Steve Bannon ( Elekes Andor)

Former White House strategist and Trump campaign “CEO” Steve Bannon has been in the news recently. CNN host and author Fareed Zakaria came to his defense after he was uninvited from the New Yorker festival. Zakaria also accused the left of being intolerant of other ideas for their treatment of Bannon.

Zakaria, who also gave Bannon a platform on his show “GPS,” doesn’t seem to realize what Bannon really stands for. Zakaria is an Indian immigrant who is now a naturalized American. He is the American dream — a smart immigrant, who came here legally, went to an Ivy league school and found success in the media world. He’s also everything that Bannon hates, because Bannon is a white nationalist. And he proudly admits that. According to former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s book, Bannon said he “was a proud white man.”

In addition, he dubbed “Breitbart,” the home of the “alt-right.” Alt-right is a euphemism for white supremacist. Bannon managed to make Breitbart, which already espoused far-right views, even more hateful. Under Bannon, Breitbart became openly racist and even included a section called “Black Crime.” If you ever want to see the depths of human depravity check out the Breitbart comments section. However, I suggest you don’t do it on a full stomach. When confronted on this by the Daily Beast, Bannon said, “What do you mean white nationalists, neo-Nazis? That’s just a flat-out lie. That’s bulls**t.”

But here is a comment I pulled today from a story about Colin Kaepernick. A Breitbart commenter said, “He looks like a toilet brush…and people say he’s black…well he’s dark..but not black like buckwheat black…he’s more like abdulah goat humping black.”

By the way, Breitbart was funded by hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer who thought that African Americans were doing great before the Civil Rights Act.

Zakaria’s defense of Bannon is curious because if Bannon had his way, Zakaria wouldn’t even be allowed in America. Bannon wants a ban on all kinds of immigration, both illegal and legal. Like Trump, he wants to Make America White Again. However a nation that wants to remain prosperous should be trying to recruit, hard-working, intelligent immigrants, especially immigrants who add their brain power to America’s technology field. But that’s not what Bannon wants. He wants to maintain America’s white hegemony.

Consider the comments he made during a 2015 interview with Donald Trump on his now-defunct Sirius XM radio show. Bannon complained about the number of Asians working in Silicon Valley.

“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think…” said Bannon. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

According to the Huffington Post, Bannon’s figures were way off. Only 27 percent of Silicon Valley workers are Asian. It’s still overwhelmingly white, a fact I confirmed in a recent Our Weekly article. And who cares, if the people can do the job and start-up billion-dollar companies like Yahoo, which was co-founded by Taiwan native Jerry Yang.

During the interview, Trump said the country should strive to retain smart immigrants. But he has since come over to Bannon’s worldview.

Ironically Bannon and Trump both bill themselves as populists. (According to Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” Trump couldn’t even pronounce the word properly at first.) But this claim is pretty flimsy. Trump, an Ivy league college grad, inherited a fortune from his father, and his policies have screwed over working people. Just because he eats junk food and mangles his grammar, doesn’t mean he ever had anything in common with the working class.

Bannon is a fake populist too. He graduated from Harvard, and made millions working in Hollywood and on Wall Street, two industries he now rails against. According to the Daily Beast, he also flies on a private jet and only stays in five-star hotels. Maybe he once was a blue-collar guy, but he isn’t anymore.

Some people have suggested that Bannon has a razor-sharp intellect. But before he joined the Trump train, Bannon was convinced he could sell Sarah Palin as a presidential candidate. I guess he ignored her thimble-deep intellect and scandal-prone family. He also showed his lack of political guile by pushing for the GOP to raise the tax rate on the wealthy to close to 50 percent. I’m not a Republican, but I know enough to realize that raising taxes on the rich is GOP heresy. No wonder he was fired from the White House!

Bill Maher, the acerbic host of HBO’s “Real Time,” recently called Bannon on his BS in a one-on-one interview.

Maher said, “I think you look for morons who you can put your ideas in.”

And when Bannon tried to claim that people like CNN anchor Don Lemon were more racist than the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, N.C., Maher laughed in his face.

Last week, the world did the same thing to Bannon’s protege.