Kevin Drum notices that the chaos caused by Trump's Muslim Travel Ban is clearly on purpose because the administration just clarified that it does apply to green card holders:
The decision to apply the executive order to green card holders, including those in transit, is almost insane. Whatever else he is, Steve Bannon is a smart guy, and he had to know that this would produce turmoil at airports around the country and widespread condemnation from the press. Why would he do this?
Charles Manson per John W. Whitehead on HuffPost:
In Manson’s case, he thought the messages were ordering him to kill, and that the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” foretold an uprising in which blacks would murder a third of the world’s white population. Like many white convicts, Manson was a racist. However, at some point in 1968, fear of black revolution began to pervade his delusions. Manson’s own ultimate domination of the black race became a primary element of the apocalypse he would orchestrate. It would be Helter Skelter. It was also the name his followers used for the murder spree.
Steve Bannon according to Conor Freidersdorf in The Atlantic (emphasis mine):
Circa 2013, Bannon continued to believe that the only way to destroy the left was a populist uprising of a sort that requires the destruction of the GOP establishment.
“We don’t believe there is a functional conservative party in this country and we certainly don’t think the Republican Party is that,” he told a gathering of conservatives in Washington, D.C. “It’s going to be an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment, and it’s going to continue to hammer this city, both the progressive left and the institutional Republican Party.”
He attributed Breitbart.com’s exponential traffic growth to “showing people that they can have a voice and you can channel that anger, where before you were defenseless. You can take that anger. And by the way, I think anger is a good thing. This country is in a crisis. And if you’re fighting to save this country, if you’re fighting to take this country back, it’s not going to be sunshine and patriots. It’s going to be people who want to fight. I mean, Andrew Breitbart was all about the fight.”
Internally, he said, Breitbart calls itself “The Fight Club,” a reference to a novel-turned-Hollywood-blockbuster about a mentally disturbed white-collar worker. He comes to lead a group of unfulfilled men with aggression issues. They start out fighting each other in basements, morph into a cult, and carry off an act of domestic terrorism. The lead character, who ultimately realizes in horror that his split-personality delusions have led him to become a monster, decides to kill himself.
