bannon 5 war room

i forgot this existed, see bannon 4 -->FIVE

SEE SIX 2 25

trifecta

male macho MMA UFC misogyny

mADE BONES CRED ON FREEDOM COCKS TAKING OUT “ESTB” RINO HOUSE SPEAKERS?

MERRI OK

XIAN?! 4 24

big lie is projection demonization; recall plan to deny results before election

SEE ELIMINATIONALIST jackal traitor thus execute milley

see retaliation

see anti-commie joe mccarthy

islamophobe thus all phobes

see fascism 5 eg kashyap press suppr SIX ENEMIES ; ~ checks and bal

SEE APOC END TIMES PREPPER GRIFT GOLD

hype fear polariz demoniz

they are coming for you = fear anger // grift}:

see grift ivermectin breitbreit

see Pope Francis wall not xian

bak}:

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mma

After Israel launched airstrikes at Iranian nuclear and residential infrastructure on June 12, right-wing media figures rushed to fearmonger that supposed Democratic “open border” policies allowed Iranian “sleeper cells” into the country that might now execute terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Israel announced it had initiated a series of strikes aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile factories which have reportedly killed top Iranian military commanders and civilian scientists. In response, Iran vowed retaliation against what it called the country’s “foolish act.” President Donald Trump called the attack “excellent” and warned that there would be “more to come.”

Some right-wing media figures have already started fearmongering about the possibility of Iranian sleeper cells committing terrorism on U.S. soil in response to the Israeli strikes. Several have also blamed former President Joe Biden for this threat due to his alleged “open border” policies.

Right-wing figures fearmonger about the possibility of “terror attacks” from Iranian sleeper cells supposedly let into the U.S. under Biden

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk warned his followers: “Keep your head on a swivel. Biden let millions of people into America. Iran might activate some sleeper cells against Americans. Stay armed.”

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Trump ally and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer urged people to be “very careful today and this weekend in American cities and tourist locations” because “Iran has many sleeper cells in the US. Iranian proxies from HAMAS and Hezbollah will likely retaliate on US soil to kill Americans in acts of Islamic terror as a form of retaliation to the Israeli air strikes.” She also claimed “there are millions of jihadi sleeper cells in our country thanks to the Democrats open border polices.”

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On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room, MAGA media influencer Jack Posobiec also suggested that the U.S. is “very vulnerable” to attacks planned inside the country because “under four years of the Biden administration, … the border was completely open,” adding later that the U.S. is “vulnerable to this type of attack from sleeper cells from any of our adversaries or potential sabotage teams around the world.”

Video

Citation

From the June 13, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

On The National Report, Newsmax host Jon Glasgow said, “We’ve had millions of people pour in over the borders. Is there a possibility of some sleeper cells here in the United States that Iran might try to activate?” Newsmax host Rob Astorino replied, “There's no question. I mean, that's been their plan the whole time.”

Appearing on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer claimed that Israel “could well have essentially limited all options that the Iranians have, except for potentially some sleeper cells, which we are definitely still worried about here in the United States.” Newsmax host Bianca de la Garza responded, “As we have to be. Joe Biden opened borders for four years.”

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AN 6 25

The Hill reports MAGA podcaster and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannoncalled for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), to be “arrested” if he doesn’t stop traveling overseas and encouraging Ukraine to defend itself against the ongoing Russian invasion.

Bannon, who has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s anti-LGBTQ policies and his “anti-woke” agenda in Russia, was also furious at Ukraine’s weekend drone attack on Russia’s bombing fleet. The strategic attack destroyed 40 aircraft deep inside Russian territory. Bannon said the White House should condemn Ukraine’s military response to the invasion and put a collar on Graham’s diplomacy of encouragement.

“The White House has to condemn this immediately and pull all support and tell Lindsey Graham to come home or we are going to put you under arrest when you come home. You’re stirring it up,” Bannon said Monday on his ‘War Room’ podcast.

He added that Graham’s cheering of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week amounted to undermining President Donald Trump. He also slammed Graham’s legislation sanctioning Russia and other countries that buy Russian products.

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“Lindsey Graham’s over there saying, ‘Hey, forget Trump. I got the House and the Senate. We’re going to pass [the legislation]. You’re going to see something in a couple of days,’” Bannon said.

“He’s stirring it up over there,” he repeated.

Bannon’s demand comes just as CNN anchors speculated on Russia requesting a limited ceasefire on Monday in response to the attack. Up until this year, Ukraine had kept most of its drone attacks close to the Ukraine/Russia boundary, or it reserved drone strikes for Russian positions inside Ukraine.

Monday, on CNN, Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Evelyn Farkas, called the barrage “a turning point” in the war, but she was not ready to say it would deter more Russian attacks.

Read the full report from the Hill at this link.

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an 6 25

In late May — four months into Donald Trump's second presidency — The Guardian reported that record numbers of Americans are applying for residency or citizenship in the U.K. Plenty of Americans are looking at countries in Continental Europe as well, and liberal American actress Rosie O'Donnell — a major critic of Trump — is now living in the Republic of Ireland and has no plans to return to the United States anytime soon.

But many observers of international politics are warning Americans who have hopes of becoming expatriates that Europe has its far-right populists as well, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in France to Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

In an article published on June 1, Axios' Tal Axelrod examines the alliances between far-right MAGA Republicans in the U.S. and far-right movements in Europe.

"MAGA media heavyweights are intervening in elections around the world, increasingly obsessed with exporting President Trump's brand of right-wing populism beyond America's borders," Axelrod reports. "Why it matters: What began as a nationalist reaction to America's perceived decline has evolved into a global ideological crusade. Now at the apex of its domestic power, MAGA is rallying behind candidates who share its views on immigration, globalism and the fight for 'western civilization.'"

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The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has held events in Hungary and Poland, and Axelrod cites examples of Trump allies promoting far-right movements in Romania and Germany.

"MAGA leaders — including Vice President Vance — excoriated Romanian authorities for annulling the results of December's election and banning the leading far-right candidate over allegations of Russian interference," Axelrod reports. "In last week's rerun, MAGA podcasters like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon rallied behind pro-Trump candidate George Simion, who even described himself as running 'on the MAGA ticket. Simion ultimately fell short to centrist Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, a result that MAGA blamed on globalist meddling…. Vance, Elon Musk and scores of pro-Trump influencers have championed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which had its best-ever showing in elections earlier this year."

Axelrod adds, "Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned German intelligence's since-retracted decision to classify AfD as a right-wing extremist organization, calling it 'tyranny in disguise.'"

Axelrod points out, however, that "MAGA's influence abroad has yielded mixed results."

According to the Axios reporter, "The AfD has been shut out of government in Germany, Simion lost in Romania, the liberal candidate is favored to win in South Korea.… A win in Poland would be a major symbolic victory — and a sign MAGA's global playbook might finally be working."

*Read Tal Axelrod's full Axios article at this link.

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MMA Steve Bannon and his guest agree: Trump should suspend habeas corpus if the Supreme Court doesn't end nationwide injunctions

Rogan O'Handley: "President Trump will have no choice but to suspend the writ of habeas corpus”

Written by John Knefel

Published 05/28/25

A guest on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast argued that if the Supreme Court doesn’t limit the federal judiciary’s power to issue nationwide injunctions, then President Donald Trump must suspend the writ of habeas corpus to accelerate his mass deportation plans. Bannon later fully agreed with the assessment.

Rogan O’Handley — a conservative commentator who goes by the moniker DC Draino — made the comments on the May 27 edition of War Room, escalating a campaign that he, Bannon, and others in right-wing media have been waging since at least April 22.

Habeas corpus refers to the constitutional right of an incarcerated person to challenge their confinement before a judge. Legal experts have said it is “absurd” to think that the Trump administration can suspend habeas without an act of Congress. Bannon and O’Handley’s conversation comes as the Trump administration has sought to use a 1798 wartime law to circumvent habeas claims, while also railing against federal judges who have issued various injunctions limiting the practice.

Previously, Bannon and War Room guest Mike Davis, founder of the Article III Project, had called for the Trump administration to force the Supreme Court to rule on whether the executive branch could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus rights before its summer recess. O’Handley’s push to tie habeas to the issue of nationwide injunctions offers a more concrete and explicit timeline.

“Right now, the Supreme Court is debating internally about the extent and the power of these federal district court judges to issue these national injunctions,” O’Handley said. “If they make a ruling that they are able to continue completely stalling the presidency, executive II powers to deport illegal aliens, then President Trump will have no choice but to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and save this country.”

“If the Supreme Court does not limit these injunctions to just the parties before the district courts, then that solidifies that we are in a constitutional crisis and Trump will have to take drastic measures to repel this historic invasion,” O’Handley added.

“I 100% agree with you,” Bannon responded.

Video

Citation

From the May 27, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

There are at least two distinct legal issues underlying Bannon and O’Handley’s commentary. One is whether unauthorized immigration constitutes an “invasion,” as the Trump administration has argued, and therefore authorizes use of the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century law that gives the president sweeping powers to detain and deport people during wartime. Legal blog Just Security characterized the administration’s position as “extremely dangerous, and at odds with the text and original meaning of the Constitution.”

On May 16, the Supreme Court prevented the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport Venezuelans without “constitutionally adequate notice.” Prior to the Supreme Court’s decision, at least three federal judges had ruled against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, although a judge in Pennsylvania OK’d its use.

The other issue is the power of federal district courts to issue rulings that apply to the entire country, known as nationwide injunctions. The topic came before the Supreme Court on May 15, during a hearing on the constitutionality of Trump’s executive order purporting to ban birthright citizenship in a case that also had direct implications for nationwide injunctions. The Washington Post reported that the Supreme Court appeared “divided” on how to rule on that issue.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump himself all appear to be willing to take the extraordinary step of suspending habeas corpus.

According to Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck, the “near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the President are per se unconstitutional.”

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MMA

Contrary to right-wing media claims, the GOP's Medicaid cuts are for far more than “able-bodied men”

While right-wing media yell about “able-bodied men,” in truth Medicaid work requirements would hit caregivers the most — and they are disproportionately women

Written by John Knefel

Research contributions from Sophie Lawton

Published 05/22/25

Right-wing media figures are telling their audiences that proposed work requirements for Medicaid will be targeted at men who are unwilling to look for a job, when the actual population most likely to be affected is poor, rural women who are taking care of elderly parents or adult children.

The discussion comes as congressional Republicans negotiate a budget bill that is widely predicted to deliver massive tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations while gutting social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. The House passed its version of the bill on May 22, which included what Axios described as “the biggest Medicaid rewrite in the history of the safety-net program, which will likely result in millions of Americans losing their health insurance coverage.”

One of the ways the House's legislation reduces Medicaid costs is by introducing arduous and unnecessary work requirements for beneficiaries that would begin at the end of 2026. The Congressional Budget Office, which provides nonpartisan economic analysis to lawmakers, estimated that 10.3 million people would lose their Medicaid by 2034 if the bill was passed in its May 14 form. The New York Times cited the same figure in its coverage of the House bill’s passage. (The bill also adds work requirements to SNAP, which could put almost 11 million people at risk of losing some of their food assistance.)

Much of the right-wing commentary supporting the bill mischaracterizes Medicaid beneficiaries by claiming there is a large pool of “able-bodied” people who refuse to seek employment. In fact, 92% of people on Medicaid are working, have a disability, or are performing duties — such as going to school or caregiving — that could qualify for an exemption from meeting work requirements.

