hahn, julia

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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Earlier this year, reporter<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Lee Stranahan was in the White House press room when another journalist asked him which outlet he worked for.</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Breitbart News,” Stranahan answered, recalling the exchange in a recent phone conversation.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The other journalist laughed, thinking this had to be a joke.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>Breitbart, after all, was largely known, whether justly or not, as a hothouse where the alt-right tended to its most outlandish, paranoid creations: Clinton conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant fearmongering, garden-variety misogyny. One of its story tags was “black crime.” The tag is no longer used, yet it remains attached to a half-dozen stories on the website, the last published just over a year ago.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tradition rules journalism as much as it rules golf, and tradition dictated that the White House press room was for upstanding men and women who’d gone to Columbia Journalism School, putting in their time at the <em>Palookaville Weekly Citizen</em> before earning a coveted spot in the newsroom of <em>The Washington Post</em> or <em>The New York Times</em>, or some other publication that deserved to be in the White House because its mission was sober reportage, not click-bait about “lesbian bridezillas” or “trannies.” Breitbart had no business being there because it would eagerly publish—has eagerly published, in fact—articles about “lesbian bridezillas” and “trannies.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And not just a couple of such articles either: Breitbart’s editorial outlook is not imbued with cultural or political conservatism. Breitbart’s guiding principle is that of the tabloid: If it bleeds, it leads. Especially if the bleeding is caused by an illegal immigrant or some “globalist” Democrat crafting the New World Order on her porch in the Hamptons. This was (and largely remains) a lurid vision of America, terrifying yet enchanting, like one of those 1980s crime blockbusters with weird racial politics and lots of explosions, not to mention at least a couple of scantily clad blondes in search of a musclebound savior, preferably one wearing a sweat-stained American flag bandana.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But there Breitbart was, the outsider suddenly in the inner sanctum of American power, the unpopular kid unexpectedly crowned prom king, sought out by all those who’d once mocked him. Its chief executive, unkempt ultra-nationalist Steve Bannon, is now Trump’s chief strategist. He brought Breitbart staffers with him to the White House, including self-styled terrorism expert Sebastian Gorka and establishment tormentor Julia Hahn, <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/315990-breitbarts-influence-grows-inside-white-house">in what <em>The Hill</em> called</a> “the Breitbartization of the White House.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And even as President Trump was supposedly draining the political swamp, his White House granted Bannon a retroactive ethics waiver that allowed him to keep talking Breitbart staffers, in seeming violation of federal rules. </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Whatever you think of Breitbart’s unabashed distaste for Democrats and centrist Republicans, or its famously incendiary headlines—<b>“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew”</b>—it is inarguable that the site helped elect Trump, in large part by mercilessly shredding every Republican opposed to his candidacy while touting his immigration plan (i.e., the border wall) and making the darkest possible insinuations about Hillary Clinton and her supposedly corrupt coterie. So there Breitbart News was on November 8, shoulder to shoulder with Trump in the electoral trenches, firing away at the Democratic firewall. It crumbled that night, and the plains of the Midwest lay open for the taking. So did the Oval Office.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>And that’s the problem Breitbart faces today, a problem similar to the one plaguing the Trump administration: Being an outsider works only when you’re on the outside. Breitbart’s</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(potential) troubles have been compounded because it sold Trump to its readers as <em>our guy</em>. Bannon had once wanted that guy to be Alabama’s Senator Jeff Sessions, now the U.S. attorney general. Instead, he got an ideology-averse pseudo-mogul, difficult to control but easy to convince. It’s hard to know how much of Breitbart’s support of Trump was a ploy for clicks, but it certainly presented a convincing portrait of an economic nationalist whose business savvy was matched only by his xenophobia.