On Thursday afternoon, as debate reportedly raged inside the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/25413/report-breitbart-news-board-considers-dumping-ben-shapiro">Breitbart News board</a> regarding the fate of recent <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/25343/trump-sets-bannon-fire-uses-ashes-fertilize-his-ben-shapiro">full-body fourth-degree burn victim Steve Bannon</a>, the Mercers — the daughter of Robert Mercer and scion of the Mercer family, funders of Breitbart News and minority shareholders in it, as well as the deepest pockets behind Bannon himself for the last several years — hit Bannon with a brick. Rebekah Mercer, the member of the Mercer family closest to Bannon during his precipitous rise, issued this statement:
<blockquote>I support President Trump and the platform upon which he was elected. My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements.</blockquote>
That statement follows her father’s statements disassociating from Bannon in early November; Robert Mercer, the billionaire conservative donor, said that he would divest from Bannon and Bannon’s alt-right-promoting provocateur deputy, Milo Yiannopoulos. “I have great respect for Mr. Bannon, and from time to time I do discuss politics with him,&#8221; Mercer said at the time. &#8220;However, I make my own decisions with respect to whom I support politically. Those decisions do not always align with Mr. Bannon&#8217;s…. actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate. I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.”
This is an extraordinary turn of events for Bannon, who spent the last several years waving around the Mercers’ wallet in an attempt to arrogate political power to himself. He used the money to make bad documentaries and leak self-aggrandizing stories about himself to The New York Times.
The Mercers have now caught onto Bannon’s game, and they’re not playing anymore. Good for them.

Billionaire Funders of Bannon and Breitbart Nuke Bannon From Orbit: ‘No Financial Support’

