Today is the day the worst elements of the far right completed their takeover of the Republican Party, as the Donald Trump campaign announced a shake-up, replacing Paul Manafort as campaign chief with Stephen Bannon, the man behind one of the most extreme right wing hate sites on the web — Breitbart “News.”

As we’ve documented many, many times here at LGF, with coverage going back years, the Breitbart “News” business model has been to incite racial resentment and xenophobia in the degraded Tea Party base, and feed them conspiracy theories and false stories to keep them ignorant. And the commenters for their articles respond in Pavlovian fashion, with thousands upon thousands of horrifically racist and hateful comments, every single day.

Lately there have been reports that Donald Trump and Breitbart “News” have a financial quid pro quo relationship, in which Trump is paying them to produce glowing sycophantic stories about his campaign. Breitbart’s editors have denied this publicly, but all you have to do is read the site to see that the adoring coverage of Trump is non-stop; they attack his enemies and hype everything he says and does. I don’t know if they’re actually being paid by Trump to do this, but it certainly wouldn’t look any different if they were.

In the last few years an even more noxious element has risen to prominence at Breitbart “News,” the “alt-right” movement of far right nationalists, neo-Nazis and outright white supremacists, with writer Milo Yiannopoulos (recently banned permanently from Twitter for organizing and inciting harassment of women and minorities) penning a lengthy, sickening apologia for the racist movement.

Even former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro (no stranger to hateful and extreme rhetoric himself) says he’s appalled at this choice by the Trump campaign. But of course, he stood by for years while the insanity grew at Breitbart “News,” and enthusiastically fed the fires of racism and right wing hatred, so even though his points about the extremism are valid they ring hollow. Where was he when there was a chance to stop Breitbart’s march toward hate speech and racism? He was on the train as one of the conductors.

Trump really hasn’t been hiding his courting of the far right, white nationalist elements of the conservative base, but this is the final dropping of the mask. He’s signaling unmistakably that there will be no “pivoting,” and no moderation of his extreme rhetoric. This is a tiny middle finger extended to the Republican Party and the people on his staff who’ve been trying to convince him to pull it back and temper his hateful rhetoric.

And it’s pretty much the death knell for the Republican Party as anything other than a symbol of hatred, division, racism and lunacy, into the foreseeable future.