America First Again 

Trump is a “blunt instrument for us,” confessed Steve Bannon to Ken Stern of Vanity Fair. “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.”[1] Stern noted, “It is likely that Bannon’s political calculus here, if not Trump’s, will be less about winning an election that seems a bit out of hand and more about cementing an American nationalist movement.”[2] As Taibbi remarked, “This seemed to confirm the darkest theory of the Trump administration: a state-smashing revolution disguised as populist political theater.”[3] According to Jeff Giesea, professional troll of the alt-right, explaining why he supported Trump: “Trump’s election will disrupt a corrupt and failing GOP. This will create a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build the future of the Right.”[4]

On assuming office in January 2017, confirming his ideological debt to the tradition of the Old Right, Trump cited the idea of “Peace Through Strength” as central to his overall “America First” foreign policy.[5] It was not Trump who wrote his boring inauguration speech, but Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, who placed emphasis on the original AFC slogan: “America First.” As described by Jeet Heer, writing in the New Republic:

Bannonism is a modernized version of the paleo-conservative politics that Pat Buchanan espoused in the 1980s and 1990s. Rejecting the sunny free-market dogmas of Reaganism, Buchanan argued that the American working class was being eroded by free trade and open immigration, while the nation as a whole was weakened by military overreach that no longer made sense after the demise of Soviet Union. Bannon would revive all of these themes in the Obama era, fusing them with an overarching message of racial grievance. On the website Breitbart and elsewhere, Bannon painted a picture of white working class Americans under siege from a globalist elite, cunning foreigners, and a restless non-white underclass.[6]

Bannon’s strategy had been to exploit 20-years’ worth of resentment cultivated among racist whites against the imagined scourge of “political correctness,” built up by Fox News and Regnery Publishing’s Tea Party agenda against “Big Government.” Ultimately, the self-righteousness of the liberal left has effectively exacerbated the rise of the right by preventing healthy debate and instead creating a quagmire of irreconcilable enmity. The dialectic exploits the New Left’s alignment with a progressive political and economic agenda to advance a set of liberal rights and values that reject traditional morality. Conversely, an opposing conservative base of support has been cultivated by identifying these liberal values as contrary to Christian “family values,” and repudiating government assistance to the poor as “communism,” in favor of neoliberal economics.

In reality, the attack on “political correctness” has been a means to achieve the Koch Brothers’ goal of what Bannon called the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” rooted in James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, which inspired Samuel T. Francis’ notion of “Middle American Radicals.” This was despite the fact that Trump had earlier Tweeted, “I wish good luck to all of the Republican candidates that traveled to California to beg for money etc. from the Koch Brothers. Puppets?”[7] On November 12, 2016, the day following Trump’s successful election to the office of President, Fox News published an opinion piece titled, “How the Tea Party helped Trump win the election,” by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, who in 2010 was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential Leaders. The article notes that Trump won because he ran on “overwhelmingly popular and commonsense issues,” including government fiscal responsibility and tightening immigration laws. She remarked, “If that agenda sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same agenda the Tea Party movement broadly, and Tea Party Patriots specifically, has helped to advance over the last several years.”[8]

A Pew analysis demonstrated that the Tea Party clearly played a role in rejuvenating the Republican Party in 2010, helping the GOP take control of the House and make gains in the Senate. Tea Party supporters made up 41% of the electorate on November 2, 2011, and 86% of them voted for Republican House candidates, according to exit polls.[9] The analysis showed that white evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly supported the Tea Party.[10] Amy Sullivan, a progressive evangelical, writing in the New York Times, explains that, “the nationalistic, race-baiting, fear-mongering form of politics enthusiastically practiced by Mr. Trump and Roy Moore in Alabama is central to a new strain of American evangelicalism. This emerging religious worldview—let’s call it ‘Fox evangelicalism’—is preached from the pulpits of conservative media outlets like Fox News.”[11]

Conforming to the Tea Party agenda, according to the Pew study, Republicans are most distinguished by their increasing commitment to minimizing the role of government. The percentage of Republicans asserting government responsibility towards the poor has fallen in recent years to 25-year lows. Democrats, on the other hand, exacerbating the partisan divide, have become more socially liberal and secular, and more positive in their views of immigrants and more supportive of policies aimed at achieving equal opportunity. There also has been a substantial decline in the share of Democrats saying they “have old-fashioned values about family and marriage.” Just 60% of Democrats currently agree, down from 70% in 2007 and 86% in the first political values survey.[12]

The issue that Republicans are most opposed to is immigration, where four-in-ten Democrats think the government does well, compared with 15% of Republicans, the lowest rating among Republicans for the government’s handling of any issue.[13] The same racist paranoia was incited by Regnery Publishing, who published Trump’s New York Times bestseller, Time to Get Tough in 2015, where he made his case to finally secure American borders and fix its immigration overflow, create American jobs by forcing Communist China into truly fair trade, and how to retire US debt without endangering long-established programs—like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

A Fortune investigation published in March 2016 revealed that numerous Trump campaign staffers followed white nationalist accounts. According to several recent studies, including one by Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College, the more resentment a voter bears toward minority groups, especially blacks, immigrants and Muslims, the more likely they are to support Trump. More immediate issues like economic status were far less important factors, according to Klinkner. A national analysis of Trump supporters by The New York Times found that twenty percent disagreed with the Emancipation Proclamation.[14]

