,” a movement that, according to the New York Times, delights in “harassing Jews, Muslims and other vulnerable groups by spewing shocking insults on social media.”

You’ll have seen some of Breitbart’s more offensive headlines, which refer to “renegade” Jews and the “dangerous faggot tour.” You maybe heard that Breitbart is gearing up to be a Pravda-like state organ for the Trump administration.

Mr. Bannon is an aggressive political scrapper, unabashed in his views, but he says those views bear no relation to the media’s description. Over 70 minutes, he describes himself as a “conservative,” a “populist” and an “economic nationalist.” He’s a talker, but unexcitable, speaking in measured tones. A former naval officer, he thinks in military terms and likes to quote philosophers and generals. He’s contemptuous of the media, proud of Breitbart, protective of the “deplorables,” and—at least at the moment—eager to work with everyone from soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

At first Mr. Bannon insists that he has no interest in “wasting time” addressing the accusations against him. Yet he’s soon ticking off the reasons they are “just nonsense.”

Anti-Semitic? “Breitbart is the most pro-Israel site in the United States of America. I have Breitbart Jerusalem, which I have Aaron Klein run with about 10 reporters there. We’ve been leaders in stopping this BDS movement”—meaning boycott, divestment and sanctions—“in the United States; we’re a leader in the reporting of young Jewish students being harassed on American campuses; we’ve been a leader on reporting on the terrible plight of the Jews in Europe.” He adds that given his many Jewish partners and writers, “guys like Joel Pollak, these claims of anti-Semitism just aren’t serious. It’s a joke.”

He blames the attacks on a lazy media, noting for instance that the “renegade Jew” line wasn’t Breitbart’s. Conservative activist David Horowitz (also Jewish) has taken responsibility for writing the headline himself, in a piece about Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol.

The Lenin anecdote came from an article in the Daily Beast by a writer who claimed to have spoken with Mr. Bannon in 2013: “So a guy I’ve never heard of in my life claims he met me at a party, and then claims I said something about Lenin, and this is taken as gospel truth, with nobody checking it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Emerging Trump Cabinet The first three picks go to loyalists amid signs of political outreach.

Donald Trump’s transition seems to be emerging from its early turmoil, and on Friday he filled three important jobs with campaign loyalists. More encouraging is that he appears to be looking for figures of stature outside his inner circle.

The President-elect has a penchant for rewarding political loyalty, and that has paid off for Jeff Sessions as Mr. Trump’s choice for Attorney General. The Alabama Republican was the first sitting Senator to endorse Mr. Trump, and he and aide Stephen Miller refined the candidate’s populist message and defended him through the squalls.

If there’s any doubt that Mr. Trump will follow through on his immigration promises, the choice of Mr. Sessions puts that to rest. He opposes illegal and most legal immigration, including H-1B visas for high-skilled professionals. He’ll oversee the civil-rights division and immigration courts, and let’s hope Mr. Sessions’s governance will be more tolerant than his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Then again, Mr. Sessions is an accomplished lawyer who has served as a U.S. Attorney and state AG. His opposition to President Obama’s executive immigration orders were grounded in his separation-of-powers constitutionalism more than mere politics. He has also joined with Democrats in pursuing criminal-justice reform.

Progressives are nonetheless already smearing Mr. Sessions as a racist, but that’s what they say about every Southern Republican. In 1986 a Joe Biden-Ted Kennedy special derailed the young lawyer from Mobile for a federal judgeship with innuendo and hearsay. Modern liberals may be surprised to learn that Mr. Sessions helped to desegregate Alabama public schools as U.S. Attorney, and he won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial. The 1981 case broke the Klan in the heart of dixie.

CAROLYN GLICK: THE ELLISON CHALLENGE

The Democratic Party’s move toward antisemitism, a move made apparent through Ellison’s rise, is one movement the Jews mustn’t lead. at a crossroads today. And so do the Jewish Democrats.
Out of power in the White House and both houses of Congress, the Democrats must decide what sort of party they will be in the post-Obama world.
They have two basic options.They can move to the Center and try to rebuild their blue collar voter base that President-elect Donald Trump captivated with his populist message. To do so they will need to loosen the reins of political correctness and weaken their racialism, their radical environmentalism and their support for open borders.

