Trump chief Steve Bannon had secret ties to anti-LGBT hate group
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Donald Trump’s former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon secretly corresponded with representatives of an anti-LGBT hate group.
Bannon, who runs far-right news service Breitbart, served as chair of Trump’s election campaign, and was the Republican President’s Chief Strategist from January to August this year.
But according to Buzzfeed News, Bannon has secret links with figures inside the Family Research Council – which is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-LGBT hate group.
Buzzfeed published extracts from emails that Bannon exchanged with FRC official Chris Gacek, who aids the group’s work fighting against LGBT rights and liberal values.
(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
In the emails, sent in August 2016, Gacek and Bannon hatch a plot to use Breitbart for an apparent attempt to infiltrate social media giant Facebook by flooding company’s job vacancies with far-right applicants.
Gacek suggests an opening is “perfect for Breitbart to flood the zone with candidates of all stripe who will report back to you (…) with INTEL”.
Bannon loops in then-Breitbart columnist and ‘alt-right’ figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos, asking him to “get on this”.
It is unclear whether the plan was ever put into effect.
The Family Research Council, an anti-LGBT hate group, is run by Tony Perkins.
Perkins, an extreme evangelical fundamentalist, has called for the US government to be ‘purged’ of gay people and LGBT allies.
The group has a history of spreading disturbing anti-LGBT propaganda and comparing gay people to Nazis.
Perkins has made a number of extremely disturbing claims about gay people in the past, insisting Christians are “going to find ourselves being loaded in cattle cars like it was when the Nazis took over before we realize we are in such terrible danger”.
He claims that Christians are being sent to “camps”, and that soon gays are “going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians”.
He has also compared gays to paedophiles, saying: “While activists like to claim that paedophilia is a completely distinct orientation from homosexuality, evidence shows a disproportionate overlap between the two. It is a homosexual problem.”
Ahead of the Supreme Court court ruling in favour of equal marriage, Perkins threatened a “revolution” in the United States over the issue.
