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Steve Bannon left no doubt who was running the conservative movement now and its not the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

NATIONAL HARBOR, MarylandAt the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, Stephen K. Bannon took the stage as a victorious revolutionary. He was greeted by an adoring audience, sprinkled with #MAGA hats, as a hero who helped reconquer the White House and completely humiliate the left. I want to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC, Bannon said on-stage.

Oh, and his sidekick and alleged pal Reince was there, too.

On Thursday afternoon, American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp hosted a conversation on the mainstage of CPAC with Steve Bannon, Trumps White House chief strategist, and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. The two men shook hands and patted each others shoulders center-stage to (once again!) affirm that they were practically the best of friends, and were definitely, absolutely, 100-percent not backbiting and leaking on each other.

We share an office suite together, Priebus told the crowd, after pushing back against all the media speculation and reporting that the pair is at odds in President Trumps inner circle.

The rest of the CPAC chat focused on how great, and supposedly chaos-free, a job Donald Trump and his administration has been doing in its first month in power. The duo, in particular Trumps chief strategist, indulged in what is also Trumps preferred hobby: bashing The Media.

Between the two, Bannon received the loudest and warmest applause and woops.

Is that the opposition party? Bannon asked somewhat jokingly, smirking at the journalists gathered in the media center at the back of the ballroom.

[We] saw them all crying and weeping that [election] night, Bannon said, to enthusiastic applause. And the reason was President Trump.

Bannon continued his casual victory lap, while continuing to knock the corporatist, globalist media that along with the Democratic Party stood in opposition to Trumps (and his) vision of nationalism.

[Trump] is maniacally focused on keeping his campaign promises, Bannon alleged, praising the presidents immediate withdrawal from TPP as one of the pivotal moments in modern U.S. history. All of these promises are going to be implemented, he added.

Trump, himself, will be at CPAC on Friday morning to state his own case and to sing his own praisesto discuss, as Bannon described it, the new political order being formed.

Bannon, who now sits on the National Security Council and serves as one of the most powerful people in the Trump administration, has come a long way at CPAC.

In years past, the former Breitbart honcho and Hollywood filmmaker hosted his Uninvited event as CPAC counterprogramming, which included right-wing voices and activists who hadnt made the official cut for the high-profile conservative conference.

Sadly for Bannon, a lot of CPAC and the ACU wish he were still uninvited.

Shortly before Bannon took to the mainstage, the ACUs Dan Schneider delivered a speech titled The Alt-Right Aint Right at All. In it, Schneider condemned the alt-right as a fascist and dangerous collective (nevermind that Breitbarts logo was stamped on banners to his right and left as official sponsors of the event). Not long after he wrapped his speech, alt-right and white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer was thrown out of CPAC after holding court with reporters outside the ballroom for roughly 45 minutes.

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Bannon, for his part, has called his former Breitbart website the platform for the racist American alt-right, and shares many of the same hardline nationalist attitudes and politics of the movement.

Just last week, CPAC nearly went full alt-right, with a much-publicized invitation extended by Schlapp to Breitbart editor and professional alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos for a prominent speaking slot.

Over the weekend, the ACU board and others revolted against the decision, and Yiannopoulos was ultimately disinvited. To many on the ACU board of directors, unfortunately, the damage was already done.

When the board held a meeting on Wednesday at a conference room at the hotel in National Harbor where the four-day conference is held, members grilled Schlapp about the alt-rights infiltration into more mainstream conservatism.

According to two sources with knowledge of the meeting, multiple board members called out the ACU chairman not only for inviting, then ditching, Yiannopoulos, but for inviting Bannon himself.

Many board members told The Daily Beast that attendees left the meeting continuing to grumble and vent about the fascist and Jew-hating and white nationalist elements that have infected the Republican Party, and how the conservative movement had a long way to go to purge them.

To them, Bannon is indeed a prominent representative of that insurgent, racist threat.

The revolution is here, and its bloody, man, one ACU board member told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. The craziest elements of the [party] have managed to get every single thing they wanted over the past yearThis is the shape our movement is in today.

Bannon, and his partner-in-crime Priebus, say that this is fine. In fact, probably better.

