STEPHEN BANNON



Stephen Bannon (left) with Reince Priebus, Former White House Chief Of Staff

Before he became the chief strategist for Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, 63, was the chief enabler of the alt-right movement. Without Bannon’s ascension to the Oval Office, the movement would likely still be confined to the dark corners of the internet. Born to a working class family in Norfolk, Virginia, Bannon joined the Navy and worked his way up to a Pentagon job.

With an MBA from Harvard, he parlayed work at Goldman Sachs into ownership of a Hollywood production company. While screening In the Face of Evil, his documentary on Ronald Reagan, he met Andrew Breitbart, founder of the conservative news website that bears his name. When Breitbart died suddenly in 2012, Bannon took over Breitba­rt News, and the site took a sharp turn. With Ban­non at the helm, it attacked the GOP establishment under what he described as a “nationalist” ideolo­gy similar to the right-wing ideology that has swept parts of Europe.

Bannon, who denies he is racist, presided over a news empire where he, as The Guardian wrote, “aggressively pushed stories against immigrants, and supported linking minorities to terrorism and crime.” Under Bannon, Breitbart published a call to “hoist [the Confederate flag] high and fly it with pride” only two weeks after the Charleston massa­cre, while the country was still reeling from the hor­rors of the murders. It also published an extremist anti-Muslim tract in which the author wrote that “rape culture” is “integral” to Islam.

JARED TAYLOR



Jared Taylor

A worldly scholar and white na­tionalist, Jared Taylor was born in 1951 to mission­aries working in Japan and educated at Yale and the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. Fluent in Jap­anese and French, he began developing a scholar­ly excuse for racism in 1990 when he founded the New Century Foundation, a think tank that pro­motes “research” arguing for white superiority.

His now-discontinued magazine, American Re­naissance, focused on research claiming links be­tween race and IQ, as well as eugenics, the de­bunked “science” of breeding better humans. Taylor has said that blacks and Hispanics are a “ge­netic drag” on Western society.

Taylor is notorious for The Color of Crime, a 1990s booklet that tried to use crime statistics to “prove” that blacks are far more criminally prone than whites and that argued, based on a misun­derstanding of what constitutes a hate crime, that black “hate crimes” against whites exponentially outnumber the reverse. The booklet remains a sta­ple in white supremacist circles.

GREG JOHNSON

The work of Greg Johnson makes him one of a handful of academics provid­ing a philosophical grounding for the alt-right and other movements.

Johnson writes that he was “red-pilled” in 2000 at a white nationalist gathering in Atlanta. After hearing Holocaust-denier David Ir­ving, Johnson began publishing journals and books to “deconstruct the hegemony of multicultural, egalitarian, and anti-white ideas and create a pro-white counter-hegemony in its place.”

After a stint as editor of The Occidental Quarter­ly, a journal that’s a favorite among academic racists, he founded Counter-Currents Publishing in 2010. As of late 2016, it had published more than 30 books, ac­cording to an interview with Johnson on the Count­er-Currents website. The books include his own titles, Confessions of a Reluctant Hater and Truth, Justice & a Nice White Country. As of late 2016, Counter-Currents had also churned out more than 5,000 articles and 200 podcasts.

Johnson boasts that he has organized “more than 10 White Nationalist weekend conferences and dozens of smaller events.” The driving force behind his prolific output may be best summed up in his own words: “[W]hen our values and worldview have sufficiently permeated the culture, it will be possible for White Nationalists to gain actual political power and put our ideas into effect.”

DAVID HOROWITZ



David Horowitz

Born into an American communist family in 1939, David Horowitz was a founding intellectual member of the New Left in the 1960s and a onetime collaborator with the Black Panther Party. He turned away from the movement he helped found after a female colleague was murdered in San Francisco in 1974. Horowitz was convinced that members of the Panthers were involved.

He turned to the radical right and became a prolific writer of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant propaganda. The David Horowitz Freedom Center has published pamphlets with names like Black Skin Privilege and the American Dream and The Muslim Brotherhood in the Obama Administration. He called President Obama “an evil man” who is “systematically destroying America.”

Horowitz’s annual “Restoration Weekend” and “The Retreat” weekend focus on anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant policies. Past attendees include political figures such as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, former Rep. Michele Bachmann, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, and John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

He honored Milo Yiannopoulos in 2016. Horowitz’s group also worked with Yiannopoulos on a program against “sanctuary campuses.” Horowitz has also underwritten a California col­lege campaign called “Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus,” which attacks efforts to boycott Israel. In an attempt to intimidate, it used posters that named students and faculty involved in such boycotts.