Sunday, the Trump transition team announced that conservative media king and alleged anti-Semite Stephen K. Bannon will serve as chief strategist and senior counsel to the President-elect. They also announced that former RNC chair and terrible name haver Reince Priebus will be the chief of staff.
Bannon—the man Bloomberg once called “the most dangerous political operative in America”—ran conservative news site Breitbart from March 2012 to August 2016, when he left to join Trump’s campaign as chief executive officer. In 1996, Bannon was charged with domestic violence. His ex-wife also claims he said, “He doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls to go to school with Jews.” (((Welcome to the White House, baby.)))
Breitbart has supported the careers of prominent shitbags like tech blogger Milo Yiannopolous, along with his 44 interns. If the site’s most infamous headlines—written under Bannon’s leadership—are indicative of the future of technology and science in this country, it is bleak. Very, very bleak.
The Future of Health
Dumbest quotes: “I’d like you to imagine that you are Neo from...The Matrix. For the purposes of this thought experiment, I am Laurence Fishburne, except with really good hair, a charming personality, and of course I’m much blacker than he is.”
“Your birth control injection will add on pounds that will prevent the injection you really want — of man meat.”
Bleakest quotes: “A single month of it would be enough to have even the most loyal woman deliberately tripping attractive men and falling on top of them… regardless of affirmative consent.”
“Now, you may be asking what I would have women replace the Pill with, since it’s obviously so awful. Condoms? Vasectomies? The answer is: nothing. We need the kids if we’re to breed enough to keep the Muslim invaders at bay.”
Number of Facebook shares: 9,445
Dumbest quotes: “Abortion is the business model of Planned Parenthood, and business is booming.”
“Richards is well on her way to personally matching Hitler’s body count. Breitbart has done the grim maths so you don’t have to.”
Bleakest quotes: “Planned Parenthood has amassed a Third Reich-style death count completely legally and while pocketing half a billion dollars a year to do so.”
“But for now we can say this: in a lineup of history’s biggest killers, Cecile Richards is currently in the middle of the list behind Japan’s Togo.”
Number of Facebook shares: 8,450.
Dumbest quotes: “The school board makes the claim that a boy can have a girl brain, something not supported by science.”
“Given the hipness of transsexualism with people like Caitlyn Jenner and Jazz Jennings, there might be a third category, especially among children, and that is fashion.”
Bleakest quotes: “The WHO performed a meta-analysis of 15 different countries and found that men who dress as women are 49 times more likely to contact the HIV virus than the general population.”
“Paul McHugh says [people are trans because]...of psychological disturbances that are not solved through dressing up or through surgery.”
Number of Facebook shares: 2,691.
Bonus content:
Bannon once wrote on the subject of Paul Ryan’s plan to overhaul the mental health system, “I’ve got a cure for mental health issue. Spank your children more.”
The Future of Tech
Dumbest quotes: “Your vagina is not a qualification for a job, for political office or for special treatment. Tits or GTFO is the second commandment of the male internet.”
“[T]hrust together constantly, [modern society] simply doesn’t work — especially if feminism has systematically infiltrated or shut down male-only spaces like golf clubs and pubs, leaving men with no outlet but online comment sections.”
Bleakest quotes: “There’s a reason that male golfers don’t compete against female golfers. They’re in a league of their own, and it would end in tears. It’s time to apply this logic to the online world.”
“Women should just log off. Given that men built the internet, along with the rest of modern civilisation, I think it’s only fair that they get to keep it.”
“I, Donald Trump and the rest of the alpha males will continue to dominate the internet without feminist whining.”
“As insane as my suggestion sounds, it’s genuinely the best recipe for harmony between the sexes until women can stop lying about “abuse” and “harassment” or at least learn to take it as well as dish it out.”
Number of Facebook shares: 7,778
Dumbest quotes: “Their test, designed to provide empirical ballast to a feminist agenda, ... suggested that employers actually discriminate in favor of women, choosing them in favor of men when they believe them to be competent enough.”