This is the sort of moderate posture that Bill Clinton led with. It is the sort of posture that Clinton tried but failed to convince his wife to adopt in this year’s campaign.

The second option is to go still further along the leftist trajectory that President Barack Obama set the party off on eight years ago. This is the favored option of the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. Sanders’s supporters refer to this option as the populist course.

It is being played out today on the ground by the anti- Trump protesters who refuse to come to terms with the Trump victory and insistently defame Trump as a Nazi or Hitler and his advisers as Goebbels.

For the Democrats, such a populist course will require them to become more racialist, more authoritarian in their political correctness, angrier and more doctrinaire.It will also require them to become an antisemitic party.

Antisemitism, like hatred of police and Christians, is a necessary component of Democratic populism.

This is true first and foremost because they will need scapegoats to blame for all the bad things you can’t solve by demonizing and silencing your political opponents.

Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, along with evangelical Christians and cops are the only groups that you are allowed to hate, discriminate against and scapegoat in the authoritarian PC universe.

Carpe Diem, Mr. Trump Forgive, but do not forget, and be the strong horse. By Victor Davis Hanson

While we speak, a jealous age will have fled.
Seize the day! Trust as little as you can in tomorrow.

The Latin poet Horace’s advice of carpe diem— to seize the day and not worry about tomorrow — should be Trump’s transitional guide.

The attacks on Trump won’t even wait until he takes office; they begin now, well apart from rioting in the streets. And they will continue to be of several types.

Of the personal sort, expect more “investigative” reporting and “speaking truth to power” op-eds about his tax returns, his supposed theft of the election, his purported instigation of turbulence and mayhem, his locker-room talks about women, his business conflicts of interests in office, Trump University, and so on — perhaps written from the high moral ground by the WikiLeaks journalists of the Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, Glenn Thrush, Wolf Blitzer, or Donna Brazile sort.

The nexus of attack will not be a dramatic scandalous revelation — it will be intended to induce bleeding from a thousand tiny nicks and cuts, all designed to reduce his moral authority and thus his ability to ratchet back the progressive decade.

Another trope, as we are now witnessing, will be of the hysterical policy brand: Trump will cook the planet, put y’all back in chains, conduct war on women, traumatize students, destroy dreamers — all the boilerplate extremism designed to put Trump on the defensive so that he will settle for half an agenda and “reach out” to cement his respectability as a “listener” before the court of D.C. fixtures, the campuses, the foundations, the think tanks, the media, the social circles of Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

The Siren strategy of the Left will also be to point out that his future is already destabilizing America — Trump must therefore reach out right now to the “disaffected” in the streets who are “hurting.” Thereby, he will “heal” the nation, if only he backs off from “right-wing” and “extremist” ideas of selling coal overseas or building a wall and taxing billions of dollars in remittance from illegal aliens to pay for it.

In extremis, the Left will call on its Never Trump counterparts of like class to convince Trump to play by the accustomed Washington rules of decorum and judicious discourse. In carrot-and-stick fashion, they might even begin to talk of Trump’s “surprising flexibility” or his “unexpected reasonableness” in hopes of watering down his agenda and leaving him addicted to more backhanded praises from the cultural elite.

Also expect to hear in the next 90 days that the idea of executive orders (of the Obama type) are in retrospect dangerous to the republic and destabilizing. Filibusters will again become essential, and as hallowed a Senate tradition as Harry Reid’s nuclear option will now be denounced as disruptive and nihilistic.

We will hear that the Supreme Court, after some rethinking, actually works just fine with eight justices for a while. Court nominations will be smeared as extremists and nuts. Frequent Trump press conferences with plenty of back and forth will be demanded as essential to the republic, as will be interviews with opposition networks such as MSNBC or CNN.

