Tag: Steve Bannon

Greenbelt, Maryland (CNN)The current "political environment" is so toxic that a large number of minorities may not reply to the 2020 Census, the Trump administration admitted in court Thursday, even without the addition of a controversial question asking about citizenship status. "That has nothing to do with the citizenship question per se," Gardner told a federal court in Maryland. "They may be less inclined to trust the government" or the Trump administration. Judge George Hazel probed Gardner's logic to see if he was conceding a key argument for the plaintiffs who want the question nixed: that the citizenship question would contribute to a less accurate count and the resulting disenfranchisement. "It seems like the macro environment is going to exacerbate the impact of the citizenship question," Hazel said. At the end of the day, it's entirely possible that the plaintiffs will be right," Gardner said. But it's also possible, he added, that "the macro environment is just so challenging" that minorities and non-citizens would not respond anyway. "Secretary Ross was a banker and the notion that he came up with this on his own is preposterous," said Denise Hulett, an attorney representing the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, one of the plaintiffs. Gardner, the government attorney, said conversations about the issue were a normal part of the policy-making process, and that Ross had ultimately and reasonably decided to include the question based on a request from the Justice Department. Judge Hazel appeared to bristle at a suggestion he wait for the Supreme Court to decide a separate lawsuit over the citizenship question before issuing his ruling.

Mr. Kurz vaulted to power in Austria in late 2017 with an anti-immigration message that challenged Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, after her country took in thousands of refugees who streamed across southern Europe from Syria and other war-torn Middle Eastern nations. He is a “rock star,” said Richard A. Grenell, the United States ambassador to Germany, who invited Mr. Kurz to lunch in Berlin. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Kurz a one-on-one meeting and an expanded session with his senior aides — the kind of attention that leaders of smaller countries almost never get, save for the prime minister of Ireland around St. Patrick’s Day. “He’s a very young leader, I have to tell you,” Mr. Trump said, turning to his guest. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kurz later discussed trade tensions between the United States and Europe, as the White House nears a decision to impose tariffs on German automobiles. Mr. Trump’s decision to meet with him was mostly about what Mr. Kurz symbolizes in a Europe with which the president has had an increasingly antagonistic relationship. “For better or for worse, he is the chancellor of a German-speaking country that is in a coalition with the hard right,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, an expert on Europe at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Kurz is not the first young European leader to beguile Mr. Trump. And the United States recently held a summit meeting on the Middle East in Warsaw — a reward for Poland’s right-wing government, which has sought close ties to Mr. Trump. “The Warsaw summit showed in brutal clarity the internal contradictions of U.S. policy towards the right in Europe.

Thousands of anti-fascists are expected to attend a central London protest on Sunday to counter a march by the far-right campaigner Tommy Robinson and his supporters. A new group within the party, Labour Against Racism and Fascism, has been created and Momentum has been trying to counter a far-right social media effort which some members believed was often more sophisticated than its own web presence. (@PeoplesMomentum) "Did you find any hatespeech"? He said: “A newly energised, well-funded network of hate is emerging, from Steve Bannon in the US to the former EDL [English Defence League] leader Tommy Robinson at home, and it threatens the very fabric of our nation. The Labour movement must be front and centre in opposing them.” Thousands were expected to attend the Robinson event, which involves a march on Whitehall three days before MPs vote on Theresa May’s Brexit package and has been billed as a “Brexit betrayal rally”. Laura Parker, Momentum’s national coordinator, said: “There has been a reluctance at times from some in the mainstream of Labour to engage in events like this in the past. Niroshan Sirisena, a Labour councillor in Croydon and a Momentum organiser, said he and others set up Labour Against Racism and Fascism weeks ago as part of an attempt to develop the party’s anti-racism policies at a constituency level. “Labour is an anti-racist party, but I think it has to do a little more than say that it is one,” said Sirisena, who has also been involved in distributing anti-racism leaflets at Premiership matches as part of a move to counter the far-right focus on football fans. The Metropolitan police have imposed strict conditions on the times and locations those taking part could protest, and warned that anyone who commited acts of violence would be arrested. The deputy assistant commissioner, Laurence Taylor, the Met’s gold commander for the operation, said: “If you want to protest on Sunday we ask that you do so peacefully, no matter what your view.

The Story: On Friday, November 2, Steve Bannon debated David Frum about populism and conservatism, and about the volatile combination of the two known in...