Following the 2016 election, Sean McElwee, a policy analyst at the progressive group Demos Action, reported that Donald Trump had received his strongest support among Americans who felt that whites and Christians faced “a great deal” of discrimination. Spencer Greenberg, a mathematician who runs a website for improving decision-making, found that one of the leading predictors of votes for Trump, after party affiliation, was opposition to political correctness.[15] As McElwee remarked, “To paraphrase a popular idiom, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like discrimination.”[16]

Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica, and Cathy Cohen have published the results in The Washington Post of a new survey which focused on the 41 percent of white millennials who voted for Trump, and found that racial resentment was the strongest predictor of “white vulnerability” among them.[17] A paper published in January 2017 by political scientists Brian Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams, and Tatishe Nteta, found that voters’ measures of sexism and racism correlated more closely with support for Trump than economic dissatisfaction, after controlling for factors like partisanship and political ideology.[18] Another study conducted shortly before the election by researchers Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn, and Gregory Major Blascovich, found that when those who strongly identified as white were told that nonwhite groups will outnumber white people in 2042, they became more likely to support Trump.[19] And a study, published in November 2016 by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, found that Trump supporters were much more likely to change their views on housing policy based on race.[20]

The American Independent Party (AIP) of California—the party of George Wallace’s 1968 run for the presidency, which represented an amalgam of the Klan and the John Birch Society—cross-nominated Donald Trump and Mike Pence to be the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the Republican Party. The November ballot listed Trump and Pence, followed by “Republican, American Independent.” It was the first time a presidential candidate was listed on the California ballot as the choice of two parties in at least 80 years. The AIP’s platform includes sharply conservative positions on abortion, as well as opposition to same-sex marriage and illegal immigration. “We are the demographic that Trump is appealing to,” said Markham Robinson, the secretary of the AIP of California. “We are heeding the voice of our voters.” The Trump campaign denies seeking the nomination, but “They appreciate that our brand is going to have some impact,” Robinson said. “It’s going to encourage people to get out there and vote.”[21]

Antiestablishmentarianism

As indicated by Robert P. Jones in The Atlantic, Trump backers represented a radical “anti-establishment” wing of the Republican Party, who resurrected the Southern Strategy, a legacy which the leaders of the Republican Party have spent the last decade trying to bury. Paul Weyrich devoted his entire career to the aim of replacing the liberal establishment with a conservative one. As Weyrich warned back in 1973: “We are different from previous generations of conservatives. We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country.”[22] As he complained to fellow members of the Council for National Policy (CNP), “I have spent thirty years of my life working in Washington, working on the premise that if we simply got our people into leadership that it would make a difference… And yet we are getting the same policies from them that we got from their [Rockefeller] Republican predecessors.”[23] Traitors to Weyrich’s fanatical brand of conservatism included Nixon, Kissinger, Rockefeller and William F. Buckley.[24]

Lee Atwater, who was a partner in Black, Manafort and Stone, explained that he wanted to become a Republican because he was anti-establishment. “For 150 years, the establishment has always been business. [Franklin D.] Roosevelt came in and established another establishment, and it was government. So, for the first time, you have two establishments,” Atwater said. “In 1980 we were able to define the establishment, insofar as it is bad, as government, not big business. Democrats tried [in 1984] and in 1982 to define the establishment as big business and corporations…”[25]

In March 2016, Trump hired Paul Manafort, one of the pioneers of the Southern Strategy. Although many of Trump’s campaign advisors were veterans of Republican campaigning, who had worked in the past for Bob Dole, Richard Helms, but most often George H.W Bush and George W. Bush, many of his early choices did not come from the traditional consultant class in the Republican Party. The New York Times reported that many policy experts were “scratching their heads as they tried to identify his choices.”[26] There were three distinct leadership phases to Trump’s campaign: that of Corey Lewandowski, Paul Manafort campaign, and finally Steve Bannon of Breitbart. Lewandowski, whose motto was “Let Trump be Trump,” came from Americans for Prosperity, founded by the Koch brothers, as did a number of early staffers. The second phase of the Trump campaign shifted from the non-traditional to more established consultants, when he hired Manafort, who has become a focal point of investigations into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. Robert P. Jones wrote in August 2016 in The Atlantic, referring to the period when Manafort managed the campaign:

Trump has developed a reputation for being un-strategic, and it’s certainly true that he tends to be pulled forward by his own off-the-cuff reactions to slights or his late-night Twitter impulses. But, particularly over the past two months, Trump’s campaign seems less like a haphazard effort, and more like a deliberate and conscious attempt to resurrect these discarded GOP tactics, recasting them for the current moment.[27]

Manafort was recommended to Trump by their mutual friend Roger Stone. According to Stone, Trump’s election was “…the manifestation of a dream I’ve had since 1988. I have always thought Donald Trump had the size, and the courage and the balls to become president of the United States.”[28] He adds, “I was like a jockey looking for a horse. You can’t win the race if you don’t have a horse. And he’s a prime piece of political horse flesh in my view.”[29]

According to Mark Ames, the secret to Trump’s campaign strategy was his alliance with Roger Stone, whose specialty is weaponizing anti-establishment politics to serve the campaigns of mainstream Republican politicians.[30] “Trump,” explains Stone, “has now elevated the issues that I believe in. Anti-elitism that was first identified by Richard Nixon, mined by Ronald Reagan, and now Donald Trump.”[31] According to Jane Mayer:

Roger is the ultimate insider, which makes him incredibly good at seeing how he could package someone and sell him as an outsider. There is real upset over jobs, over globalization, over people losing their status and their incomes. There are all kinds of answers to these questions, but the answers that he’s provided for the most part are the answers that billionaires are interested in… There’s no grassroots movement to gut the EPA and give people dirty water and dirty air. The only people who are really caring about that are the polluting industries.[32]