Reckless debt limits cannot be raised (as Obama pressured the Congress to do in 2011). There should be no New York Trump cronies in the Oval Office (in the manner of a Valerie Jarrett). If need be, Trump will be trashed as a golf-course junkie, decked out in bright-colored leisure clothes befitting his plutocratic and detached status.

Leftist Hysteria & Hate Crime Hoaxes Anti-Trump agitators engage in campaign of violence and fabrication while media lends helping hand. Ari Lieberman

The 2016 elections are finally over and America has chosen its next leader but the stench of hate emanating from the radical Left still lingers. A lethal mix of professional agitators, anarchists, illegal aliens and basement-dwelling social justice warriors, has taken to the streets to voice protest over the results. In actuality, they are protesting against the democratic process itself.

Some of the anti-Trump manifestations have become violent. In Redwood City, California a high school student was physically assaulted after she voiced support for Trump on social media. Her attacker, a fellow student, accused her of “hating Mexicans” and without provocation proceeded to punch, kick and throw her to the ground. The school said that it would discipline the perpetrator but failed to elaborate further.

In Chicago, a group of five thugs – three men and two women – brutally savaged 49-year old David Wilcox while screaming “You voted Trump” and “Don’t vote Trump.” One of the gang riled the others by taunting, “Yeah, it’s one of them white boy Trump guys.” Several days passed before the mainstream media gave the incident any attention while the website Snopes initially issued a sanitized account of what occurred, downplaying or burying outright, other aggravating factors. The New York Times, the paper that recently apologized to its subscribers for its slanted coverage of the election, dedicated a grand total of five short paragraphs to the story.

The attack on Wilcox commenced following a minor traffic accident. Another vehicle had sideswiped his car. Wilcox’s sole offense was to ask the other motorist is she had insurance. That was enough to trigger the unprovoked violent assault. He was thrown to the ground and repeatedly punched and kicked and then robbed of his personal belongings. Ultimately, one of the attackers managed to steal Wilcox’s car while Wilcox desperately clung to the side of the vehicle (and nearly died doing so). Chicago police said they were “investigating.”

In Sweden, a chef was set upon by a group of Muslim men because they said he looked like Trump. Two men grabbed Anders Vendel from behind while a third proceeded to pummel him. He eventually fell to the ground where the beating continued with a flurry of kicks and punches. Vendel sustained a fractured thumb, broken nose as well as other facial injuries.

The Left’s Orwellian Tactics Yearnings for a thugocracy. Michael Cutler

Since the election of Donald Trump to be America’s next President, large groups of protestors and rioters have fanned out around the United States, smashing windows, damaging property and physically attacking other people to express their anger of Trump’s victory.

Their conduct in the aftermath of the election of a president is unprecedented but, given the riots launched by “Black Lives Matter” not a huge surprise.

The central theme of the anti-Trump demonstrators is to equate his calls for border security and effective immigration law enforcement with racism and bigotry.

Undoubtedly some of the demonstrators, particularly the non-violent demonstrators, are truly concerned about racism. However, they are grossly misinformed and are tragically being exploited and manipulated by the globalists and immigration anarchists, having been convinced by the decades of lies told about immigration by our politicians and pundits.

Our immigration laws as we will see, have absolutely nothing to do with xenophobia or racism.

During the first Republican presidential debate Fox News correspondent Bret Baier opened the debate by asking all of the Republican candidates on stage to raise their hand if they would not support any Republican candidate who would win the primaries and possibly run as a third party candidate.

Trump was the only candidate on stage to raise his hand. Trump’s reaction was reported on by news media across the country, typical of those reports was “Trump tells Republicans in 2016 debate he may not support GOP nominee.”

None of the reporters thought, however, to ask the Democratic candidates if they would support the Constitution of the United States if a Republican won the general election. Perhaps those reporters should have.

Steve Bannon and Keith Ellison: Do the Democrats Really Care About Anti-Semitism? The record is clear. Robert Spencer

When is anti-Semitism not anti-Semitism? When it comes from the Left, of course.