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The sale was made, but as has been frequently the case with Trump, the buyers have started to suspect they may have been played for fools. Breitbart (and, really, the entire right-wing media establishment) is now faced with a bungling chief executive who has embraced NATO and Goldman Sachs, largely ditched his plan for a border wall with Mexico and, during a speech in Saudi Arabia, didn’t utter the words that have been the touchstone of Republican foreign policy: <em>radical Islamic terrorism</em>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What’s to be done about this? Breitbart doesn’t have a particularly rich tonal register, its voice reverting most frequently to outrage, derision or disgust. It is incapable of hitting the complex notes of regret, or even of measured concern. If you wanted nuance, you’d probably be a <em>Weekly Standard</em> subscriber.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They are an outlet that has a very, very large stake in the success of President Trump,” explains Ben Shapiro, <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/03/michelle-fields-ben-shapiro-resign-from-breitbart-220709">who left Breitbart during the presidential campaign, after Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski roughly grabbed Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields.</a> After the incident, Breitbart sided with the Trump campaign over its reporter’s easily verifiable claims. Shapiro, founder of The Daily Wire and host of a popular right-leaning podcast, says that under Bannon,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b>Breitbart had become “Trump’s personal <em>Pravda</em>.”</b></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For Breitbart, the potential spoils of playing the role of a state propaganda organ are great. The dangers are greater still. In February, Alexa, which ranks the popularity of websites, scored Breitbart as the 29th most visited website in the nation. This was an astonishing achievement for a news organization founded a decade ago in a Los Angeles basement, unknown to most Americans until the Trump candidacy ceased to seem like a political sideshow. Breitbart celebrated the achievement with typical bluster, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2017/02/19/breitbart-news-traffic-surpasses-pornhub-espn/">touting its digital supremacy over both ESPN and PornHub</a>. By the beginning of 2017, Breitbart had more unique visitors than Politico, more total traffic (that is, both visitors and page views combined) than <em>The Washington Post</em>. Breitbart had beaten not just the pornographers but also the journalistic elites who’d scorned it for years.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But much like Trump himself, Breitbart News may have expended too much energy on gloating. Breitbart has fallen to 63rd<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>in Alexa’s rankings (its ranking was actually much lower, in the 270s, but after <em>Vanity Fair </em>published that figure, Breitbart complained to Alexa and had its ranking somehow recalibrated). SimilarWeb, a company that uses Google Analytics to analyze web browsing patterns, <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/website/breitbart.com">found</a> that Breitbart had 128 million total visits in November, but that the number has since dropped to 78 million total visits in April. That is still an amazing feat, one that places Breitbart well above most other news organizations. Yet some in the media wonder whether the high watermark of the site’s relevance was the election in November.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right-wing sites like the nascent Heat Street and Tucker Calrson's more established Daily Caller have shown themselves to be more nimble in their coverage, less tied to the White House and more willing to conduct genuine journalism. Traffic numbers aside, those are the sites I visit when I want to understand what the right is thinking.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Web popularity is fleeting, especially so when tethered to the fortunes of one exceedingly volatile, temperamental head of state. Alex Marlow, 31, the site’s Berkeley-educated editor-in-chief, has said he won’t allow for Stalinist shows of loyalty in his newsroom (the newsroom is mostly digital; writers tend to work from home). “When we feel like the president is not honoring the pledges he made to the public, he’s going to get critical coverage,” <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/03/17/watch-breitbart-editor-chief-alex-marlow-interviewed-nbcs-today/">he told NBC’s <em>Today</em> in March</a>.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Breitbart’s attempts to detach from Trump have been minor. For the most part, the site has either pulled its punches or directed them elsewhere. Much like the president, Breitbart is adept at transferring blame, usually to hapless White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, to whom almost unimaginable powers of ruin have been ascribed; the modestly more competent chief of staff, Reince Priebus; or the team of “globalists” (an epithet that, to some, has anti-Semitic connotations) who’ve pulled Trump toward centrist positions that could yet rescue his presidency but alienate his base.</font></p>

