There’s a note in 2018 about how Steve Bannon’s guidance for the GOP was to take a topic and “flood it with shit“.
Although no connection to history was made at that time, just a year earlier an obvious explanation for his strategy was sitting ripe and ready for anyone to pick it up. He had worked in Hollywood on a film “very much like Soviet propaganda”.
Julia Jones, who worked as Bannon’s screenwriting partner for a decade… described how Bannon admired the documentary films made by the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, such as “Triumph of the Will”: “Her playbook was key for him. I think he used her technique of fear, which you can see in that movie [In the Face of Evil, released by Bannon in 2004].”
Budget? $500,000 (estimated). Gross sales US & Canada? $110,577. Bannon had written this movie glorifying Reagan’s biogtry under the premise of “racists enable racists…turns of phrase and tropes are daggers.”
By 2015 Bannon had transitioned from such propagandist attempts within Hollywood to become chairman of political extremist Breitbart News, clearly motivated to “flood it with shit”. A year later in 2016 he was hired to be CEO overseeing disinformation tactics in a GOP campaign for President.
Why had Bannon become so enamored of Nazis that he helped one run for President? Why did he love propaganda methods to destroy truth and replace it with fear, generating false fascist narratives about “strong white men” as saviors?
Arguably it goes back to his role as a low-level budget planner in the U.S. Navy and, while deployed at sea, being heavily imbibed on baseless fears about the Iranian hostage crisis.
Ronald Reagan worked covertly to block American attempts to free their hostages in Iran, as a means to win the Presidency.
Bannon worshiped Reagan and saw such “means to win” as perfectly fine. It is exactly why Bannon two decades later planned in 2007 to make a completely fabricated propaganda hit piece about Jews and Muslims, calling them a threat to the Nixon/Reagan vision of America run only by white men.
Early symptoms of his fear-addled power-thirst showed up in around 1995 during a bitter lawsuit:
What sunk Bannon was, he lied…
And then in 1996 he was…
…charged with spousal abuse, simple battery, and dissuading a witness, because he had made it impossible for his wife to talk to the police.
And then 1997:
He claimed that he would sue the school if they accepted our children… the biggest problem he had with [school] is the number of Jews that attend. He said he doesn’t like Jews…
Clearly over the years he has been repeatedly accused of using horrible, ginned-up hate tactics in order to get whatever he wanted.
It’s an interesting fact that Bannon spun from being a scared bean-counter in the bowels of the Navy to go work in Hollywood, in Goldman Sachs and ultimately get rich only because of a lottery ticket — some early papers he signed on the sitcom Seinfeld.
…Bannon’s legitimation of a white nationalism that hates Jews but admires Israel has forced a reckoning with the single-minded meaning of the “new anti-Semitism”…
His “new anti-Semitism” would thus be the more classic variety, riding the backs of Jews while subtly trying to blame them for any and all failures, as if an almost exact repeat of the Nazi propaganda machine created by Riefenstahl to manipulate fear, in order to hide a fascist fraud-to-riches platform.
Bannon, Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors in connection with the “We Build the Wall” campaign [based on false xenophobic fear mongering], which raised $25m (£19m), the Department of Justice (DoJ) said. Bannon received more than $1m, at least some of which he used to cover personal expenses, the DoJ said.
In the “pitbull without lipstick” world of the GOP the Bannon pedigree of pushing hateful lies served to navigate them into the morass they operate today. They seem not to mind at all taking his lead as their own, while leaving “Sloppy Bannon” behind and stuck into charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, not to mention contempt of democracy.
And one final thought, Hollywood became what it is today because all the movie-making talent fled from Berlin, Germany in the 1930s.
From the time Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933 to the opening salvos of World War II in 1939, about 800 actors, directors, writers, composers and producers fled Europe for the safety of America. The Third Reich’s loss was Hollywood’s gain as the infusion of artistic talent changed moviemaking for decades to come.
Seems sadly predictable that men like Bannon hate others for surviving and thriving like this. How dare Hollywood be so diverse, skilled and enjoy success, proving every day that Hitler failed? Bannon’s toxic competitive thirst based on fears means he fixates on easy profits and hates freedoms; but he stands out as especially easy to explain, given his overt attraction to Nazi propaganda methods intended to defraud the public and steal power… especially from “liberals” who *gasp* believe in collaboration.