As explained by Jane Mayer, “Roger Stone came to power with Nixon, and Nixon of course had the southern strategy which was all about milking people’s racial resentments, and in the case of Trump, anti-immigrant resentments, working up hate that would turn them against the government, and against the so-called elites who ran government.”[33] Mayer explains Stone is “…very smart about anger. It’s one of the things he understands best. It’s angry, white, working-class voters whose resentments are being milked to push an agenda that’s useful to some of the richest people in the country. These are hardly people who are in tune with the little guy’s interests. But they understand how to manipulate the little guy’s interests.”[34]

“Look, I’m a brand name when it comes to dirty tricks” Stone boasted.[35] In a 2007 Weekly Standard profile written by Matt Labash, Stone was described as a “lord of mischief” and the “boastful black prince of Republican sleaze.”[36] According to Stone, “Those who say I have no soul, who say I have no principles, are losers. Those are bitter losers. Everything I have done, everything I have worked for, is to propel ideas and a political philosophy that I want to see dominant in government.”[37] He also added, “Yeah, I live a pretty Machiavellian life. I’m a skeptic. I tend to believe the worst in people, because I understand human nature. Human nature has never changed. That’s why one of Stone’s Rules is ‘hate is stronger motivator than love.’ That’s because it is.”[38]

Stone was forced to resign from Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign when the National Enquirer revealed he and his wife placed ads seeking swinging partners. Stone then worked for the campaigns of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush. Seeing how the Reform Party run cost George H.W. Bush his second term in 1992, and wanting to ensure that George W. Bush would be elected, Stone engineered the implosion of the Reform Party in 2000 by convincing his friend Donald Trump to run against Pat Buchanan, who was threatening to take votes away from George W. Bush, “only to drop out of the race, and attack Buchanan’s Reform Party as a cesspool full of Hitler lovers and racists.”[39]

In 2000, Stone was instrumental in orchestrating the so-called Brooks Brothers riot outside the Miami recount center, which helped shut down the Florida recount and secure George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore. During George W. Bush’s 2004 run for office, Stone reportedly convinced Al Sharpton to join the presidential race as a pasty to defeat rival Al Gore, and directed Sharpton’s race politics against Howard Dean. Sharpton was also a member of Prince Hall Freemasonry.[40]

In 2007, Stone, who is known for his flamboyant style, had Richard Nixon’s face tattooed on his back. Stone’s office in Florida has been described as a “Hall of Nixonia” with framed pictures, posters and letters associated with Nixon. Exceptions are a poster of a stripper and a photo of him standing by a pool with porn star Nina Hartley, both in bikinis.[41] Stone was also photographed in New York’s 2010 Pride parade, shirtless and with the tongue of a topless woman in his right ear. In a comment that surely also applied to himself, Stone said, “Roy [Cohn] was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate.”[42]

As explained Jeffrey Toobin, “In many respects, Roger Stone created Donald Trump as a political figure. There is no doubt that in tone, in affect, in profile, the Trump candidacy was a pure Roger Stone production.”[43] According to Stone’s protégé Michael Caputo, who became a political adviser to Trump, “I would argue that Roger Stone, after thirty years of working for Donald Trump, is one of his primary influences, perhaps the primary influence.”[44]According to Manafort, “Roger’s relationship with Trump has been so interconnected that it’s hard to define what is Roger and what’s Donald. While it would be clearly a Trump presidency, I think it’s influenced by a Stone philosophy.”[45]

Lee Atwater associate Ed Rollins said “Roger was always a little rat.”[46] Rollins is currently the Co-Chairman of the pro–Donald Trump Great America PAC. It was founded in 2016 by Eric Beach, a Tea Party advocate and political strategist who is a veteran of the presidential campaigns of New Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani and Rand Paul. Rollins was a political commentator for CNN before jumping to Fox in 2011. Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren, lampooned as “White Power Barbie,” joined the organization as a senior adviser in May 2017.[47] Lahren began working in a communications role at an offshoot of Great America PAC, the Great America Alliance, chaired by Gingrich and Giuliani.

Middle American Radicals

As the alt-right’s Jared Taylor remarked in American Renaissance, “[Samuel T.] Francis would be very pleased to see the GOP and conservative establishments mocked and destroyed.”[48] Referring to Trump’s outreach to racists, Taylor said Francis “would have said that Trump is doing exactly what he advised Patrick Buchanan to do.”[49] Buchanan supported the nomination of Donald Trump, who ran on many of the same positions that Buchanan ran on twenty years earlier.[50] According to Greg Mueller, who served Buchanan as communications director on the 1992 and 1996 campaigns and remains a close friend, Buchanan was “was the pioneer of the vision that Trump ran on and won on.”[51]

All the ideas that seemed original to Trump’s campaign, explained Tim Alberta for Politico, could be attributed to Pat Buchanan, “from depicting the political class as bumbling stooges to singling out a rising superpower as an economic menace (though back then it was Japan, not China) to rallying the citizenry to ‘take back’ a country whose destiny they no longer dictated. ‘Pitchfork Pat,’ as he was nicknamed, even deployed a phrase that combined Trump’s two signature slogans: ‘Make America First Again.’”[52] “I was elated, delighted that Trump picked up on the exact issues on which I challenged Bush,” he related to Alberta. “And then he goes and uses my slogan? It just doesn’t get any better than this.” “The ideas made it,” Buchanan told Alberta, letting out a belly laugh. “But I didn’t.”[53]

According to Paul Rosenberg, writing in Salon, “The corporate media haven’t been able to make much sense of Donald Trump. One thing they’ve said is that he’s non-ideological, or at least at odds with ‘true conservatives’.”[54] Talk To Action co-founder Bruce Wilson has pointed to the similarities of Trump’s pronouncements with paleoconservative ideas, particularly as laid out in the 2009 book, The Next Conservatism by Paul Weyrich and William Lind, a copy of which Lind gave to Trump. 