<p class="Tweet-text e-entry-title" lang="en" dir="ltr" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; border: none; cursor: text; direction: ltr;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cry more. <a href="https://t.co/X2PkYNzxm6" rel="nofollow noopener" dir="ltr" data-expanded-url="http://trib.al/xBDahxE" class="link customisable" target="_blank" title="http://trib.al/xBDahxE" data-scribe="element:url" style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px;"><span class="u-hiddenVisually" style=" position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important;">http://</span>trib.al/xBDahxE<span class="u-hiddenVisually" style=" position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important;"> </span></a></font></p>

<p><a class="js-openLink u-block TwitterCardsGrid-col--12 TwitterCard-container TwitterCard-container--clickable SummaryCard--small" href="https://t.co/X2PkYNzxm6" rel="noopener" data-theme="light" data-card-breakpoints="w450 w400 w350 w300 w250 w200 w150 w100 w50 " style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border-radius: 0.42857em; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(225, 232, 237); box-sizing: border-box; overflow: hidden; cursor: pointer; outline-offset: -1px; transition: background-color 0.15s ease-in-out, border-color 0.15s ease-in-out; float: left; width: 458px; clear: both; display: block !important;"> </a><a class="js-openLink u-block TwitterCardsGrid-col--12 TwitterCard-container TwitterCard-container--clickable SummaryCard--small" href="https://t.co/X2PkYNzxm6" rel="noopener" data-theme="light" data-card-breakpoints="w450 w400 w350 w300 w250 w200 w150 w100 w50 " style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border-radius: 0.42857em; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(225, 232, 237); box-sizing: border-box; overflow: hidden; cursor: pointer; outline-offset: -1px; transition: background-color 0.15s ease-in-out, border-color 0.15s ease-in-out; float: left; width: 458px; clear: both; display: block !important;"> </a><a class="js-openLink u-block TwitterCardsGrid-col--12 TwitterCard-container TwitterCard-container--clickable SummaryCard--small" href="https://t.co/X2PkYNzxm6" rel="noopener" data-theme="light" data-card-breakpoints="w450 w400 w350 w300 w250 w200 w150 w100 w50 " style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border-radius: 0.42857em; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(225, 232, 237); box-sizing: border-box; overflow: hidden; cursor: pointer; outline-offset: -1px; transition: background-color 0.15s ease-in-out, border-color 0.15s ease-in-out; float: left; width: 458px; clear: both; display: block !important;"> </a><a class="js-openLink u-block TwitterCardsGrid-col--12 TwitterCard-container TwitterCard-container--clickable SummaryCard--small" href="https://t.co/X2PkYNzxm6" rel="noopener" data-theme="light" data-card-breakpoints="w450 w400 w350 w300 w250 w200 w150 w100 w50 " style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border-radius: 0.42857em; border-width: 1px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(225, 232, 237); box-sizing: border-box; overflow: hidden; cursor: pointer; outline-offset: -1px; transition: background-color 0.15s ease-in-out, border-color 0.15s ease-in-out; float: left; width: 458px; clear: both; display: block !important;"> </a><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Luis Gutierrez Whines: Breitbart News Coverage of Illegal Immigrants, Muslim Refugees Too Harsh -...</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Luis Gutierrez Whines: Breitbart News Coverage of Illegal Immigrants, Muslim Refugees Too Harsh</font>

<span class="u-block TwitterCardsGrid-col--spacerTop SummaryCard-destination" style=" margin-top: 0.32333em; text-transform: lowercase; color: rgb(136, 153, 166); max-height: 1.3em; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; text-overflow: ellipsis; display: block !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">breitbart.com</font></span></p>

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<div class="tweet-InformationCircle--bottom tweet-InformationCircle" style=" position: absolute; right: 0px; bottom: 3px; margin: 10px 20px;"><a href="https://support.twitter.com/articles/20175256" class="Icon Icon--informationCircleWhite" title="Twitter Ads info and privacy" data:image="data:image" svg="svg" xml="xml" charset="utf-8,%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2060%2072%22%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23657786%22%20fill-opacity%3D%22.8%22%20d%3D%22M30%2012C16.768%2012%206%2022.765%206%2036s10.766%2023.998%2024%2023.998%2024-10.765%2024-24S43.235%2012%2030%2012z%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20d%3D%22M30%2052c-1.657%200-3-1.343-3-3V38c0-1.657%201.343-3%203-3s3%201.343%203%203v11c0%201.657-1.343%203-3%203z%22%2F%3E%3Ccircle%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20cx%3D%2230%22%20cy%3D%2226.5%22%20r%3D%224.5%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20fill%3D%22%23FFF%22%20d%3D%22M30%2063C15.112%2063%203%2050.888%203%2036S15.112%209%2030%209s27%2012.112%2027%2027-12.112%2027-27%2027zm0-48C18.42%2015%209%2024.42%209%2036s9.42%2021%2021%2021%2021-9.42%2021-21-9.42-21-21-21z%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E" xmlns:data="data" style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; display: inline-block; height: 18px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-size: contain; vertical-align: text-bottom; width: 15px; background-image: url();"><span class="u-hiddenVisually" style=" position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter Ads info and privacy</font></span></a></div>

