Other News brings you two stories that highlight the growing connections among Far-Right forces in Europe and the US: Some are in power, others aspire to it, are we witnessing an Alt-Right International in the making?
Breitbart’s Man in Rome: A Gentle Voice in a Strident Chorus
By JASON HOROWITZ
New York Times
ROME — Rushing to meet his wife at St. Peter’s Square, Thomas Williams walked past priests in black cassocks and said that the only thing he missed from his own decades of wearing a priest’s collar was “a real sense of helping people very directly.”
He paused and added, “I’m sure I’m helping people in some way.”
Mr. Williams’s current mission, since 2014, is in the service of Breitbart News, the populist, right-wing website that backed Donald J. Trump in his run for the presidency and is popular with the alt-right, an extremist and often xenophobic movement that embraces white nationalism.
The website is now hoping to buoy Europe’s surging anti-immigrant parties by spreading into Germany and France. But for years, Breitbart has had a presence in London, Jerusalem and Rome, which is perhaps most important for its imagining of itself as an expanding empire with a foothold in the ancestral home of the Crusades.
To man the fort in Rome, Stephen K. Bannon, then Breitbart’s chief executive and now Mr. Trump’s chief White House strategist, turned to Mr. Williams, a telegenic and polyglot theologian who had spoken for the Vatican and defended the leader of his conservative religious order against accusations of child molestation (ultimately proved true). Mr. Williams himself then left the priesthood in disgrace when it emerged that he had broken his vows of celibacy and fathered a son.
“You know my history,” Mr. Williams, 54, said, referring to a past worthy of its own Breitbart headline. “I was looking to re-establish myself again.”
He has done so by documenting the illegal immigration inundating Italy’s shores; tracking the country’s ascending anti-establishment movement; monitoring the religious persecution of Christians; and focusing on the Catholic hierarchy’s conservative reaction to Pope Francis.
Yet Mr. Williams, amiable and soft-spoken, seems a discordantly gentle voice in the strident Breitbart chorus.
He said his time in the public eye had made him extra sensitive to inflicting harm and he lamented the “horrible” Breitbart commenters. Referring to the laptop computer on his dining room table, he noted, with a hint of sarcasm, that his home office — where he keeps a reliquary of bone chips of Dominican saints and framed photographs of Pope Benedict XVI smiling with his mother-in-law, a former United States ambassador to the Holy See — was “pretty nondescript for a subversive, alt-right, world-changing organization.”
From the beginning of his talks with Mr. Bannon, he said, Mr. Williams had expressed wariness about the website’s tone.
“Breitbart seemed like the exact opposite of everything I had been trained for and naturally tended towards,” the former priest said. “Which was help people understand each other, smooth over differences, show maybe you are not as far apart as you think.”
Mr. Williams had first met Mr. Bannon in 2003 through a mutual friend who was producing Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” on which Mr. Williams worked as the theological consultant. (“Mostly just to say things like, ‘You can’t do that,’” Mr. Williams said.)
“I thought he was a little crazy,” Mr. Williams said of Mr. Bannon. “I knew he was in this media stuff and he had all these theories about everything.”
At the time, Mr. Williams was the face of the conservative Legion of Christ religious order. In 1997, Mr. Williams helped found the conservative Legion-sponsored Zenit news agency, and he has written 15 books, including “Knowing Right From Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience.”
Traveling in rarefied American church circles, he met Mary Ann Glendon, a prominent lawyer who, since 2013, has sat on a pontifical commission appointed by Pope Francis to investigate the Vatican Bank. She introduced Mr. Williams to her daughter, the Vatican art historian Elizabeth Lev. In 2003, Ms. Lev gave birth to Mr. Williams’s son, but kept her child’s paternity secret.
In the meantime, Mr. Williams became the go-to priest for Vatican analysis on American television and defended the leader of his order, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, from accusations of child molestation.
Pope Benedict forced Father Maciel to leave public ministry in 2006, and after the priest died in 2008, it was shown he fathered several children, and abused drugs and children. (“I thought he was innocent,” Mr. Williams said quietly, adding: “I was wrong.”)
