If irony is dead, it just got resurrected with the fraud arrest—while aboard a $28 million super-yacht—of self-proclaimed Leninist-populist and anti-elitist Steve Bannon. Seems he used money Trumpists gave to a We Build the Wall fundraising group that promised “All money donated to the campaign goes directly to the wall!!! Not anyone’s pocket” to siphon off at least $1 million into his pockets and those of his partners.
It appears that still another enemy of the globalists has been living in style by scamming the yokels.
Misappropriating funds is the main crime alleged, but as Postal Inspector-in-Charge Phillip R. Bartlett explained, “not only did they lie to donors, they schemed to hide their misappropriation of funds by creating sham invoices and accounts to launder donations and cover up their crimes.” Doesn’t Bannon know that covering up the crime is sometimes as illegal as the crime itself? He must have said to himself, “Trump got away with it when he ran the fraudulent Trump University. I can do it too.”
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Over the years since Trump’s inauguration, I have written in The Daily Beast about Bannon’s pose as a populist more than once. I pointed to a speech he had given back on April of 2010 where he blasted the “the financial elites and the world populist class.” The “pushers on Wall Street,” he told a crowd, posed an “existential threat” to America. It was the middle class who saw “socialism for the poor and the very wealthy,” while they suffered.
In a 2018 column, I quoted Bannon praising “This Land Is Your Land,” saying that even though “the populist left have taken it… it’s still one of the most powerful songs written in this country. So I’m a big fan.” By endorsing the song written and performed by Woody Guthrie, who considered himself a communist, Bannon tried to show his working class bona fides or at least a shorthand for those bona fides that would register with the media elites.
At times, Bannon even echoed the themes of Marxist intellectuals. In 2016, he told a group of right-wing Catholics in the Vatican who were opposed to the policies of Pope Francis that the West was facing “a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.” The enemy was “state-sponsored capitalism” that exists in Russia and China, and the “crony capitalism” that exists in countries like Argentina that serve only “a small sub-set of people.”
Ironically, Bannon urged his audience that “it really behooves all of us to really take a hard look and make sure that we are reinvesting that back into positive things.” He called for creating wealth that creates jobs and not simply for the purpose of personal well-being. What he urged was creation of “a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos.”
One must remember now how important Bannon was to the evolving populist movement worldwide. Besides Trump, the former Breitbart boss was perhaps the biggest hero of the Trumpist right wing. In 2017, he got the cover of Time, whose editors asked, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?” The cover photo and article infuriated Donald Trump, who would eventually remove Bannon from some positions he held in the White House, and later fire him.
In 2017 David Horowitz, Stephen Miller’s intellectual mentor, awarded Bannon his Freedom Center’s annual “Courage award.” In announcing it, Horowitz said “Steve Bannon’s war is a war for our country. It is about patriotism—which Steve likes to call nationalism—and its enemies. It is about us. God bless him.” On many occasions, Horowitz has said that if not for Bannon, Donald Trump would not be president.
Speaking of Bannon in July 2019, appearing on PBS Frontline, Horowitz said: “If you listen to Bannon, all his talk is warrior talk. And so he encouraged Trump to be Trump… Trump was very much in sync with Bannon’s attitude. Bannon feels the country is being betrayed, and there’s a lot of evidence for that. And it was betrayed by Bush as much as by Obama.”
One wonders what led Bannon to preach the same message, while personally abandoning all the talk of a capitalism that serves the middle class and not the wealthy.
But while Bannon talked about a capitalism that serves the middle class and not the super-rich, he always liked the good life of the super-rich, taking private jets to transport him to high-end hotels in various European cities, as you can for yourself in the 2019 documentary film about him, The Brink.
After his obvious failures to build an anti-Francis new conservative Catholicism in Europe, and then an international alliance of the far-right populist parties across Europe—what irony!—perhaps Bannon gave up the game. Trump hasn’t asked him to return to help steer his re-election campaign, as I once thought he might do. Perhaps the only way Bannon could find to feed his luxurious lifestyle was by fleecing the common men he pretends he’s trying to help.
