Editorial: The appalling rise to power of the alt-right

Is right-wing provocateur Stephen K. Bannon as racist, anti-Semitic and bigoted as the website he ran and the audience it has attracted?

We can take the measure of Bannon from his own words and those published by Breitbart News.

It is ugly.

Bannon shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House, let alone whispering in the ear of the President-elect. Donald Trump may have revealed a great deal about himself in naming Bannon his senior counselor and strategist — presenting him on a par with his pick to be chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

“The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office,” John Weaver, a Republican strategist who ran Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign, told The New York Times.

“Be very vigilant, America,” Weaver warned ominously.

Trump’s elevation of Bannon puts an extreme fringe group — a group that Bannon admits is fueled by hatred — at the very center of power in the American government. White nationalists rejoiced at his appointment, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported. Bannon’s meteoric rise to power is as stunning as Trump’s victory last week.

All citizens who value democracy, reason, pluralism and peace should be greatly concerned by Bannon’s virulent nationalistic tendencies and the unsavory cast of racists, white nationalists, xenophobes and misogynists he has drawn to Breitbart while driving it to the extreme right.

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In his own words, Bannon would rather tear down our government than run it well. These are not the words of a man who considers himself a public servant.

He told the Daily Beast two years ago that he wanted to “bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” That includes, he said, even the Republican Party that Trump rode to the nation’s highest office. Bannon later said he didn’t remember the conversation.

Bannon has expressed general contempt for elected officials of both parties and what he views as the political and cultural “elite,” which includes an independent press.

A special target of Bannon and his inflammatory website? U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, of Janesville, who was reelected unanimously by Republicans as House Speaker on Tuesday. “We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class,” Bannon told the Washington Post earlier this year.

“We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”

Asked about Bannon’s promotion to Trump’s right hand, Ryan told CNN: “I don’t know Steve Bannon, so I have no concerns.”

If Ryan has ever read Breitbart under Bannon, then he needs to work on strengthening his spine.

If he hasn’t, then he needs an education.

Here’s a primer:

■Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart headlined a May hit-piece on conservative editor William Kristol: “Bill Kristol: Renegade Jew, Republican spoiler.”

■A piece published just two weeks after a white supremacist murdered nine African-Americans attending church in Charleston, S.C., proclaimed: “Hoist it high and proud: The Confederate flag proclaims a glorious heritage.”

■A Breitbart story last December by Milo Yiannopoulos told women that birth control “makes you fat,” “makes you jiggle wrong,” “makes you a slut” and “makes you unsexy all the time.”

■A July article by the same author was headlined, “The solution to online ‘harassment’ is simple: Women should log off.” (Yiannopoulos managed even to be barred from Twitter, which has become notorious for allowing trolls to make up and say virtually any hateful thing).

■Breitbart made up phony ties between Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, and Islamic extremists; it bitterly attacked politicians who didn’t support an unconstitutional religious test for Muslims; and it even blamed migrants for the spread of disease, The New York Times reported.

Bannon became politically active as the tea party rose in 2009. He said he was animated by the federal government’s decision to bail out the banking system. Though he went to Harvard Business School and became rich at Goldman Sachs and by investing in “Seinfeld” and such companies as Internet Gaming Entertainment, Bannon said the bailout was a misuse of taxpayer money to help wealthy bankers and politicians at the expense of the working class. He expresses hatred for the elite class of people he belongs to.

Many people are angry about the way the government failed to regulate and then bailed out the investment bankers who caused the Great Recession without holding accountable those responsible.

But Bannon preaches that the only way to purify the system is through a scorched-Earth revolution fueled by hate.

“Let the grassroots turn on the hate because that’s the ONLY thing that will make them do their duty,” he wrote a Breitbart editor about Republican leadership, the Daily Beast reported.

Bannon told the Times that he rejects the “ethno-nationalist tendencies” of some in his movement. He describes himself as a champion of the disenfranchised. But the Southern Poverty Law Center says Bannon ran Breitbart as a “white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill.” And he himself has bragged that he was providing “the platform for the alt-right,” which includes those who espouse white supremacy and think its just fine to harass Jews, Muslims and African-Americans.

USA TODAY EDITORIAL: Bannon could darken Trump White House

Here’s who Steve Bannon really is: A suddenly powerful man, who benefited greatly from the system he now seems to despise. Worse, he has channeled the dangerous impulses of a radical fringe and landed a position of trust serving a newly elected commander in chief who doesn’t have a whiff of government experience.

And the only people standing between Bannon and government policy appear to be two politicians from Wisconsin: the fawning and freshly promoted Reince Priebus and the diffident Paul Ryan.

Be very vigilant, indeed, America.

If we want good government, we must demand it for ourselves in a loud and clear voice. Even if you voted for Trump, demand that he and the Republican leadership dump Bannon.