Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, said during a 2010 webinar for Tea Party activists that liberal Democrats have a “plantation mentality” towards African Americans to keep them under government control.
Bannon, the former Breitbart executive who has now emerged as one the most influential advisers inside Trump’s White House, described a “victimology” among African Americans created by the welfare state, which caused them to attack black conservatives.
After listing off several prominent black conservatives, Bannon said, “These people are heroes. They take an incredible, incredible amount of grief because the welfare state has built in this victimology. And the elitist, liberal, progressives have a plantation mentality that they don’t think African Americans should be out of government control.”
A spokesperson for the Trump administration did not return a request for comment.
Bannon, one of the co-founders of the National Tea Party Federation, is not the first to invoke the history of slavery in the United States to attack the relationship between the Democratic Party and black voters. Former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain and former congressman Allen West–both prominent black conservatives–have also referred to the Democratic Party as a “plantation.”
Bannon added in the webinar that Tea Party activists have to support black conservatives.
“The Democratic progressive party cannot rule if they don’t get 90% of the black vote. If we cut into the black vote, if we make it 80/20, we can win a hundred congressional seats this time,” Bannon said.
Earlier in the program, Bannon said conservative women and minorities are attacked by liberals because they pose a threat to their narrative about conservatives.
“If you think the women are vilified, if you think Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and Michelle Malkin, all of these great women in the tea party movement are absolutely vilified because they are an existential threat to progressive narrative, you haven’t seen anything by how they viciously attack our black and African American conservatives,” he said.