[Julia] Jones, [Bannon's] film colleague, said that in their years working together, Mr. Bannon occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.But there's a lot in the profile that portrays Bannon just the way he wants to be portrayed -- as a hard-charging, swashbuckling iconoclast who is the establishment's worst nightmare. Among other things, he wants us to believe that he's ordinary Americans' best friend, and the Times profile gives us that spin more or less undiluted:
“I said, ‘That would exclude a lot of African-Americans,’” Ms. Jones recalled. “He said, ‘Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.’..."
At times, Mr. Bannon’s rants against the ruling class -- in which he is at least as unsparing of Republicans as of Democrats -- strikingly echo populists on the left. In a revealing 2014 talk via Skype to a Vatican conference, some of his words might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts or Mr. Sanders of Vermont.Hmmm ... it seems to me that I recall a group of people who got together a few years ago to draw attention to precisely this problem. The group was furious at Wall Street's ability to walk away from the financial crisis unscathed, and was disgusted at the ever-widening gap between the rich and everyone else. What the heck were those folks called again? Oh, yeah, I remember -- Occupy Wall Street.
“Not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with the 2008 crisis,” Mr. Bannon fumed. “And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken.”
So what did Steve Bannon -- the working-class hero -- think of Occupy? Let's go to the Breitbart archives:
The Occupy Wall Street movement was not an innocent attempt by youth across America that broke out spontaneously. It was, instead, a movement that was insidiously plotted by forces that intended to eliminate the United States forever from the free, liberty-loving, last best hope on earth it has always been.Omigod! Unions -- organizing! It's too horrible to contemplate!
The late Andrew Breitbart, with his close friend Stephen K. Bannon, producer of the hit documentary “The Undefeated,” teamed up to make “Occupy Unmasked.” Breitbart’s last work rips away the façade from the Occupy movement and lays bare for all the world to see how nefarious the movement truly is....
No stone was left unturned in the making of the film; the duo pored over video evidence, documented proof, and exposed e-mail chains galore. Bannon was unflinching in his condemnation:
This is not a bunch of college kids and hippies putting this thing together. Below the surface is a very dark, very ugly and very dangerous group of people. They managed to change the narrative. Their goal is to create chaos, destroy the system. They want to create anarchy, put the system in crisis and from crisis gain power.... The film starts to appear even more sinister when it reveals the organizers behind the protests. One organizer, Malcolm Harris, a self-described communist, lied to the Occupiers in order to get them to Zuccotti park by telling them the band Radiohead would be playing there. And just as you’d expect, a New York Times writer helped him get that message out.
Employee unions were instrumental in organizing the protests, of course, since their socialistic goals were absolutely in sync with the Occupy movement. “Occupy Unmasked” even shows how the unions are still organizing, protesting and occupying.
And Bannon said Occupy's goal was "to create chaos" and "destroy the system" as if that was a bad thing? I thought he was the guy who said in 2014, “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” So what's his problem with Occupy? Is he afraid of the competition?
Steve Bannon may attack the conservative establishment when it's battling anti-establishment right-wing radicals, but if the battle is between establishmentarians and anyone on the left, then Bannon is going to side with the establishment every time. He is not the hero of the common people. Reporters, don't let him spin you that way.
2 comments:
It worries me that writers at NYT would willfully or lazily or ignorantly make that claim of echoes of "the populist left" when all it took was a blogger--and I do not mean that in a derogatory way, Steve, I love your work--to do some Googling to find his disdain for people who share a value he supposedly has.
Violence and anger at Government is accepted and even encouraged in the US but, left-wing agitation is never acceptable and must be crushed each and every time. It's fascism, it's breitbart, it's Bannon it's America.
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