1: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38787241
2: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge-a...
3: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...
1: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38787241
2: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge-a...
3: http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/12/the-british-data-cruncher...
You are giving a tool to the unscrupulous to bury conversations by labeling their opponents "conspiracy theorists."
Would you say Edward Snowden is in the same bucket at Bannon?
1: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/01/28/terror-ti...
The former term is how his detractors, including me, would describe him. The latter is a term he famously used for himself.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-banno...
Though Bannon may be more accurate than he realizes about being a "Leninist" since he wants his faction to be the vanguard party with power derived from the white working class and voters who identify with such.
But since when is he a neo-nazi? Breitbart.com is about as pro-Israel as you can get, and Breitbart himself was a Jew. Trump's daughter Ivanka is also a Jew, as is her husband, who is now another special advisor.
His antisemitism has been well documented. How he gets along with Kushner and Ivanka, I have no idea. I suspect they don't get along at all. There will plenty of books on Trump's Team of Rivals, though probably much less glowing than for Lincoln's similar team.
One reference for Bannon's antisemitism: http://www.timesofisrael.com/stephen-bannon-5-things-jews-ne...
Speaking of which: I also wouldn't be surprised if Bannon is behind Trump's recent Holocaust statement in which Jews aren't mentioned at all.
> How he gets along with Kushner and Ivanka, I have no idea.
The obvious answer is that he's not anti-Semitic.
You can try to make up stuff, or pull one off references from divorce proceedings, but he was head of a strongly Pro-Israel website, created by a Jew. If he's anti-Semitic, he's a failure. He's working for a president that obviously supports and loves Jews, since his daughter converted to Judaism without any issue from him, and his Jewish son-in-law is his top adviser.
If you think he's some Othellian figure that can endure working for so many Jews and espousing Jewish values, all for the chance to whisper one-or-two white nationalist policies into Trumps brain, you're absolutely crazy. Okkam's razor, dude. The simplest answer is that you're wrong and he's not anti-semitic.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/11...
As for who wrote the executive orders:
" Inside the West Wing, it is almost impossible for some aides to know what is in the executive orders, staffers say. They have been written by Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior White House adviser for policy, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, according to people familiar with the matter. Ideas for some of the Trump executive orders came from transition officials and so-called “landing teams,” " --http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trumps-flashy-executiv...
How can someone be pro-Israel and antisemitic?
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/steve-bannon-made-breitb...
http://forward.com/news/israel/354402/how-steve-bannon-and-b...
And of course he would put up working with Jews if it meant he had a seat at the table and a chance to enact his wildest dreams. In a choice between power and principles, most people chose power. Your proposed Occam's Razor doesn't work because you're ignoring the most obvious thing: the desire of people for power. If being Trump's right hand man means putting up with Kushner, then so be it. I'm sure Kushner, as the other key figure standing beside the throne, feels the same way. He can put up with an antisemite in order to be in the White House.
Think about it. Occam's Razor is for the simplest choice. Assuming Bannon's racism, Bannon's choice here is: work with Jews and have a lot of power, or avoid Jews and go back to the mundane life as a publisher with no seat at the table. There's really no question of what he would choose.
Nothing you suggest makes sense. The only answer that makes logical sense is that he's not an anti-semite. None of your conspiracist theories make any sense.
But then again, if you think Bush was behind the 9-11 bombings, then there's nothing really to discuss either.
(And Snowden is more accurately called a 'whistleblower' or maybe, if you want to get creative, a 'conspiracy practitioner'
I find this terrifying, that an untested extremist is the one in charge of our entire foreign policy approach, and that his goal is greater militarization and igniting populism. Not going to invoke Godwin's Law, but I think the parallels are obvious.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-steve-bannon-national-s...
1. http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/28/politics/donald-trump-travel-b...
A politician using an analytics firm that uses psychological profiling...welcome to the 20th century.
OP is presenting it as if it's an unusual affront to democracy. It's extremely disingenuous or extremely ignorant, I'm not sure which.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-obamas-team-us...
