President-elect Donald Trump has been busy building his team, and white nationalists are thrilled with the choice of former Breitbart executive Stephen “Steve” Bannon as chief strategist. The alt-right movement apparently believes that Bannon will advocate for policies they agree with.
"I think that's excellent," former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke told CNN. "I think that anyone that helps complete the program and the policies that President-elect Trump has developed during the campaign is a very good thing, obviously. So it's good to see that he's sticking to the issues and the ideas that he proposed as a candidate. Now he's president-elect and he's sticking to it and he's reaffirming those issues."
During Bannon's tenure at Breitbart, which is referred to as "the platform for the alt-right," the website continually took hard stances on immigration, Muslims and building a border wall to stop Mexican immigration.
CNN notes that in 2015, after terrorists attacked Paris, Breitbart, under Bannon's tenure, ran the headline, "Paris Streets Turned Into Warzone by Violent Migrants."
"You have an individual, Mr. Bannon, who's basically creating the ideological aspects of where we're going," Duke told CNN. "And ideology ultimately is the most important aspect of any government."
Bannon's ex-wife claims in a court document from 2007 viewed by CNN that Bannon didn't want his daughter to attend a Los Angeles school because there were too many Jews, a claim that Bannon's spokesperson denies.
"I think it's amazing," Peter Brimelow, who runs the white nationalist site VDARE, said to CNN about Bannon's hiring. "Can you imagine Mitt Romney doing this? It's almost like Trump cares about ideas! Especially amazing because I would bet Trump doesn't read online. Few plutocrats do; they have efficient secretaries."
Read more at CNN.