It’s true that there is a group of people who qualify as able-bodied, nonworking Medicaid recipients without a young child who also aren’t enrolled in school. But contrary to conservative punditry, that population is overwhelmingly made up of women (79%), mostly living in rural areas, who are caring for elderly parents or adult children and have low levels of formal education and have recently left the workforce, according to new research from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“Work requirements would primarily target this population,” the researchers write.

Fox News’ Jesse Watters says Medicaid work requirements target men in their 20s who “sell ecstasy on the side"

Fox News, Fox Business, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page — three gilded properties in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire — have pushed for cuts to Medicaid, either by adding work requirements or through an outright rollback of the program’s expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Slashing Medicaid is incredibly unpopular, including among supporters of President Donald Trump, so on some occasions Fox has misled its viewers into thinking the Republican budget doesn’t pose a threat to the program.

But as Trump has thrown his weight behind the bill, so too has Fox modified its austerity-heavy rhetoric.

Following the House’s passage of the bill, Fox national correspondent Aishah Hasnie said some Republicans from states that have “a lot of constituents on Medicaid” were “worried there were going to be massive cuts.”

“Really, Republicans wanted to go after illegal immigrants that were using Medicaid and able-bodied men that were on Medicaid,” she continued. “They wanted to add work requirements, and those work requirements now will start in 2026. It’s a huge win for fiscal conservatives.”

Video

Citation

From the May 22, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

On May 19, host Jesse Watters said, “If you're a young, able-bodied, healthy American man — 26 years old, you don't even want to go to work — you can get on Medicaid.”

“You can live at your parents’ house, play softball on the weekend, sell ecstasy on the side, not even look for a job — and you can get free health care,” Watters added. “That’s what they’re doing. They’re just closing that lazy loophole."

Video

Citation

From the May 19, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five

The same day on Fox & Friends, on at least two occasions co-host Charlie Hurt falsely argued that work requirements strengthened Medicaid.

“A major Democrat attack on the bill is they claim it cuts Medicaid,” Hurt said. “What it actually does is it saves Medicaid by not paying, first of all, people who are ineligible for it, but also because it doesn’t — it puts in work requirements for, you know, 30-year-old, able-bodied males without dependents, and it says, you know, if you are going to get welfare from the government, you're going to need to work, and that seems like a really low standard to a regular person."

Video e

Citation

From the May 19, 2025, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends

Elsewhere in the program, Hurt argued the bill strengthens Medicaid and “protects it by getting people off that — able-bodied, 30-year-old men … without dependents ought to be working."

Steve Bannon says Medicaid work requirements for able-bodied men should be “40 to 60 hours” at a “minimum”

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has attempted to present himself as both a defender of Medicaid and an advocate for large cuts to the program. One of the ways he tries to reconcile that contradiction is by dividing Medicaid users into the deserving and undeserving poor, using rhetoric strikingly similar to Fox’s.

Contrary to right-wing media claims, the GOP's Medicaid cuts are for far more than "able-bodied men" | Media Matters for America

...

User Clip: Steve Bannon Nazi Salute

C-SPAN

https://www.c-span.org › video › user-clip-steve-banno...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5154286/user-clip-steve-bannon-nazi-salute)

Feb 20, 2025 — Steve Bannon throws a Nazi salute on stage at CPAC 2025. The crowd loves it.

[### Steve Bannon gives fascist-style salute after speech at CPAC

YouTube · The Independent

17.7K+ views · 2 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WbMFW3zxMA)

Steve Bannon flashed a 'Nazi-style' salute at the end of his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

[### Steve Bannon is accused of doing a straight-arm Nazi ...

AP News

https://apnews.com › article › steve-bannon-cpac-nazi-s...](https://apnews.com/article/steve-bannon-cpac-nazi-salute-gesture-wave-43a06de6184fe58940c8ae3d743bc6ba)

Feb 21, 2025 — Steve Bannon has been accused of making a Nazi salute at a conservative gathering where President Donald Trump is slated to speak this ...

[### French far-right leader cancels speech, accusing Bannon ...

BBC

https://www.bbc.com › news › articles](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2glydm3gmo)

Feb 21, 2025 — Former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon denies making Nazi salute at CPAC and says Jordan Bardella is "unworthy to lead France".

[### Bannon gives Nazi salute at CPAC, President of the Czech ...

Romea.cz

https://romea.cz › world › bannon-gives-nazi-salute-at-...](https://romea.cz/en/world/bannon-gives-nazi-salute-at-cpac-president-of-the-czech-senate-unhappy-that-czech-meps-were-there/)

Feb 24, 2025 — while I was not present in the room, one of the speakers out of provocation allowed himself a gesture alluding to Nazi ideology,” Bardella said, ...

[### Steve Bannon denies using 'Nazi' salute and says he was ...

Sky News

https://news.sky.com › story › steve-bannon-denies-usi...](https://news.sky.com/story/steve-bannon-denies-using-nazi-salute-and-says-he-was-just-waving-13314384)

Feb 22, 2025 — Steve Bannon has denied making a Nazi salute at a conservative gathering, insisting the gesture was just a wave.

[### Musk, Bannon should know better, a Nazi salute is still ...

Miami Herald

https://www.miamiherald.com › local › article300977289](https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/andres-oppenheimer/article300977289.html)

Feb 26, 2025 — Musk, Bannon should know better, a Nazi salute is still a Nazi salute | Opinion ... An X image showing Elon Musk making the Hitler salute.

[### Steve Bannon's 'Nazi' salute prompts France's Bardella to ...

YouTube · Times News

139K+ views · 2 months ago](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTDMHv0IXt8)

... Nazi salute by a speaker, an apparent reference to Steve Bannon ... Steve Bannon's 'Nazi' salute prompts France's Bardella to cancel CPAC.

[### France's Bardella cancels CPAC speech over Bannon ...

Reuters

https://www.reuters.com › world › frances-bardella-can...](https://www.reuters.com/world/frances-bardella-cancels-cpac-speech-over-bannon-nazi-salute-2025-02-21/)

Feb 21, 2025 — Bannon denied he had made a Nazi salute, telling a French journalist it was a "wave". He said that if Bardella had cancelled his appearance due ...

[### Steve Bannon, days after Nazi-like salute, tells Orthodox ...

The Forward

https://forward.com › Fast Forward](https://forward.com/fast-forward/700585/steve-bannon-nazi-orthodox-israel/)

Mar 2, 2025 — More than a week after Steve Bannon made a straight-armed gesture resembling a Nazi salute, the former adviser to President Donald Trump ...

### Matt Walsh urges Trump to ignore the Supreme Court's ruling on notice before deportations: “It's illegitimate. It's ridiculous. Trump should ignore it.”

05/19/25 3:10 PM EDT

### Steve Bannon pushes for habeas corpus showdown at the Supreme Court by the end of June

:{05/16/25

AN 4 25

When Pope Francis passed away on Easter Monday this week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) postedon the social platform X, “Evil is being defeated by the hand of God."

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter said, “Good job, JD,” jokingly suggesting that Vice President JD Vance, the last foreign leader to meet the pope before his death, bore some responsibility for it.

In an article published in PoliticoFriday, journalist Jamie Dettmer wrote that this "venom" from MAGA after the Pope's death is not surprising.

ALSO READ:A progressive Pope? Here are Francis' greatest reforms and controversies

"MAGA stalwarts never hesitate to use personal invective and hyperbole to smear and intimidate — it’s their way of grabbing attention while seeking to break opponents and discipline institutions that won’t bend the knee, whether church, university or media outlet," he wrote. "And Francis, who was no friend to populist nationalism, certainly infuriated them."

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The article notes that Benjamin Harnwell — a close associate of former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who has been working to create a right-wing “gladiator school” at a monastery in Lazio near Rome — wasted no time likening Francis to King Herod, the ancient Roman ruler in Judea who, as recounted in the Bible, ordered the massacre of all male infants in Bethlehem, fearing that Jesus was among them.

In an interview with Politico regarding the aggressive tone of his statements, Harnwell acknowledged that he would be a hypocrite for adhering to “your norms of compassion." He went on to say, “I’m very glad he’s dead.”

"The irony is that MAGA leaders are now marching in lockstep with a deep state — in this case, the Vatican’s cloistered and rigidly doctrinaire insiders, who would like to turn the clock back not just to before Francis but preferably to before John XXIII’s liberalizing reforms of the 1960s," wrote Dettmer, who is the opinion editor of Politico Europe.

ALSO READ:Megyn Kelly unleashes on Pope Francis just one day after his death

"Francis began skirmishing with MAGA during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term in 2016, criticizing Trump’s plans to build a 'big beautiful wall' along the southern U.S. border. At a Mass in Ciudad Juárez, he said that a 'a person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,'" Dettmer wrote.

The writer further said, "Then, in 2017, Francis warned against rising populist movements, cautioning that they could lead to a new Hitler. Noting that Germany in 1933 was the most obvious example of populism in Europe, 'in times of crisis, we lack judgement,' he told Spain’s El Pais newspaper. 'Hitler didn’t steal the power, his people voted for him, and then he destroyed his people.'"

Dettmer notes that while President Donald Trump didn't directly attack him, MAGA figures targeted the pope because they viewed Francis as a major proponent of global progressivism and an adversary to their movement. Among them, Bannon notably sought support from affluent allies in the U.S. and Europe, particularly traditionalist church members unhappy with Francis' reforms and limitations on the Latin Mass. He aimed to purchase the aforementioned Lazio monastery, Certosa di Trisulti, as part of this effort, per the article.

Meanwhile, Catholics globally are getting ready for Pope Francis' funeral this Saturday in Rome. Some conservative Catholics in the United States are sharing their hopes for a new pope and voicing their criticisms of the former pontiff.

ALSO READ:Pope's Easter address denounces 'contempt' for migrants following meeting with Vance

Despite the criticisms, Francis continued to enjoy popularity among conservatives in the U.S A February poll by the Pew Research Center indicated that 70 percent of Republican-leaning Catholics viewed Francis favorably.

ALSO READ:'Bizarre in many ways': Libertarian reveals what’s behind far right’s 'war on empathy'

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RWW

04/23/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Khaya Himmelman @ Talking Points Memo: Trump’s DOJ Is Taking Cues From MAGA Influencers And Conspiracy Theorists

President Trump’s nominee for D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, and Donald Trump’s Department of Justice more broadly, are taking cues from right-wing influencers — allowing some of the loudest media figures on the right to influence significant decisions, including who gets fired from the DOJ and who and what gets investigated.

Media Matters: Cigar company founder Michael Knowles asks Trump for a tariff exemption

Knowles: “Anyone listening right now in the admin, a great little carve out would be for all of the patriotic Americans who have been oppressed for too long, who work in the premium cigar industry, and for all of the premium cigar smokers.”

Alex Griffing @ Mediaite: MAGA Influencer Tells Steve Bannon Trump ‘Will Have No Choice’ But to Suspend Habeas Corpus

Former Trump White House advisor turned podcaster, Steve Bannon, spoke to another MAGA influencer on Tuesday, who argued that President Donald Trump will eventually have to suspend habeas corpus in order to facilitate mass deportations.

