Steve Bannon



[ Donald Trump ] is a blunt instrument for us … I don’t know whether he really gets it or not. Stephen Kevin Bannon is an American businessman, "documentarian", and former executive chairman of Breitbart.com, an alt-right online tabloid. Bannon is the self-made man Trump pretends to be: from Naval Officer to Harvard grad, to Goldman Sachs banker (oh boy), to Hollywood producer, to an anti-US globalist tool, to hobo, to (eccentric) media mogul, to White House senior staffer, to being indicted on federal fraud charges.

According to Ronald Radosh, Bannon sees himself as a "Leninist", stating, "Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment." And that includes the Republican Party itself.

The similarities between the Breitbart crowd and Project Mayhem from Fight Club are strange. But it's not corporations they're at war with: it's cosmopolitans and elites.

After making every possible political mistake, Bannon was finally let go from the Trump administration on August 18, 2017. He returned to Breitbart, only to be canned from that organization. The BBC reported on January 9, 2018, "Steve Bannon's fall from power is now complete."

In November 2021, Bannon was indicted by a federal grand jury on two counts of contempt of Congress. Bannon was found guilty of both counts on July 22, 2022, and sentenced to 4 months in prison on October 21, 2022.

Oeuvre
Darkness is good… Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when [liberals] get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing.

As a film director, Bannon modeled himself on Michael Moore and He bankrolled his projects with the residuals from Seinfeld, which he had a small hand in producing.

If you look at his love affair with Sarah Palin, it's clear that he has been looking for an empty vessel to enact his policy agenda for some time:

In 2012, Bannon directed Occupy Unmasked, a "documentary" about the "sinister" nature of the Occupy Wall Street movement and their connections to Obama.

War...War never changes
He was also involved with a loony Arizona project to test whether 8 "dedicated researchers" could live self-sufficiently and grow their own food (they couldn't, as they paired off and started fucking to pass the time, while also splitting into two factions of four that hated each other), first as a cost overrun investigator (for instance, the then-CEO of the management company has used some of the funds to redecorate her house), then as CEO. He was accused of harassing women at the project. It all ended in a lawsuit. Apparently, around this time, he was well acquainted with and studied the basics of global warming, believing in it and even being concerned with its ethical issues.

Views
On the surface, Bannon is just another vicious ex-hippie of the David Horowitz/Michael Savage school, a former Grateful Dead fan who overswung the other way to embrace a Nazistic "culture first" alt-right movement.

His political views are hard to know. He doesn't give many interviews or talk about his personal life, and his speeches are all over the map—most likely because he has an agenda that he's not fully disclosing, so some of his stated "beliefs" are a means to an end. The best way to collect information on him would be to listen to every episode of Breitbart News Radio he's hosted. But since we can't do that, here are the facts.

Economics
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bannon traced the genesis of his economic outlook to his father, Marty, who got burned by Jim Cramer and lost a lot of money in 2008. This shattered his confidence in institutions (though apparently not in pundits). If we were to give Marty the benefit of the doubt at that time, starting at 39.90 a share, it would have dropped to 26.77 on October 31, 2008. This means that Marty would have had 300-400k in AT&T stock alone. Marty had enough money in the market to lose 100k on one company, and he's griping that no one was paying attention to his family during one of the biggest economic crises in history. People were being thrown out of their homes; maybe there were other pressing concerns. And the Trump cabinet is pushing for the fiduciary laws to be killed, which makes no sense in this context.

Over the past couple of decades, you've heard from the people at Davos that the age of the "nation-state" is over. Not if Steve Bannon has anything to say about it! In the past, he criticized the political establishment for funneling wealth from the working class of the United States to create a new middle class in China.

The most cryptic thoughts shared by Bannon refer to the three types of capitalism. During a Vatican speech, Bannon criticized state capitalism and Ayn Rand-cutthroat capitalism. Bannon instead wants to create (or recreate) a form of capitalism based on Christian values. Mixed into the Kool-Aid is a call for a proletarian revolution. He calls on Christians everywhere to rise against "crony capitalists" and Wall Street and to support "a cap on wealth creation and distribution".