President-elect Trump has enraged the establishment media by choosing Steven K. Bannon as his chief strategist, because Bannon, they claim on the flimsiest of evidence, is a white supremacist and an anti-Semite. Meanwhile, that same media is hailing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) for announcing his candidacy for Chairman of the Democratic National Committee – despite Ellison’s very real links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two groups that are outdone by no one in anti-Semitism.

“A chorus of critics took to Twitter,” said the New York Times, “to lament what they said was a frightening normalization of the fringe views that Mr. Bannon promoted as the chairman of Breitbart News. The site has for years given voice to anti-Semitic, racist and white nationalist ideology.”

The evidence? Slim to none. As David Horowitz pointed out Monday, the source for the claim that Bannon is anti-Semitic is “a one sentence claim from an angry ex-wife in divorce court no less, that Bannon didn’t want their kids to go to school with Jews.” Horowitz noted in response that Bannon had wanted to produce a Horowitz biopic: “I find that particularly amusing since Bannon wanted to make a film to celebrate this Jew’s life.”

Horowitz also noted that CNN hit Bannon over “a headline at Breitbart.com calling Bill Kristol a ‘renegade Jew.’” Surely that proves Bannon’s anti-Semitism, right? Wrong. Said Horowitz: “In fact, neither Breitbart nor Bannon is responsible for that statement. A Jew is. I wrote the article, which was neither requested nor commissioned by Breitbart. And I wrote the headline: ‘Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,’” because “Kristol and his friends betrayed the Republican Party, betrayed the American people, and betrayed the Jews when he set out to undermine Trump and elect the criminal Hillary Clinton. Obama and Hillary are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that launched the Arab drive to destroy Israel and push its Jews into the sea (that was their slogan).”

Joel B. Pollak, senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News and an Orthodox Jew, declared: “I have worked with Stephen K. Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s new chief strategist and senior counselor, for nearly six years at Breitbart News. I can say, without hesitation, that Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel, as well as being a passionate American patriot and a great leader.”

Stephen K. Bannon: Friend of the Jewish People, Defender of Israel:Joel B.Pollak

I have worked with Stephen K. Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s new chief strategist and senior counselor, for nearly six years at Breitbart News. I can say, without hesitation, that Steve is a friend of the Jewish people and a defender of Israel, as well as being a passionate American patriot and a great leader.

A word or two about my credentials: I am an Orthodox Jew, and I hold a Master of Arts degree in Jewish Studies. My thesis at the Isaac and Jesse Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town dealt with the troubled status of Jews in an increasingly anti-Israel, and antisemitic, post-apartheid South Africa. I believe myself to be a qualified judge of what is, and is not, antisemitic.

It defies logic that a man who was a close friend, confidant, and adviser to the late Andrew Breitbart — a proud Jew — could have any negative feelings towards Jews. As I can testify from years of work together with Steve in close quarters, the opposite is the case: Steve is outraged by antisemitism. If anything, he is overly sensitive about it, and often takes offense on Jews’ behalf.

Steve cares deeply about the fate of Jewish communities in America and throughout the world, a fact that is reflected in Breitbart News’ daily coverage. It was in that spirit that Steve joined Breitbart News CEO Larry Solov (also Jewish) in launching Breitbart Jerusalem last year, fulfilling Andrew’s dream of opening a bureau in Israel specifically to cover the region from an unabashedly Zionist perspective.

Trump’s Dueling White House Heads Priebus and Bannon will be ‘equal partners.’ This will be interesting.

Donald Trump’s success as President will depend on whether he can merge his populist instincts with the reform agenda of Republicans in Congress to form a united and effective government. His choices for his most senior White House aides suggest those two tendencies will compete in his Administration the way they did during the campaign.

