Why the Big Lie About Steve Bannon?

All the existential rage of the defeated and humiliated elites is now focused against Steve Bannon — the architect of Trump’s victory, the media genius who won the battle with less than a fifth of the financial resources at Hillary Clinton’s disposal.

I know Steve Bannon, and have had several long discussions with him about politics. Steve is fervently pro-Israel, and it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that he is anti-Semitic.

Other observant Jews who know Bannon — for example, Joel Pollak — attest to his support for Israel and his friendship for the Jewish people.

We have learned from the sewage-storm directed at Bannon that the Establishment plays dirty, and that the formerly Republican #NeverTrumpers aren’t just misguided ideologues, but also yellow-bellied, gutter-crawling, backstabbing, bushwhacking liars. Hell hath no fury like a self-designated elite scorned.

They hate Steve Bannon because he beat them, fair and square, on the battlefield of social media. He is the president-elect’s most effective general. Trump’s enemies can’t reverse the results of a national election, but they can try to cut the incoming president off from his popular base.

The charges against Steve Bannon are a tissue of lies without a modicum of merit.

Anyone can search the Breitbart Media archive for posts on Israel, Jews, and related topics, as I have, and determine that Steve Bannon’s hugely successful media platform is 100% pro-Israel.

Not only that: Breitbart consistently reports on the dangers of anti-Semitism around the world.

Not a single article appeared in Breitbart.com during the past two years that could not have appeared in Israel Hayom, the leading Israeli daily.

But that is not what one hears from Ian Tuttle at National Review, who complains that “in May, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol was labeled a ‘Renegade Jew.'”

He was, indeed — but by another Jew, David Horowitz. Horowitz argued that Kristol had betrayed Jewish interests by trying to torpedo Trump.

Tuttle knows this. But Tuttle chose to twist Horowitz’s headline into its opposite.

Tuttle’s colleague Jonah Goldberg also now inveighs against Bannon, but his post is too silly to quote.

Generously, Tuttle allows that Bannon is not Goebbels.

He isn’t. But the Establishment (including the conservative Establishment) media drumbeat against Bannon takes its cue from Goebbels’ doctrine of the Big Lie: repeat it often enough, and people will believe it — no matter how absurd it is.