In 2012, Mr. Williams acknowledged a news report that revealed his secret life and that he had fathered a child. He refused to identify the mother, apologized and went home to Michigan, where he said he “just kind of hid.”
A year later, Mr. Williams left the priesthood and returned to Rome to marry Ms. Lev and raise their son, who has Down syndrome. The three now live with Ms. Lev’s two adult daughters from a previous relationship.
Mr. Williams speaks adoringly of his son and accompanies him to therapy. He said he was “thrilled” to have his mother-in-law visiting for the holidays. He paints Roman street scenes for his wife and expresses appreciation for a “full life.”
But the circumstances of his leaving the priesthood had left him without an outlet for his considerable Vatican experience and academic expertise. That is when Mr. Bannon, seeking a presence for his website in a foundational spot of Judeo-Christian culture, came calling.
“Culture moves politics,” Mr. Williams said Mr. Bannon told him when pitching him to take the job three years ago. “Politics doesn’t move culture.”
Mr. Bannon, less than interested in food and fashion, often came to Rome to discuss the project.
“Eating with him is no fun,” said Mr. Williams, who wears a lapel pin that identifies him as a certified sommelier. At restaurants, Mr. Bannon paid no attention to what he ate and wore “a sport jacket with the cargo pants. It just looks silly, especially for Italians who care.”
But Mr. Williams said he was deeply impressed by Mr. Bannon and had never seen any evidence of his harboring racist or anti-Semitic views.
“The only place you could find anti anything is definitely toward Islam, there is some animus there,” Mr. Williams said, adding that he shared Mr. Bannon’s reservations about assimilating Muslims. He participated in a 2014 Vatican event where Mr. Bannon argued that the “church militant” needed to unite against secularization and an Islamic fascism “that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years.”
On other issues, however, there was considerable distance between Breitbart and its correspondent in Rome.
Mr. Williams was far less skeptical about European unity and the euro than the Breitbart line, which he called “obviously pushing this populism and very much anti-European.”
As Mr. Bannon began championing Mr. Trump as a way to blow up the establishment, Mr. Williams said he challenged his boss, telling him, “If you are going to tear down, you better know what you are building.” He added, “But I think he prefers tearing down to building up, honestly.”
When it came to immigration, Mr. Williams said he considered the symbol of a wall between the United States and Mexico “terrible” and fell in the middle between Mr. Trump’s hard-line position and the advocating of building bridges by Pope Francis, of whom he spoke respectfully.
Mr. Williams said that while his editors didn’t meddle in his coverage of the pope, they pressed for stories highly sympathetic to opponents of Pope Francis in the Vatican, especially the vocal Cardinal Raymond Burke, a friend of Mr. Bannon whom Pope Francis stripped of power.
Generally, Mr. Williams said, Breitbart considered Pope Francis a challenge. “Challenging in the sense that they don’t love the guy,” he said, adding that Mr. Bannon, who declined to comment, was “suspicious” of Francis.
Mr. Williams now dresses in a sports coat and jeans instead of clerical attire, but he still seemed entirely comfortable in the Vatican as he arrived at St. Peter’s Square to meet his wife. While he posed for a photograph, she considered how she liked being married to Breitbart’s man in Rome.
“I’m the wife of Thomas Williams,” Ms. Lev said with a smile. “And I love that.”
Donald Trump and the Russian Honeypot
by John Feffer
Lobelog
[I wrote this article about Russian efforts to cultivate Donald Trump as an asset last week for a Korean newspaper where it was published on Sunday. Little did I know that news would break this week of allegations that Russia has a file of damaging information it can use to blackmail President-elect Trump. In that file is information about Trump’s dalliance with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. The allegations come from a former British intelligence officer, and the Trump camp denies them. The information was “widely known among journalists and politicians in Washington,” according to The New York Times, but aside from a piece in Mother Jones, it remained under wraps.]
In the world of espionage, the “honeypot” is trap in which someone seduces an unsuspecting diplomat or embassy employee. Then the seducer – a “swallow” (woman) or a “raven” (man) – blackmails the dupe. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union developed a certain expertise in using honeypots to extract information from CIA operatives, FBI agents, and ambassadors.
