Fake News from Left-leaning Sites

[Dill]

(05-05-2017, 10:30 PM)NATI BENGALS Wrote: How do you figure?

Dude is in the white house. He is the "CHIEF STRATEGIST". How is that a false equivalency? That is called the reality of the situation. 

You can spin out whatever rankings you want. Fact of the matter is Steve Bannon and Breitbart are very much tied to the president. And the president has repeated things from Breitbart since he has been in charge of our country. 

Your president is saying things he reads from Breitbart. That alone makes it a mainstream publication. 

I wouldn't call Breitbart a "mainstream publication," but I would say that it is mainstreaming many alt-right ideas and memes. Bannon claims much of the responsibility for that.  Trump's presidency has certainly given that sector of the right greater visibility--and influence in national politics.

More than ideas are mainstreamed here as well. The general coarsening of public discourse and the constant denial of factual accuracy matched by constant assertion of Trump hyperbole (5 million illegal voting, rapists pouring across the borders, WIRETAPPING!) tends to unsettle any public discourse around policy issues.  People can advance racist policies and scream "race card" when called on it.

The president not only reads Breitbart, but he sucks conspiracy theories from it as well. If you were a foreign intel service and you wanted to disrupt/influence our foreign or domestic policy, you might do that if you could figure out what catches his eye (something about how he "really" won the popular vote?) and laden it with something you wanted him to believe and act on, it might work.