And people are talking about what is fueling them. NPR's Sam Sanders sees race as a throughline shaping our politics and current events. SANDERS: You know, even besides the history of this amendment, if you trace the origins of the Trump White House's push to change it right now, the people in Trump's orbit and the hard-liners on issues like immigration and citizenship, they have been talking about this stuff in very racialized ways. And they've basically been making the argument for years now that something must be done about immigration and borders and who gets to be a citizen. And so when I hear journalists say we should ignore it, it just feels like a really privileged thing to say. So how do we talk about race in a way that allows the most people into that conversation? Whenever I talk to real people in the real world, if you listen long enough and hard enough, they will start to talk to you about race. And then we kept talking about race. And they want to talk about it. GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sam Sanders is the host of the NPR podcast and radio show It's Been A Minute.

The Story:  Steve Bannon, the man who was once hailed as the central strategist of Trumpism, but who was pressed out of the administration only...

Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon told Politico that he thinks a coalition government in Italy is an experiment that could "change global politics." Bannon was discussing the new government formed between Italy’s Five Star Movement and the League, two anti-establishment parties. The parties agreed to form the coalition in May. Bannon told Politico the coalition could serve as a model for other parts of the world. “A populist party with nationalist tendencies like the 5Stars, and a nationalist party with populist tendencies like the League … it’s imperative that this works because this shows a model for industrial democracies from the U.S. to Asia," he said. Bannon spoke to Politico while in Europe to promote a Brussels-based foundation called the Movement that advises right-wing populist parties campaigning for European Parliament elections. Italy's Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, a member of the League, has joined the Movement, per Politico. Politico also reported that Bannon has reached out to Luigi Di Maio, the leader of the Five Star Movement. Bannon offered praise to both the Five Star Movement and the League in his interview with Politico. “Throughout the entire world, you will not find two politicians that worked as hard as Salvini and Di Maio, for no money, leading their parties to these unbelievable victories and then stepped back and let someone else be the guy that goes to the [Group of Seven], [Group of 20] and sits in the Oval Office with Trump," he said.

ROME — Italy is the “center of the political universe,” according to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. Thus far, many of the Continent’s far-right politicians have reacted cautiously to Bannon’s advances. Bannon began promoting it in July. The League’s Matteo Salvini, Italy’s interior minister, has already joined, and during his trip to Rome Bannon also reached out to 5Stars leader Luigi Di Maio. According to two individuals with knowledge of the talks — one a person who has worked with Bannon and another a 5Star MP — Bannon and Di Maio met on Saturday and had a “constructive dialogue.” The 5Stars are yet to decide whether they will endorse the project or not though. On the face of it, the far-right base of the Movement (Bannon is also in talks with Germany’s far-right AfD, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France and Viktor Orbán’s Christian nationalist Fidesz party in Hungary) is far removed from the 5Stars’ left-wing populism. Some of the party’s MPs are worried it would alienate their voting base. Nevertheless, Bannon has praise for both sides of Italy’s coalition government. Following Italy’s general election in March, neither party would agree during negotiations about forming the coalition to the other’s leader heading the government. The American political strategist said that he hoped the Italian model of bringing together populists on the left and right could be replicated both in the U.S. and the U.K. “You are going to have to compromise … On one side you have the guaranteed income, on the other the flat tax, both sides will get what they want and you’ll move on from there,” he said, referencing major domestic priorities of the 5Stars and League parties.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria says Liberals are making a mistake in choosing to suppress idealological voices they don't agree with, like former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, in hopes that their ideas will go away.

(As these are annual numbers, only larger counties have large enough populations for statistical significance, and, therefore, not all counties are included on the charts below.) When we consider the foreign-born population, we often think largely of immigrants from Latin America. But as our analysis last year noted and as Brookings Institution analysis of the new Census Bureau data suggests, more foreign-born residents of the United States come from Asia than from Latin America. The larger the circle on the chart above, the larger the percentage of the foreign-born population in that county which is from Latin America. They did so in 2016, as the chart below indicates. There’s a correlation between the urban population in a county and its vote. (In that chart, we’ve rescaled the circles to represent the overall population of foreign-born individuals in the county, not just those from Latin America.) If we consider the change in the foreign-born population, particularly the change in noncitizen foreign-born residents per county from 2008 to 2016, the places with the biggest increase in that population since 2008 were more likely to vote Republican. If we scale the circles to the populations of the county, the chart looks like this: Clearly Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, often echoing Bannon’s, was resonant in the 2016 campaign. Clearly, too, places with more foreign-born residents voted more heavily against him.