It was William Lind who laid out the source of Trump’s rhetoric when he gave a copy of his and Paul Weyrich’s 2009 book, The Next Conservatism, with extensive discussion of Lind’s “cultural Marxism” and “political correctness” conspiracy theory.[55] According to Moira Weigel, “Throughout an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political correctness, blaming it for an extraordinary range of ills and using the phrase to deflect any and every criticism.”[56] He claimed that Obama and Hillary were willing to let America’s problems fester because of their commitment to political correctness. The implication is that the solutions to country’s ills required pragmatic responses that ran contrary to popular sentiments. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Trump answered, to audience applause. “I’ve been challenged by so many people, I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either.”[57]

Lind and Weyrich’s The Next Conservatism suggests a new mechanism for domestic counterterrorism, by mobilizing the manpower of local anti-government militia groups which “might report to county sheriffs.” Such county alliances have already been initiated under the auspices of a national sheriffs group called the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), and by late 2016, top Trump for President campaign staff and surrogates had established contact with CSPOA leadership. An article by the Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center states that “…the real root of the ‘county supremacy’ movement that has been explicitly embraced by the CSPOA is the Posse Comitatus.”[58]

In the last weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, dozens of top Trump campaign advisers and surrogates appeared as guests on a relatively obscure far-right radio show, the Liberty Roundtable. The show frequently features the co-founder and current leader of CSPOA, Richard Mack, and Liberty Roundtable show host Sam Bushman has himself served on the CSPOA board.[59] Mack is also on the board of Oath Keepers, a far-right patriot organization known for its controversial presence during the Ferguson unrest related to police brutality and racial inequality and for supporting Cliven Bundy in his standoff against the federal government.

According to William Lind, also agreeing with Samuel T. Francis, conservatives have been “spurning their natural constituency—the mostly white working class.”[60] Dr. James Scaminaci, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, claims that Trump’s policy goals are an extension of Lind’s concept of “4th generation warfare” (4GW).[61] As Bruce Wilson explains, Lind and Weyrich’s book “also reads as if it had been specifically commissioned as a strategic template for Trump’s presidential campaign.”[62] As Wilson summarizes:

They decry the deindustrialization of America and oppose globalization and neo-Liberal free trade policies. They regard Wall Street’s financial machinations as parasitic and detrimental to the economic well-being of average Americans. And, they are partial to conspiracy theories in which secret elites, typically Jewish, scheme to rule or conquer the world and enslave humanity.[63]

Lew Rockwell wrote that the Trump “phenomenon” is attributable to what Samuel T. Francis called “Middle American Radicals” (MARs). They are not concerned with conventional conservative views about economics, like regulation and free trade, and cutting back social programs. But are disgruntled about an “establishment,” or what Francis referred to as in “From Household to Nation” for the magazine Chronicles: “the Ruling Class proved unable to uproot the social cultural, and national identities and loyalties of the Middle American proletariat, and Middle Americans found themselves increasingly alienated from the political left and its embrace of anti-national policies, and counter-cultural manners and morals.”[64]

In January 2016, Rush Limbaugh told his radio listeners, who average around 13 million people a week, that Trump’s supporters do not perceive Trump as part of the establishment but are driven by anger at what he called “Republican establishment central” in Washington. Citing a Michael Brendan Dougherty’s influential article How an obscure advisor to Pat Buchanan predicted the wild Trump campaign in 1996, Limbaugh said, “I want you to really listen to this,” and read from Francis’ Chronicles article. “What’s interesting,” Limbaugh said, “is how right on it is in foretelling Trump.” However, Limbaugh noted, Francis “later in life suffered the—acquired the—reputation of being a white supremacist,” a reputation Limbaugh believed wasn’t deserved.[65] Limbaugh quoted Francis, who reflected language normally expected from the likes of Alex Jones:

[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our people, and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty, a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives.[66]

Keegan Hankes of the Southern Poverty Law Center followed the aftermath of Limbaugh’s comments. The passage, referred to by Limbaugh, followed an analysis by Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week that argued that Francis had accurately described Trump’s rise in popularity. A day later, the National Review condemned Trump, which was celebrated by the extremist right, who viewed it as confirmation that Trump was a candidate who opposed to the conventional conservative establishment. Another several days later, the National Review article appeared, Hannibal Bateman, writing in Richard B. Spencer’s Radix Journal, declared that, “The dispossession of the Beltway Right is a moment that should be celebrated and seized… The controlled grammatical tyranny they have exercised over the thought of the Right is nearing its end. Instead of writing their obituaries with a period, let’s do it with an exclamation mark!” Brad Griffin, a leader in the League of the South and the voice behind the white supremacist blog Occidental Dissent, wrote that same day, “Sam Francis was right: we need to stop pretending we are ‘true conservatives’ or that we have anything in common with these bow-tied, low-T clowns. We don’t support the ‘conservative agenda’ as articulated by the National Review. We are populists and nationalists, which means we are ‘tethered’ to the well-being of our own people and protecting and advancing their interests, not some abstract ideology.” “Lord Tinsdale,” a prolific poster at Stormfront, criticized Limbaugh for failing to acknowledge the central role of race in Francis’s argument. “Now if only El Rushbo will also acknowledge, that what’s at the heart of this Nationalist & Populist movement is Racialism,” he wrote. “Come on Limbaugh. Grow a real set of nuts would ya [sic].”[67]