Democrats and Republicans support global alliances and trade deals like Bretton Woods, NAFTA, the EU, the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. These are the cornerstones of the liberal world order. When Bannon says he wants to "destroy" the bipartisan "establishment", this is what he wants to destroy. From his point of view, he's saving the United States from the forces that have drained its wealth. By forcing China (and Europe) back into their cage, the hope is that other nations of the world can no longer depend on American largesse and will take responsibility for their own survival and growth.

Islam
Talk to us about this mosque on the North Pole.

As to the cultural side, Bannon has said he believes a country is more than an economy. This is probably why Breitbart is so opposed to the refugee resettlement program: he sees Muslim immigration as a threat to European culture—his culture.

In the days after the September 11 attacks, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir condemned the attackers and gave a speech in which he said, "Islam is peace." That statement was repeated by George W. Bush. On his radio program, Bannon said it was "the dumbest" comment that Bush made. In subsequent shows, Bannon sarcastically refers to Islam as the "religion of peace". (In fairness, so do we sometimes.)

In various interviews on Breitbart News Daily, Bannon told his listeners that the Western world is engaged in a "global existential war": "I think that most people in the Middle East, at least 50%, believe in being 'sharia-compliant'", by which he means Islam-observant. In interviews with Frank Gaffney and others, he entertained claims of a "fifth column" of Islamist sympathizers that has infiltrated the government and news media.

Al-Qaeda enjoyed his saber-rattling so much that they used him as a recruiting tool in their official newspaper. Good one, Steve!

Playing footsie with Nazis
I think in the closing days of the campaign if you listen to what Trump was saying—I mean, it was unhinged—I mean, this stuff about dark conspiracy theories and cabals of global bankers. It struck tones, I think, that were anti-Semitic. I would argue that Trump in the final weeks of the campaign was, you know, mainlining the purest distillation of Bannon's views out there on the stump. And, to my shock and a lot of other peoples', that actually resonated with a much larger segment of the electorate than we had anticipated.

Bannon is most-known for promoting sexist and bigoted views through his website. His defenders say that Breitbart's "headlines are designed to attract attention and readers, and are not necessarily evidence that Bannon himself is an anti-Semite, a misogynist, or an anti-Muslim bigot". But Bannon may be an ethnic nationalist, as some have said. The rumors come from a conversation he and Trump had where Trump was sympathetic toward Asian immigrants needed in the tech sector. Bannon responded by saying that he thought they had too many of them already and that they undermined civic society. It's incredibly suspect that he's partnered with people/headed initiatives that push xenophobia. If he does have a white nationalist agenda, that would explain the reticence to be open on any coherent viewpoint.

In any case, he is a nationalist. He described himself as an "economic nationalist" in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. He has expressed a desire to end illegal and legal immigration, so it is more accurate to say he is a cultural nationalist. He doesn't like how the United States government operates and would rather it be replaced with another form of government. Whites make up 70% of the electorate, though they're in decline; appeal to enough whites, and it becomes easier to enact your agenda.

The kids are alt-right
The pipeline from Gamergate to the alt-right is well-documented. Pre-Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos referred to gamers as “pungent beta male bollock-scratchers and twelve-year-olds”. When Gamergate exploded, Yiannopoulos was brought on by Steve Bannon to appeal to gamers, which Bannon himself admits was an attempt to court them politically. In 2014, Yiannopoulos published his first Breitbart article on Gamergate, just a couple of weeks after Eron Gjoni began shopping the story that would become "Gamergate" on 4Chan, Something Awful, and Penny Arcade.

What does that have to do with the alt-right? Yiannopoulos was a spokesman for both movements. On March 29, 2016, Milo published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right." It later came out through leaked emails that he was workshopping that article with Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer (who himself publishes on The Daily Stormer) and Devin Saucier (the editor of the white supremacist magazine American Renaissance). Then there was that time Yiannopoulos sang “America The Beautiful” in front of a live audience, including Richard Spencer, who gave Milo a Sieg Heil.

Great Walls of Fire
While hosting his radio show, Bannon made statements that diverged from 45 years of foreign policy:

America hereby declares war on China and volunteers Steve Bannon as our lone soldier. His bravery will not be forgotten.

