Tuesday, March 14, 2017

You'll never beat the Irish

Wall Street Journal ($) on Steve Bannon's formative years in Richmond Virginia --

Steve Bannon and his friends grew up with chips on their shoulders in the former capital of the Confederacy, says Pat McSweeney, a boyhood friend of the Bannon family and former Virginia Republican Party chairman. Their race conferred a certain amount of privilege, but their Irish-Catholic backgrounds were out of place in the Southern Baptist town. The Benedictine school they attended was integrated. “We had a hurdle that most didn’t,” says Mr. McSweeney. “I was the first Mick to get a job in a big [law] firm here in Richmond, and that was only 40-some years ago,” he says, using a pejorative for Irish-Americans.

The other nugget in the article is that Bannon traces a lot of his embitterment at "elites" to his father's sale at a loss of AT&T stock in 2008 -- following advice not from his family or broker, but CNBC yeller Jim Cramer!

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