Dude, who even knows.
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The fact that Steve Bannon consistently types “you” as “u” just fucking kills me
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The correct next Brietbart provocation under Bannon is to set up a touring company of The Crucible and 1776 that give them alt-right undertones, take it on national tour
make noise about every theater that rejects you and stage it in outlying county fairgrounds with friendly authorities, hype it into a thing
(The REALLY troll thing to do would be The Klansman, which had a successful but overlooked theatrical tour in Dixie before it became Birth of A Nation, just like a Tyler Perry joint)
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Fired he might have been, but I’m not sure Steve Bannon’s wrong when he says he’ll be able to fight harder from the outside
He sure wasn’t controlling Trump (or Trump much of anything) in the White House, and since going in he lost his grip on the alt-right that largely went to shit. You’ll recall the original plan to draw out antifa was underwriting the delightfully playful Milo on a campus tour, while chugging milk and scampishly frustrating Shia LeBouef.
Without that direction and momentum it’s dispersing to attention whores and entryists – McInnes and his Proud Boys, Cernovich, especially Richard Spencer.
Charlottesville was a textbook entryist campaign by Spencer, who I remind you knows what he’s doing. You get some people not quite ready for the uncut stuff, you have a milder front group where they can be active in solidarity and politically educated, then you fold them into the OG group. “Unite” them, if you will. The British socialist splinters do a lot of entryism, the ANSWER antiwar marches against Dubya were a US equivalent.
My impression is Spencer succeeded in bringing the Stormers and TRS types along (they were there already) but not as much /pol/, let alone the fun-time channers and post-PUA bodybuilders, let alone the meming masses. (Only person I’ve seen noticing this is radical-of-good-faith Amber A'Lee Frost, it does weaken a good narrative)
So Bannon’s job would be to clean off the more impish side, rebrand, regroup. There is going to be right-insurgent energy on the fundamentals one way or another, and it can be better-channeled. The left unto normie left is high on its own hype, pretty far over its skis if you look at those polls, product of the (social) media bubble that’s Bannon’s foil. Could easily see him finding pressure points to turn racial iconoclasm towards a nation where whites party-vote like Dixie, aggravate the tensions in urban Dem coalitions (wokeness cant bond anarchists to landlords and employers forever, and they aren’t gonna let Deray herd them towards Cory Booker and Kamala Harris).
And he’s got the Mercers’ money so immune to pressure on advertisers, too connected to be cut off or blocked in otherwise, plus whatever insider information and access he has while it’s fresh. Don’t sleep on that boy.
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The Hollywood Reporter? Off-brand Variety? That’s the last place I’d expect the first interview with a triumphant political macher to run.
That’s exactly where I’d expect an old Hollywood dealmaker to call in debts for a friendly outlet though. And that’s the last place I’d expect the writing staff to get uppity in the name of wounded journalist pride.
Steve Bannon has done some thinking about how to end-run the MSM, I assure you.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to Reagan, journalists started out trying not to normalize him, bird-dogging and fact-checking and after a few months their editors pointed out they’d gone out on crusade without an army following, and things calmed.
And so after a while you’d have press conferences where Teflon Don would deflect a hostile question through two completely unrelated talking points before concluding with a joke on liberals, and even the asker would laugh and laugh.
Which critics of the time felt horrifying, along there with “talking heads” and the chirpy frivolity of local TV Action/Eyewitness News formats and MTV-influenced stylized editing. What Max Headroom was getting at. Part of the backsliding from the Great Introspection of the 70s.
One difference there, I see journalists saying their Reagan-era bosses were saying “we can’t destroy ANOTHER president”. Because Nixon. Driving him from office had looked like the ideal realization of the noblest journalistic impulses but instead of yielding some bicentennial national renewal it gave us the muddy, paranoid, demoralizing ‘70s, when the center could not hold.
(Like what was what was significant about Reagan getting shot but pulling through joking, after which he was politically invincible - we not only had a President who wasn’t a lemon but we actually got to KEEP him this time like we hadn’t since Eisenhower)
And without that cautionary tale gonna be people going into this one gunning for Nixon, we’ll see.
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Also in re: Steve Bannon “there’s a white populist in the White House giving political advice! He says he wants to destroy the government! THIS IS NOT NORMAL”
Pat Buchanan had a close advisory role in both Nixon and Reagan’s White Houses. Grover Norquist fantasized about drowning the government in a bathtub and he was a chief architect of the Republican Revolution.
This is normal, if anything it was the Bushes’ Christian Democratic take on the GOP (”thousand points of light”/”kinder, gentler”/”compassionate conservatism”) that was the outlier.