Judd Legum @ Popular Information: U.S. citizen wrongly detained by Border Patrol says government account is false

Jose Hermosillo was held in a detention facility for undocumented immigrants for 10 days.

Amanda Lewellyn @ Vox: How Trump is rewriting American history

Yale professor David W. Blight explains why Trump is far from the first to try to rewrite the record.

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Bondi launches dubious ‘Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias’ in U.S. government

Trump administration officials could be focused on “anti-religion bias” within the government, but they’re instead focused only on “anti-Christian bias.”

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an 4 25

mma

April 17, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): A world on fire as President Trump continues to hammer in every different vertical and take on the institutions of this country to make sure that they are — that the DEI wokeness, anti-American, neo-Marxist — I don't know what we're going to call it, is wringed from them. It's really magnificent. He's breaking the big law firms that run the country. He is breaking these big universities, the Ivy Leagues.

I'm just waiting to go to the Bannon pivot to the public ivies, which is essential, to get to the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

And the way he's doing this is cutting off everyone from the public trough. All the pigs feed. What, $9 billion to Harvard, all these people getting billions and billions of your taxpayer money. And guess what taxpayers, middle class, working class taxpayers, they've had it, not interested.

I also think that they got to de-em— It's not about anti-Semitism. That's a big — that's a part of it. In some cases, a big part of it. That's not the reason.

The reason is that these are radically — radical progressive, neo-Marxist faculties and administrations and we have to purge that. Or just go do it — if you want to do it privately, finance it privately, go for it. Harvard, you got $52 billion. I don't even think that counts the business school and the other colleges. I think that's just Harvard College and the university. I don't think the individual — I think the business schools got a $10 billion. I'm not sure they just rolled that up and that's what it is. I think it's bigger. I think Harvard may have $100 billion. And only 1 year ago, 2 years ago, they started using it for letting kids that couldn't afford to go there, go there.

Cut them off. They're not so tough. Law firms are not so tough when you cut them off the federal, off your tax dollars, when you cut it off from the trough. You want to drain the swamps, start by taking the pig trough and draining that. They're not, they're not, they're not so big. They're not big shots anymore.

### Steve Bannon and guest argue rising bond yields mean “tough times ahead” if Trump doesn't secure trade deals and “get government spending down”

04/10/25 2:52 PM EDT

### Steve Bannon suggests the Trump administration “immediately revoke” all Chinese student visas

04/10/25 11:36 AM EDT

### Steve Bannon: Trump “loves his charts. Those are like the tablets that Moses brought down.”

04/03/25

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Steve Bannon suggests the Trump administration “immediately revoke” all Chinese student visas

04/10/25 mma

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mma

### Steve Bannon: “There's major law firms in Washington, D.C.” and “what we are trying to do is put you out of business and bankrupt you”

03/13/25

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mma

### Steve Bannon: “We’re going to block grant” Medicaid or have “stringent work requirements”

02/26/25

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February 20, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Jayne let's talk to some of these good War Room posse folks before they go up to hear the Vice President.

JAYNE ZIRKLE: Your name and what brings you here today?

GUEST: Hi, I'm Gordon White and I came here to say Trump 2028.

ZIRKLE: Oh yeah.

BANNON: Alright. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hang on, hang on, hang on. What do we have to do to get Trump 2028?

GUEST: We just got to - we keep – we got to show up and stay loud.

BANNON: Exactly. We've got to maybe work the Constitution too although I think there's a way to slip through there but you never know.

GUEST: You've just got to keep repeating it over and over. You've got to desensitize them to it until they get used to it.

BANNON: I like that, that's a psyop, you're in a psyop right now.

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BEEF RIVAL VS LEGIT CRITIQUE?

AN 2 25

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former advisor, attacked Trump crony Elon Musk, saying his moves to cut the federal government are disrespectful to the country’s values. The comments were reported by UnHerd in an article posted Tuesday.

"Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and playact as God without any respect for the country's history, values, or traditions," Bannon told UnHerd.

DOGE has made cuts at USAID, the Department of Education, and DEI programs.

"Musk is the one with power at the moment," Bannon said. "The Democrats are nowhere to be seen."

He also called Musk’s handling of the budget “performative.”

"DOGE is sitting there with the budget, but where the f--- are the DOGE cuts?" Bannon said. "We are 30 days away from approving a budget for the entire year with $2 trillion already baked in, and not one penny of anything that DOGE found. It's ludicrous."

"There's hesitancy to take on the Pentagon," Bannon said, adding that he wants significant cuts. "I want $100 billion cut from its $900 billion budget—really a trillion."

“This is not the first time the 78-year-old strategist has attacked Musk's past. Bannon has gone as far as to call Musk a "racist," grouping him with other South African-born tech moguls, Peter Thiel and David Sacks, whom he accused of influencing U.S. politics without any real allegiance to the country,” Jesus Mesa writes at Newsweek.

Bannon pleaded guilty last week in a case involving defrauding people who donated to a private attempt at building a wall on the southern U.S. border.

---

rww

Christian Nationalists Plot To 'Seize The Institutions Of The Federal Government'

02/13/2025

Kyle Mantyla

From the moment President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau immediately began plotting, declaring on election night that he and his fellow Christian nationalists now had four years to align with the White House to strengthen the Christian church in the United States and abroad while placing right-wing Christians inside the government to tear down spiritual "strongholds."

Shortly thereafter, Wallnau proclaimed that once Trump took office, "the government and the church" would begin "moving together to build the ekklesia" to take control of "the government mountain" globally. ("Ekklesia" is a term used by dominionists to refer to the church as God’s governing body on Earth.)

Wallnau then announced something he called The Nehemiah Project, which is committed to "partnering the prophetic collaboration of government and church and business together to take all the domains we can while we have the wind to our back."

Recently, Wallnau appeared on "The War Room" with Steve Bannon, where the two discussed how the Christian right can use the newly re-established White House Faith Office, run by right-wing pastor Paula White, to "seize the institutions of the federal government."

"Reformation is different than simply a religious renaissance," Wallnau said. "It's the recapturing of institutions—oh, this is what makes the left go crazy when I say these things. It's the recapturing of education, of media, of business, of government, and it's recapturing them with the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization."

"We've got a foothold with Paula White," Wallnau added. "But the expansion of that has got to be the underrepresented Christian population, which is over half the United States in all sectors in what we call the high places of culture, or the mountaintops of culture."

This is the language of Seven Mountains Dominionism, of which Wallnau has long been a leading promoter. Seven Mountains Dominionism is a radical theology associated with the New Apostolic Reformation that advocates having right-wing Christians control all aspects of society. Followers of Seven Mountains theology believe that they are to “do whatever is necessary” to take control of the seven main “mountains” that shape our culture—education, government, media, business, arts and entertainment, family, and religion—in order to implement the will of God throughout the nation and the world.

"There are three arteries that make this happen: Legislation, litigation and the shaping of public opinion," Wallnau replied, explaining that they intend to pass laws and file lawsuits to further their Christian nationalist agenda while simultaneously using the power and influence of the media, the government, and the church to shape public opinion in support of that agenda.

"Paula White has to be careful [about] what she says in public.," Wallnau stated. "[But] I believe I might have learned that from her."

---

AN 2 25

Far-right activist Steve Bannon — who was previously one of President Donald Trump's most senior advisors — just formally pleaded guilty in his Manhattan criminal case.

Bannon was prosecuted for a fraudulent crowdfunding campaign to build a wall along the Southern border of the United States. He and others managed to raise more than $20 million, which built a few miles of border fencing before hitting regulatory roadblocks. Manhattan prosecutors unearthed emails showing that Bannon privately called the campaign a "scam" and likened the funds raised for border wall construction — which would cost hundreds billions of dollars — to "lunch money," but went along with it to make money for his own ventures.

But on Tuesday, CNN reported that Bannon pleaded guilty to first-degree scheme to defraud in order to avoid jail time. He has instead been sentenced to three years of conditional discharge, and won't be ordered to pay any restitution. Prosecutors said victims of the scam had already been made whole in a separate federal case. Bannon maintained that "nobody lost money" after entering his plea.

The fact that Bannon — who has already served a four-month federal prison sentence for refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena — won't serve any time behind bars angered some legal experts on social media. Attorney Bradley P. Moss posted to Bluesky: "If no jail time, what's the point," while Gonzaga University law professor Ann Murphy "wish[ed] he was going to prison again."

"If you are a Republican, you are allowed to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars," University of Texas at Austin lecturer Alex Wild wrote on Bluesky.

Journalist Oscar Gonzalez opined that Bannon was already plotting his next scam, tweeting: "Time for him to start the next grift campaign to get more money for his legal fees." And software engineer Alex Cole mocked Trump supporters Bannon scammed for their gullibility, tweeting that Bannon "looks like he marinates in dumpster juice" and likened getting scammed by Steve Bannon to "pigeons getting scammed by breadcrumbs."

"Imagine being dumb enough to donate your hard-earned Walmart paycheck to a millionaire in a trench coat promising to build a wall," Cole tweeted. "Yall dumb [as f---]."

Click here to read CNN's full report.

---

q`A

mma

Mike Davis to Steve Bannon: “It'd be a great way to get rid of these mayors in these Democrat hell holes is just charge them with federal felonies”

01/08/25

---

Steve Bannon threatens DOJ officials: “We are going to torment you and destroy your lives”

01/06/25 mma

January 6, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Matthew Graves. These people are relentless. They are unchained, and Matthew Graves has to understand something. Matthew Graves, write this down. Or if Matthew Graves' family or anybody that knows Matthew Graves, make sure his family knows this.

You're going to prison for a very long time. You're a totally evil person that has broken the law and destroyed lives, and the people whose lives you destroyed may not have the power to do anything about it, but we certainly do, and we are. You are a truly evil individual and you're deranged.

Lisa Monaco, Merrick Garland, the guy Bratt, Matthew Graves, all of you, we are going to torment you and destroy your lives because you deserve to have your lives destroyed like you've destroyed patriots from January 6th. Yes, patriots.

…

Matthew Graves, you think this is funny? You think we take this as funny? We don't take it as funny, brother.

And when you're serving in your 10th year of your 20 year sentence in that - in the cell, in a cell block right at some low security, because you're not going to go to a camp, to a low security prison, I want you to remember this day when we actually committed ourselves body and soul to make sure that you people are hunted down and brought to justice.

Steve Bannon says Mike Johnson should not be speaker: “We don't need partisanship now. We need hyper-partisanship now.”

12/20/24 1:53 PM EST

### Media Matters weekly newsletter, December 20

12/20/24 10:48 AM EST

### Steve Bannon on a government shutdown: “I'd like just to shut it down. Go home.”

12/19/24

---

porn star case sentencing

Fox News legal analyst calls for investigation into Jack Smith and his staff

01/03/25

January 3, 2025, edition of Fox News' Hannity

JASON CHAFFETZ (HOST): Gregg, what's the incoming administration -- what can they do to push back not just in this case, but across the country, the lawfare that's been used against the Trump family, quite frankly, and against conservatives and Republicans broadly? What can this administration do to just put justice back where it's supposed to be, with a blindfold and equal to everybody?

GREGG JARRETT (GUEST): Well, Trump already won the lawfare battle. He is essentially prevailed. This is sort of the last case -- and the professor and I agree, it's guaranteed to get reversed because it was such an abomination.