All this is, is a refinement of what politicians always did. Micro-targeting based on personality traits is just the natural evolution of the tradition of pandering to voters. Quantitative change, not qualitative.
In addition, Obama, Clinton and Trump all employed or used persuasion experts to help their campaigns (Cialdini for the former two, and Trump for himself). This is absolutely unavoidable, and again no qualitative difference between persuasion experts and the traditional PR consultants or speech writers.
And regardless, he was elected in a fair vote. The end. If you run another election now he'll win again.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:ODNI_Stateme...
> being powered by
Donald Trump needs a supernatural explanation, presumably because you think he's incompetent. At the least, you're saying he can't do what he's doing by himself.
> conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon
The term "conspiracy theory" is supposed to discredit him. But, if he has trouble telling truth from reality, why is he enabling Donald Trump? People who make mistakes interpreting data lose elections.
> board member of Cambridge Analytica, an analytics firm that used psychological profiling to cynically exploit the American electorate.
It's called "marketing", and everyone here does it. Nothing wrong with it. Again, how's a "conspiracy theorist" going to exploit psychological profiling? They're supposed to see patterns where none exist, which means whatever analytics they're doing would be ineffective.
> This is an existential threat to the American public and to the world
You haven't actually described anything that could be an "existential threat". Examples include: Nuclear war, a large asteroid, an incurable highly contagious disease, etc. You can only call him an "existential threat" if you believe America and the world will literally stop existing in 4-8 years.
You did say it right after a comment about being appointed to a "national security" position. I imagine many people on HN get triggered by the phrase "national security", getting flashbacks to George Bush and the Patriot Act. If you think politicians have been abusing the term "national security" to push their bad policies, you should welcome the position being effectively removed from the President's advisory.
Nothing you've presented is really bad, so I'm not really sure how to respond to the facts. People might be interested in Stefan Molyneux's "The Untruth about Steve Bannon" video[1], though. He's not as bad as people are making him out to be.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/a-clari...
Cohen is no liberal; he cofounded PNAC and served as a deputy under Rice in the Bush administration. And his take on Trump's last week is even more urgent than the parent comment's.
It is in fact not normal at all for the President's "chief strategist" --- an informal, non-confirmable role, created to house someone who stood a decent chance of washing out of Senate confirmation --- to replace the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Energy, and the Director of National Intelligence on the NSC PC.
Someone watching this unfold dispassionately might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that Bannon is there because he doesn't trust Trump alone in a room by himself with a bunch of actual adults; Trump is, as has been reported for over a decade, famously impressionable.
"Partisan" doesn't mean "wrong".
This is a good argument. Many of these White House roles need to be confirmed; even if they are mostly advisory, because the law assumes that the President's advisors influence his decisions. If people want to say "Steve Bannon needs to be confirmed by the Senate", that's something I could probably be convinced of.
To be clear, there are probably some good arguments against the executive order. In particular:
* It affects green card holders, who are legally allowed to travel to the US.
* There are rumors of people being asked to voluntarily renounce their green cards, which if not illegal is at least immoral.
* The order probably shouldn't include Iran. I think the list of countries was based on one that's already in law?
* Maybe they should've given people a week or a couple days to get back into the US, rather than immediately banning them.
It's only saving grace is that it only lasts for 90 days, so it was intended to be temporary while they write up some actual reform. And I know of at least one other case where the court has allowed something unconstitutional because it was temporary to solve a specific problem(Affirmative Action).
It'd be nice if there was a "Stefan Molyneux of the left". As it is, it's hard to read through all the fear to find the arguments.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182
> Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President"
> Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.
I don't think anyone here explicitly said it was illegal, but I've seen a lot written that seemed to indicate that it was, which was the basis for me singling out the green cards in my other comments.
The rest of the order is partially fulfilling his campaign promises, and the broad idea is what's expected of him.
This is understating the case. Green card holders aren't just "allowed to travel to the US" - that's true of any visa holder. Green card holders live in the US and aren't allowed to come home.