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Charles Pierce, the resident radical-left political pundit at Esquire magazine &#8212; that intellectual powerhouse best known for its Sexiest Woman Alive award &#8212; is lamenting the role of Steve Bannon in electing President Trump, as well as Trump financial backers &#8220;Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the reactionary New York gozillionnaires.&#8221;
Pierce wanted everyone to read about a lawsuit filed in May (news that&#8217;s almost half a year old is &#8220;breaking&#8221; if the targets are conservatives) by a former Bob Mercer employee named David Magerman who, reportedly against company policy, felt compelled to tell The Wall Street Journal that his boss had &#8220;contempt for the social safety net&#8221; and wanted &#8220;government be shrunk down to the size of a pinhead.&#8221; (Horrors!) In his lawsuit, Magerman upped the ante and claimed that Mercer held racist views.
Full disclosure: The Mercers are not just supporters; they are friends. That kind of repugnant slur is undeserving of a response and will get none here.
Magerman is irrelevant. That lawsuit being described as &#8220;news&#8221; is silly. So, why the story? It&#8217;s all about &#8220;gozillionaires.&#8221;
Left-wingers in the media believe gozillionaires are a malignant force in politics &#8212; unless they are on the &#8220;right side of history.&#8221; The Mercers get an amazing amount of media ink &#8212; most of it predictably negative &#8212; because they aren&#8217;t. They are conservatives. Worse, they are rich conservatives. Their wealth is dangerous. They are dangerous. They must be exposed!
But check out the Forbes list of top billionaires. At the top of the pile sits Bill Gates, a liberal. Next in line is Warren Buffett, who&#8217;s also a liberal. He&#8217;s followed by Jeff Bezos, another liberal. No. 5 is uber-liberal Mark Zuckerberg. No. 10 is Michael Bloomberg, another leftist. George Soros, a radical leftist if ever there was one, registers at No. 30. In fact, there are liberals all over the Forbes World&#8217;s Billionaires list.
You won&#8217;t find the Mercers in the top 1,000.
Quick: When was the last time &#8212; or when was there ever a time &#8212; you remember a media story that focused on the controversial views of Gates, Buffett, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg or Soros?
It&#8217;s quite the opposite. A few months ago, the very same Esquire writer mocked the Trump people for objecting to liberal gozillionaires. According to Pierce, conservatives thought anti-Trump protesters in Washington, D.C., were &#8220;some sort of a plot concocted by George Soros.&#8221; To object to political activity by wealthy people on the left is to dabble in cockamamie conspiracy theories, this being just another one of them.
Except it was true. The Media Research Center documented that Soros and his Open Society Foundations had contributed $246 million between 2010 and 2014 to 100 of the 544 groups listed as partners of the Women&#8217;s March on Washington the day after the inauguration. Did the liberal media care? Were they alarmed? They yawned. Soros is on the &#8220;right side of history.&#8221;
These self-righteous attacks on the Mercers are nothing new. Before Bob and Rebekah Mercer, there were David and Charles Koch. And before them, there was Richard Mellon Scaife, dubbed the &#8220;godfather of the vast right-wing conspiracy&#8221; by some liberals. Twenty years ago, Time magazine&#8217;s list of the 25 most influential people identified Scaife as a &#8220;conservative agitator&#8221; who controlled foundations that help subsidize &#8220;rabidly anti-Clinton magazines.&#8221; Pages later, Time described Soros as a &#8220;philanthropist&#8221; with an &#8220;iconoclastic critique of free-market capitalism.&#8221;
Liberal gozillionaires are hailed as Time&#8216;s &#8220;Persons of the Year&#8221; (Bill and Melinda Gates) or get a Presidential Medal of Freedom from former President Obama (Buffett). It doesn&#8217;t hurt that liberal journalists can often thank these billionaires for jobs &#8212; or be grateful that their colleagues are employed by them. Buffett, Bloomberg, Zuckerberg and Bezos are all in the left-wing media business now.
The same trend applies to leftist foundations like the Ford Foundation (with a $12 billion endowment), The Pew Charitable Trusts ($5 billion-plus endowment) and the Rockefeller Foundation ($4 billion-plus endowment). Toss in the Carnegie Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and so many more. Is there controversy? Anywhere? Conservatives have nothing to match any of them.
As we type these words, it has just been announced that Soros has transferred a cool $18 billion to his radical Open Society Foundations in recent years, making it instantly the second largest foundation in the world after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
But it&#8217;s still all about the Mercers.
L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Brent Bozell III and Tim Graham, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
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The Mercer family has quietly become one of the most powerful and influential players in politics; they are a key reason that Donald Trump won the White House and had sway over who he selected for his cabinet. They will also be involved in <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/29/politics/mercer-trump-nonprofit/">outside organizations</a> to promote the Trump agenda.
Who is the Mercer family exactly? What is their history in politics and why did they choose to support Trump? Here are six things you need to know:
1. Robert Mercer is the co-chief executive officer of the Renaissance Technologies hedge fund. <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/the-reclusive-hedge-fund-tycoon-behind-the-trump-presidency">Mercer</a> initially worked for IBM to utilize computers as translators. He left IBM for Renaissance in 1993 when he finally acquiesced to Nick Patterson&#8217;s repeated requests to join the hedge fund to help pay for college tuition for his three daughters. Renaissance elevated Mercer from being middle-class to enormously wealthy; he reportedly earns a yearly income of <a href="http://www.npr.org/2017/03/22/521083950/inside-the-wealthy-family-that-has-been-funding-steve-bannon-s-plan-for-years">$135 million</a>. He has been described as reclusive, which may be one of the reasons he eschews talking to the press.
2. Mercer has been described as a Ayn Rand-esque libertarian with a searing hatred for the Clintons. David Magerman, a self-described &#8220;centrist&#8221; Democrat who has worked at Renaissance for 20 years, described Mercer&#8217;s views in <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-have-to-stop-renaissance-executive-tells-boss-about-trump-support-1487845803">The Wall Street Journal</a> as wanting to reduce the federal government &#8220;to the size of a pinhead.&#8221; Mercer also has a reported disdain for the Clintons, to the point where he subscribes to conspiracy theories about them murdering people.
3. The other Mercer power player is Mercer&#8217;s middle daughter, Rebekah. Rebekah Mercer shares her father&#8217;s affinity for capitalism and a limited federal government as well as his disdain for the media. She became well-known in conservative circles after she gave &#8220;an unsparing critique of the Republican&#8217;s technology and canvassing operations&#8221; to a crowd of GOP donors in the aftermath of Mitt Romney&#8217;s loss in 2012, according to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/the-rise-of-gop-mega-donor-rebekah-mercer/2016/09/13/85ae3c32-79bf-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html?utm_term=.0c92dc7afa04">The Washington Post</a>. She has since served on the boards of various conservative organizations, including The Heritage Foundation. Rebekah is reportedly sharp on political strategy but less well-versed on the nuance of policy.
4. Steve Bannon has been described as the &#8220;Svengali&#8221; of the Mercer family. The Mercer family became connected to Bannon through Andrew Breitbart at a Club for Growth event. Bannon has been close with the Mercer family ever since and has provided them with political strategy. He convinced them to invest $10 million into the Breitbart website. The Mercer family has also been involved with other Bannon initiatives, such as the Government Accountability Institute that produced Peter Schweizer&#8217;s Clinton Cash book.
Bannon and the Mercers might seem like an odd couple given Bannon&#8217;s unabashed nationalism and the Mercer&#8217;s free-market oriented worldview, but they appear to be united by their disdain for the elites, the Clintons and the establishment.
5. The Mercer family initially supported Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). They gave $11 million to pro-Cruz Keep the Promise 1 super PAC; the Cruz campaign also used the Cambridge Analytica data firm funded by the Mercers. They were still Cruz supporters even as Breitbart smeared Cruz while the primary grew contentious between the conservative senator and Trump, but once Cruz dropped out in May, the Mercer family threw their support behind Trump.
6. The Mercer family transformed Trump&#8217;s campaign; their influence can be seen in Trump&#8217;s cabinet. Rebekah Mercer was reportedly the key figure behind convincing Trump to shake up his campaign in the summer by getting rid of Paul Manafort as his campaign manager and bringing aboard Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie, the chairman of Citizens United, to the campaign, all of whom have ties to the Mercers. Rebekah Mercer was also on Trump&#8217;s transition team and lobbied successfully for Jeff Sessions as attorney general and Mike Flynn as national security adviser. She also unsuccessfully lobbied for John Bolton to be the secretary of state.
The Mercers have emerged as among the most influential political donors in the country; it will be interesting to see how much of their worldview is adopted by the Trump administration going forward.
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Billionaire Funders of Bannon and Breitbart Nuke Bannon From Orbit: ‘No Financial Support’

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