Nation-State Populism

The Trump platform was well settled on long before Steve Bannon joined the campaign,” Roger Stone told Fox host Tucker Carlson. “And it appears that [White House policy adviser] Stephen Miller helped the president articulate it. But the agenda is Trump, the drive to win is Trump. The populist campaign is all Donald Trump. Just taking the title of chief strategist is a misnomer, at best,” said Stone.[68] When Manafort stepped down as Trump’s campaign manager in August of 2016, in response to press investigations into his ties not only to Dmytro Firtash, but to Ukraine’s previous pro-Russian Yanukovych government, Steve Bannon was appointed to succeed as campaign manager, along with fellow CNP member, Kellyanne Conway. Bannon’s appointment represented the third and final phase of the Trump campaign.[69] Bannon’s approach to political reporting, which CBS News described as “happy to embrace fringe beliefs,” contrasted with Manafort’s previous efforts to work with established consultants.[70]

Bannon’s strategy was an alternative to the compromise proposed by the Republican Party in 2012, following Obama defeated Mitt Romney to become President for a second term. Reince Priebus, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, commissioned an analysis known in Washington as the “autopsy,” which urged Republicans to appeal to the growing Latino electorate by championing comprehensive immigration reform. Bannon thoroughly disagreed with the assessment. Bannon had become interested in an article written by Sean Trende, the senior elections analyst for the website RealClearPolitics, titled “The Case of the Missing White Voters.”[71] Trende determined that Obama’s victory was less a consequence of the fact that 6.6 million white voters who participated in the 2008 election didn’t vote in 2012, because while they did not approve of Obama, they but were alienated by Romney’s perceived elitism.

In January 2013, Bannon invited then Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trump’s eventual pick for Attorney General, and his top aide, paleoconservative Stephen Miller, to the “Breitbart Embassy” in Washington DC to discuss the matter. Sessions is known to have said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”[72] Sessions was ranked by National Journal in 2007 as the fifth-most conservative U.S. Senator, siding strongly with the Republican Party on political issues. As a senator, he is noted for his opposition to illegal immigration and advocacy of reducing legal immigration. He supported the major legislative efforts of the George W. Bush administration, including the 2001 and 2003 tax cut packages, the Iraq War, and a proposed national amendment to ban same-sex marriage. He opposed the establishment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the 2009 stimulus bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Miller grew up in a liberal-leaning Jewish family, and received his bachelor’s degree in 2007 from Duke University, and served as president of the Duke chapter of David Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom and wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper. While at Duke, Miller and the Duke Conservative Union helped co-member Richard B. Spencer, with fundraising and promotion for an immigration policy debate in March 2007 between the open-borders activist and University of Oregon professor Peter Laufer and journalist Peter Brimelow, the founder of VDARE, and fellow member of the H.L. Mencken Club with William Regnery and Jared Taylor.[73]

Miller and Sessions developed what Miller describes as “nation-state populism” as a response to globalization and immigration that would strongly influence Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. “You could not get where we are today with this movement if it didn’t have a center of gravity that was intellectually coherent,” said Steve Bannon. “And I think a ton of that was done by Senator Sessions’ staff, and Stephen Miller was at the cutting edge of that.”[74] According to Tucker Carlson, “Miller is providing the intellectual architecture for an insurgency against the Republican Party.” Carlson was converted to Miller and Sessions’ ideology, which he described as “nationalist.” When asked if he too identifies as a nationalist, Carlson said, “of course.”[75] Carlson’s the Daily Caller ran stories on immigration and trade that presented Sessions and his agenda in a positive light.

Carlson founded the Daily Caller in 2010 with Neil Patel, former adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney and a member of the CNP. Prior to that, Patel served as deputy of Scooter Libby. In October 2005, Libby from his positions in the Bush administration after he was indicted on five counts by a federal grand jury concerning the investigation of the leak of the covert identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson. He was subsequently convicted of four counts, making him the highest-ranking White House official convicted in a government scandal since John Poindexter, the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra affair. President Donald Trump fully pardoned Libby on April 13, 2018.

Carlson initially floated the idea for The Daily Caller in 2009 at CPAC. He and Patel then officially announced its creation later that year at a Heritage Foundation gathering. The Daily Caller News Foundation receives funding from the Koch brothers as well as the Bradley Foundation.[76] A Southern Poverty Law Center report claimed in 2017 that “The Daily Caller Has A White Nationalist Problem.” The report stated that “the Daily Caller has not only published the work of white nationalists, but some of its writers have routinely whitewashed the Alt-Right, while one editor there is an associate of key Alt-Right figures. Two Daily Caller contributors, including a senior investigative reporter, were recently announced as speakers at the upcoming white nationalist H.L. Mencken Club conference organized by Paul Gottfried, a godfather of the Alt-Right.”[77]

In November 2011, Carlson hosted a book party in his Northwest Washington home to celebrate the launch of Jack Abramoff’s Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist. Carlson opened the night with a personal tribute to what Abramoff had endured, having spent three and a half years in a Maryland prison on charges of mail fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion. “I raise a glass to Jack Abramoff and I’m proud to do so,” Carlson said.[78]