[Trump is going to be] one of the greatest presidents that will ever serve this country! Priebus told the cheering crowd. The chief of staff compared his boss to Ronald Reagan, saying both Republican presidents sought lasting peace through strength.

Bannon, on the other hand, reminded the audience that despite recent electoral victories, they should all gear up for the coming war.

If you think theyre going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken, Bannon warned, again attacking the globalist media.

"Every day is going to be a fight, he added.

Continued here:
Alt-Right Now: Steve Bannon Storms CPAC - Daily Beast

Washington Post

Conservative organizer calls 'alt-right' groups 'left-wing fascists' Washington Post February 23, 2017 12:35 PM EST - Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, told attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference that members of the 'alt-right' are anti-Semites, they are racists, they are ...

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Conservative organizer calls 'alt-right' groups 'left-wing fascists' - Washington Post

The alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, pictured at center, may have seen his speaking invitations dry up and his book deal dissolve, but the damage to the conservative movement has already been done.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY FADEK / REDUX

Editors note: on Tuesday afternoon, Milo Yiannopoulos resigned as an editor at Breitbart News.

On Monday afternoon, shortly before he learned that he had been disinvited from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, that his book deal with Simon & Schuster had been cancelled, and that his fellow-employees at Breitbart News were threatening to quit if he wasnt fired, Milo Yiannopoulos calmly explained to me that he wasnt a pedophile or an anti-Semite. Over the weekend, interviews in which he discussedunderage sex and Jewish influence on the media and finance had circulated on social media. A group calling itself the Reagan Battalion had scoured the Web and assembled a highlight reel of Yiannopouloss most offensive statements, including an endorsement of having sex with thirteen-year-olds.

Things sometimes tumble out of your mouth on these long late-night live streams, when everyone is spitballing and had a couple of drinks, that are not completely expressed and not exactly what you intend. Obviously, if I had known I was going to have the media profile I have now, I would have been cautious about this stuff. I never imagined that I would become famous, Yiannopoulos told me. He is usually brash and outrageous, leaning on his partly Jewish background and the fact that he is gay as a shield to justify his insults. A recent short music video that he posted on YouTube showed him and some shirtless men building a wall on what purported to be the Mexican border. But yesterday afternoon he was sorrowful and self-pitying as he tried to explain himself. Everything I say in there is completely defensible with proper context and explanation. It just takes nuance and close attention to understand what Im really getting at.

Yiannopoulos is the technology editor for Breitbart, the right-wing, pro-Trump news site formerly run by Steve Bannon, who is now President Trumps chief strategist and arguably the most powerful man in the White House. While working for Bannon, Yiannopoulos did more than anyone else at Breitbart to explain and build bridges to the so-called alt-right, the amorphous collection of neo-nationalist activists. Bannon once said that Breitbart was the platform for the alt-right. Yiannopoulos, who has called himself a fellow-traveller of the movement, last year wrote a sympathetic essay, An Establishment Conservatives Guide to the Alt-Right, which attempted to usher the movement into semi-respectability among the sites many Trump-loving readers. Somemostly Establishment typesinsist its little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set, Yiannopoulos and his co-author, Allum Bokhari, wrote. Theyre wrong.

Actually, they were right. The Anti-Defamation League, which studies the movement, describes its adherents as those who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of forms of conservatism that embrace implicit or explicit racism or white supremacy. At an infamous alt-right conference in Washington in November, attendees toasted Trump with the Nazi salute. But, over the past year, Yiannopoulos, along with the alt-right, Bannon, and Trumpwhom Yiannopoulos often calls Daddymoved from the laughingstock fringes to the center of the conservative movement. Earlier this month, when a Yiannopoulos event at U.C. Berkeley attracted violent protesters and was cancelled, the President took notice with a shocking threat. If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view NO FEDERAL FUNDS? he said on Twitter.

The Berkeley event turned some of Yiannopouloss critics on the right into sympathizers, who started to view him as a martyr for free speech. Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC, invited Yiannopoulos to speak. The annual conference begins on Wednesday, and will feature remarks by Vice-President Mike Pence and a joint appearance by Bannon and Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff.

Instead of avoiding controversy, we have decided that its a more responsible thing, in a respectful way, to put controversial topics on the stage and to allow the attendees to hear what they like and what they dont like, Schlapp told me. Were seeking to resolve some differences, especially differences in the conservative movement.