But I do think, to answer your question, that the incoming Department of Justice needs to take a very close look at the conduct of Jack Smith, his entire staff, bringing specious cases in Washington and Florida. And if laws were broken by prosecutors, those prosecutors should be prosecuted. If they didn't break laws, nevertheless, their unscrupulous, unprincipled behavior needs to be exposed, and that's the job for Pam Bondi, assuming she is approved as the next attorney general in charge of the Department of Justice.

Same thing goes for the FBI. I mean, it has -- sad to say, this is not a reflection on the hardworking agents out in the field, but, you know, it is the headquarters that has corrupted itself with an abuse of the law and that needs to be fixed as well.

---

12 24 MUSK KILLED W/O UNDERSTANDING, JOINED BY T AND JDV, DEBT CEILING?

### Ben Shapiro: A “government shutdown isn't the end of the world. We've done it before. It's not that big a deal.”

12/19/24 1:47 PM EST

### Steve Bannon says it's “open to interpretation” whether a president can serve more than two terms

12/19/24 1:02 PM EST

### Steve Bannon on a government shutdown: “I'd like just to shut it down. Go home.”

12/19/24 1:02 PM EST

### Sean Hannity: “It's a misnomer that a government shutdown is the worst thing in the world”

12/18/24

---

===

MMA

### Steve Bannon endorses cutting food stamp benefits

12/18/24

AN 12 24

any Never Trump conservatives have argued that the Republican Party's Ronald Reagan era officially ended when Donald Trump won the 2016 GOP nomination and went on to defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election.

Since then, the GOP has only grown more and more Trumpified. Many conservative Trump critics are no longer in Congress, including former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Wyoming), ex-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), and ex-Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona). And outgoing Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) decided against seeking reelection.

Trump's narrow defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election only tightens his stranglehold on the GOP. The Dispatch's David M. Drucker, in an article published on December 17, stresses that when he returns to the White House on January 20, 2025, he will be "flanked by an army of outside enforcers prepared to squeeze any Republican who resists his agenda."

"Once Trump is inaugurated," Drucker reports, "this MAGA-aligned network will shift to strong-arming obstinate House and Senate Republicans to support the president-elect's agenda, be it executive orders or legislative proposals. Critically, MAGA insiders tell The Dispatch, they won't be sitting around waiting for direction from Trump to join a particular fight."

One of those MAGA insiders is "War Room" host Steve Bannon, who told The Dispatch, "The ecosystem on the right is going to be a force multiplier…. What I think you're seeing now is the institutionalization of what had been a self-organizing effort."

Bannon, according to Drucker, is "describing" what "amounts to the rise of a new Republican establishment, complete with well-funded activist groups and influential media figures."

Bannon, now 71, has been involved in far-right politics for decades. But Trump's MAGA loyalists aren't necessarily Baby Boomers or members of Generation X.

In a New York Times article published on Dec. 16, reporter Shawn McCreesh describes a New York Young Republican Club gathering that took place Sunday, Dec. 15.

Bannon was the keynote speaker, but many of the "true believers" in attendance were much younger. And according to McCreesh, they are fine with "retribution" against Trump's detractors — if unclear about the form it should take.

"This club's members are, by and large, a terminally online, trollish, far-right collective who would consider any sort of tack toward the center by Mr. Trump or those guiding him to be an act of betrayal," McCreesh reports. "They are the prime audience for retribution rattling. And yet, on Sunday, many seemed at odds about just how much retribution they could expect, or who precisely should be targeted, or how.

Preston Parra, a 22-year-old MAGA Republican at the gathering, said of Trump's foes, "We want to throw the book at them because they deserve it. They're godless demoniacs…. The leftist, elitist cabal, whatever you want to call it. Nancy Pelosi. Mitch McConnell."

READ MORE:['How long it’ll be until he sues an economist': Experts blast Trump's lawsuit against pollster

*Read The Dispatch's full article at this linkand the New York Times' reporting here (subscription required).

an 12 24

### Steve Bannon: Republicans will have to “raise taxes on the wealthy” to fulfill Trump's campaign promises

12/16/24

### Steve Bannon: “We want retribution and we're going to get retribution”

12/16/24 mma

'Trump ’28': Bannon calls for third term

===

aha not pm

msnbc 12 24

carusone says tucker has taken place of limbaugh as setting major uber narrative [ // bannon?], so not nec literally picking cab but trump has to cast to fit the story?

what is his meta narrative? GRT but tucker primary on that? trump as disrupter accounts for how basically incumbent could run against biden status quo?

bannon survival depends on being seen as influential in trumpworld? teaser: not what you expect hint j6

kash copies russian icons on mantle bkdrop?

===

---

MMA

December 10, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Here's what we're going to turn the page on. We're going to fire everybody in this illegitimate regime on moment one. Everybody, every battlefield commission, every historical society, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, every person that was put in by this illegitimate regime is going to be shown the door. Shown the door.

And we dare you, if you're listening, we dare you, because we know you are. We dare you to give a blanket preemptive pardon on these criminals. Yep, on Fauci. Yep, on shifty Schiff. Yep, on Milley. Yep, on Liz. Liz had a big long thing yesterday. She came back with President Trump, you know, President Trump said something about that – about J6. No.

We're going to pardon all the J6 people who have been in the prisons and then they can get the civil suits and come after you people personally, which they have to do.

…

I'm sure there'll be a couple of, three, you know, investigations and see where that gets. Maybe a special counsel. Maybe. I think that'd be pretty cool. But, hey, that's all decisions guys are got to make. I'm not - I'm just sitting here in front of a microphone screaming like a madman.

---

===

mma 12 24

December 6, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): What are they spending their time on, wait for it, preemptive - blanket preemptive pardons. What is a blanket preemptive pardon? I don't know. I'm not so sure it's constitutional. I'm sure the Supreme Court will have to decide.

We've so rattled these people. We've so rattled them, they know their crimes and they're so rattled because finally somebody in opposition to them is saying, hey, we're coming after you and we're not going to stop, we're not going to stop. We're going to be relentless. We're going to unearth your crimes. We're going to investigate, adjudicate, put you on trial, and then incarcerate.

You're going to go broke. You're going to spend all your money. You're going to be worried nonstop, am I going to prison? Andrew Weissman the entire crowd. We're going to get all the connective tissues of the text messages, all of it. And the vast criminal conspiracy, not simply against President Trump, but what you did to the life movement, the parents movement. There's so much. It's a vertical that will go quite deep.

…

We broke you and now you're going to pay for what you did to the American people. This has nothing to do with President Trump. It has nothing to do with Steve Bannon. It's not vengeance, it's not retribution, it is justice and the administration of justice.

---

rww 12 24

12/03/2024

Kyle Mantyla

In the wake of former President Donald Trump's reelection, former Trump White House chief strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon spoke to the secretive Council for National Policy, a coalition of Christian nationalists and right-wing activists that was deeply engaged in the plot to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election.

Bannon, fresh from his stint in prison for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, told the CNP audience that the Senate's role is simply to confirm whoever Trump nominates and celebrated that conservatives are on the verge of having a complete monopoly on the Supreme Court.

"Donald Trump took a bullet to the head, and then four months later won in a landslide," Bannon proclaimed. "He can pick anybody he wants to serve in his government and all I wanna hear is a cheery 'aye, aye' from the United States Senate."

"It's advice and consent," Bannon said. "We'll take your advice, but you're going to give us your consent."

The Senate serving as a mere rubber stamp for the president is, of course, not what the Constitution proscribes, but the fact that Bannon's bellicose pronouncement received raucous applause says a lot about the CNP's supposed reverence for the nation's founding document.

Bannon then hailed Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Matt Gaetz as "the Four Horsemen of the deep state apocalypse" and vowed that all four are "going to be confirmed." Since Bannon delivered his speech, Gaetz has already withdrawn his nomination and the other three are all plagued by controversy.

"We we have a unique time," Bannon continued. "We have the White House, we have the executive branch. We have the House and the Senate—small majorities, but we have them. We have the courts. And if we do our work and stop [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren—there are 47 court openings right now—if we stop her in the Senate between now and [January] 20th, we will actually redo the district court level. And then these corrupt appellate courts. And guess what? We're going to get two or three pickups in the Supreme Court. We're going to go for a 9-0 court of conservatives."

---

cerberus feinberg pal blackwater? kushner?

---

mma

MAGA allies in the media make the case for Trump to ignore the Senate confirmation process

Written by Gideon Taaffe

Published 11/19/24

President-elect Donald Trump has called for Senate Republicans to let him make recess appointments for top positions in his upcoming administration, and his allies in right-wing media are making the case for his plan.

Trump named several picks for prominent cabinet positions that have drawn scrutiny for their inexperience and controversial statements, raising concerns that he is focused primarily on filling his administration with loyalists. He also signaled his intention to push through his picks without scrutiny by calling on Republican senators to let him make recess appointments.

His allies in right-wing media are now arguing that recess appointments would be justified and calling on senators to bend to his will and forgo their standard confirmation process.

Trump has demanded support to use recess appointments for top members of his cabinet, and he plans to fill multiple posts with right-wing media loyalists

- :{:{Trump posted on Truth Social on November 10 that “any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments.”As The Associated Press pointed out, Trump’s plan represents “a significant shift in power away from the Senate.” Though past presidents have confirmed appointments while Congress is in recess, it’s rare to use this process for high-level cabinet positions. The move would require Republican senators to pass a motion of adjournment with a simple majority vote. NBC News, [11/10/24; The Associated Press, 11/14/24]}:

- Trump’s nominees include multiple right-wing media personalities who are loyal to him but have little to no relevant experience and have peddled conspiracy theories and extreme views.He has named multiple current and former Fox employees to top posts, including Pete Hegseth, Sean Duffy, Tom Homan, Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Huckabee, and Michael Waltz, along with frequent Fox guests including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Media Matters, [11/13/24, 11/14/24, 11/15/24, 8/27/24; WNYC, On the Media, 11/15/24; Politico, 11/13/24; NPR, 11/16/24; CNN, 11/19/24]

## Trump’s MAGA allies in right-wing media are championing Trump’s plan to force his nominees through without Senate confirmation

- Center for Renewing America fellows Jeff Clark and Anthony Licata published a piece on the legality of Trump’s recess plan, saying he would be justified to pursue it.They wrote: “Given the extensive delays experienced during his first administration in getting the Senate to approve his nominees expeditiously, President-elect Donald Trump recently proposed the use of recess appointments, if necessary, to briskly stand up his new administration early next year. The question is whether the law and our history confirms the President’s belief that he should be allowed to assemble his Cabinet quickly via recess appointments? The answer is ‘yes.’” Center for Renewing America, [11/17/24]

- During an appearance on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’sWar Roompodcast, Clark advocated for Trump to use the recess power.Clark claimed that “there are many of us who think that he [Trump] should” use the recess power in order to “set right the boundaries between the branches of the government.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [11/18/24]

- Article III project founder Mike Davis responded to a question about recess appointments by saying, “Every option should be on the table.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [11/18/24]

- Bannon told his audience members to call their senators and demand a 15-day recess for Trump to appoint his cabinet.Bannon told his audience that “we need you, when you call,” to tell your senator “the president needs 15 days recess — recess days in the first hundred.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [11/11/24]

- Former Trump administration official Ric Grenell told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly that Senate Republicans should “at the very minimum, give him [Trump] a recess appointment and let the reform start.” Newsmax, *Greg Kelly Reports*, [11/15/24]

- :{Right-wing commentator :{Mike Crispi wrote: “Recess appointments solves all. It’s time to WIN!” Twitter/X:(style="background-color:#ffff00ff"):}:, [11/17/24]}:

- Far-right podcaster and Trump ally Laura Loomer attacked Senate Majority Leader-elect John Thune (R-SD) for saying the Senate might struggle to get the votes to recess.She wrote: “The joke is on everyone who fell for the unity nonsense this election season. Senate Republicans are about to screw President Trump.” Twitter/X, [11/15/24]

- Fox News host Laura Ingraham said: “I certainly hope that as they carry out their advise-and-consent role, Republican senators remember that Donald Trump is the reason they even have a majority.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [11/14/24]

===

---

mma

Steve Bannon accuses MSNBC producers of being “part of a vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump”

November 15, 2024 edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): By the way, a couple of reporters called me last night after a couple of my rants and said, hey we’re getting text messages from a lot of the producers, particularly younger producers at MSNBC and they’re saying is Bannon serious or is he just being Bannon, right?