Mr. Trump offered something for both camps Sunday with his announcement that Reince Priebus will be his chief of staff while Stephen Bannon will be chief strategist and senior counselor. Mr. Priebus is the head of the Republican National Committee who stuck with Mr. Trump despite the many valleys of the campaign and provided the get-out-the-vote operation that Mr. Trump lacked. Mr. Bannon is a former Goldman Sachs banker, Naval officer and Breitbart News executive who joined the campaign with Kellyanne Conway in August amid one of those valleys.
It’s hard to know whether this is will be a sublime union of yin and yang or “Survivor: Trump White House.” Typically the chief of staff runs the White House and is the President’s most trusted adviser. But it’s notable that the announcement from the Trump transition established no clear hierarchy between the two men. The transition statement said that “Bannon and Priebus will continue the effective leadership team they formed during the campaign, working as equal partners to transform the federal government, making it much more efficient, effective and productive.”

Equal partners? Rarely does any organization run well if there are dueling heads, and one reason the Obama Presidency suffered is that his early chiefs of staff were undermined by the competing influence of White House aide and Obama family friend Valerie Jarrett.

Mr. Trump has sometimes set up competing forces within the Trump Organization, as he did with his Atlantic City casinos. This arrangement can succeed if Messrs. Priebus and Bannon divide responsibilities cooperatively, but it will lead to a mess of leaking dysfunction if they divide into competing factions. Someone will have to be the final word on who gets to see the President and which issues require a presidential decision.

The two men certainly come with different instincts and constituencies. Mr. Priebus is an establishment operative who built the Wisconsin GOP into one of the country’s most effective state parties. He has close ties to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republicans across the country. He brings knowledge about how Washington works that is essential if Mr. Trump is going to move fast to take advantage of whatever honeymoon he will get.

DNC staff: Arrogance cost Hillary Clinton the election vs. Donald Trump US News DavidCatanese

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, held a conference call with devastated staffers that put the rosiest possible frame on a calamitous picture.

The message to the dozens of mostly young, sleep-deprived and shell-shocked aides: We did everything we could have. We wouldn’t have changed a thing. You should still be proud.

Inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which sits half a mile south of the U.S. Capitol, eyes rolled and heads shook in frustration and disbelief.

Clinton’s loss at the hands of Donald Trump amounted to the most surprising outcome in the history of modern electoral politics. Of course things could’ve been done differently. And ignoring that fact wasn’t going to make the searing defeat any easier.

“We are pissed at them and state parties are pissed at them because they lost due to arrogance,” a top DNC staffer tells U.S. News, sharing the candid sentiment suffusing the high levels of the committee in exchange for anonymity.

It’s no surprise that the hierarchy of the Clinton campaign leadership was insular and self-assured. But DNC staffers say the team’s presumptuous, know-it-all attitude caused it to ignore early warning signs of electoral trouble inside the states, and demoralized DNC staff who felt largely marginalized or altogether neglected for most of the campaign.

There is always some level of tension between the sprawling bureaucracy of the party committee and the nominee’s campaign apparatus. But in the wake of Clinton’s loss, when intraparty finger-pointing is inevitable, some DNC staffers describe the relationship between the two entities as uniquely ineffectual, even after the displacement of unpopular chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. And they attribute it to one fundamental reason: Clinton’s campaign leaders always thought they knew best. The DNC was to do what it was told: Essentially, be seen and not heard.

On election night, DNC number crunchers’ first saw signs of trouble when tallies from Virginia began to roll in. Here was a state the Clinton camp expected to carry by nearly 10 points, and the early returns showed that wasn’t going to happen. She won it by 5, but the slimmer-than-expected margin made DNC staffers nervous, especially because they had warned the Clinton camp not to pull staff and resources from there. The campaign did anyway, slashing its advertising investment in August. Sure, they survived inside the commonwealth, but inside the DNC, the late call of Virginia for Clinton was a distressing warning of things to come.

If their projected margin in Virginia was cut in half, where else was their forecast wrong?

Florida was always expected to be a slog. But a shiver went down the DNC’s collective spine when a call came in from Scott Arceneaux, executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, saying, “We’ve got a problem.”