Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator.

I'm joined today by Michael Brendan Doherty, who is a senior writer at the National Review.

And we're going to be talking about BuzzFeed's sensational story on Bright Bart and Steve Bannon and its curious flirtation with white supremacism.

So, Michael, last night, I think it was, or yesterday for you in America, BuzzFeed released their, let's call it, their wiki leaks on Brightbart, revealing all sorts of very interesting emails between Miley Yiannopoulos, a right-wing controversialist,

and Steve Bannon, of course, who everybody knows, is chief strategist in the White House.

And it appears to create the sense of Bright Bart trying to cultivate the alt-right.

How much of this is actually a sensational story?

How much of it is just titillating for people who follow these things like you and me.

So it's very titillating for people like you and me and thousands of other journalists

who I think marveled at the way Milo Yianopoulos seemed to just, you know, become a vortex of attention and presumably money, uh,

in 2015 and 2016.

Uh, so I think there's huge Scandin Freud to be had in, in kind of seeing how the sausage is made, uh, in his career,

about how he has a ghost writer

or some of the other details that were in this.

Yes, and also how Bannon was able to make it happen for him.

And as soon as Bannon lost interest, Milo's star faded pretty quickly.

Right, and what's interesting, you know, what is interesting about the

story as far as the Bannon angle is that it confirms rumors, you know, that I've heard in a sense

that Bannon comes across as a crazy person, right? He comes across as someone who, or he comes across as someone who believes that aggressive online journalism can change the ideological complexion of the entire planet, right?

That, you know, he talks about being at war and he types these kind of silly messages

without proper words in them, just like the letter you and R.

...