Re: Bannon the European: He’s opening the populist fort in Brussels
[{"sender": "Benjamin Harnwell", "recipients": ["Steve Bannon"], "timestamp": "Sun, 22 Jul 2018 22:01:54 +0200", "subject": "Re:", "body": "The former Trump strategist arrives in Europe with \"The Movement\". Objective: an alliance between\nright-wing leaders, from Salvini to Orban in view of the 2019 elections\n\nNEW YORK. The invasion of Europe has begun. Steve Bannon, 65, the American far-right guru who\nwas Donald Trump’s right-hand man in the White House — but let go last summer following the\nracist violence in Charlottesville — is preparing to march on Brussels. Launching, he told the Daily\nBeast himself, a new non-profit foundation called The Movement, (Il Movimento), right in the heart\nof Europe and its institutions. Through which he hopes to coordinate the populist right in view of the\nEuropean elections which will be held in spring 2019.\n\nObjective: to compete with George Soros, the American billionaire of Hungarian origin, benefactor of\nthe Democratic party, who since 1984 with his Open Society has spent at least $32 billion in support\nof NGOs dealing with human rights. And for this he became the bogeyman of the populist right,\naccused of plots of all kinds: including that of wanting to replace Italians with immigrants in order to\nhave labour at low cost. A mantra repeated in the past on Twitter also by the current Minister of the\nInterior Matteo Salvini.\n\nThe ambition of Steve Bannon, former director of the alt-right American site Breitbart — which in\nthe European campaign preceded him since the platform had already opened bureaux in London and\nRome — is therefore to become the coordinator of the one great “populist international” of which he\nhas long since been dreaming.\n\nThe Movement, in fact, intends to function as an extreme right-wing think tank: a source of strategic\nadvice to channel the not-so-politically structured discontent of the most extreme European\nmovements. Analysing data and giving strategic advice. But also by raising funds and channeling\nfunding.\n\nThe aim is to create a populist alliance, a sort of “super group” that if victorious can conquer up to a\nthird of the European Parliament in the elections next May.\n\nIndeed — putting the common policy of the Old Continent in the hands of Bannon and his own. The\nAmerican strategist is very attached to the Freedom Caucus — the extreme right of the US Congress\n— and in 2014 he was at the top of the Cambridge Analytica company, which in 2016 used data\nstolen from Facebook to try to influence the presidential election from which Donald Trump emerged\nvictor. It is not a mystery that for a long time he courts nationalists of the right from East to West.\nAnd he has already met, among others, the Hungarian Orban, the French Marine Le Pen and the\nformer leader of the British separatists Nigel Farage. The latter reappeared, coincidentally, on Friday\nin Pennsylvania, USA, to a fundraiser in favor of the Republican congressman Lou Barletta. Without\nforgetting the Italians of Lega and 5 stars. Of them, he said: \"If it works in Italy, we can import the\nmodel anywhere\"."}]