Since the verdict declaring Donald Trump and Mike Pence as future President and Vice President of the United States, countless people have expressed their distaste at the future state of our nation for minority groups. Yet, to give justice as to how alarming this outcome truly is, we must look not only at Donald Trump and Mike Pence’s flaws—but the sickening flaws of those being put into power by the two.
Stephen K. Bannon was just named as White House chief strategist and senior advisor. This is a man who was most recently Executive Director of Breitbart news, an ultra-conservative and more often times than not stigmatizing site that Bannon himself deemed “the platform for the Alt-Right.” Under Bannon, Breitbart has gone on to release articles stating that sex crimes in Europe are at the fault of Muslim immigrants, that LGBT people are better off going back in the closet, that being black puts people at “an advantage” in modern society (meanwhile calling the Black Lives Matter movement “chaos”), that defended the Confederate flag and deemed the Southern rebellion of the Civil War a “glorious heritage”, and that has provided a list reasoning how birth control makes women “unattractive and crazy.”
With this kind of content pandering toward discriminatory individuals, one might ask themselves what exactly is the Alt-Right movement? Why is it not spoken of to the sickening degree of what it truly is?
The Alt-Right “movement” is simply a wolf in sheep’s clothing; it is the all too familiar assembling of a group pushing for white supremacy masquerading as a legitimate political movement, except they’ve traded infamous white hoods for suit-and-tie.
The so-called movement was created by Richard Bertrand Spencer, a self-proclaimed white nationalist and a man hailed as an “intellectual” by Bannon himself. Spencer also runs an independent organization titled the National Policy Institute (NPI) that works to establish an ethnocentric society in regards to Americans with European descent.
The NPI held a conference in Washington D.C. on November 19, where Spencer saluted the audience with an opening statement: “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory.”
Throughout his speech, Spencer recited Nazi vocabulary to refer to mainstream press and was met with thundering applause and Nazi salutes. Spencer also stated “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” He added, “the white race is a race that travels forever on an upward path,” and “to be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror.”
Videos of this terrifying speech can be found, showcasing the blatant white supremacist ideologies employed by the founder of the Alt-Right movement, a movement that was supported by future Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon. Despite Trump disavowing the Alt-Right, he defends the hiring of a man catering directly to the Alt-Right movement and its supporters.
Therefore, by having Stephen Bannon serve our melting pot of a country that has been plagued with racial supremacy ideals for an unfortunately long amount of time, it is reinforcing the fact that the Alt-Right, white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and whatever other labels can be pinned on such oppressive individuals, have a representative in the White House.