But...wait, missiles on "aircraft carriers"? Aren't aircraft carriers for planes and stuff?

Political career
We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war.

Bannon says many things, but money talks louder: he has an affinity for grassroots parties, especially those with a "center-right" or "Judeo-Christian" focus. This includes European populist parties like UKIP and the Front National. Putin gets a pass because he has kompromat on Trump is a strong "traditionalist"/"nationalist".

So what is a traditionalist? Bannon doesn't tell us much about it, but he tells us which thinkers promote it. Specifically, he attributes it to two people:

He doesn't mention the other by name. Still, he references one of Putin's advisors who is a proponent of "Eurasianism", which narrows things down to Aleksandr Dugin—who has also been profiled by Breitbart. Both of those men are prominent fascist thinkers. So, in other words, Bannon says the U.S. needs to consider adopting the ideology put forward by Evola/Dugin and that the movement they inspired (and their influence on Putin) is one positive thing happening in Russia right now. That's as much of an admission of sympathy for fascism as you'll get from a Beltway insider.

Shapiro also name-dropped because you can't discuss Planet Breitbart without covering the Mercers. Robert M. is a tech guru with some wingnutty libertarian views and is also Trump's biggest financier. The Mercers backed Ted Cruz until he lost momentum and realized Trump was a better vehicle. The difference between the two is that the Mercers only care about power (akin to plutocratic Russia), while Bannon is on some holy crusade. If Trump had lost the nomination, the Mercers would have shifted their allegiances, whereas Breitbart would not have been as kind—even during the general election.

Cambridge Analytica
The Mercers with Bannon founded Cambridge Analytica in 2013. Cambridge Analytica is a big data company that allowed Trump to overperform in the Rust Belt and influenced Brexit's success. Guess who sits on the board of Cambridge? That and Breitbart are among the tools at his disposal to nurture a return to nationalism in various countries.

In 2018, Cambridge Analytica was alleged to have committed illegal acts before and during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, including with Facebook data. Cambridge Analytica is also associated with Frontier Services Group (whose CEO is Erik Prince ), which provides security to Chinese businesses in Africa.

White House strategist
I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors.

I can tell you that Karl Rove was never in any meeting in the situation room.

In 2016, he became the CEO of Trump's presidential campaign. On November 13, he was appointed as the President's chief strategist.

In the early days, Trump and Bannon were ticking off the signs of Putinism like it's a to-do list. The war on media and truth was probably the most blatant aspect of this, something Bannon was quite proud of: The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.

It wasn't just CNN that was banned from the White House; it was a sizable chunk of the press pool. (While Breitbart and the Moonie Times got in.) Meanwhile, a man who wanted to tear down the world order of the last 150 years was continuously handed more power in the administration. Trump was sealed up in a bubble by those he trusted; this is how Cheney and Rumsfeld got Bush on board for the Iraq war.

Stopped clock?
Being a self-proclaimed populist with anti-establishment views, Bannon pushed for a 44% marginal tax rate on the highest earners in the country, presumably in a roundabout attempt to run to the left of Obama. He also broke rank by openly opposing possible military action in North Korea, but his resignation left the future of the Land of the Morning Calm uncertain. He also called out the bullshit the DNC pulled on Bernie Sanders in an interview with Bill Maher.

Downfall
The focus on Trump's "both sides" comment by the press missed what was happening. Trump was probably only dimly aware of what was happening if even that. But Bannon was appointed as a "strategist" to wrangle the Neo-Nazis into going out and stirring the pot. This is an old tactic by right-wing governments. People don't remember that Milo Yiannopoulos, working directly under Bannon, was having private meetings with Richard Spencer before the election. He'd give a speech in a liberal college town, the left would show up, and then the Nazi gangs would get bused in to crack some skulls. It all blew up in Charlottesville, though, with the murder of a woman; Bannon was sacked a few days later. Those 8chan guys have no idea what to do except channel that energy into the mosque and synagogue shootings.