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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Any attempts to separate themselves from Trump will result in an immediate collapse of their traffic,” warns Shapiro, “and will not result in any additional mainstream credibility.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That credibility won’t be easy to come by, especially from a Washington press corps predisposed to sneer at Breitbart as an unsophisticated arriviste, one that has consistently put click-getting ahead of truth-telling.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In March, the Standing Committee of Correspondents denied Breitbart a congressional press pass. Hadas Gold, a media reporter for Politico, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/breitbart-capitol-hill-credentials-mercers-236547">explained at the time</a> that committee members had questions about Breitbart’s monetary ties to right-wing activists Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, which the site has generally downplayed. The committee seemed to also frown on the fact that Breitbart’s newsroom was a Capitol Hill townhouse, known as “the Breitbart Embassy.”</span></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">News organizations are funded by all sorts of individuals, some of them perhaps unworthy of the high-minded journalistic enterprises they sponsor. And though I’ve never been to the Breitbart Embassy, I doubt it’s all that different from your average Manhattan newsroom, with its abused coffee machine and even more abused bathrooms. Regardless, the correspondents’ committee felt these to be signs of Breitbart’s pervasive amateurism. “The whole thing suggests to me that they’re just not ready for a credential,” a committee member told Politico.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>At the same time, Breitbart’s much-touted plans to expand into Europe, proof of its newfound relevance, seem to have been more talk than anything else.</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In February, <a href="http://www.politico.eu/article/breitbarts-european-offensive-all-talk-no-action/">Politico reported</a> that “difficulties in recruiting journalists, questions about which language to use and a desire to make a high impact on launch have all slowed down efforts to establish French and German editions.” In the course of my reporting, I also heard that domestic bureaus weren’t nearly as well staffed as Breitbart wanted readers to believe.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Right around the same time, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2017/02/21/milo-resigns-breitbart-news/">Breitbart cut ties with its most prominent writer, expert provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos</a> —or “MILO,” as he is called on the site, like a European soccer deity—after it was revealed that he’d made comments supportive of pedophilia.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After the London Bridge attack at the beginning of this month, Breitbart reporter Katie McHugh made Islamophobic comments on Twitter (“There would be no deadly terror attacks in the U.K. if Muslims didn’t live there”). She was promptly fired, in what may have been a sign of how sensitive Breitbart News has become to accusations that it promulgates right-wing extremism. The firing instead exposed it to criticism from those very extremists, some of whom are now calling the site "Cuckbart," using the far right's favorite term (i.e., "cuck," from cuckold) for weak-kneed members of its clan.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The site’s gravest problem may be the wholesale flight of advertisers, who have been pressured by anti-Trump forces to disassociate themselves from any outlet friendly to his administration. "Breitbart ads plummet nearly 90 percent in three months as Trump’s troubles mount," <a href="https://digiday.com/media/breitbart-ads-plummet-nearly-90-percent-three-months-trumps-troubles-mount/">read the headline of a Digiday story by Lucia Moses</a> that detailed the site's deepening financial woes.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The campaign against Breitbart is being led by a group <a href="https://twitter.com/slpng_giants?lang=en&lang=en">that identifies itself on Twitter as Sleeping Giants</a>. At the time of this writing, its online spreadsheet of advertisers that no longer buy ads on Breitbart includes 2,178 entries, from German flagship airline Lufthansa to Zeus, a beard grooming company. A visit to the Sleeping Giants feed finds a tweet at the founder of tech company Taboola, which apparently advertises with Breitbart: “Do you love money more than tolerance?”</font></p>