Sessions shared Bannon’s belief that the Republican Party needed to emphasize immigration reduction, border security and the preservation of working-class jobs through trade policy rather than courting Latino voters with a bill he regarded as “amnesty.” As Sessions would write in a memorandum to his Republican colleagues six months later, “This humble and honest populism—in contrast to the administration’s cheap demagoguery—would open the ears of millions who have turned away from our party.”[79] Bannon suggested to Sessions that he run for President, as an anti-candidate to seize the nomination of the Republican Party, where he could make immigration the No. 2 priority after trade. According to Bannon, “The working class, and in particular the lower middle class, understands something that’s so obvious — which is that they’ve basically underwritten the rise of China.”[80] However, when Sessions resisted, “It was pretty obvious by the end of the night,” Bannon recalled, “that another candidate would have to do it.”[81]

Two months later, on March 15, 2013, Bannon attended the CPAC in Washington where he heard Trump speak about China’s economic superiority, 11 million “illegals” and the erosion of America’s manufacturing sector. By 2014, Miller was expressing the hope that Trump would run for president. By the time Trump announced his candidacy, in June 2015, Sessions was supporting Trump. In an email he sent on August 30, 2015, to his former filmmaking partner Julia Jones, Bannon explained that while Republican candidates like Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina were “all great,” Trump represented a superior choice, because he “is a nationalist who embraces Senator Sessions’ plan” on immigration.[82] Miller became Trump’s chief speechwriter throughout the campaign and wrote the speech Trump gave at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Jim Newell of Slate described Miller’s speechwriting style as, “terse, efficient bursts of hyperbolic horror against coastal elites, immigrants, big business, foreign countries, multiculturalism, and other nefarious interests arrayed to exterminate working-class white men from existence.”[83]

Bannon remembers telling Trump, after taking over the campaign, “As long as you stick to the message”—by which he meant the kind of anti-immigrant populism devised by him, Jeff Sessions and his aide Stephen Miller—“you have a 100 percent probability of winning.”[84] Trump noted in a statement that Miller had played a “central and wide-ranging role” in the campaign. “He is deeply committed to the America First agenda, and understands the policies and actions necessary to put that agenda into effect.”[85] In November 2016, Trump nominated Sessions for Attorney General. Miller, who had joined Trump’s in January 2016, was to serve as a senior policy adviser. Miller, along with Bannon, was involved in the creation of Executive Order 13769, which results in restricted US travel and immigration by individuals from seven countries, suspends the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days, and indefinitely suspends entry of Syrians to the United States.

The alt-right’s Jason Reza Jorjani bragged to undercover investigator Patrik Hermansson, about his contacts in the American government: “We had connections in the Trump administration — we were going to do things!” “Our original vision was the alt-right would become like a policy group for the Trump administration,” he explained. The administration figure who was the interface, he claimed, was Steve Bannon. Unfortunately, he told Hermansson, the political establishment was “disconnecting us from the Trump administration, almost completely.” With the ousters of Michael Flynn and then Bannon, Jorjani lamented, the alt-right’s efforts to carve out a place in the White House failed.[86]

Deconstructing the Administrative State

For Bannon, inciting white nationalism seems to have been a means to an end. For Bannon, inciting white nationalism seems to have been a means to an end. In what he thought was an off-the-record conversation with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, he remarked, “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more. These guys are a collection of clowns.” He added, “The Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”[87]

Describing Trump’s appointees, Taibbi noted in Rolling Stone, “Many were blunderers and conspiracists whose sole qualification for office appeared to be their open hostility to the missions of the agencies they were tapped to run.”[88] While President Trump has not moved to fill many jobs that require Senate confirmation, he has quietly installed hundreds of officials to serve at every major federal agency, from the Pentagon to the Department of Interior. These “beachhead teams,” said Max Stier, the CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, “involve people with considerable authority over the federal government.”[89] A list obtained by ProPublica includes obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart, at least eight staffers drawn from the Heritage Foundation, and many former lobbyists who lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.[90]

Explaining the strategic goals of the several cabinet appointments, Bannon had explained, “I kind of break it up into three verticals of three buckets.” “The third, broadly, line of work is what is ‘deconstruction’ of the administrative state,” explained Bannon. As noted by J.C. Atkins, “the crusade of run-of-the-mill conservatives to roll back government and the welfare state merges with the authoritarian nationalist agenda of ideologues like Bannon.”[91] The same denunciations of the “administrative state” are heard in right-wing think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Similarly, Rich Lowry, national editor of the National Review, wrote in 2017:

The administrative state has been called “the fourth branch” of government. It involves an alphabet soup of executive agencies that wield legislative, executive and judicial powers and thus run outside of and counter to our constitutional system. The agencies write “rules” that are laws in all but name, then enforce them and adjudicate violations.[92]

Reflecting the language of Samuel T. Francis and James Burnham, Jared Taylor added, “It was a revolt against managerialism, a revolt against expert rule, a revolt against the administrative state. It opens the door to possibilities.”[93] The term “administrative state” refers to the group of federal agencies tasked with carrying out the executive branch’s constitutional duty to execute the laws passed by Congress. Such agencies have multiplied and grown. During the last century, administrative agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Environmental Protection Agency, were empowered by Congress to formulate federal rules and regulations that carry the force of law.[94] While overseen by Congress along with the president and presidential appointees, these administrative agencies effectively possess the power to create and enforce law, despite being part of the executive, rather than the legislature or judiciary. For this reason, the administrative state is sometimes called the “fourth branch of government,” a governmental body not envisioned by the Constitution.[95]

