Given Bannon’s responsibilities, some think it is highly unlikely that he is issuing any sort of regular directives from the West Wing. On some level, Breitbart may be fundamentally uncontrollable. For one thing, its writers and editors are based around the country, and many work from home. Even the D.C. staff rarely works out of the Embassy. (Like everyone else these days, staffers communicate via Slack, the enterprise communications software.) For another, whether you agree with it or not, the site is largely staffed by iconoclasts who are more experienced opposing power than placating the White House. “I have no proof otherwise, but I think that Bannon has his hands full and needs to be focused on the White House job,” said Eddie Scarry, a conservative media writer for The Washington Examiner who has followed Breitbart for years. “I really imagine it’s a 24-hour job. He’s focused on political strategy and thinking about long-term things.”

But Scarry also wondered whether Bannon needed to formally issue orders to exert influence. “At the same time,” he told me, “I do imagine that at Breitbart they’re still all very conscious that Bannon reads the content.” Indeed, Bannon hired or nurtured many of Breitbart’s most influential writers and editors, and their devotion to him, people familiar with the inner workings of the site told me, border on extreme loyalty. “If on the way out the door, he told [Breitbart Washington editor] Matt Boyle, ‘You know what I would want you to do? No matter what I say from now on, I want you to do what Steve Bannon circa 2015 would tell you to do,’ then I think it’s pretty clear what you would do, right?” conservative political commentator Matt Lewis observed. “You would keep attacking Paul Ryan and be populist or nationalist. Bannon doesn’t have to pull the strings. As long as that’s the understanding he put in motion, he can have plausible deniability about that.” (Breitbart did not return multiple requests for comment.)

Breitbart is easy to parody—essentially, write an all-caps headline about a random terrorist attack or Obama official, throw in a hyperbolic adjective or two, and publish it on a black-and-orange Web site—but it is still the subject of some profound misconceptions. The staff, for instance, is not composed of only knee-jerk xenophobes and hillbilly rabble-rousers. Many of the writers and editors have undergrad and graduate degrees from Ivy League and other elite schools. Editor-in-chief Alex Marlow is a U.C. Berkeley graduate; editor-at-large Joel Pollack has a Harvard Law degree; and Julia Hahn, a 25-year-old Breitbart prodigy whom Bannon brought to the White House as a special assistant to the president, is a University of Chicago alum. (Bannon’s résumé, of course, includes a degree from Harvard and stint at Goldman Sachs.) Breitbart recently hired John Carney, a veteran financial reporter from The Wall Street Journal, who has a blazing contrarian streak.

“A lot of people go there and they have no frame of reference for whether this is normal or not.”

What differentiates this group from the usual crew of elite school grads who end up at The New York Times or any other traditional New York or D.C.-based media outlet, however, is a profound sense of disgust toward the establishment, a mischievous desire to get under its skin, and a willingness to accept anyone from any background who’s willing to pour his or her life into the site and share the same mission. And Bannon encouraged this, despite his bona fides granting him access to the global elite. It was certainly an attitude I encountered frequently as a recent college graduate in 2011, when I worked at Tucker Carlson’s site, The Daily Caller, and floated among the journalistic world that eventually became known to the mainstream as the alt-right.

Another differentiator is the organization’s youth and journalistic inexperience. While their peers were struggling for bylines at traditional outlets, or seemingly waiting in line behind more experienced reporters for plum beats, young Breitbart reporters enjoyed enormous professional freedom within the site’s nationalistic purview. “There are reasons why the military is interested in having someone who is 18,” said Lewis. “If you’re 18, you’re physically more capable of enduring the rigors of battle and of modern journalism—of staying up crazy hours and working crazy hours. I would also say it’s probably true that somebody who is 18 is probably less developed in terms of the ability to say no to something that could be ethically questionable.”