I am 100 percent serious.

MICHAEL FLYNN (GUEST): I am too.

BANNON: You know what you did with various people out there you had on your shows. You are part of a vast criminal conspiracy against President Trump and that is going to be drilled down.

11/15/24

Steve Bannon on Trump's return in January: “We're going to burn some of these institutions down to the ground”

11/15/24

November 15, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Donald Trump and his revolution is in charge now. And that revolution is going to make its way from Mar-a-Lago and from every part of the country, like Andrew Jackson, it's going to converge on the imperial capitol in late January. And yes, we're going to burn some of these institutions down to the ground. Because you know why? They need to be burned down to the ground. Metaphorically. As the process of creative destruction. The process of the structure of revolutions, the paradigm shift has impact.

...

We're not going to cave. We're not going to give up on Gaetz. We're not going to give up on Tulsi Gabbard. We're not going to give up on Pete Hegseth. We're not going to give up on RFK Jr. We're not going to give up on anybody. And you know why? If President-elect Donald J. Trump wants them, he's going to get them.

---

November 13, 2024 edition of *War Room: Battleground

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Weissmann, you were on TV with MSNBC and all the producers at MSNBC, preserve your documents. Ari Melber and all you hosts, preserve your documents. All of it. You better be worried and you better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, better call mom and dad tonight — hey mom and dad, you know a good lawyer? Lawyer up. Lawyer up.

You tried to destroy Trump, you tried to imprison Trump, you tried to break Trump. He’s not breakable. You couldn’t destroy him and now he is turned on you and he’s put a firebrand in charge of main justice, Department of Justice. And you’re going to have to live it with — Andrew Weissmann and all your kind — McCabe and Comey. Oh my lord.

…

The hunted now become the hunters, yep. With the full apparatus — but here’s the difference, here’s the difference, here’s the difference.

It’s going to be totally transparent. It’s going to start with the mass declassification of all this information we've been keeping back from the American people, shouldn’t keep it back.

American people should understand that, should see it, and see what you’ve done. It’s going to be fully transparent, all of it, and all of the interconnections. Norm Eisen and all these NGOs, and you know, and Reid Hoffman is all worried. You better be worried. You big billionaire donors, you better be worried. You better lawyer up. You should be worried.

---

MMA 11 13 24

Steve Bannon calls for a military tribunal to try retired General Mark Milley for treason

November 13, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): This is why this is an important moment and a seminal moment in the history of this republic, because President Trump seeing the forces arrayed against him, understanding that he had won 2020 but it was stolen from him and he kind of got kicked to the curb, and the whole established order in every aspect, including canceling his cards and bank lines and everything, every aspect they could surround the great lion, the jackals and the hyenas, to kill it.

…

That's why the investigations must go on. You have to. You have to recall Milley immediately to uniform and let him - and have a military tribunal try him for treason. Has to. Has to happen. If you don't have - if you don't do that, you're not going to be able to exert civilian control over the uniformed services.

---

YIKES TRUMP ADMIN

MMA Trump defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth said in 2020 that the United States should “just get rid of the U.N.”

11/13/24 2:02 PM EST

### Charlie Kirk threatens to remove Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as majority leader

11/13/24 1:07 PM EST

### Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts says he's “escastic” over Trump's cabinet picks: “This is exceeding our expectations”

11/13/24 12:57 PM EST

### Steve Bannon calls for a military tribunal to try retired General Mark Milley for treason

11/13/24 12:50 PM EST

### Trump picked Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Here's some of what he's said on the air.

11/13/24 12:22 PM EST

### A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration

11/13/24 11:34 AM EST

---

mma

---

retaliation?

mma Steve Bannon floats Rudy Giuliani to “assist” a special prosecutor in the Trump administration

11/12/24

November 9, 2024 edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Is there a necessity for a special counsel since Jim Jordan looks like he’s going to be on it, a special prosecutor and if so, would you be available to assist them, sir?

RUDY GIULIANI: Well, the answer is yes to all of those, there’s certainly is a need for a special prosecutor and I certainly would be available to help, I probably know it better than anyone from the very beginning. And you have to do this, Steve.

…

BANNON: What’s your current situation? You talk about the deep state coming after somebody, they are trying to destroy one of the greatest Americans, living Americans, Rudy Giuliani, before our eyes. Tell the audience what’s going on.

GIULIANI: Well, right now, based on a judgment that is easily reversed, the $145 million judgment to two women where I’m not able to use the tape recordings or video recordings that support the truth of everything I say because they’ve been taken off the tape deceptively.

I’ve been given a tape of what they did at the center that’s missing three hours and they rejiggered the numbering so it looked like it was consistent. And I discovered that. And in my bar association proceeding the judge ignored it. It would completely prove that -- although the $145 million is absolutely ridiculous even if I did what they say I did, I can show definitively that I didn’t.

Now based on that they’ve taken everything I own.

---

mma 11/08/24 MMA

### Bannon praises Tom Homan and Stephen Miller's mass deportation plans: “They know what they're doing”

11/12/24 12:31 PM EST

### With “Border Czar” Tom Homan, Trump restarts the revolving door between Fox and his administration

11/12/24 11:03 AM EST

### Steve Bannon floats Rudy Giuliani to “assist” a special prosecutor in the Trump administration

11/12/24 10:50 AM EST

### Fox & Friends co-host: “I don't remember Republicans acting out like this, cutting their hair and all of this after Donald Trump lost in 2020”

11/12/24 10:07 AM EST

### Jesse Watters says mass deportation is “going to be hysterical”

11/08/24

---

rww

11/07/2024

Kyle Mantyla

Isaac Schorr @ Mediaite: Far-Right Lawyer Trump Is Considering for AG Says He Want to Drag ‘Dead Political Bodies Through the Streets’: ‘F*ck Unity’

Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer whom President-elect Donald Trump reportedly considers a candidate to serve as attorney general in his second administration, celebrated Trump’s election with some pugnacious and even disturbing rhetoric on Wednesday.

Bob Smietana @ Religion News Service: White Christians made Donald Trump president — again

White Christians remain an influential force in American culture and politics. Their support, and the support of Hispanic Christians, helped Donald Trump regain the White House.

Mike Hixenbaugh @ NBC News: Evangelical leaders celebrate Trump's victory as a prophecy fulfilled

Some evangelical Christians see Donald Trump’s win as ordained by God, offering “a divine mandate” in his second term.

Media Matters: Steve Bannon: “Rough Roman justice” coming for media companies like NBC, Washington Post, NY Times

"What you have done to this country, what you've done to the citizens of this country, and yes yes yes, you will pay a price for that. You will pay a price for that. It's called justice. Rough Roman justice."

Hannah Allam @ The Washington Post: Far-right extremists celebrate, see opportunity in second Trump win

In a burst of hate and misogyny, MAGA militants cheered the return of a president they consider an ally.

Mark Joseph Stern @ Slate: Meet the Extremist Trump Judges Likely to Shift the Supreme Court Even Further Right

In his first term, Donald Trump reshaped the federal courts in his image, installing far-right jurists at every level of the judiciary and securing a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. His second term will cement that legacy, likely locking in the Supreme Court’s hard-right bloc for generations. Over the next two years, we should expect the two oldest justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, to step down—and for Trump to replace them with two of the most unabashed partisans the court has ever seen. These justices will make Trump’s first three appointees look moderate by comparison. And their elevation will thwart Democrats’ hope of recapturing or rebalancing the court for the foreseeable future.

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mma

November 5, 2024 edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): They still use the term all votes. OK, all votes don't count. Only certifiable, chain of custody votes from American citizens and these guys continue -- their mantra is all votes, the tell is right there.

...

They only win if they cheat like in 2020.

### Steve Bannon says that Trump will appoint Fox host Larry Kudlow as Treasury secretary or head of the National Economic Council

11/04/24

### On War Room, Tucker Carlson blames abortion for hurricanes

11/04/24

### Jack Posobiec: “They are prepping the color revolution yet again”

11/03/2

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chris h 1024 out of jail attacks marc elias

boris e, 2 others

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CBS Evening News reports that Steve Bannon “began planting seeds to challenge the 2024 results” as soon as he was released from prison

10/29/24 MMA

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mma Steve Bannon: “A Trump second term without the House would be a nightmare”

10/29/24 11:48 AM EDT

Steve Bannon: “If you're not prepared to be sent to a federal prison as a political prisoner, then you're not worthy to be in this movement”

10/29/24

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an 10 24

"War Room" host Steve Bannon has often described himself as a "Leninist" — not because he actually embraces communist ideology, but because he applies one of Vladimir Lenin's principles to the MAGA movement.

Lenin famously argued that before a revolutionary movement can make serious progress, it first needs to tear down existing political structures. And Bannon believes the U.S. must be purged of Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans before a total MAGA revolution can come about.

In an October 29 post on X, formerly Twitter, Politix.fm's Brian Beutler argued that some MAGA Republicans are seriously talking about tanking the U.S. economy on purpose in order to give the country a full-fledged MAGA makeover.

READ MORE:['Spreading like wildfire': Puerto Rico scandal may doom Trump in crucial swing state

Beutler highlights a tweet posted by far-right Trump supporter @FischerKing64, who acknowledged that some of the things Trump is proposing — including "mass deportations" and "firing" government employees in big numbers — could, in fact, create an economic crisis.

@FischerKing64 tweeted, "Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on a sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy."

Beutler, in response, warned that @FischerKing64 is making an argument for crashing the economy on purpose.

Beutler posted, "An important story here for the campaign press corps. Trump's top backer, whom Trump has promised to hand this very remit, acknowledges the plan is to crash the economy and markets so they can rebuild society in MAGA's image. I don't think most Trump voters were in on that plan!"

Beutler, in a separate tweet, noted that @FischerKing64 was using "false premises" to push a "bad plan."

mma 10 24

On War Room, “Fight Voter Fraud” founder offers MAGA audience voter data for mass eligibility challenges in Georgia

Linda Szynkowicz: “You can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting”

Written by Madeline Peltz

Research contributions from John Knefel

Published 10/07/24

On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Fight Voter Fraud founder Linda Szynkowicz encouraged her MAGA audience to request voter data so they can challenge the eligibility of people they believe should not have ballot access in Georgia.