Political scientist Dwight Waldo defined the concept of the Administrative State in his classic 1948 public administration text. Waldo’s main hypothesis was that career public servants were not just implementers of policy set by elected officials. Here Waldo argues that democratic states are underpinned by professional and political bureaucracies and that scientific management and efficiency is not the core idea of government bureaucracy, but rather it is service to the public. He asserted that public servants had a significant role to play in establishing and ensuring policy and processes that protected the public interest, complied with democratic principles, and adhered to the Constitution. Waldo further argued that because of this scope of responsibility, a government agency could not be run or managed like a business.[96]

“Every business leader we’ve had in is saying not just taxes, but it is also the regulation. If you look at these Cabinet appointees, they were selected for a reason and that is the deconstruction, the way the progressive left runs, is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just gonna put in some sort of regulation in—in an agency,” added Bannon. Bannon’s reason was—reflecting the language of James M. Burnham and Samuel T. Francis—the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” “That’s all gonna be deconstructed and I think that that’s why this regulatory thing is so important.”[97] Bannon’s first “bucket” was national security and sovereignty which is intelligence, the Defense Department and Homeland Security. And the second, is what he referred to as “economic nationalism,” served by Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steven Mnuchin at Treasury, Robert Lighthizer at Trade, National Trade Council head Peter Navarro, and Stephen Miller. These people, explained Bannon, “are rethinking how we’re gonna reconstruct our trade arrangements around the world.”[98]

[1] Ken Stern. “Exclusive: Stephen Bannon, Trump’s New C.E.O., Hints at His Master Plan.” Vanity Fair (August 17, 2016).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Matt Taibbi. “Trump the Destroyer.” Rolling Stone (March 22, 2017).

[4] Jeff Giesea. “Strategic Priorities for the MAGA Movement.” Medium (July 17, 2017).

[5] Karen DeYoung. “Trump’s national security adviser says foreign policy will emphasize ‘peace through strength’.” Washington Post (January 10, 2017).

[6] Meet Heer. “The Afterlife of Steve Bannon.” The New Republic (January 5, 2018).

[7] Russ Baker. “Trump and the Bushes — The New Guy and the Old Guard Dance.” Who What Why (December 21, 2006).

[8] Jenny Beth Martin. “How the Tea Party helped Trump win the election.” Fox News Opinion (November 12, 2016).

[9] “The Tea Party and Religion.” Pew Research Center (February 23, 2011).

[10] Ibid.

[11] Amy Sullivan. “America’s New Religion: Fox Evangelicalism.” New York Times (December 15, 2017).

[12] “Partisan Polarization Surges in Bush, Obama Years.” Pew Research Center (June 4, 2012).

[13] “Beyond Distrust: How Americans View Their Government.” Pew Research Center (November 23, 2015).

[14] Luke O’Brien. “My Journey to the Centre of the alt-right.” The Huffington Post (November 03, 2016).

[15] Matthew Hutson. “Why Liberals Aren’t as Tolerant as They Think.” Politico (May 09, 2017).

[16] Sean McElwee. “Trump’s supporters believe a false narrative of white victimhood — and the data proves it.” Salon (February 12, 2017).

[17] Matthew Fowler, Vladimir Medenica & Cathy Cohen. “Why 41 percent of white millennials voted for Trump.” Washington Post (December 15, 2017); German Lopez. “The past year of research has made it very clear: Trump won because of racial resentment.” Vox (December 15, 2017).

[18] Brian F. Schaffner, Matthew MacWilliams & Tatishe Nteta. “Explaining White Polarization in the 2016 Vote for President: The Sobering Role of Racism and Sexism.” Conference on The U.S. Elections of 2016: Domestic and International Aspects. January 8-9, 2017, IDC Herzliya Campus.

[19] Brenda Major, Alison Blodorn & Gregory Major Blascovich. “The threat of increasing diversity: Why many White Americans support Trump in the 2016 presidential election.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 21(6): 931-940.

[20] Matthew D. Luttig, Christopher M. Federico & Howard Lavine. “Supporters and opponents of Donald Trump respond differently to racial cues: An experimental analysis.” Research & Politics 4(40).

[21] John Myers. “Donald Trump will be nominee of two parties on California’s November ballot.” Los Angels Times (August 16, 2016).

[22] David Grann. “Robespierre Of The Right.” New Republic (October 26, 1997).

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Thomas B. Edsall. “Partners in Political PR Firm Typify Republican New Breed.” Washington Post (April 7, 1985).

[26] “Top Experts Confounded by Advisers to Donald Trump.” The New York Times (March 22, 2016).

[27] Robert P. Jones. “How Trump Remixed the Republican ‘Southern Strategy.’” The Atlantic (August 4, 2016).

[28] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[29] Ibid.

[30] Mark Ames. “Behind the scenes of the Donald Trump - Roger Stone show.” Pando (August 11, 2015).

[31] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Elizabeth Preza. “Trump’s Dirty Trickster: The Staggeringly Shady Dealings of Political Operative Roger Stone.” AlterNet (May 11, 2016).

[36] Andrew Prokop, “A top Donald Trump adviser either just quit or was just fired.” (August 8, 2015)

[37] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[38] Ibid.

[39] Mark Ames. “Behind the scenes of the Donald Trump - Roger Stone show.” Pando (August 11, 2015).

[40] Bro. Timothy A. Johnson. “Famous Prince Hall freemasons.” Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon (Accessed October 10, 2002).

[41] Matt Labash. “Roger Stone, Political Animal, ‘Above all, attack, attack, attack—never defend.’” The Weekly Standard (5 November 2007).

[42] Pareene. “Did Roger Stone Take Down Eliot Spitzer? (Ans: Who Knows).” Gawker (May 27, 2008).

[43] “Get Me Roger Stone.” Netflix (May 12, 2017).