And in the end, the Trump clan did what they always have done: behead their servants like celebratory bottles of champagne. Trump was annoyed by Bannon and friends pulling a fast one on him, placing Steve on the Security Council via an Executive Order Trump signed without reading. Also, Bannon's at loggerheads with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Kushner is pushing the neoliberal economic policy Bannon pretends to despise, thus ingratiating him with the Washington crowd to the exclusion of Bannon. The kid learned at the knees of Charles Kushner, a guy so ruthless in destroying anyone who opposed him that he once had a prostitute seduce his brother-in-law, got it on tape, and sent the video to his sister. What a shocker that a day drunk racist got played.

On January 3, 2018, President Trump cut all ties with Bannon, stating, "Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” This was in response to Bannon being quoted in a forthcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, regarding Trump's election campaign The meeting included Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort:  The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.

As is his style, President Trump branded Bannon with the nickname "Sloppy Steve" on his way out the door. This was presumably a reference to Bannon's disheveled looks. Some Trump supporters expressed disappointment that "Stinky Steve" or "Skunky Steve" were not officially chosen.

With Bannon's removal from the NSC, an effort was underway to shuffle him off to some fat-salaried think tank glue factory.

European gap year
I think shares in Bannon are overvalued. This idea that he’s going to become this pan-national Dr Evil figure producing this big radical right alignment ... there are some big barriers to entry. Influence in the US doesn’t really translate to influence in Europe.

In 2018 he headed off to Europe, hoping to unite all of Europe's far-right parties into one populist and anti-European Union organization centered around a foundation called "The Movement", which he planned to set up in Brussels, Belgium. The Movement would provide support and possibly money to right-wing populist parties throughout the EU, in the same way he imagined George Soros controlled Europe's left. To fulfill this scheme, he met with members of several parties:
 * Mischaël Modrikamen of Belgium's People's Party, the only politician who accepted his proposal and joined The Movement.
 * Filip Dewinter of Vlaams Belang (formerly Vlaams Blok), also of Belgium.
 * Nigel Farage of UKIP in the UK. Like Farage, his attacks on big business are highly suspect since Bannon got rich by working in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department of Goldman Sachs. Rob Ford of the University of Manchester said Bannon and Farage had a lot in common: "They have an exaggerated sense of how many people actually bought into their core agenda."
 * Jérôme Rivière of France's National Rally (formerly Front National).
 * Kent Ekeroth, associated with Sweden Democrats, although in trouble with them for being a bit violent.
 * Jacob Rees-Mogg of the UK Conservative Party met Bannon in December 2017. Later Rees-Mogg and Bannon denied that they wanted to be involved with each other, making it hard to know who was genuinely opposed to working with the other and who was sulking.
 * Boris Johnson, also of the UK Conservatives, met Bannon in July 2018.

Sadly (for him and arguably nobody else), his scheme ran into several problems. Firstly, most European countries have electoral laws governing political parties' operations with bans on foreign funding (it's easy to understand how a former Trump aide would miss this). This meant most parties were legally unable to accept his support. Also, some nationalists didn't like foreign interference, including reportedly Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally.

Book club
It's war. It's war. Every day, we put up: America's at war, America's at war. We're at war. Note to self, beloved commander in chief: We're at war.

His apocalyptic worldview has been partly influenced by his interpretation of the pseudoscientific book The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy by William Strauss and Neil Howe.

Since 2015, Bannon has repeatedly referenced the dystopian French novel which has been accurately described as "shockingly racist".

Great Walls of Fraud
In 2018, an ultra-right-wing military veteran named started (in lieu of the, which in part occurred over disputes over funding for Trump's planned "wall" with the United States-Mexico border) a crowdfunding campaign on  to raise money to give to the government some of the wall funding. Kolfage assured supporters that the fundraiser "is not a scam" (even though Kolfage had run some questionably right-wing conspiratorial ad farms on Facebook in the past). In February 2019, the campaign switched focus away from GoFundMe and directed all attention to a new nonprofit group called  Bannon was brought in to chair the advisory board; other anti-immigrant hard-liners closely associated with Trump, such as Kris Kobach, Tom Tancredo, and  also got involved in the organization.

