Wednesday, April 11, 2018

'Race Realism': How Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica modernized white supremacy to elect Trump

“Race realism,” it seems, is a modern update on centuries of pseudo-science (the eugenics movement of the earliest 20th century, for example). It’s also been called “scientific racism,” and you probably won’t be shocked to learn this debunked mumbo-jumbo was also a key philosophical underpinning of Nazi Germany and its propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. 


(Philly.com) -- There’s nothing real, or factual, about “race realism.” To the contrary, it’s the rank, old-school racial stereotypes about black- and brown-skinned people that once animated slaveholders, the KKK or the White Citizens Councils of yesterday, dressed up in Adidas sneakers and a hip-hop T-shirt instead of a white robe. 


What we’ve learned these past few days is a kind of a dystopian nightmare: That Team Trump, led by its multimillion-dollar data gurus Cambridge Analytica (CA) and the president’s former propaganda minister, Steve Bannon (with a still mysterious assist from Russian trolls), used the modern techniques of information warfare — and hijacked data from Facebook — to inject a virulent strain of thinly disguised white supremacy to elect an American president.


Continue reading  http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/will_bunch/race-realism-steve-bannon-cambridge-analytica-elected-trump-20180322.html