The chief strategist of Donald Trump’s incoming presidential administration is former Breitbart “News” CEO Stephen Bannon, and in a recent interview he made a very revealing statement. Bannon praised the comments section at Breitbart.

Yes, he praised one of the worst sewers of racism and hate speech on the web.

In his interview Friday, Bannon repeatedly praised Breitbart, crediting its website and radio shows for “following this [movement] and reporting on it for years.”

“We’ve lived through an historic time,” he said. “I think they’ll talk about what happened in this year politically for many, many decades to come.”

He told Breitbart’s audience that he “really” misses them and looks forward to chatting with Breitbart again “early in 2017.”

Bannon said the best things about Breitbart are the comments section and the callers.

We’ve been writing about the boiling toxic stew in the Breitbart comments section for years, while the media and most other blogs and news sites ignored it. Many people told me to ignore these comments too.

But I knew all along that we were seeing something truly disturbing growing and gaining strength in the right wing world — an open embrace of bizarre conspiracy theories, Birtherism, and the kind of ugly white supremacist ideology that was previously kept under wraps and considered unacceptable in society.

When Andrew Breitbart was alive, he actually seemed to understand that this wasn’t something he should be proud of; in those days, the people who ran the site used to make at least some attempt to moderate the comments section and keep it from getting too out of control. Oh, don’t get me wrong — they still encouraged extremism and racism, but this was still a time when they felt they had to keep it at least nominally hidden from view.

But since the advent of Bannon and his nurturing of the “alt-right” movement, the racism and hatred has completely taken over and they’re not trying to hide it any more. On the contrary, Bannon and his crew of cynical exploiters have weaponized this degraded right wing mentality, and turned it into a tool to help elect a president.

I believe this was a deliberate strategy, and it was aided by the fact that the hatred Breitbart was cultivating was so extreme and repulsive that journalists and liberals didn’t even want to look at it; instead, they talked themselves into believing it was something they could safely ignore. And what a huge mistake that turned out to be.

Here’s an example to illustrate this point; a couple of days ago, Breitbart had a post about the discovery of bodies of 61 human smuggling victims in Brooks County, Texas.

And here are just a few of the nearly 400 comments for this post, hidden by default because the ugliness is almost unbelievable; and this is just from the first few pages. This is what Breitbart “News” has created, and the people who did this will soon be in charge of the United States.