It is/was a tagline, even. Ironically, Breitbart.com may not be long for this world. From The Post:
In January 2017, Breitbart.com was flying high. Donald Trump, the candidate it had backed during the 2016 campaign, was sworn in as president. Its former executive chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, was named chief White House strategist, seemingly auguring an era of unparalleled access and influence for the far-right, anti-establishment news and commentary site.
In hindsight, it looks like it was Breitbart’s high-water mark.
The site Bannon once described as “the platform for the alt-right” has steadily tumbled from the commanding heights it occupied just 30 months ago.
Since Trump became president, monthly traffic has virtually collapsed, plummeting nearly 75 percent. Aggressive conservative competitors have zoomed past it. At the same time, it faces a double financial whammy: the loss of its biggest donor and an ad boycott launched by a liberal group that continues to erode its revenue…
[Former Breitbart spokesman Kurt] Bardella thinks the site will make it through another election cycle. But he’s not sure after that. “I think the future for them is very bleak,” he said.
Some complaints about the WaPo piece, which was authored by Paul Farhi: As you can see from the above excerpt, the article does note that the site’s own former chairman turned Trump White House chief strategist turned unwelcome hunk of unFebreezed flab encased in multiple buttoned-down shirts Steve Bannon called it “the platform for the alt-right.”
Farhi also notes that Chardonnay-soaked tampon fart Ann Coulter is a columnist for the site. From that fact, astute readers will instantly intuit that Breitbart.com must be a kind of online flophouse for wingnut charity cases who’ve been bounced out of more ongoing concerns for saying the quiet parts a little too loudly. And they’d be correct.
But Jesus, Mr. Farhi, isn’t it past time to start connecting the fucking dots for people? Describing Breitbart’s ethos as “anti-immigration, pro-economic nationalism, skepticism of multiculturalism” is like calling that thing on Trump’s head a “follicular innovation.” It’s an abomination, FFS, and Breitbart was/is a full-on racist hate site that until the election had a “black crime” tag to helpfully point its white supremacist readers to rage boner-inducing content. That’s worth mentioning, in my opinion.
Also, Farhi left out any mention of journalists from more respectable outfits who joined Breitbart.com after the election, putting all their chips on ethno-nationalism. Let’s take a short jaunt down memory lane, shall we? From the 1/10/2017 CJR:
Q&A: A scrappy Wall Street Journal reporter on his jump to Breitbart
THE NEWS THAT RESPECTED Wall Street reporter John Carney is leaving his role at The Wall Street Journal to head up a new vertical at the right-wing news site Breitbart raised eyebrows among media types late Monday. As Bloomberg’s Joshua Green first reported, Carney will lead a team of contributors in establishing a business, markets, and economics news site that is informed by what Carney describes as “an optimism about the potential for the American economy.”
I can’t be the only one who wonders how Carney’s decision to head up the “Jews Control the Economy” desk at the Daily Blood & Soil worked out. I assume he’s making the most of Trump coasting on the economy he inherited from President Obama, but does Carney surreptitiously send résumés to online financial advice and economics outfits, hoping to make the jump from mottled fool (Bannon) to Motley Fool?
The article mentions the site’s loss of patronage from wingnut oligarch Rebekah Mercer, and it references Sleeping Giants’ successful campaign to discourage brands from placing ads on the site. Shamefully, WaPo remains an advertiser with Breitbart. Maybe that’s all the explanation we need for the gaping holes in the story.
Still, I find it disturbing that our dailies — even mostly good ones like The Post — won’t at least call the racist, sexist, xenophobic president’s most racist, sexist, xenophobic fringe hangers-on what they are. It doesn’t bode well for getting past this accursed era.
Open thread.