“Online commenters on the report were quick to spot the irony.”
Bleakest quotes: “Is this a ‘gender gap’ in technology, or are women simply not trying?”
“Despite claiming to make women sound like men, and men sound like women, to my ears the voice-changing technology made female interviewees sound more like trannies, with the signature croaky-sounding pitch change.”
Number of Facebook shares: 8,099.
Dumbest quotes: “52 per cent of British Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal, 23 per cent would like to see Sharia law in England... Imagine if the same thing were to be asked of a Silicon Valley company. Would a Bay Area startup really want to hire someone who believes homosexuality should be illegal?”
“ ‘Islamophobia’ is a silly myth put about by left-wing journalists.”
Bleakest quotes: “Western culture, for example, does not endorse the oppression of women, the murder of apostates or the execution of homosexuals ... Muslim cultures do.”
“If Silicon Valley’s inhabitants were thinking critically and were not so obsessed with gender and race, they would recognise their own hypocrisy and realise that building the wall isn’t, for most Americans, a matter of race or even of economics — but rather a last-ditch attempt to rescue western civilisation from oblivion.”
Number of Facebook shares: 3,976.
Dumbest quotes: “I predicted that his campaign would focus on trolling the lazy, entitled Establishment elites the American people hate so much... As always, I was right.”
“I hate to toot my own horn, but I also predicted Trump would perform well with blacks.”
Bleakest quotes: “The internet made them look stupid. The internet made them look weak. And what begins on /pol/ and leaks out into Twitter has a way of colouring media coverage and, ultimately, public perception, even among people who don’t frequent message boards.”
“Establishment types no doubt think this is all silly, schoolyard stuff. And it is. But it’s also effective.”
Number of Facebook shares: 4,705.
The Future of Our Planet
Dumbest/bleakest quotes: “Lord Christopher Monckton, chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute and expert for the Heartland Institute...believes the Obama administration is spending vast amounts of money on ‘trashing their own economy by driving every steelworks and aluminum works overseas, by not allowing the development of the XL pipeline, interfering with fracking, and establishing a war on coal.’”
“Bannon asked Monckton why does he believe Pope Francis is getting involved in the climate change movement... Monckton explained that if one looks at the book of Genesis...and heroes of the church like St. Francis of Assisi, taking care of the earth has always been ‘part of established Catholic social teachings. Nothing new in any of that. But what happened was a communist managed to get control of the pontifical academies of sciences and social sciences—Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo.’”
Number of Facebook shares: 1,370.
Dumbest/bleakest quotes: “There is a natural inverse relationship between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2levels.”
“There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution.”
“The climate alarmists were abandoned by scientific reality long ago – and the only reason they keep on trying to prop up their bankrupt cause is either because it pays the mortgage or because it suits their left-liberal Weltanschauung [a particular philosophy or view of life]– or both.”
“None of the people involved in [the global warming] scam deserve the merest scintilla of respect. They are pure scum.”
Number of Facebook shares: 3,051.
The Future of Media
Although this wasn’t written under Bannon’s leadership, it nevertheless provides us deeper insight into the troubled future of digital media.
Dumbest quote: “Breitbart’s Facebook followers punch far above their weight class and constitute one of the most engaged and politically savvy online communities in the world.”
Bleakest quotes: “Breitbart beat other news organisations such as CNN, The Hill, and The Guardian with a total combined 9,098,013 Twitter and Facebook interactions, of which 89% came from Facebook and 11% from Twitter.”
“This October, Breitbart News broke company traffic records, generating over 240 million pageviews and 37 million unique visitors.”
“While several publishers have enjoyed an uptick in traffic due to election coverage, we are proud to have built a massive and deeply-rooted community that will remain long after the election cycle fades.”
Number of Facebook shares: 18,754.
God help us all.