In the middle of 2019, a parcel of land near El Paso, Texas, was chosen for the initial construction of the wall (with the help of a right-wing militia group called the, a group that the ACLU described as a "racist and armed" "fascist militia organization" whose activities include illegally detaining migrants entering the United States, and a landowner sympathetic to their cause). By 2020, a small section of the wall was completed, despite clashes with the over failure to get permits, cutting off access to waterways and a public monument, and building a gate for the wall on federal land without authorization. From some accounts, the construction was completed too hastily. It was poorly designed, so questions were raised over potential flooding. There was concern that erosion could eventually lead to the wall falling into the.

It turns out that building the wall may not have been the entire purpose of the nonprofit. On August 20, 2020, Bannon, Kolfage, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (a person previously notable for, as the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, helping to get charges against Michael Flynn dropped and getting Roger Stone's sentence reduced), and financier Andrew Badolato were charged with fraud by federal authorities; Bannon was arrested that day in Connecticut. The charge accused Bannon of funneling more than one million dollars from We Build the Wall through an unnamed nonprofit organization, some of which was used for personal expenses. Kolfage was also charged for funneling $350,000 in donations for personal use.

Naturally, Donald Trump couldn't just sit there and let a fellow loyal grifter actually get punished for his misdeeds. So, on January 20, 2021, only hours before Trump departed the White House, Trump granted a full presidential pardon to Bannon, perhaps as a protective measure to maintain his loyalty. The others weren't so fortunate; having pleaded guilty to some of the charges on April 21 2022, on April 26 2023, Kolfage was sentenced to 51 months in prison, and Badolato was sentenced to 36 months in prison. Shea, meanwhile, was convicted of wire fraud, money laundering, and obstruction of justice on October 28 2022. As presidential pardons only cover federal charges, Trump's pardon didn't stop the state of New York from launching their own indictment against Bannon in September 2022, alleging money laundering, fraud, and conspiracy.

Spreading COVID-19 and 2020 election misinformation
Despite the legal troubles, Bannon still had enough followers to listen to him. So Bannon continued to post right-wing bullshit on social media under the program title Steve Bannon's War Room. This eventually got Bannon into trouble when, in one War Room episode in November 2020, he called for pandemic expert and FBI director  to not only be fired but to be beheaded and put their "heads on pikes" just like the "old times of Tudor England". The blatant advocacy for violence was enough for Bannon to get permanently booted from Twitter, get the offending episode removed from Youtube, lose the service he was using to mail newsletters, and, to top it off, lose the legal counsel that was defending him against these fraud charges. Additionally, YouTube banned Bannon's "War Room" program on January 8, after Rudy Giuliani appeared on the program two days after the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, and falsely blamed the riot (whose participants were, in reality, largely those in the alt-right or MAGA social sphere) on Democrats. Bannon also confirmed that he was involved in planning the rally immediately preceding the January 6 coup attempt.

Although the bans significantly reduced the spread of misinformation, Bannon continued to babble bullshit on his podcast, which was still listed on platforms run by Apple and Google, and appeared on an obscure cable and streaming media outlet called "Real America's Voice". In 2021 Bannon's focus increasingly shifted to supporting Donald Trump's bullshit "election fraud" claims, with his show underwritten by fellow election fraud bullshitter Mike Lindell. Bannon was happy to host guests like Lindell and Giuliani, giving them a platform to repeat their baseless fraud allegations (and even wackier bullshit, such as a strange allegation from Giuliani that the Lincoln Project helped participants in the 2021 U.S. Capitol riot). This transpired despite pending libel lawsuits by voting machine manufacturers and  against the two. Bannon also continued to push bullshit advice on COVID-19, featuring guests such as Marjorie Taylor Greene pushing bizarre anti-vaccination or anti-face mask musings.

Unsurprisingly, Bannon also took a page from the playbook of right-wing hucksters ranging from Jim Bakker to Infowars and started hawking his own brand of bullshit supplements on his show using the name "Wellness Warrior". A collection of zinc and Vitamin D3 called the "War Room Defense Pack" was marketed by Bannon as "the ultimate defense against sickness". On April 15, 2021, the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Wellness Warrior, alleging that they were violating the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act by marketing these simple vitamins as a treatment for COVID-19 that was more effective than vaccination.