February 24, 2017

How nice of ABC TV to introduce us to the latest racist who has taken over Steve Bannon's position at Breitbart.com. I suppose someone's got to introduce another face of evil from this hideous era of trumpism. There's no question that the new Breitbart editor, Joel Pollak, is rotten to his core. Throughout this segment, it was addressed several times that Pollak is Jewish, as if that would erase the anti-Semitism of his predecessor.

Incidentally, today, Breitbart lobbied for a coveted spot in the U.S. Senate Press Gallery.

Breitbart CEO Larry Solov petitioned the standing committee of the U.S. Senate Press Gallery — which is made up of five reporters at traditional media outlets — to grant the site permanent press passes so its reporters could move freely within the halls of Congress.

On Friday's "The View," Sunny Hostin and Joy Behar threw him a few good questions, and his answers sounded like Bannon himself wrote them.

HOSTIN: you co-wrote a book called "How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution" and you think that the biggest reason he won the election was because he defied the media. He received more free airtime than any other candidate in American history. Did he defy them or con them?

POLLAK: The answer is yes! He certainly pulled a few tricks on the media, the most notorious of which was when he called the press conference and everyone came there and thought they were going to hear him talk about Obama and his birthplace. And he spent half an hour rolling out one military leader after another, talking about what a great Commander-in-Chief he was going to be. And in the last 10 seconds, he said, 'Oh, and by the way, Obama was born in Hawaii.'

BEHAR: He is a liar, you do admit that.

HOSTIN: He said he was going to protect the LGBTQ community and he just rescinded those protections.

POLLAK: There was a guy who showed up at the (dictatorial installment) Inauguration on January 20th with a big sign that said I don't know any Russians and he was sending out a message to the media that we "voted" for Donald Trump. We like Donald Trump. This Russian thing is fake news. We have real support for him.

That's why the White House is trying to stop the Russian investigation by the FBI, right Joel? Perhaps the Mercer-Trump-Putin connection presents some problems?

The evil tentacles of the whole alt-Right movement have spread over every single facet of government within this Führer Trump White House. The dots couldn't be connected in a more obvious fashion. Breitbart is owned by Andrew's widow, Susan, Larry Solov and the Mercer Family. The Mercers are highly wealthy and doubly corrupt. They are responsible for inflicting Kellyanne Conway on us, for starters. Just after we 'celebrated' the arrival of 2017, the WSJ explained this tentacled government in greater detail.

Back when Mr. Trump’s candidacy was on the rocks, Mr. Mercer, co-chief executive of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies LLC, provided financial support. Then, in a surprise shake-up in August, two of the Mercer family’s confidantes, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, were installed atop the Trump campaign following a recommendation from Ms. Mercer.

Another strange coincidence between Breitbart's Bannon and Trump?

Breitbart News, like Trump, has never made its financial records public, so it’s not known whether Bannon owns stock in the organization and whether he would sell it to avoid any appearance of a conflict while serving in the White House.

Pollak's bio shows a history of opportunistic behavior.

About a year after Andrew Breitbart's death, Alternet published an article that discussed Pollak.

Joel Pollak was born in South Africa, and moved to suburban Chicago at a young age, becoming a US citizen by age 10. Pollak enrolled in Harvard in the mid-90s, telling a local paper that his dream was to become the Ted Koppel of his generation...

In every way Joel Pollak of the 1990s was a different creature...Pollak was a Democrat student activist in his undergrad years. (A) photograph shows young Joel Pollak, with his Jewfro cropped, smiling as he screams in unison with other pro-Clinton activists protesting against the Clinton impeachment hearings.

We spoke to several former Harvard classmates of Pollak. Each offered a uniform description of an extremely aggressive, often blundering, always self-promoting character who knew no shame. One former classmate who knew him during his undergraduate years and then during his time at Harvard Law School told us the young Pollak idolized Cornel West, the former Harvard African-American studies professor, socialist activist and critical race theory proponent.

In 1999, Pollak graduated Harvard, and moved back to his native South Africa, where he remained until at least 2006, working as a speech writer for a controversial white, Jewish South African politician, Tony Leon, who was accused by top ANC politicians,including former President Thabo Mbeki, of racism. Leon inherited a party that had been known for its comparatively progressive politics during the apartheid-era, merged it with the pro-apartheid National Party, and made race-baiting and fear a cornerstone of his politics. It was while working for Leon that Pollak met his future wife, Julia Bertlesmann.

Before falling under the sway of Tony Leon's race-baiting neocon politics, Pollak was a Clinton Democrat. When he left South Africa in 2006, Pollak says, he had become an opponent of the concept of majority rule — which in the context of South Africa means opposing black rule.

Pollack's return to the US coincided with Bertlesmann – then 18 or 19, and Pollack a decade older – enrolling in Harvard. Pollack didn't just follow his future wife to Harvard, but according to former classmates, he also moved in to her dormroom, along with her teenage friends.

As one former Harvard student described the situation to us:

"When she was an undergrad, they were living together in her dorm room. From what I heard, it was something that people in the house there thought was kind of strange. An older law student always being there all the time with these younger students—and being his usual obnoxious self who was not even low key.

The future heir to the Breitbart empire was over 30 years old, living in his girlfriend's college dorm, and tapping his parents' money to attack welfare and Big Government handouts.

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Is anyone surprised? I'm sure Pollak has some black friends, so he's definitely not a racist. Right?

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