New York Post columnist Mike Walsh, author of The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, tells Sirius XM host Stephen K. Bannon on Breitbart News Daily about his latest column, “Donald Trump Is Going to Troll His Way to Victory.”
Walsh explained that he christened Trump “King of the Trolls” because he has demonstrated how “you can troll your way to prominence in the political process,” by “keeping his opponents continually off-balance, the way that a troll does.”
As Walsh put it, Trump “often disagrees with himself in the same sentence, and that whipsaw effect is driving his critics absolutely insane.”
Bannon praised Walsh as a pioneer of New Media, a former editor of the Big Journalism division of Breitbart News who was among the first to appreciate how Internet journalism was different from print media. This makes Walsh well-suited to understand the art of “trolling,” which is named after the fairy-tale trolls who lurked under bridges to ambush unwary travelers.
“The trolls, we’ve all had experiences with them, anyone who posts regularly in a very public way will get criticism from anonymous, what are called ‘trolls,’” he explained. “They often operate under multiple ‘sock-puppet’ names, they have multiple identities. They’re there just to stir trouble.”
“I think, in a good way, that’s what Trump is doing,” he continued. “He stirred trouble in the whole Republican political process, and the result is that he’s standing on top of it right now, and I think that’s a phenomenon that we needed to take notice of.”
Bannon asked what Walsh would say to Trump critics who think his “troll” persona makes him look unpresidential.
“First of all, get over it,” he replied. “Second of all, stipulate it. People keep saying to me, ‘Well, he’s not a real conservative.’ I have two problems with that. First of all, everybody knows that, and B – that’s ‘A’ – what is a real conservative? Now, I’ve been around long enough to watch conservatism go from basically nothing, through the Barry Goldwater movement in ‘64, to Nixon in ‘68, to McGovern in ‘72, when conservatism was at its low point, and through the Reagan Administration.”
“I think a lot of the people who are making these comments that Trump isn’t a ‘movement conservative’ are absolutely right – but it doesn’t matter, because movement conservatism is the aberration, not the rule,” said Walsh. “They don’t have quite a long enough span to have looked at this, to see that that Reagan era – which ended, by the way, with Bush I – was a very short, brief period of time in this country, that is not likely to come back in the near future, that’s for sure.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. EST.
LISTEN:
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.