Szynkowicz’s call to action comes amid a wave of harassment against election officials — and could potentially turn this tactic on the general voting public.

Video

CitationFrom the October 7, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“Go to our website, download the request data so you can have a list of people in your county that we believe should not be voting in your county, and you can actually hang on to those,” Szynkowicz said during the October 7 episode. “Do your due diligence. We’ll even teach you how to do it.”

Szynkowicz specifically singled out Georgia, where county election boards across the state are dealing with large batches of these voter challenges. From The Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Mass voter challenges have become a new front in the battle between partisan activists and local election boards. State laws passed in the wake of former President Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election have empowered activists to contest an unlimited number of voters within the same county.

But a majority of challenges are rejected by county boards. Election officials often say the challenges lack credible evidence to prove that the challenged voter moved to a new state or jurisdiction, died or broke some other rule making them ineligible to vote.

“Over 350,000 voter challenges have been lodged since 2020,” the article continues. “County election officials have rejected the vast majority.”

Voter challenges in Georgia have been a tactic of national election denial groups. Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer and founder of the Election Integrity Network, developed software called Eagle AI that empowers “MAGA activists to generate mass voter challenges.” According to Documented, “Activists affiliated with EIN in states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida are already testing the Eagle AI system, and setting up meetings with election officials to normalize the program and encourage them to accept voter challenges generated by the platform.”

The Brennan Center for Justice notes that these types of challenges can be “intimidating” and “spread disinformation” when they are cited “as ‘proof’ that ineligible people are voting.” Former President Donald Trump, right-wing media, and GOP Congress members have fearmonged about the imaginary threat of mass noncitizen voting to create a cloud of doubt around November’s presidential election results.

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an 10 24

On Wednesday, October 2, Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a 165-page legal brief in which special counsel Jack Smith makes a detailed, comprehensive case for moving forward with his election interference indictment against former President Donald Trump.

The document is mindful of the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States, which declared that a president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed as part of "core" duties but not for "unofficial" acts. And Smith, in the court filing, zeros in on acts he considers "unofficial" and therefore, subject to criminal prosecution.

In a listicle published by Politico, reporters Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein lay out 11 of the "most significant and striking details in Smith's brief."

"Much of Smith's brief focused on Trump's state of mind in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021," Cheney and Gerstein explain. "Smith described a slew of conversations suggesting that the then-president knew his claims of election fraud were spurious. And Smith laid out evidence that Trump's sole objective was to stay in power — not, as he and his lawyers have claimed, to exercise legitimate authority over election integrity."

The details that Cheney and Gerstein highlight are: (1) Trump "alone with his phone," (2) "Trump asked, 'So what'?," (3) Trump "disregarding the" election "results," (4) "inventing statistics," (5) "broken promises of evidence," (6) "mocking Sidney Powell," (7) "Trump's January 5 call to Steve Bannon," (8) "a view of forensic evidence," (9) "make them riot," (10) former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's "rise," and (11) "Rudy's follies."

Powell, like Giuliani, was among the Trump attorneys who promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. And according to Smith's filing, Cheney and Gerstein note, the special counsel cites examples of Trump calling Powell "unhinged" and "crazy."

The Politico reporters point out that "well before" January 6, 2021, an "unidentified Trump campaign employee" described in Smith's brief "enthusiastically spoke of the potential for a riot in Michigan."

"The employee, whom prosecutors described as a co-conspirator, allegedly sought to 'create chaos' at a polling center in Detroit when it became clear a batch of election returns favorable to (Joe) Biden was legitimate," Cheney and Gerstein note. "'Find a reason it isn't,' the alleged co-conspirator said to a colleague, prosecutors wrote. When the colleague said an outbreak of violence appeared imminent, the campaign employee replied: 'Make them riot' and 'Do it!!!'"

the full Politico article at this link.

special counsel Jack Smith won’t get a chance to bring his best criminal case against Donald Trump to trial before the 2024 election — and if Trump wins, Smith probably will never get that chance. But on Wednesday, the public got its most complete look at the evidence Smith has amassed to try to prove that the former president orchestrated criminal conspiracies as he sought to overturn his loss four years ago.

In a 165-page legal brief unsealed by a federal judge (albeit with some redactions), the special counsel fleshed out detailed evidence he would use against Trump at trial, if the case ever makes it that far. Smith also presented his arguments for why Trump is not immune from the charges, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling over the summer that granted presidents broad immunity for official acts.

Much of Smith’s brief focused on Trump’s state of mind in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith described a slew of conversations suggesting that the then-president knew his claims of election fraud were spurious. And Smith laid out evidence that Trump’s sole objective was to stay in power — not, as he and his lawyers have claimed, to exercise legitimate authority over election integrity.

Here’s POLITICO’s look at the most significant and striking details in Smith’s brief.

Alone with his phone

At 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, as Trump supporters were attacking the Capitol, Trump took to Twitter to condemn Vice President Mike Pence, saying Pence lacked “courage” because Pence had resisted Trump’s pressure to intervene in the Electoral College certification.

According to Smith’s prosecutors, Trump was alone in the White House dining room when he sent that tweet. Trump’s aides had left him there after failing to persuade him to call on his supporters to leave the Capitol.

“The defendant personally posted the tweet … at a point when he already understood the Capitol had been breached,” prosecutors wrote.

Trump asked: ‘So what?’

The tweet criticizing Pence coincided with one of the most perilous moments of the riot: the precise minute Pence was being evacuated from his Senate office to a loading dock below the Capitol. Rioters had come within 40 feet of where he was sheltering just before this moment.

When Trump was told by an aide of Pence’s evacuation, prosecutors say Trump responded: “So what?”

Trump’s first call for calm — which advisers viewed as insufficient — came 14 minutes later: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

Disregarding the results

According to prosecutors, at one point during Trump’s bid to overturn the results, a Trump White House aide overheard Trump tell his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” The comment was allegedly made on Marine One.

Inventing statistics

Prosecutors said they would prove at trial that Trump and his allies often made up statistics about voter fraud “from whole cloth.” For example, Trump and allies alleged that 36,000 noncitizens had cast ballots in Arizona, changing the figure to “a few hundred thousand” five days later, eventually revising it back to “bare minimum … 40 or 50,000,” then to 32,000 and back up to the original number of 36,000.

Broken promises of evidence

One week after Election Day in 2020, Trump told then-Gov. Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.) that he was “packaging up” fraud evidence to share with him, prosecutors wrote. But Trump never provided it. Ducey told Trump that Arizona was all but lost, comparing it to being in “the ninth inning, two outs, and [the defendant] was several runs down,” Smith’s brief recounted.

Mocking Sidney Powell

After a Fox News host called out Trump-aligned lawyer Sidney Powell for making bizarre claims about Dominion Voting machines, Trump called her on speakerphone. On the Nov. 20, 2020 call, Trump muted his line and mocked her to two aides, calling her claims about the election “crazy” and making a reference to Star Trek, prosecutors contend. On another occasion, he called Powell “unhinged.”

Though it’s not referenced in Smith’s new filing or his indictment, Trump later considered naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate election fraud, and he considered a proposal she crafted to seize voting machines from swing states for a forensic inspection.

Trump’s Jan. 5 call to Steve Bannon

Prosecutors, who had more access to telephone records and emails than the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6, allege that Trump spoke to ally Steve Bannon by phone on Jan. 5 less than two hours before Bannon issued a prescient and provocative prediction on his War Room podcast that “all hell is going to break loose” on Jan. 6.

A preview of forensic evidence

Prosecutors plan to have an FBI computer forensic examiner testify about Trump’s phone use on Jan. 6. They say it will show which news and social media apps he had on his phone and will reveal that Trump was on Twitter for much of the day. Prosecutors also plan to show at trial what Fox News was broadcasting at specific times during the day, since Trump had it on in the dining room and was watching coverage of the riot.

‘Make them riot’

Well before Jan. 6, an unidentified Trump campaign employee enthusiastically spoke of the potential for a riot in Michigan. The employee, whom prosecutors described as a co-conspirator, allegedly sought to “create chaos” at a polling center in Detroit when it became clear a batch of election returns favorable to Biden was legitimate. “Find a reason it isn’t,” the alleged co-conspirator said to a colleague, prosecutors wrote. When the colleague said an outbreak of violence appeared imminent, the campaign employee replied: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!” person 15?

Rudy’s rise

Trump sidelined his campaign lawyers on Nov. 13, 2020, with Bannon informing another Trump campaign adviser — and alleged co-conspirator — that Trump had replaced them in the pecking order with Rudy Giuliani. Bannon said he told Trump that without Giuliani in charge, “this thing is over.” “Trump is in to the end,” Bannon added, according to prosecutors.

Rudy’s follies

Counting on Giuliani didn’t turn out so well. Smith’s brief includes yet another instance of Giuliani’s prolific record of butt-dialing and clumsy cell phone use. Prosecutors say he attempted to send a proposed resolution to Michigan lawmakers declaring the election to be in dispute — but sent it to the wrong number.

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an 724 bANNON HAS HOURS OF JEFFrey epstein INTERVIEW LOCKED UP incl djt?

note tshirt demand for tapes/list by evang?

July 17, 2024 rww

Carl Gibson and Maya Boddie @ AlterNet: JD Vance caught quietly deleting ‘100% pro-life’ position from his website

Abortion is one of the defining issues of the 2024 election. Now, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the GOP’s presumptive vice presidential nominee, is trying to conceal his past opposition for the procedure in all cases.

Andy Kroll and Nick Surgey @ ProPublica: In Private Speech, J.D. Vance Said the “Devil Is Real” and Praised Alex Jones as a Truth-Teller

Vance gave the speech to the secretive Teneo Network. The GOP vice presidential nominee has been a member of the Leonard Leo-backed group, which seeks to cultivate conservative influence in business and culture.

Jacob Shamsian @ Business Insider: Steve Bannon filmed Jeffrey Epstein for 15 hours. His ‘documentary’ has never surfaced

Before his 2019 death in jail, Jeffrey Epstein spent hours being interviewed on camera by Steve Bannon.

Tabitha Mueller @ The Nevada Independent: Grand jury indicts ex-Las Vegas Councilwoman Michele Fiore on wire fraud charges

A federal grand jury has indicted Michele Fiore — a former Las Vegas city councilwoman and current Nye County justice of the peace — on four counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud after she allegedly defrauded donors of more than $70,000 for personal gain.

Steve Benen @ The Maddow Blog: Why the leaked phone call between Trump and RFK Jr. matters

We don’t have to wonder what Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talked about, because a partial recording of candidates’ chat leaked.

Zachary Folk and Jake Lahut @ The Daily Beast: Republicans Are Wearing Ear Bandages to Copy Trump

Some attendees at the Republican National Convention are wearing fake bandages in an apparent display of solidarity with the former president.

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mma 7 24

Steve Bannon, former Trump White House adviser and host of the flagship MAGA media show War Room, goes to federal prison today for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena issued by the House January 6 committee. He is sentenced to serve four months.

Bannon deserves to be held responsible for flouting the law, but prison will not solve our Steve Bannon problem. For the past decade, his style of politics — featuring conspiracy theories, racist fearmongering, and disinformation — has reigned over right-wing media, even as his own standing in Donald Trump’s circle has risen and fallen. That does not stand to change over the course of his incarceration.

