(2024-04-04) How Steve Bannon Guided The MAGA Movements Rebound From Jan6

How Steve Bannon guided the MAGA movement’s rebound from Jan. 6. Seated in his podcast studio, Bannon looked, as usual, under-slept and over-caffeinated, but on this morning, the first Saturday in February 2021, his beady eyes were bright with excitement.

It was in those rooms, during a book party in November of 2013, that Bannon had once announced, “I’m a Leninist.”

“Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too,” Bannon answered. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” (BITFD)

He was obsessed with history, specifically the concept of historical cycles — the idea that time was not, as Americans usually learned, a linear march of progress, but rather, more like the view of ancient traditions, a recurring pattern of distinct phases.

Bannon especially liked the version of this theory in “The Fourth Turning,” a 1997 book by historians Neil Howe and William Strauss

The book predicted a coming rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, across the world and in America.

Bannon was not merely a student or passive observer of this prophecy; he wanted to be an agent of it, and an architect of the era that came next. So when he watched Donald Trump glide down a golden escalator to announce his campaign for president, in 2015, his first thought was, “That’s Hitler!” By that he meant someone who intuitively understood the aesthetics of power, as in Nazi propaganda films

He saw in Trump someone who could viscerally connect with the general angst that Bannon was roiling and make himself a vessel for Americans’ grievances and desires.

Bannon’s thinking on building a mass movement was shaped by Eric Hoffer.

his first book, “The True Believer.” The book caused a sensation when it was published in 1951, becoming a manual for comprehending the age of Hitler, Stalin and Mao.

“He cannot conjure a movement out of the void,” Hoffer wrote. “There has to be an eagerness to follow and obey, and an intense dissatisfaction with things as they are, before the movement and leader can make their appearance.”

The true believers were seeking not self‐advancement but rather “self‐renunciation” — swapping out their individual identities, with all their personal disappointments, for “a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause.” The kinds of people who were most susceptible to becoming true believers were, in Hoffer’s idiom, poor, struggling artists, misfits, unusually selfish, or just plain bored.

For Bannon, as he was building Breitbart’s audience, the ready supply of true believers came from disaffected young men.

Breitbart’s traffic figures confirmed Bannon’s hunch that candidate Trump was catching fire in 2015, and Bannon positioned the site as the Trump campaign’s unofficial media partner in thrashing the Republican primary field

he supplied a closing message that, if not exactly lucid, did have a kind of coherence. The message was that Trump, the “blue‐collar billionaire,” was here to blow up the established political order that was plainly failing to serve the needs and interests of the common public, and would be a champion for the forgotten and left‐behind Americans.

Bannon was constantly testing things out. With so many bombastic schemes in motion, it could be hard to tell when Bannon was onto something or when he was just blowing smoke.

He found a new patron, the fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, who cast himself as the shadow‐boxing action hero in music videos about taking down the Chinese Communist Party

Bannon and Guo landed in the SEC’s crosshairs for a cryptocurrency offering, called G‐Coins or G‐Dollars. (Guo was arrested in 2023 and charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud and money laundering amounting to more than $1 billion.)

Trump was by then running for reelection, and though he’d entered 2020 in a formidable position, the COVID‐19 pandemic had paralyzed the economy and showcased a president in ineffectual denial, refusing to wear a mask, demanding to suppress case counts by slowing down testing and musing about injecting bleach.

Trump was longing to replace his campaign manager

But Bannon turned down the job

Bannon thought the race was already over. The Trump campaign was beyond saving.

Undermining a Biden presidency, however, was something Bannon said he knew how to do

Bannon addressed audiences who were feeling sure that Trump would win, because they’d seen massive boat parades of Trump supporters, and they didn’t personally know anyone who was voting for Biden. Bannon warned them to stay focused, pay attention. Trump had been saying since the summer that the Democrats would use mail ballots to steal the election

Bannon promised, Congress would either return the election to Republican‐ controlled state legislatures or decide it in the U.S. House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled a majority of state delegations.

Could they really pull it off? Didn’t matter. “I had no downside,” Bannon would later say. His aim was to use the occasion to stage such a spectacle that it would undermine Biden’s legitimacy with millions of Americans

Bannon kept hyping Jan. 6 to his hundreds of thousands of podcast listeners. (2021 Storming of the US Capitol)

He didn’t say exactly what everyone was supposed to do once they got to Washington on Jan. 6.

Soon the lawmakers in the Capitol could hear the crowd roaring outside. The mob broke in and the lawmakers fled.

Pence refused to do what Trump demanded, and not enough Republicans objected to the votes to force a contingent election in the House. The massive victory Bannon had promised did not come to pass.

In the weeks that followed, Bannon’s show got booted from YouTube, Trump was banned from Twitter, rioters started getting arrested, Trump got impeached, Biden got inaugurated, and at the last possible minute before Trump left office, he pardoned Bannon. (Presidential Pardon)

The pro‐Trump media ecosystem splintered

But Bannon stood out from the pack by any measure: he reached more listeners, had the most in‐demand guests, churned out more content, set the agenda

He kept distributing through Apple’s podcast app, repeatedly topping the charts.

Bannon and his guests developed a canon of the Stolen Election myth. The fraud was just the first part. The Democrats always tried that; it was a given. The second part, the crucial step, was the stab in the back — the Republican election officials and state legislators who knew the election was stolen and let the Democrats get away with it.

All the tumult of 2020 had, as Hoffer foretold, done the preliminary work of undermining institutions

Now it was up to Bannon to transform the defeat of January 6 into the galvanizing moment for the next phase of the MAGA movement.

Bannon wasn’t messing around with basement kids anymore. The MAGA movement had matured. His audience now was grayer — people in their 50s, 60s and beyond, a lot of empty nesters and retirees — but with a similar need for connection, and perhaps even memories of a gentler time. (Clinger Party)

The social critic Christopher Lasch, another Bannon influence, had written about this beginning in the 60s: how liberalism was a failure because people looked at the world that “freedom” got them and decided they didn’t want it. It sucked.

Modern life was so fragmented, so disembodied, so alienating. Dealing with that alienation was what War Room was all about. “Action, action, action,” Bannon would say. “This is all about your agency.”

The way Bannon saw it, there already was a third party: that was the establishment he hungered to destroy. The neocons, neoliberals, big donors, globalists, Wall Street, corporatists, elites. He sometimes called them “the uniparty,” because they were the only ones who ever got power, no matter whether Democrats or Republicans won elections. This formulation was not entirely wrong‐headed, to the extent that the structure of having two pluralistic, big‐tent parties pushed them both toward the center, producing a measure of stability and continuity

Bannon was not, like a typical political strategist, trying to tinker around the edges of the existing party coalitions in the hope of eking out 50 percent plus one. Bannon already told you: he wanted to bring everything crashing down. He wanted to completely dismantle and redefine the parties

Trump’s rank‐and‐file supporters were getting carried away with the third‐party idea, and Bannon needed to put a stop to it. He knew a third party would be a fool’s errand,

How to put the Patriot Party idea in its place, and harness the MAGA movement through the Republican Party where it belonged? Bannon had just the man for the job, someone he’d known for years, someone who used to blog for him back at Breitbart. His name was Dan Schultz, and his time had come.