Russia is in the news at the moment for a more high-tech spying operation – its alleged hacking of Democratic Party e-mail accounts. The Obama administration claims that it has proof of Russian fingerprints on this operation and thus its influence on the November presidential elections. The White House has imposed a set of additional sanctions against Russia and also expelled 35 Russian diplomatic personnel.
These charges are serious and should be investigated. But they are a distraction. The real operation Russia is conducting in the United States is an old-fashioned honeypot trap. But it’s not a conventional version of the scheme in which an attractive woman makes eyes at a lonely intelligence officer.
Rather, the “raven” in this case is Vladimir Putin. And the dupe is Donald Trump. By romancing the Republican candidate, the Russian president has gotten much more than mere information. He is acquiring the most influential ally imaginable. And he doesn’t even have to wait until the inauguration. When the Obama administration announced its retaliatory moves, Putin declined to escalate. Trump, rather than standing behind his president, praised Putin and promised to “move on.”
Let me be clear. I don’t think Russia directly tampered with the vote in November. Nor do I think that the revelations connected to the alleged Russian hacking made the difference in the election. Trump won for other reasons; Clinton lost for other reasons too. I’m not even sure that Putin wanted Trump elected. The Russian president probably just wanted to sow some confusion and discord in the U.S. political system.
Nor do I want to see a new Cold War develop between the United States and Russia. I’m not a fan of Vladimir Putin or current Russian policies in Ukraine or Syria. But Moscow and Washington can certainly identify common interests such as reducing nuclear weapons, preserving the landmark agreement with Iran, and negotiating some new agreement with North Korea.
But the honeypot that Russia has used to trap Trump will have much more serious ramifications than a few email accounts hacked or disinformation spread around the Internet.
First of all, Putin will get some immediate foreign policy benefits. The Trump administration is likely to lift all economic sanctions against Russia, which will provide a nice bump up for the Russian economy. The United States will accept the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea and roll back its complaints over Russian meddling in Ukraine. Trump has already expressed reservations about NATO, so his administration will not likely welcome new members around Russia’s perimeter. And the new administration will cooperate with Russia in attacking the Islamic State and pull away from backing rebels who want to oust Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
All of that is worth a great deal more than the name of a few spies or a cache of secret Pentagon documents.
But Vladimir Putin has even grander plans, and Donald Trump could play a role in those as well.
In a 2013 speech, Vladimir Putin chastised the Euro-Atlantic countries for “rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.” He went on to excoriate “political correctness” and “unlawful migration.” He added, “One must respect every minority’s right to be different, but the rights of the majority must not be put into question.”
Here are all the themes of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign two years before Trump even launched it. More importantly, these themes can found in the campaigns of most far-right-wing political parties in Europe. It’s no surprise that Marine Le Pen of France’s National Front, Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary are all part of Putin’s widening circle of admirers.
Putin aspires to create a new global alliance founded on conservative values, religious principles, and autocratic leanings. The Russian leader is comfortable working with outright racists, xenophobes, and Islamophobes. He aims to unravel the European Union and has provided support to European movements that share that goal. He has nothing but contempt for civil society unless it slavishly follows his political line. He no longer appears to believe that global warming is a hoax, but he still presides over an economy dependent on fossil fuels that does some of the greatest damage to the environment.
Again, Donald Trump fits right into this picture. The honeypot scheme doesn’t involve sexual propositioning but ideological seduction.
The greatest threat over the next couple years is not that the Trump administration will simply step back and allow Russia free rein in the world. Russia, after all, has rather limited global influence beyond its ties with right-wing extremists and a few morally bankrupt autocracies. Rather, the real threat is that Donald Trump will help Putin create a noxious alliance that gives an international platform for all the most deplorable actors, from white supremacists to crusading Islamophobes.
The media makes a mistake by calling the relationship between Putin and Trump a “bromance.” That somehow implies mutual fondness. Putin doesn’t care about romance any more than the “ravens” and “swallows” of the Cold War era. The Russian president has laid a trap for Donald Trump. And it looks as though Trump will drag America into the honeypot with him.
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