Bannon has heavily promoted the Trump campaign and effectively forced out a Breitbart reporter, Michelle Fields, who was assaulted by Trump campaign manager Lewandowski earlier this year.
The same day Trump named Bannon to head his campaign, there were reports that he had been meeting as well with Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News who was forced out last month over charges of sexual harassment against numerous former and current employees of the network. There have been published suggestions that Trump, Bannon and Ailes are preparing to launch a new right-wing movement, perhaps centered on a cable television network, after Trump's expected defeat in the November 8 election.
The first political product of the new regime was the Trump campaign's first general election television commercial, a vitriolic attack on immigrants, aimed not at convincing any voters who might be "on the fence," but rather at whipping up hatred and racism among Trump's most fanatical supporters.
Meanwhile, a further connection between the Trump campaign and fascistic circles has come to light, with a report by McClatchy News Service on anti-Semitic comments by Joseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon official, who is one of Trump's five-man team of foreign policy advisers.
Three former Pentagon officials have filed complaints charging they were harassed and even fired from their jobs at the instigation of Schmitz because of their Jewish heritage during the period he was inspector general of the Pentagon from 2002 to 2005. According to one of the complaints, Schmitz "allegedly lectured [the complainant] on the details of concentration camps and how the ovens were too small to kill 6 million Jews."
Schmitz, who left the Pentagon to become general counsel of the parent company of the mercenary supplier Blackwater, is the son of the late Republican Congressman John Schmitz, a notorious anti-Communist aligned with the John Birch Society.
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