President-elect Trump’s appointment of Stephen Bannon as his domestic security adviser has ignited a firestorm of criticism within the predictable quarters, namely mainstream media.

In the interests of providing a broad context for consideration and discussion, I’ve posted the Mother Jones article on Bannon. The whole subject of Breitbart and the alt-right is a complicated one, as most political movements are. The founder of Breitbart, the late Andrew Breitbart, was a Jew, a liberal Democrat who gravitated to conservatism while watching the Clarence Thomas hearings.

I’ll have more to say about this in future posts.  For now, suffice it to say that the alt-right label remains a fuzzy one, reflecting a loose association of many deeply disaffected conservatives of various ideological convictions. And to add an extra layer of complication to all of this, one of the conservative intellectuals singled out as a founder of the movement is Paul Gottfried, a Yeshiva University graduate and an unusually well-published university professor. In fact, Gottfried is acknowledged as having coined the term “alternative right” – or alt-right.

Adding an extra wrinkle to this story, Gottfried appears ambivalent about the role he played in the formation of this loose movement.