When is military aggression not military aggression? For the powers that be in Washington and their media lackeys, the foreign policy interests of US imperialism dictate the answer. Hence, in the August 2008 war between US-ally Georgia and Russia, the former was portrayed as the helpless victim and the latter the aggressive bully.
In 2017, Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon called Robert Kuttner out of the blue about forming an “economic nationalist” alliance of the right and the left. Kuttner is a progressive journalist and editor of The American Prospect who has been highly critical of pro-corporate “free trade” agreements like NAFTA and the Trans Pacific Partnership. He is also fervently anti-Trump.
The phone call was shortly after the horror of Charlottesville and Trump’s unwillingness to denounce the fascists. Kuttner was “stunned” that Bannon thought that some shared opinions between them “might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism,” he wrote in a 2017 Prospect article. Bannon was the Darth Vader of white nationalism who used Breitbart to stir up racial bigotry, misogyny and Islamophobia. He helped create Trump’s far-right base.