# Steve Bannon — "Wear it as a badge of honor" > [!quote] "Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker." > — Steve Bannon, National Front party congress, Lille, France, March 10, 2018 ## Context [[Steve Bannon]] delivered this to France's National Front (now [[National Rally]]) at its party congress in Lille, where he also met party leader [[Marine Le Pen]]. The appearance came during his post-White-House European tour, as he tried to knit together the continent's nationalist parties into a coordinated movement and export the "economic nationalism" message he credited for Trump's 2016 win. ## Why this matters This is the rhetorical move at the heart of the modern far right: not denying the charge of racism but inverting it into a marker of identity and defiance. By telling a nationalist party to "wear it as a badge of honor," Bannon coaches the normalization of stigmatized politics — reframing mainstream condemnation as proof of authenticity and momentum. It is the transnational, on-the-record companion to his domestic work building the [[Alt-Right]] bridge, and it directly courts the demographic-anxiety politics of the [[Great Replacement Theory]]. A clean receipt for how the post-2016 right turned accusations of bigotry into a recruiting tool. ## Verification - **Reporting:** [France 24, March 11, 2018](https://www.france24.com/en/20180311-france-usa-bannon-le-pen-national-front-racist-badge-honour-populist-pep-talk-lille-trump); [ABC News](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/steve-bannon-call-racist-wear-badge-honor/story?id=53656814); [NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/bannon-tells-french-far-right-party-let-them-call-you-n855536). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed; delivered from the stage to a live audience and on the record to press. ## Related quotes - [[Steve Bannon - platform for the alt-right]] — the domestic-media half of the same project.