In the course of hosting Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily, Breitbart London Editor-in-Chief Raheem Kassam stood up for departed Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon, who has been under sustained attack from the Left since becoming first Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and now chief White House strategist.
Kassam recalled how he was a 27-year-old with his own website when he met Bannon in late 2013.
“He came to me and he said, ‘You know, I hear great things about you. Can you do what you do from inside Breitbart?’ At the time Breitbart was not a very well known name in the U.K. I admit to being skeptical — what was the commitment going to be? Would I be taken care of? Would I have editorial freedom? Why do they want me, or trust me?” he said.
“But I knew of Breitbart from my trips to CPAC — there’s only ever been about 12 Brits at CPAC, in any one year, but I was always one of them,” he continued.
“You know, people say with a name like Raheem Kassam, that I was born and raised into a Muslim family and I get asked sometimes if I am practicing or religious. And I say no, I don’t do that stuff, I don’t make the Hajj, I don’t do the pilgrimage. My pilgrimage is every February or March to CPAC.
“In 2013 I took Bannon at his word, and my life has just become a remarkable journey since.
“You know seven years ago I was working for a call center owned by Lehman Brothers, trying to get people to pay for their mortgages they were defaulting on. At one point I was asked whether or not I wanted to do a training course to become a certified mortgage advisor. I thought that was a great idea. That’s basically what I aspired to do.
“But I kept seeing these things happening around me, these injustices, and I decided to do something. I started working for a neo-conservative think tank in Westminster, for my sins, and I’ve graduated beyond that — what I think is a stunted political philosophy — into what really matters. You know, people’s lives.
“And that’s where Steve Bannon comes from as well.
“You know when he thinks of any move, when he thinks of any policy, he’s thinking about what makes people’s lives better. He doesn’t care about the color of your skin, or which God you choose to pray to, or whether you pray to a God at all.
“He doesn’t nit pick over diversity, or bureaucracy, or even quite frankly ideology. Conservatism, as a philosophy, is the antithesis of ideology — and Stephen Bannon, as a human being, is the antithesis of ideologues.
“And that’s why they’re calling him one. They’re projecting. The liberal media, who has decided amongst themselves what the world should look like — through their ideology – sees people who stand athwart history yelling ‘stop’ as the biggest threat to their androgynous, zombie civilization.
“As a caller said earlier they said Bannon reminds them of Gandalf: ‘YOU SHALL NOT PASS.’ I get it. I get that. I’m all about that. And it terrifies the establishment. It terrifies the Left. So they resort to the thing that they know, the only thing they know: smears, lies, hate, libel, defamation, and an abdication of decency.
“No, Stephen K. Bannon is not an anti-Semite. Stephen K. Bannon is not a white nationalist. Stephen K. Bannon is not far right, or an extremist, or someone whose influence should be feared in the White House.
“Stephen K. Bannon is a family man. He’s a father. Stephen K. Bannon treats his staff like family. Stephen K. Bannon is a phenomenal business man, a history buff, a successful filmmaker, and more than anything, Stephen K. Bannon is a true patriot.
“Stephen K. Bannon is the man who flew to London to hire me, this brown guy called Raheem Kassam from a Muslim family to run his London operation, and he’s now put him in the seat on his radio show.
“Swallow that, liberals. Swallow that, CNN. Swallow that, New York Times.
“And that’s all I have to say on the matter,” Kassam concluded.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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