“Let Them Call You Racists” Bannon Tells France’s Nationalist Party

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told members of France’s National Front Party to brush off liberal backlash over their nationalist stance on migrants entering Europe and other controversial topics. 

“Let them call you racists, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists, wear it as a badge of honor,” Bannon sad to an annual gathering of NF members in the French city of Lille, adding that “history is on your side.”

Bannon showed no sign of bad blood with the Trump campaign despite being ousted from his West Wing post last year, along with several recent barbs traded with the President. While praising Trump’s “economic nationalism” platform that Bannon says “does not care about your race, your religion, your ethnicity,” he stated “It cares about one thing: Are you a citizen of the United States of America?” 

Bannon said that it took “someone like Donald Trump, that they run down as a racist every day, to solve the problem of the black and Hispanic working class.” 

To wit: 

“Because of the low levels of human capital and the fact that they often lack adequate English-speaking skills, the vast majority of illegal immigrant workers are employed in low skilled occupations. Even those few with higher skills are often forced to work in the low skilled sector because their illegal status means that they often cannot use their credentials to get better jobs. Thus, the estimated 7.4 million illegal immigrant workers (who are about one-third of the total foreign-born labor force) compete for jobs and income with the other 43 million adult members of the low skilled labor force who are legally entitled to work in the civilian labor force (i.e., native born workers and the remainder of the foreign-born work force who are naturalized citizens, permanent resident aliens, and non-immigrants with visa authorizations to work).”

“Given the inordinately high unemployment rates for low skilled black workers (the highest for all racial and ethnic groups for whom data is collected), it is obvious that the major looser in this competition are low skilled black workers. This is not surprising, since if employers have an opportunity to hire illegal immigrant workers, they will always give them preference over legal workers of any race or ethnic background.” –Vernon M. Briggs Jr.,  Emeritus Professor of Labor Economics, Cornell University (2008)

It seems that from Bannon’s perspective, illegal is the operative word in “illegal immigrant,” and economic nationalism has nothing to do with race, although after his recent fall from grace, having lost both his access to Trump and Breitbart, he may have some trouble convincing mainstream America, which is perhaps why he is now squarely focused on Europe as the NYT reports in its extensive profile of Trump’s former advisor “Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s.“