<h4><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Perils of Access Journalism</font></strong></h4>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Perhaps no man has a more complex relationship with Breitbart than<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><b>Lee Stranahan,</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>one of the most polarizing and unusual figures of the alt-right, which brims with unusual and polarizing figures. He has quit the site twice and been fired once, because of clashes with editors. But having been originally hired by Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, Stranahan sees himself as a Breitbart purist, a “reader’s’ advocate” who will rescue the organization from its own trolliest impulses, returning it to its original mission, which was to...well, that’s actually not entirely clear.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I take that legacy really seriously,” Stranahan tells me while talking about working for Breitbart, whose founder died in 2012, effectively leaving the site in the hands of Bannon, a slovenly, self-styled intellectual with a visceral feel for the kinds of stories that would animate the far right, the stories mainstream conservative publications like the <em>National Review</em> would never publish.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s why I kept going back to Breitbart,” Stranahan says. (None of the several current Breitbart editors contacted for this story responded to a request for comment. Nor did Breitbart Chief Executive Larry Solov or the company’s spokesperson, Chad Wilkinson.)</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>These days, Stranahan hosts a radio show for the Sputnik news agency, the Kremlin-funded outlet that has been friendly to Trump.</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>He also runs an online journalism school and The Populist, a news outlet. His sensibility remains edgy and outré, tending to be angry and suspicious. Those can be helpful qualities for a reporter, allowing Stranahan to spot big stories the mainstream media may have missed, <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/26/nyt-breitbart-was-right-about-pigford/">most notably the Pigford farm loan scandal</a>, which allowed some African-American farmers to collect $50,000 federal compensation payments after falsely claiming discrimination by the federal Farm Service Agency. But those same qualities could be ruinous if you’re trying to cozy up to the White House in hopes of getting first-rate access.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Stranahan is also adept at Periscope, the video-based social media platform owned by Twitter.</b><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>After his latest departure from Breitbart in March, he posted a 23-minute video in which he called himself Breitbart’s “crying mom” and “stern dad,” saying the site was in need of “tough love.” Congressional Republicans were in the midst of their first, and unsuccessful, attempt to bring the American Health Care Act (AHCA) to a vote, in a push led by House Speaker Paul Ryan but supported by Trump. The bill, which would weaken President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act without abrogating it, was toxically unpopular with the American public, so Breitbart had deemed it Ryancare, thus implicitly absolving Trump of any responsibility.</font></p>

<p class="Tweet-text e-entry-title" lang="en" dir="ltr" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; border: none; cursor: text; direction: ltr;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramadan 2017 has claimed 1,000 lives that we know of. Our tally of attacks so far: <a href="https://t.co/hcpbVnk56r" rel="nofollow noopener" dir="ltr" data-expanded-url="http://trib.al/QdHZZbs" class="link customisable" target="_blank" title="http://trib.al/QdHZZbs" data-scribe="element:url" style=" background-color: transparent; color: rgb(43, 123, 185); text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px;"><span class="u-hiddenVisually" style=" position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important;">http://</span>trib.al/QdHZZbs<span class="u-hiddenVisually" style=" position: absolute !important; overflow: hidden !important; width: 1px !important; height: 1px !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px) !important;"> </span></a></font></p>

<h2 class="TwitterCard-title js-cardClick tcu-textEllipse--multiline" style=" margin: 0px 0px 0.15em; padding: 0px; list-style: none; border: none; overflow: hidden; max-height: 1.3em; white-space: nowrap; text-overflow: ellipsis;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">017: The Complete List of Jihadist Attacks Around the World - Breitbart</font></h2>

<p class="tcu-resetMargin u-block TwitterCardsGrid-col--spacerTop tcu-textEllipse--multiline" style=" margin: 0.32333em 0px 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; border: none; overflow: hidden; max-height: 3.9em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ramadan Rage 2017: The Complete List of Jihadist Attacks Around the World</font>

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<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Stranahan, himself a Trump supporter,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></b>would have none of it. “Donald Trump has been actively supporting this bill,” he said in the Periscope video, arguing that the responsibility for the AHCA ended with the president. Breitbart pretending otherwise would only mean disaster for Breitbart.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“You’re making yourself look bad to the outside world. You’re pandering to the worst elements of your readership, who will just go along in complete denial, in complete total denial, that Donald Trump might have actually made a mistake,” Stranahan said, his voice far closer to pain than bitterness.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It’s a bad move,” he warned. “It’s bad move journalistically. It’s a bad move politically.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stranahan tells me what the site lacks most is responsible leadership. “You got people running things, in editorial positions, who are 30 years old,” he says. The reference is clearly to Marlow, the editor-in-chief.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style=" background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Stranahan’s greater nemesis is Matt Boyle, the 29-year-old White House editor, with whom he reportedly clashed. A Bannon protégé who lacks his mentor’s dark intellectual pretensions, Boyle is reportedly disliked by some on the right, including former colleagues at The Daily Caller<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>who are said to have widely mocked him behind his back. <a href="https://www.washingtonian.com/2017/05/21/meet-matt-boyle-breitbarts-man-white-house/">Boyle was recently the subject of a mostly unflattering profile in the <em>Washingtonian</em></a> in which a former editor, Jonathan Strong, happily went on the record to say that Boyle “has two modes: murder and blow job.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Personal rivalries aside, Stranahan’s greater point is that access journalism is not real journalism, that playing publicist to the president ultimately does the president little good while squandering long-sought journalistic credibility. Nor can it be said that Breitbart News has capitalized on that access in the way it must have intended. In February, it landed a White House interview with Spicer, which was broadcast on Facebook Live. The reactions were brutal, with<em> The Washington Post</em>, for example, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/10/sean-spicers-facebook-live-interview-with-breitbart-news-is-the-most-awkward-thing-ever/?utm_term=.3c2c0bb15e94">calling it</a> “the most awkward thing ever.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It was a Trumpian predicament, a classic Rodney Dangerfield moment of respect maddeningly withheld at the moment when it was so plainly deserved.</font></p>