To be sure, War Room will suffer without him in the short term. For the past several years, the show has been the center of the MAGA media universe, and neither his proposed list of guest hosts nor his ragtag staff will be able to supplant his relentless work ethic and talent for far-right messaging. While it’s possible he’ll get messages out through other media figures, his ability to communicate will surely be diminished during this period, and that is a blow to his movement.

In the timeline of Trumpism, however, four months is a drop in the bucket, and to suggest this brief change to the War Room lineup will substantially improve the political environment somehow is tragically shortsighted. Consider the longer arc of Bannon’s career during the Trump era.

We all know Bannon for his flamboyant style in the early days of Trump; coming from far-right outlet Breitbart, he was a key vector of amplifying racist anti-immigrant extremism as chairman of the 2016 campaign and later as the (short-lived) chief strategist of his administration. After flaming out of the White House, he started War Room and used it as a platform to saturate Trump’s base with the lie of a stolen election in 2020, which resulted in a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. This legacy clearly lives on through the persistent election denial of Trump and the Republican Party.

Less attention, however, has been paid to what Bannon has been up to between January 2021 and today, and how he’s used to remake the GOP in his image.

It began with the “precinct strategy,” an effort Bannon spearheaded on the show to get his audience to sign up as precinct committee members. According to The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, “in the years since the 2020 election, the precinct strategy has driven thousands of new Republican activists” to volunteer in these low-level roles, forcing out veteran Republican party officials “who were anything less than completely faithful to Trump and his election denial, smoothing his path back to the Republican nomination.”

And who’s to say the road ends there? Bannon has said that the War Roomaudience would embrace more Trump terms after 2028. “Of course, our audience, hey, three, give me three, I’ll throw in a fourth, right? What’s this Barron thing? Don’t skip Don Jr.,” the host told his biographer Josh Green during the May 21 edition of War Room.

Video

CitationFrom the May 21, 2024 edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

A key strategy that War Room and Trump have in common is the campaign to turn the American justice system into MAGA’s public enemy No. 1. As Trump’s legal problems have piled up since leaving office, he’s lashed out daily, and War Room has been a key platform amplifying this narrative of a corrupt justice system intent on political persecution.

“Biden’s fingerprints are on all four of these criminal prosecutions” against Trump, Bannon told the Article III Project’s Mike Davis on April 30, presumably referring to special counsel Jack Smith’s two criminal cases against the former president, Fani Willis’s prosecution of election interference in Georgia, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s hush money case.. Bannon’s smears against Bragg and a prosecutor who worked under him named Matthew Coangelo resulted in House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sending a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland seeking “information and documents related to Mr. Coangelo’s employment.” Bannon called the judge overseeing Trump’s civil fraud trial in New York a “Nazi.” After Trump was indicted in Georgia for his role undermining the 2020 election results, Bannon described it as “lawlessness”: “They will do anything, they will break any law, they will destroy any institution, they will do anything to defeat Donald Trump.” And when Mar-a-Lago was searched by the FBI in August 2022, Bannon said it was part of a plot to assassinate Trump.

More recently, he’s begun casting himself as a victim of “lawfare” as his case has progressed.

“I am a political prisoner,” he told ABC’s Jon Karl.

On his show: “It’s a political war.”

And Bannon doesn’t just diagnose the “lawfare” problem as he sees it, whether on behalf of himself or Trump. He also offers a path forward, and that is how retribution came to be such a salient theme in this election.

When Trump announced his 2024 campaign last March in Waco, Texas (a symbolic location to the far right), the former president promised his followers: “I am your warrior, I am your justice … I am your retribution.” Even without Bannon hosting War Room, retaliatory persecution of law enforcement and political opponents will be a major narrative for the MAGA movement, and Bannon has been instrumental in setting that tone.

Here’s a very limited selection of his missives promising vengeance from just the past few months:

Bannon threatened Garland: “You're going to be a target of a massive investigation. You're going to go from the Supreme Court to prison.”
He promised “teams” that will “go after the criminals and the traitors in the deep state.”
Bannon said a second Trump administration will launch investigations of journalists for trying to “destroy the American republic.”
He called Trump’s political opponents “enemies and traitors to this country” who should be “very worried” about retaliation.
“We’re going after you. The hunted are going to become the hunters,” Bannon warned on April 24.
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, Bannon said Trump will “drive the vermin out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.,” adding, “Some of our folks may say justice in this case is retribution. I will let that be defined as we go forward.”

The right-wing movement has a plan to actualize this vision. Called Project 2025, it's an initiative organized by The Heritage Foundation and embraced by Bannon that would provide policy and personnel to the next Republican presidential administration. The effort involves more than 100 partner organizations, and the plans outlined in its nearly 900-page policy book — titled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise — represent a major threat to democracy. Project 2025 has been in development for years, and Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has specified that its framework will carry forward “for the next century in the United States,” well beyond the term of Bannon’s incarceration.

Among its wide-ranging policy goals, Project 2025 seeks to radically reshape federal law enforcement for the benefit of a conservative strongman; its chapter on the Department of Justice, written by a former Trump official, states that “anything other than a top-to-bottom overhaul will only further erode the trust of significant portions of the American people and harm the very fabric that holds together our constitutional republic.”

Project 2025 is the Trump movement’s vehicle for enacting Bannon’s vision of retaliation, which goes far beyond what’s in the Mandate for Leadership.

“On the spectrum of MAGA,” he recently told NBC News, “I would say President Trump is a moderate in our movement. And I think the MAGA movement is shifting day by day to the right.”

Under a second Trump presidency, not only would the administration likely draw on the Project 2025 framework, but it would also be under pressure from Bannon and his supporters to go significantly further.

IFrame Content

So while Bannon’s visibility temporarily fades as his sentence begins, his worldview remains and continues to pose a significant threat to democracy.

Journalist Jennifer Senior, who wrote an explosive profile of Bannon in 2022, made an astute observation to this point in a recent with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, another worthy observer of War Room. Senior said that Bannon’s goals to weaponize his prison term transcend Trump, that Bannon sees himself “as the head of some other grassroots movement” entirely complementary to the former president but also decidedly independent.

“I don’t think he thinks he’s martyring himself, even though he says publicly that it’s on the movement’s behalf,” she explained. “I think there’s some part of it that he thinks it’s on his own behalf, that his own listeners are going to be energized by this.”

I agree. Through his own purported self-sacrifice, which is really just a predictable outcome of a legal problem he created for himself by refusing the House January 6 committee's request for documents and testimony, Bannon is building a foundation of support from Trump’s base to fall back on that is unique to him — a new facet of the MAGA movement that can survive on its own.

So while accountability for Bannon in the limited manner of a prison sentence for two misdemeanors is, in my amateur view, appropriate, it’s far from a triumph over the fascistic tendencies of the Trump movement that he has been so instrumental in actualizing. It’s hardly even a temporary reprieve.

“Pray for our enemies,” Bannon told his faithful MAGA audience in a recent broadcast, “Do not write a letter to me at all — it will not be read.” What to do instead? “I want you to get to work. This is all about victory.”

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Days ahead of his scheduled imprisonment, Steve Bannon declares the country is in a “political war”

06/27/24 mma

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mma 6 24

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and others in MAGA media have recently praised disgraced Sen. Joe McCarthy and his blacklists, a tactic that Project 2025 partner organization the American Accountability Foundation is attempting to bring to the White House should Donald Trump win in November.

According to The Associated Press, AAF is planning to create and publicly post a list of “100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be … ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings,” with a focus on “those in senior executive positions who could put up roadblocks to Trump’s plans for tighter borders and more deportations.”

The plan is reportedly underwritten by a $100,000 grant from conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation as part of Project 2025, its far-reaching and extreme effort to provide policy and personnel recommendations for a potential second Trump administration. One of Project 2025’s top priorities is the implementation of “Schedule F,” a scheme to remove job protections from federal workers by reclassifying career staffers as political appointees — a direct attack on federal unions that could be used to fire civil servants deemed insufficiently pro-Trump.

AAF is one of more than 100 conservative organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, and its initiative — synergistically dubbed Project Sovereignty 2025 — is the latest broadside against the 2.2 million people who work for the federal government. The AP article notes that the group’s list of what Heritage referred to as “anti-American bad actors” echoes the blacklist era of McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist crusader whose name became synonymous with one of the most repressive periods in U.S. history.

Notably, MAGA media have been attempting to rehabilitate McCarthy’s illiberal tactics and goals using rhetoric that often dovetails with justifications for AAF’s project.

In October, Bannon said that McCarthy “was dead spot on and quite frankly didn't go far enough.”

In a December,

vid]

British outlet The Telegraph asked Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “Was McCarthy right?” Roberts responded: “On the whole, yeah,” adding, “Especially in hindsight, I think he was spot on."

A month later, Roberts doubled down on defending McCarthy, explaining to The New York Times: “I was referring to his motivation, and his motivation was, as you know, that real Communists, like capital-C Communists, had infiltrated the federal government, which we learned in hindsight he was right about. Obviously, at least some of his tactics were terrible, but what he got right was the motivation.”

In March, right-wing media figure and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec promoted his anti-communist book on his Thoughtcrime show with Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk, praising McCarthy — as well as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco — as figures “who have fought Marxists … over the years and actually done something about it.” (Franco’s regime is believed to have killed between 160,000 and 200,000 people during a period known as the White Terror.)

A week later, Trump ally and self-identified Islamophobe Laura Loomer repeatedly referred to mainstream reporters as “communists,” adding: “It honestly makes me think that Joseph McCarthy was right, honestly. Really. Honestly. Maybe there was something to it, about rounding up all these communists.” She then repeated, “Maybe Joseph McCarthy was right."

Bannon returned to the subject in May, telling his audience, “Sen. McCarthy did a fantastic job.” He’d earlier said, “The reason they hated Nixon, because Nixon, even more than McCarthy, really went after the communists.”

Later that month, Posobiec appeared on former Trump adviser Roger Stone’s show to promote his book and again praised McCarthy. “We do talk about the man whose name is to not be spoken anywhere in American politics,” Posobiec said. “Yes, of course, I'm talking about one of my favorite Catholic senators of all time — Joseph McCarthy. There’s a fantastic section in there about how Joseph McCarthy tried to warn us, and we didn't listen.”

Project 2025’s Schedule F and AAF’s proposed blacklist are clear, direct descendants of the literal McCarthyism that MAGA media figures are so quick to praise. The McCarthy era saw massive purges of left-wing federal employees as part of the Cold War’s rightward shift in national politics, halting the potential for American social democracy and helping to plant the seeds for the neoliberal turn of the 1970s and the ensuing rise in inequality that accompanied it.

McCarthy and fellow anti-communists like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover also directed their oppressive tactics toward gay people — and those suspected or accused of being gay — who worked for the federal government during a period known as the Lavender Scare. McCarthy “directly linked homosexuality and Communism,” depicting gay people working in government as a national security threat. Historians estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 federal workers were forced to resign during this period, often behind closed doors for fear of their gay identity — real or perceived — becoming public.

McCarthyist attacks on workers extended far beyond federal government employees. The broader Red Scare was disastrous for unions and the working class, hollowing out organized labor’s power and setting the stage for the wage stagnation and exploding wealth inequality that have defined the United States since the early 1980s. As leading historian of McCarthyism Ellen Schrecker writes, “labor's declining percentage of the workforce” had its “roots in that grim moment."