For Schlapp, the Berkeley event was the crucial factor. We talk about that topic every year at CPAC, he said, referring to intolerance of conservative views in academia. And he is the latest example of a voice that gets shut down on college campuses. We thought it was a reasonable thing to add that to the agenda.

The invitation immediately drew outrage, including from members of CPACs own board. When Ned Ryun, a pro-Trump board member who runs the organization American Majority, which helps train conservatives to run for office, learned of the invitation, during a green-room conversation with Schlapp at Fox News, he was furious, and told him that he would go public with his opposition.

The board was not consulted at all on Milo, Ryun told me. There was no board vote. And some of us have very strong opinions about Milo. I think the alt-right and its apologists and fellow-travellers, or however the hell he describes himself, doesnt deserve any platform inside the conservative movement. I think they should be drummed out much like Buckley did with the John Birch Society, in the sixties. He added, We dont need to give vile, disgusting, hateful speech a platform.

Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative commentator and Never Trump activist, was similarly disgusted. So let me get this straight: Matt Schlapp thinks that Milo has an important message and this is about free speech? he asked me, via a direct message on Twitter. Not sure what is worse: the intellectual or the moral decadence on display here. Apparently, racism, anti-Semitism, and the embrace of Alt Right isnt disqualifying for CPAC, he wrote. This raises the larger question: Are there any standards for conservatives in the Age of Trump? Obviously being an erratic narcissist cant be disqualifying. Racist tweets or bullying cant be disqualifying. Trafficking in Alt Right memes has been normalized. So with Trump as POTUS, where can conservatives draw the line? CPACs logic: Well embrace anyone the Left hates, even if they are a vile, disingenuous, bigoted click whore.

Conservatives scheduled to speak at the event also started to grow uncomfortable. Ive always thought Milo was pointlessly provocative and that he added nearly nothing in terms of conservative or libertarian ideas, Tim Carney, the commentary editor for the Washington Examiner, said. CPAC never should have invited him to give a major speech, because his provocativeness is often bigoted or licentious.

In the face of the growing outrage, Schlapp at first stood by his decision. Then, over the weekend, the videos of Yiannopoulos began to circulate. In one clip, he cavalierly approves of sex with thirteen-year-olds and suggests that he once attended a party at which minors were sexually assaulted. In another, he talks about the statistical fact that Jews own most of the banks and completely dominate the media.

Yiannopoulos told me that he regretted the statements, and that they were simply his way of dealing with being sexually assaulted when he was younger. Im gay, as you know, he said. And Im somebody that this happened to. Im somebody who has been on the receiving end of child abuse. I kind of thought I could talk about it how I pleased. Does that make sense? I sort of felt like I owned the subject and I was entitled to come to terms with that and express myself about that however I pleased. He continued, I dont believe sex with a thirteen-year-old is O.K. When I mentioned the number thirteen, I was talking about myself. I was talking about the age that I lost my virginity.

Did he ever go to a party and see young boys being sexually assaulted? I had absolutely no idea, he said. I didnt check anyones I.D.s. I have no idea what the ages of any of those people at the parties were. I think when I said very young, I was guessing they might be sixteen or seventeen. I said very clearly I dont advocate for any illegal behavior, nor do I excuse it. If I saw it and I was sure about it, I would report it. He added, I lived in Los Angeles in 2008, and its difficult to avoid parties like that if youre young and good-looking, you know?

He also addressed his claim about Jewish control of the media. My mother is Jewish. I was raised Jewish, he said. I said we are proportionally overrepresented in some industries, and I dont think pointing out that fact is anti-Semitic.

The explanations were too late. Before we got off the phone, Schlapp had already disinvited Yiannopoulos. Later in the day, Simon & Schuster cancelled his book contract, which had reportedly been worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

But the damage to the conservative movement had already been done. In a previous era, there was an lite conservative establishment that could police the movement and cast aside its fringe adherents. William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review, famously did this in the early sixties, when he attacked the conspiracists and racists of the John Birch Society, the alt-right of the day.