<h4><strong><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alt-Right Theater of the Grotesque</font></strong></h4>

<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They’ve had a lot of growing pains,” says Will Sommer, a writer for <em>The Hill</em><a href="https://tinyletter.com/rightrichter"> who publishes a newsletter on conservative outlets, Right Richter</a>. “It’s easier, if you’re a site like Breitbart, to be in the opposition," especially if your roster was stocked with iconoclasts like Stranahan and Bannon.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, you have editor-at-large <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/25/america-first-donald-trump-muscles-past-montenegro-pm-nato-summit/">Joel Pollak explaining</a> that when Trump pushed aside the prime minister of Montenegro during the recent NATO summit, he was merely asserting American supremacy. And you have reporter <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/05/26/flynn-greg-gianfortes-critics-forgot-that-the-bodyslam-is-a-finishing-move/">Daniel Flynn defending Montana politician Greg Gianforte</a>, who’d assaulted a journalist, for “the good politics of body slams” Gianforte practiced in Bozeman.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s hard to say whether this is what Breitbart readers want or what Breitbart is most capable of giving its readers.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It may simply be that Breitbart was never equipped to become the sober, <em>Wall Street Journal</em> -like publication Marlow seemed to promise after helping to elect Trump</b>. The site was started by Breitbart as “a streamlined news portal for information junkies seeking access to every single story produced by the major newswires,” <a href="http://gawker.com/5398176/bizarre-love-triangle-breitbart-reuters-and-the-drudge-report">as writer Greg Beato described it in a 2009 post for Gawker</a>. Beato pointed to the not-so-secret formula for Breitbart’s success: aggregate wire stories in a way that would earn links from the Drudge Report, the traffic behemoth where Andrew Breitbart had once toiled with the site’s founder, Matt Drudge. Beyond any motivating ideology, the site has been sustained by Drudge-friendly links that consistently drive web traffic. That is as true today as it was eight years ago: SimilarWeb’s analysis shows that 53 percent of all outside referrals to Breitbart come from Drudge. That may seem like a high number, but it actually represents a precipitous drop of 28 percent since March.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Breitbart’s unexpected death, Bannon sharpened the site, turning it into a high-volume theater of the grotesque, the “platform for the alt-right” that most Americans came to know during the presidential campaign. The hiring of figures like Yiannopoulos signaled a more combative stance on cultural issues; Gorka gave the site its strong anti-Muslim edge, while Hahn, a young University of Chicago graduate, came to so closely mirror her boss’s vituperative attacks on the Republican Party’s centrists that she came to be known as <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/becoming-steve-bannons-bannon">“Bannon’s Bannon.”</a></font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Bannon built a far-right-wing media sledgehammer, an enforcer of orthodoxy that its fans praised for its swagger and that its critics labeled xenophobic or worse.” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/bannon-molded-breitbart-into-a-far-right-sledgehammer-how-it-will-be-wielded-in-the-trump-era/2017/02/19/422fbed2-f704-11e6-be05-1a3817ac21a5_story.html?utm_term=.5b65ce77218b">That was the colorful description offered by <em>The</em> <em>Washington Post</em></a> as Bannon moved from the Breitbart Embassy to the big white mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. The audience was—and remains—younger and more sophisticated than that of Fox News yet animated by the same resentments: the Clintons, Mexico, Muslims, Goldman Sachs, Lena Dunham.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Breitbart can’t pivot away from right-wing click-bait to sober, deeply reported news any more than Trump can pivot away from paranoid tweets, self-pitying broadsides against the media and weekends at Mar-a-Lago. Trump, at least, has daughter Ivanka to keep him in check, or so they say. With Bannon gone, it’s hard to see anyone at the Breitbart Embassy overseeing the kind of radical editorial overhaul that would make Breitbart more like the <em>Journal </em>and less like World Net Daily.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the same time, the president it helped elect has an approval rating below 40 percent, making the daily job of selling his policies even more difficult. Breitbart remains an ally, though. If it has anxieties about Trump, it isn’t quite ready to share them just yet. That’s because while Drudge provides the traffic, Bannon provides the access, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/04/27/exclusive-white-house-chief-of-staff-reince-priebus-on-first-100-days-president-trump-going-big-league-on-trade/">the interviews and “exclusives”</a> that are the meat of Breitbart’s reporting. Anger the president, and the gates to the White House might close. That has made it difficult for Breitbart to honestly ascribe Trump’s shortcomings and failures to Trump himself.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They’re failing to grapple with news of the day,” says <em>The Hill</em> ’s Sommer. “Eventually, your audience starts to get disillusioned.” </font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This is true not only of Breitbart but of an entire right-wing media ecosystem still largely unwilling to call out Trump on the plainly unrealistic promises he made</b>. Sustained illusion thus becomes the best antidote to creeping disillusion. So in the Breitbart world, the jobs have all come back from China, while “the illegals” have all gone back to Mexico. The administrative state will be deconstructed, just as Bannon promised, until there are so few bureaucrats left in Washington they can share a single Uber out of town. NATO, NAFTA, NEA: They are all dead, or dying, cowering in the last dank dungeons of the “deep state.”</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stranahan isn’t optimistic about the long-term success of this approach for Breitbart. “I would not be surprised if their readership goes down again,” he says of the site he once loved but no longer recognizes."</font></p>

