Democrats, after having lost the Presidential election by playing every other card in the deck of identity politics, had outgoing senator Harry Reid take to the Senate floor Tuesday begging President-Elect Donald Trump to rescind his appointment of Breitbart CEO Stephen K. Bannon as White House Chief Strategist.
Even though men and women of various races have defended Bannon on this point, Reid continued the crusade to condemn the Breitbart CEO as a white supremacist who hates Jews, blacks, and everything else in between. His address below:
President-elect Trump must act immediately to make Americans like that seventh-grade girl feel that they are welcome in his America. Healing the wounds he inflicted will take more than words. talk is cheap and tweets are cheaper. Healing wounds is going to take action, but so far, Mr. President, rather than healing these wounds, Trump’s actions have deepened them.
In one of his very first if not his first official act, he appointed a man seen as a champion of white supremacy as the number-one strategist in the White House — number one, everybody else under him. According to CNN, and I quote — “white nationalist leaders are praising Trump’s decision to name Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist.” In the same article, they say they see Bannon “as an advocate for policies they favor.”
According to [Southern] Poverty Law Center, Bannon “was the main driver between [sic] Breitbart becoming a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill.” When asked to comment on Bannon’s hiring, KKK leader David Duke told CNN, “I think that’s excellent.” Court filings stated that Bannon said “that he doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be whiny brats, and that he didn’t want his girls to go to school with Jews.” That’s a court document.
By placing a champion of white supremacists a step away from the Oval Office, what message does Trump send to the young girl who woke up Wednesday morning in Rhode Island afraid to be a woman of color in America? It’s not a message of healing. If Trump is serious about seeking unity, the first thing he should do is rescind his appointment of Steve Bannon.
Rescind it. Don’t do it. Think about this. Don’t do it.
As long as a champion of racial division is a step away from the Oval Office, it would be impossible to take Trump’s efforts to heal the nation seriously. So I say to Donald Trump: take responsibility. Rise to the dignity of the office of the President of the United States. Instead of hiding behind your Twitter account, and show America that racism, bullying, and bigotry have no place in the White House or in America.
Ever since leftists began blowing the whistle on Bannon's supposed anti-Semitism, Jews from David Horowitz and Alan Dershowitz have leaped to his defense. Dershowitz said of him Tuesday:
I think we have to be very careful before we accuse any particular individual of being an anti-Semite. The evidence certainly suggests that Mr. Bannon has very good relationships with individual Jews. My former researcher, Joel Pollak, is an Orthodox Jew who takes off the Jewish holidays, who is a committed Jew and a committed Zionist, and he has worked closely with him. He has been supportive of Israel.
So, I haven’t seen any evidence of personal anti-Semitism on the part of Bannon. I think the (Breitbart) headline about a Conservative Republican being a renegade Jew was ill-advised. But it doesn’t suggest to me anti-Semitism. It suggests to me a degree of carelessness.
Following Reid's lament, Sen. John Cornyn spoke on the Senate floor and rightfully called Reid a sore loser.
"We used to call people like that ‘sore losers,'" he said. "But frankly, what he does is also contribute to the coarsening of our discourse and debate here in the United States Senate."