The invitation strikes me as more important than the disinvitation, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, said of the CPAC conference. The invite said, We are welcoming an alt-right (or alt-right-fellow-travelling) provocateur into the big tent. The disinvite said, Well, O.K., since youve advocated pederasty, well back off. CPAC hasnt set out a principled position here, and absent the tapes presumably would have forged ahead.

Schlapp stood by his original decision and dismissed critics like Lowry. Last year around this time, there was the creation of the Never Trump movement, and there were a lot of these very same journalists who were attacking us for inviting Donald Trump, he told me. There are journalists in the conservative world that use CPAC as a piata once a year, and they attack us for inviting, for not inviting. The fact is this: politics is messy and its complicated. And we can try to sanitize it for our stage or we can decide to not avoid the controversies, but simply put them on the stage in an appropriate way for our attendees to listen to.

But even one of Schlapps own board members did not buy that argument. So we were cool with the Anti Semitic, racist, vile stuff, but we drew the line at pedophilia? Ryun wrote to me via text, echoing Lowrys complaints. My argument from the minute I heard about it was to reject the alt-right ASAP.

As for Yiannopoulos, when I spoke to him at one P.M. yesterday, he said that he was still consulting with his team about what to do next. Asked if he might still show up in Washington this week, he responded, Probably.

Whether or not he attends, CPAC promises to be a rowdy forum for debate about the future of conservatism and the alt-right. Fans of Yiannopoulos wont be too disappointed. Yesterday, before announcing that Yiannopoulos was disinvited, CPAC organizers revealed that they had a new speaker who was even more beloved by the alt-right: Donald Trump.

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How Alt-Right Fellow-Traveller Milo Yiannopoulos Cracked Up the Right - The New Yorker

LEE'S SUMMIT, Mo. (WDAF) A woman said she is still disturbed by a discovery she made at a Lee's Summit business. On Tuesday, Cydney Carl said she was eating lunch at The Peanut on Main Street and found what she calls racist business cards.

"That's so sad that this is something that is still a problem," she told FOX 4.

Carl said she alerted a manager who was just as shocked to learn the business cards were sitting near the magazines. She said the manager immediately pitched the cards.

The logo on the cards is similar to the one used by the Alt-Right, which is associated with white nationalism.

The back of the card said "America was 90% white in 1950. It is now 60%. Make America Great Again. Trump is the first step. We're the next."

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Woman finds alt-right business cards at restaurant

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Carl said she immediately felt disgusted by the business cards.

"When you think of the Alt-Right, in my head, I imagine some tiny little town in the middle of nowhere with zero access to media, with lack of education, lack of diversity, not in Lee's Summit," she told FOX 4.

Carl said she is happy she notified the manager at the restaurant, because she would hate for a child or somebody else to come across the message on the card.

"I think that they are cowards to hide behind something like this and to distribute something like this into unknowing businesses," she said.

The manager at the restaurant on Wednesday said she immediately tossed the cards and said nobody at The Peanut associates with the kind of views on the cards.

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Woman finds alt-right business cards in restaurant - AOL News

I never knew what to make of the whole excitement over Milo. He always seemed, well, boring. I guess its because after almost four decades on the planet, Ive seen his act before Andrew Dice Clay, Howard Stern, Opie and Anthony, hell, even Gore Vidal. All edgy edgelords edging towards the edge of edgy edginess. Its a tired shtick, which has always made me wonder how the hell he ended up getting so much attention in the first place. He always struck me as sort of a bigotry-based cover band, and a bad one at that. The old saying "Those who cant do, teach" should have a counterpart that goes "Those without talent, shock." Before I get into the meat of this essay. though, I just have to get one comment out of the way frosted tips in 2017? Really?

Back to the main point. Milo is a guy who was born with the boring last name of Hanrahan and changed it to an unpronounceable Yiannopoulos, which is just as much of a pain to spell as it is to say. Of course this was just to try to get a one-name persona going in the vein of Stalin, Mussolini, or Mao, he was probably going for more of a Cher vibe though. He even created a logo for it that looks like it just ripped off the Rock Band font, which itself is a self-parody of bad '80s metal band logos. The image is meant to conjure up the Aquanet-powered masculinity of a man with big hair and a pink fishnet shirt, which is of course nonexistent, just like Milos edginess.