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<h2 style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 30px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 38px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In his first days as president, Donald Trump has added two Breitbart staffers to his administration, highlighting his bond with the populist right-wing news outfit formerly run by his chief strategist Steve Bannon.</font></h2>

<p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 30px; line-height: 27px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Julia Hahn, </b>who covered immigration issues for Breitbart through an aggressively anti-immigration lens, has been named special assistant to the president, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNNMoney.</font></p>

<p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 30px; line-height: 27px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sebastian Gorka, the site's national security editor and a policy consultant on Trump's presidential campaign, has joined the Trump White House in a yet-to-be-announced role, a source with knowledge of the matter confirmed. Business Insider, which was <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sebastian-gorka-trump-breitbart-2017-1?op=1" target="_blank" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">first to report the move</a>, said Gorka will likely have a role on Trump's National Security Council.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment regarding the hires. But the moves indicate that Breitbart, which praised and defended Trump throughout his campaign, now has an open door to his White House.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hahn's hire also threatens to antagonize House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans at a moment when they are looking to establish common ground with the new administration.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>A former executive producer for Laura Ingraham, Hahn gained notoriety at Breitbart for attacking Ryan on immigration policy</b>. In December 2015, she and Bannon co-authored an article titled "Paul Ryan Betrays America" in which they accused Ryan of "a total and complete sell-out of the American people masquerading as an appropriations bill."</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When Hahn asked a panel of lawmakers around the same time if they would support a suspension of Muslim immigration into the United States, Rep. Raul Labrador, an Idaho Republican, shot back: "I don't answer questions from you, because you are not a truthful reporter."</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gorka, who has been with Breitbart since 2014, is the author of "Defeating Jihad" and served as a paid policy consultant on Trump's presidential campaign. He was also a Fox News contributor up until his appointment in the Trump administration.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At Breitbart, Gorka was an aggressive critic of President Barack Obama's handling of ISIS and other terrorist groups, often arguing that the Obama administration empowered America's enemies.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gorka is also awaiting a court hearing in Arlington County Criminal Court relating to a January 2016 incident in which he was stopped by Transportation Security Administration officers for going through security with a 9mm handgun in his carry-on bag. That incident was confirmed by TSA and by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which confiscated his weapon and charged him with a weapons offense.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Court filings show that Gorka is now awaiting adjudication in Arlington County Criminal Court after accepting a guilty verdict without admission of guilt, or what's known as an Alford plea. The court date is scheduled for February 3.</font>

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gorka, his defense attorney, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and White House spokesperson Hope Hicks all did not respond to multiple requests for comment regarding Gorka's pending court appearance.</font>

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