In his first interview outside of the conservative website Breitbart News since the election, Steve Bannon said that he thinks “darkness is good.”
“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they (liberals) get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing,” The ex-Breitbart executive, who serves as Trump’s chief strategist for the new administration, first told the Hollywood Reporter in an interview.
According to CNN, Bannon has been associated with Breitbart since 2007. The news organization was pro-Donald Trump throughout his presidential campaign, and is known for its nationalist policy positions and conspiracy theories. Since the organization has also been criticized as racist, sexist and anti-Semitic, as well as a mouthpiece for and legitimizer of the alt-right movement, Bannon’s move to Trump’s chief strategist for the new administration has faced scrutiny, notes USA Today. Many are outraged that someone from the news organization will be working in the White House.
In the interview, Bannon also denied being a “white nationalist”:
“I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” he said in the interview. “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If (the Trump White House delivers), we’ll get 60% of the white vote, and 40% of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”
Trump’s presidency will “build an entirely new political movement,” Bannon added, adding that it, “will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
Alt-Right’s Breitbart, InfoWars, Are Massively Popular in Trumplandia
At the end of the interview, Bannon said he always knew Trump would win the election, saying that “I knew that she [Hillary Clinton] couldn’t close.”
“They outspent us 10 to one, had 10 times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn’t matter, they got it all wrong, we’ve got this locked.”