Who is Steve Bannon? Bannon isn’t a household name for the average Brit but he should be because Bannon is perhaps one of the most powerful men in the world.
Bannon is the former editor of the alt-right ‘news’ site Breitbart News and now the White House’s Chief Strategist in the Trump administration. Since he who cannot be named took office on January 20th, Bannon has been central to the direction of the administration’s domestic and foreign policy. It is reported by The Independent too that Bannon was the mastermind behind the ‘Muslim ban,’ which would’ve prevented the very well-known ‘Bowling Green Massacre,’ if you apply alternative facts to policy creation. In an unprecedented move, Bannon has been given a permanent position on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council (NSC) whilst the director of national intelligence and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff (the ‘dudes’ that actually have experience in matters of national security) are only allowed to attend NSC meetings if the Cheeto Voldemort decides their expertise is relevant to the matters at hand.
What makes all this worrying is the fact that Bannon is a maniac. Back in March 2016, Bannon stated on a Breitbart News radio phone in show that “we’re [the U.S.] going to war in the South China Sea in five to ten years” and in November 2015 that “we’re [the U.S.] clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East again.” This explains why Trump has taken a hard-line with Iran as demonstrated by his recent sanctions on the country and his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal struck by Obama. Trump is easily influenced by those around him and by the media as exemplified by how he tweeted about the “carnage” in Chicago due to high gun murder rates just after Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who Trump is an apparent fan of, reported on the issue. Bannon manipulates information, it’s what Breitbart news specialised in and now, he has the ear of the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world.
Bannon also told The Daily Beast in 2013 that he’s “a Leninist… [because] 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.” Bannon’s goal is not to govern for the people, by the people, with the people. Bannon’s goal becomes clear if you understand his obsession with the book ‘The Fourth Turning’ which theorises that history moves in cycles of 80-100 years where a cataclysmic event destroys the current world order and a new world order is built upon its ashes. Bannon believes the 2008 Great Recession was the catalyst for this event just as the Great Depression of the 1930s was the catalyst for WWII. Bannon believes authoritarian politics are the necessary preparations for a large scale war that will be our cycle’s cataclysmic event.
Bannon is a nutter, a maniac and a crackpot of huge proportions yet this crackpot not only has a place in the White House, he’s a key orchestrator of domestic and foreign policy due to his substantial influence over Trump. Trump’s just an idiotic puppet riding the waves of Bannon’s alt-right movements. Bannon is the real brains behind the Orwellian nightmare we are beginning to inhabit. Trump shouldn’t be our focus of our resistance – it should be Bannon.
Christian Hague
(Image courtesy of The Daily Beast)