As I said previously, anyone who tries to tell you that theyre edgy, or, in Milos case "a dangerous faggot," is without a doubt not. His whole thing has been to say things that are deliberately offensive and then mock his way out when cornered. I figure the only way this ever made him stand out from the millions of other insufferable people was that he decided to market it. In the past, these Walmart-brand Oscar Wildes were content to snark from behind the straws of their cocktails about how bad drag queens were. Milo figured out he could make money off of it by making fun of not just peoples weight but their race, gender, and sexuality, and then packaging it as being the racist "cool gay friend" for a bunch of racists. If you look at what Milo has said, though, its boring and unoriginal. His first major foray into fame was rewriting forum posts about Gamergate into a form that passed as something better than meme-heavy ramblings. Milos claims that writer Shaun King is actually white werent originally his. Milos attempt to do performance art was to sit in a tub of pigs blood. Hear that sound? Thats the sound of performance artists groaning at how lame that is. Even Milos self-loathing anti-Semitism was so blatantly transparent the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer called him out on being unoriginal and a hack.

Roll that around on your palate for a few minutes and savor the complexity of the flavors. Actual neo-Nazis think Milo is an unoriginal hack when it comes to bigotry.

This should be the part where I go into Milos history of harassment and doxxing, especially with Leslie Jones and Ghostbusters, but I want to show you something beautiful. You see, back in 2012, Milo wrote an article for The Daily Dot actually condemning trolling and bullying. No, really, he did that.What moves it into jumping-the-shark territory is the opening paragraph:

Glibness and superficial charm. Manipulation of others. A grandiose sense of self. Pathological lying. A lack of remorse, shame or guilt. Shallow emotions. An incapacity to feel genuine love. A need for stimulation. Frequent verbal outbursts. Poor behavioural controls. These are just some of the things that social media are encouraging in all of us.

If you tried to introduce a plot twist like that to an editor, they would throw you out of their office and ban you from the building.

Thats ultimately why I could never be that shocked and surprised by Milo. He was always just in it for the fame and the money. So much so that he created a fundraiser to send white men to college, raised a quarter of a million dollars and paid out, you guessed it, nothing. Milo was always the basic bitch of bigotry and not even a good one at that. His comments were always meant to incite people by pressing the right buttons on people who had suffered past trauma or cared so deeply about something they would jump at any attack. He manipulated people using what Im told is supposed to be good looks and charm and chumming the waters of people's hatred and biases. He really was an internet troll come to life. Why am I referring to him the past tense, though? Well, because hes over; Icarus flew too close to the sun.

After he got invited to the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is sort of a conservative white peoples pep-rally/debutante ball, Milos interview where he defended not only pedophilia but priests abusing boys (he has said the person who abused him was a priest) hit the mainstream and it was over. Milos book deal was canceled before the books could end up in the discount bin at Barnes & Noble; the place where you can find all of Sarah Palins body of work. He was disinvited from CPAC and just fired from his job at Breitbart, a website so awful it has a "black crime" section. Of course he says hes going to start a new media venture, but so what? It wont be YouTube, which just gutted PewDiePie for being anti-Semitic. He cant make money off his Facebook, and hell, I have a website. He could beg for donations on Patreon, but its not like he draws hentai for cash, and theres plenty of free bigotry out there.

Nope, Milo is over. Like all hacks, mediocrities, and shlock-shock artists, they fade away. When was the last time Marilyn Manson was shocking? Andrew Dice Clay is doing reality competition shows. Milo is going to be one of those nostalgia items only the dedicated still care about or remember. He really hasnt provided any legacy of work thats unique; hes unremarkable in his bigotry compared to his peers, and hes now cast out into the digital wilderness without a platform and a monetization scheme. The only time hes going to show up on a college campus again is when someone is turning in an undergraduate sociology paper that cites him. Milo will fade away, the Milli Vanilli of the alt-right. The next time we will probably hear from him again is when hes been arrested in a truck stop parking lot for trading sex for drugs or 750-word hot takes on PC culture.

AMANDA KERRI is a writer and comedian based in Oklahoma City. Follow her on Twitter @EternalKerri.

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Milo, the Alt-Right Emperor With No Clothes, Is Mercifully Over - Advocate.com