Inside Steve Bannon's Plans for a Worldwide Media Empire

The French media are ahead of American media when it comes to understanding the dangers of Trump's inner circle. A French cable television channel aired a segment on the rise of Steve Bannon over the weekend, comparing him to Hitler's media man, Joseph Goebbels.

The people of France have already had a taste of Bannon mingling in their country's alt-right media and politics. All he had to do, the Daily Beast notes, "was say he’d like to expand Breitbart’s operations to France and allude to Marion Maréchal-Le Pen as 'the new rising star' on the French version of the alt-right and she started gushing on Twitter in English." 

This isn't the first time Bannon has reached out to the European far-right, which has seen a staggering increase in power in recent years, with elected officials and political operatives across the continent, including Marine Le Pen in France, Frauke Petry in Germany and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. The Daily Beast (among others) reminds us that Bannon has been reaching out to these parties for years. Their names include the "United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the Party for Freedom Party (PVV) in the Netherlands, all of which have earned glowing coverage on the pages of Breitbart."

But the election of Donald Trump makes Bannon's overtures all the more frightening. Nigel Farage, a driver of the Brexit disaster, has already visited Trump in Trump Tower, and toured with Trump during the election. Breitbart has operations in London and Jerusalem. While the latter may sound strange coming from an organization run by a known anti-Semite, founder Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012, was Jewish and a staunch supporter of Israel. (One Jewish ex-editor of the site says he felt the alt-right's vitriol when he refused to support Trump.)

“He has long wanted to work with all of those parties, but that was only in promoting them with Breitbart,” a source close to Bannon told the Daily Beast. “Now he has the power of the White House to do it.”

Geert Wilders is already aping Trump's slogans, promising to "Make the Netherlands Great Again." Like Trump, Wilders is no stranger to using the Kremlin’s RT television network/proganda machine to promote his views. He told the station, "Politics will never be the same and what I call the ‘patriotic spring’ is an enormous incentive. What I say to the Europeans is, ‘Look at America, what America can do, we can do as well.’”

A Bannon media empire would make this infinitely easier.