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Elizabeth Preza. “Trump’s Dirty Trickster: The Staggeringly Shady Dealings of Political Operative Roger Stone.” AlterNet (May 11, 2016).

[47] Jason Wilson. “The rise of Tomi Lahren, the media star lampooned as ‘white power Barbie’.” The Guardian (September 23, 2016).

[48] Timothy Shenk. “The dark history of Donald Trump’s rightwing revolt.” The Guardian (August 16, 2016).

[49] Ibid.

[50] Chris Cillizza. “Pat Buchanan says Donald Trump is the future of the Republican Party.” The Washington Post (January 12, 2016).

[51] Tim Alberta. “‘The Ideas Made It, But I Didn’t’” Politico (May/June 2017).

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Paul Rosenberg. “Donald Trump’s weaponized platform: A project three decades in the making.” Salon (July 16, 2016).

[55] Bruce Wilson. “Trump Meets Man Who Inspired 2011 Terror Attack Deadlier Than Orlando Shooting.” 4th Generation Warfare (July 3, 2016).

[56] Moira Weigel. “Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy.” The Guardian (November 30, 2016).

[57] Ibid.

[58] Mark Potok & Ryan Lenz. “Line in the Sand.” Intelligence Report of the Southern Poverty Law Center (Jun. 13, 2016).

[59] Bruce Wilson. “Trump Meets Man Who Inspired 2011 Terror Attack Deadlier Than Orlando Shooting.” 4th Generation Warfare (July 3, 2016).

[60] Timothy Shenk. “The dark history of Donald Trump’s rightwing revolt.” The Guardian (August 16, 2016).

[61] Rosenberg. “Donald Trump’s weaponized platform”.

[62] Wilson. “Trump Meets Man Who Inspired 2011 Terror Attack Deadlier Than Orlando Shooting.”

[63] Ibid.

[64] Samuel T. Francis. “From Household to Nation.” Chronicles (March 1996), pp. 12-13.

[65] Timothy Shenk. “The dark history of Donald Trump’s rightwing revolt.” The Guardian (August 16, 2016).

[66] “‘Nationalism’ Trumps ‘Conservatism,’ Says Limbaugh.” WND (January 20, 2016).

[67] Keegan Hankes. “Conservative Pundits Use White Nationalist Sam Francis To Explain Trump's Popularity.” Southern Poverty Law Center (January 29, 2016).

[68] Daniel Chaitin. “Roger Stone: Steve Bannon’s former ‘title of chief strategist is a misnomer, at best’.” Washington Examiner (January 4, 2018).

[69] Mark Potok. “Revealed: Conway, Bannon Members of Secretive Group.” Southern Poverty Law Center (August 31, 2016).

[70] Will Rahn. “Steve Bannon and the alt-right: a primer.” CBS News (August 19, 2016).

[71] Michael D. Shear & Katie Benner “How Anti-Immigration Passion Was Inflamed From the Fringe.” New York Times (June 18, 2018).

[72] Ken Rudin. “Blog: Specter Helped Defeat Sessions In 1986 Judiciary Vote.” Political Junkie. NPR (May 5, 2009).

[73] Tim Mak. “The Troublemaker Behind Donald Trump’s Words.” The Daily Beast (January 19, 2017).

[74] Julia Ioffe. “The Believer.” Politico (June 27, 2016).

[75] Ibid.

[76] “The Daily Caller.” SourceWatch. Retrieved from https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_Daily_Caller

[77] Stephen Piggott & Alex Amend. “The Daily Caller Has A White Nationalist Problem,” The Southern Poverty Law Center (August 16, 2017).

[78] Patrick Gavin. “Tucker Carlson toasts Abramoff.” Politico (November 16, 2011). Retrieved from https://www.politico.com/story/2011/11/tucker-carlson-toasts-abramoff-068467

[79] Robert Draper. “Trump vs. Congress: Now What?” The New York Times Magazine (March 26, 2017).

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Jim Newell. “The Dark, Resentful Voice Behind Trump’s RNC Speech.” Slate (July 22, 2016).

[84] Draper. “Trump vs. Congress: Now What?”

[85] “Who Is Stephen Miller, the Jewish Adviser Behind Trump’s ‘American Carnage’?” Haaretz (Jan 23, 2017).

[86] Jesse Singal. “Undercover With the Alt-Right.” New York Times (September 19, 2017).

[87] Robert Kuttner. “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant.” The American Prospect (August 16, 2017).

[88] Matt Taibbi. “Trump the Destroyer.” Rolling Stone (March 22, 2017).

[89] Justin Elliott, Derek Kravitz & Al Shaw. “Meet the Hundreds of Officials Trump Has Quietly Installed Across the Government.” ProPublica (March 8, 2017).

[90] Ibid.

[91] J.C. Atkins. “Why does Steve Bannon want to destroy the ‘administrative state’?” People’s World (February 24, 2017),

[92] Rich Lowry. “Yes, Deconstruct the Administrative State.” National Review (February 28, 2017).

[93] Eliana Johnson & Eli Stokols. “What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read.” Politico (February 07, 2017).

[94] M. Anthony Mills. “Deconstructing the Administrative State.” RealClear Politics (June 29, 2017).

[95] Ibid.

[96] Ed Crego & Frank Islam. “The Need For Reconstruction, Not Deconstruction, Of The Administrative State.” Huffington Post (March 13, 2017).

[97] Gregory Krieg. “What the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’ really looks like.” CNN (March 30, 2017).

[98] Z. Byron Wolf. “Steve Bannon outlines his plan to ‘deconstruct’ Washington.” CNN (February 24, 2017).

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First