David Saunders, veteran Democratic strategist-turned-“Trumpocrat,” told Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Matt Boyle the charges of racism thrown at former Breitbart News executive and founding Breitbart News Daily host Steve Bannon, following his departure to work for the Tump campaign and Trump White House, are utterly ridiculous.
“I had a long talk with Steve Bannon right when he came to work for Trump, being a fellow Virginian, and both of us are Virginia Tech Hokies,” he recalled. “We talked about the post-racial society, something that he’s interested in and something that I’m interested in. Of course, Steve was raised in a family of faith, and I’m a heathen. I don’t doubt that to anybody. But I do have, as most southerners do, a strong working faith. He went to Benedictine school, a Catholic military school there in Richmond, stricter than the orphanage was in The Blues Brothers.”
“We talked for a long time about the post-racial society, and how we get there, how we get back to the basics of ‘red or yellow or black or white, they’re precious in His sight,’ like we used to sing at Sunday school. It’s offensive to me, this idea that’s been put forth. I’m not going to sit here and shoot at Hillary Clinton; that’s over with for now, but identity politics that the Democrats are doing right now simply do not work with the masses,” he observed.
“It’s like you said: they didn’t get out of the Beltway, and didn’t get out here in rural America, small town third-tier market and beyond America, throughout the Rust Belt, throughout the country. They’re sick, man, and they’re hurting. I mean, these people are seeing their kids leave in droves, going to these population centers. We’ve been typecast as Simon LeGrees standing above a creek in Deliverance style, waiting on somebody to float down the river. It couldn’t be further from the truth,” Saunders contended.
“I think Donald Trump articulated the problems of a nation moved to a coin-operated government, and anybody who doesn’t believe that we now have a coin-operated government is foolish. Trump hit the right notes. As far as I’m concerned, he espouses what I am,” he said.
“And I am a Democrat,” Saunders added. “I’m not jumping to the Republicans. I want to be very clear there, although I have many Republican friends. Where I live, if you don’t have Republican friends, you don’t have any friends. We’ve got a lot of work to do to our party to return it to the days of Jacksonian democracy – where social justice, and economic fairness, and individual liberties run at the top.”
When Boyle asked how he feels when he sees high-ranking Democrats accuse Steve Bannon of racism or “white nationalist” leanings, Saunders said he finds it “insane.”
“Something the media never talks about, and this is in my conversations with Steve Bannon, he doesn’t have this huge ego,” Saunders said. “When I first went to Washington after I did Mark Warner’s campaign in 2001, and went to work for John Edwards, I met 16,412 people who were the reason Bill Clinton got elected, and then I met 16,412 people that if Al Gore had listened to them, he would have been elected. But the egos up there are unbelievable.”
“Steve did something very, very, very smart, and very unpolitical-operative-like, even though I am one: he stayed out of the spotlight,” he continued. “He knew that the campaign could become about him. So Steve didn’t do all these interviews. He didn’t promote himself. In no way did he do that, and there is no proof out there that he did any other. That was really impressive to me, that he would go over there, for no pay, and do what he did, and at the same token wasn’t in the public eye. He stayed out of it because he knew.”
“It drives me crazy, this racism thing,” Saunders exclaimed. “What people don’t understand is, inside the Beltway, is that since the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, which is now 52 years, a lot has happened. The most important thing that has happened in my view, from watching this thing go and move along, is every white person for the most part in the South now, has a good black friend. And every black person in the South now has a good white friend. I live out here in the country, and I can tell you, I know two pure racists. And that’s it.”
“This idea that the Klan’s down here everywhere – hell, the Klan’s been gone from here for years,” he scoffed. “It’s just stereotypes that have been placed upon us, movies you see; they’ve always got a dumb southerner in there, or a dumb redneck, or something. They stereotype these people, and it’s wrong. I think that the people got fed up with it, and once they heard they’re deplorables, and the irredeemables, and racism, and all that other stuff, they balked.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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