MAGA media’s celebration of that “grim moment” for workers further highlights the superficial rhetoric of right-wing populism.

Now, Project 2025 has taken up the mantle of targeting the federal workforce — and the working class at large— with effects that could be just as long lasting. As Roberts told Bannon in June, “What we're doing here is building not just for 2025, Steve, but for the next century in the United States."

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an 6 24 no lnx

alternet-

How Steve Bannon’s 'sway over Republican politics' is stronger than ever

Steve Bannon with Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk in Las Vegas in January 2024 (Gage Skidmore)

Alex Henderson

June 24, 2024

On Thursday night, June 20, a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected, 2-1, "War Room" host Steve Bannon's request to stay out of federal prison while he appeals his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The former Trump White House chief strategist is still expected to surrender on July 1 for a four-month sentence.

But Bannon's legal problems aren't making him any less influential in the far-right MAGA movement.

The Guardian's David Smith, in an article published on June 24, stresses that Bannon's "sway over Republican politics cannot be overestimated" as he gets ready for four months in prison.

READ MORE: Steve Bannon and the culture of impunity

"From attacking Trump's impeachment to draconian border security…. from baseless vaccine conspiracy theories to slashing military funding to Ukraine," Smith explains, "'War Room' is an incubator of policies that worm their way into Republican orthodoxy months or years later…. Last year, a study by the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington found that almost 20 percent of 'War Room' episodes contained a false, misleading or unsubstantiated statement, making it a bigger spreader of disinformation than any other political podcast."

Bannon argues that his "War Room" podcast is successful because it tackles subjects that even Fox News won't cover. And he also says that many people in the MAGA movement are to the right of former President Donald Trump politically.

Bannon told The Guardian, "President Trump is actually a moderate in the MAGA movement…. To the right of President Trump? Not so kind-hearted. We're very focused, and we're to the right of him because it's just not his nature to be as far-right-wing as we are."

Bannon continued, "We love him; he's the head of our movement. But what comes after Trump is a much bigger shockwave to the liberal establishment and to the progressive establishment that basically controls the country."

READ MORE: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s desperate scramble to stop Steve Bannon from going to prison

Read The Guardian's full interview with Steve Bannon at this link.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'MAGA nightmare' as Trump allies fight to keep 'establishment neocon' Nikki Haley off VP list ›

Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson explains why Steve Bannon 'must be destroyed' ›

Bannon to serve term in prison that inspired 'Orange is the New Black': report ›

Bannon: “We're going to take power and then there's going to be a season of accountability”

06/13/24

---

mma

Bannon: A Trump administration will launch investigations of journalists: “You tried to destroy the American republic and you came very close”}:

:{:{06/12/24}:

### National TV news largely ignored the climate connection during coverage of the recent extreme heat event

06/12/24 9:03 AM EDT

### Newsmax host calls Hunter Biden's conviction a “psyop”

06/12/24 9:02 AM EDT

### OutKick's Clay Travis calls Olympian Katie Ledecky “pathetic” after she “refused to give an opinion” on trans inclusion in women's sports

06/11/24 7:43 PM EDT

### Jenna Ellis defends Colorado GOP chairman who encouraged burning Pride flags: “The Republican party on a national scale is failing”

06/11/24 7:42 PM EDT

### American right-wing media celebrate far-right European electoral success

06/11/24 2:56 PM EDT

### MAGA propagandists juggle conspiracy theories following Hunter Biden verdict

06/11/24 2:42 PM EDT

### Charlie Kirk dismisses Hunter Biden guilty verdicts: “They're trying to make it seem as if, oh, our justice system is fair. You go after Donald Trump, and you go after Hunter Biden.”

06/11/24 1:03 PM EDT

### Turning Point USA is promoting drinking raw milk amid bird flu outbreak

06/11/24 12:11 PM EDT

### Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes tells his followers to join Project 2025

06/11/24 11:43 AM EDT

### Aaron Rodgers’ descent into the right-wing fever swamps

06/11/24 11:36 AM EDT

### Project 2025 partners want to make divorce a lot harder

06/11/24

---

Bannon says former AG Bill Barr and FBI Director Chris Wray should be “brought up on charges” related to Hunter Biden laptop](https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/bannon-says-former-ag-bill-barr-and-fbi-director-chris-wray-should-be-brought-charges)

06/05/24

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an 6 24

Trump once again is threatening to jail his political opponents, including President Joe Biden. And unlike his 2016 presidential debate remark to Hillary Clinton, this time there’s an actual plan in place to do just that.

In addition to saying, “lock her up,” Trump has a history of repeatedly threatening or calling for Clinton to be thrown in prison. One month before the 2016 election Trump told a Florida crowd, .” That was just days after the second presidential debate, when Trump told Clinton she would “be in jail” if he were president.

IFrame Content

Trump has been strongly focusing on prosecuting and putting President Joe Biden in prison.

“Since the start of last year, Trump has issued direct or implied threats on Truth Social to use the powers of the federal government to target Joe Biden during a second Trump administration 25 times. Specifically, Trump has threatened him with FBI raids, investigations, indictments and even jail time,” government watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) wrote last month.

Tuesday night on the right wing media outlet Newsmax, Trump again threatened to jail his political opponents.

“So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to,” he said, NBC News reported, blaming Democrats for his criminal conviction, “and it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”

Trump, according to Newsmax, also called his New York criminal conviction last week on 34 felony counts, “a terrible precedent for our country. Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question.”

IFrame Content

“One of Trump’s most consistent talking points on the trail centers on his intention to prosecute Biden if he regains executive power,” NBC News reported in February.

“I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family,” Trump said last year in June. That was “just hours after being arraigned at a federal courthouse in Miami on charges alleging willful retention of classified documents.”

When Trump first entered the Oval Office, he had institutional guardrails, as many experts have noted. He appointed former government officials, including his “generals,” to top posts and they worked to steer him away from his most extreme desires.

Over time, those institutionalists resigned or were fired.

Now, thanks to a massive multi-million dollar enterprise funded in part by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, there’s a plan in place to jail Trump’s political opponents, should he win back the White House.

Project 2025 is the far-right’s plan to entirely remake the Executive Branch to hand Trump massive, unchecked power, via a 920-page policy “mandate.”

“Trump and his aides are reportedly assembling a list of people to be investigated, prosecuted, and possibly jailed,” The Atlantic‘s Tom Nichols wrote last year. Nichols is a former U.S. Naval War College professor and expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs.

“Trump also wants to go after President Joe Biden for ‘corruption,’ which (like so many of Trump’s accusations) is pure projection,” Nichols continued. “If Trump follows through on all of this lunacy, half the government will spend its days investigating the other half, while the military is put on alert in case too many Americans object to Trump’s destruction of their constitutional rights.”

“If you’re wondering how Trump plans to accomplish all of this, he likely has no idea. But his cronies at the Heritage Foundation (including former administration officials) do, and they are busily making plans. They’ve even written them down in something called Project 2025, a detailed blueprint for a right-wing takeover of the United States government. Trump, who seems to be losing his grip on reality more each day, might be devolving into a flaming piñata of offensive nonsense, but his enablers and the authors of Project 2025 know exactly what they’re doing.”

Take Steve Bannon.

Last year Media Matters called Bannon’s “War Room” podcast “the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans.”

Last week, Bannon made the right’s plans clear.

“The DOJ is completely corrupt from top to bottom,” he said on his podcast in video reposted by The Recount. “It’s going to have to be purged, it’s going to have to be restructured,” he said, insisting “they’re going to have to get rid of lots of personnel on the afternoon of January 20, 2025.”

“The FBI is the American Gestapo,” Bannon added, also insisting it be “totally restructured.”

IFrame Content

Axios on Wednesday reported on “MAGA’s jail plan.”

“If former President Trump wins in November, top supporters will push him to investigate, prosecute — and even try to imprison — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who won Trump’s conviction in the hush-money case,” the news outlet reported.

“‘Of course [Bragg] should be — and will be — jailed,’ Steve Bannon, one of the top voices of the MAGA movement, told us — saying for the record what many Trump supporters are privately plotting.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

---

War Room guest: “Minnesota has been conquered. It is now Islamist.”

05/15/24

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projection //

Greg Gutfeld claims Democrats are “cooking up” ways to illegally steal the presidential election

05/13/24

mma

the MAGA movement and the Trump assassination plot that wasn’t

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACK WHEATLEY

PUBLISHED 05/29/24

Stephen Bannon’s Tuesday appearance on Alex Jones' show provided a perfect window into the state of the MAGA movement: It’s an unhinged echo chamber running on deranged conspiracy theories and wildly overheated rhetoric, aimed at fomenting grievance and seeking retribution, and it’s unwilling or unable to self-correct in the face of contrary facts.

Bannon, a key Trump ally, told Jones that the FBI’s August 2022 court-ordered search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and resort had been a planned “assassination attempt,” promoting a conspiracy theory that the agents’ standard use-of-force orders revealed the search was part of a scheme by President Joe Biden to kill his predecessor.

“Let me be blunt: This was not a standard operating procedure. Alex Jones, you know that better than anybody,” Bannon told Jones, a notorious false-flag enthusiast.

The host replied that “they were hoping for a confrontation” in which the “Secret Service would think it was an attack.”

Bannon went on to claim that the FBI “had use of lethal force approved” and “wanted someone to bleed out. This entire thing was thought through in a high level of detail, and they weren’t absolutely sure Trump wasn’t going to be there.” He added, “They were looking to have a confrontation that would be an armed confrontation.”

Jones agreed, adding that the agents’ plainclothes attire, instead of uniforms, showed they were “looking for somebody to think it’s a burglary” and “make a mistake.”

In reality, the FBI reportedly picked a date when Trump would not be present for the search, contacted the Secret Service in advance of their arrival, and wore white polo shirts and khakis rather than their usual FBI jackets to avoid attracting attention from guests at Trump’s club.

Bannon subsequently claimed this assassination plot was part of a “vast conspiracy” that requires congressional investigations to “adjudicate” alongside the 2020 “stolen election” and the January 6 “Fed-surrection.” He concluded that when Trump is elected in November, “we’re going to take apart the administrative state brick by brick, and we’re gonna purge the deep state.”

Video

CitationFrom the May 28, 2024, edition of Infowars' The Alex Jones Show.

The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search triggered an immediate MAGA firestorm in August 2022, with Trump’s media supporters comparing the bureau to the East German Stasi and Nazi Gestapo. They have not been deterred by revelations that the search uncovered a trove of highly classified documents Trump had refused to return, by special counsel Jack Smith charging Trump with 40 federal criminal counts, or by an armed and enraged Trump supporter’s attack on an FBI field office.

In their latest salvo, MAGA commentators used last week’s unsealing of filings in that case to argue that the FBI search had been part of a Biden plot to assassinate Trump. Their theory was facially absurd, and the evidence they cited — an unsealed court filing in the classified documents case which stated that the FBI agents conducting the search had been advised that they “may use deadly force when necessary” — was swiftly debunked. Reporters, legal experts, and the FBI itself pointed out that this “generic” language is part of “every FBI operations order” as part of the bureau’s “standard policy” — and had been similarly provided for document searches conducted at Biden’s own home.

After Trump responded to the MAGA frenzy by claiming that the FBI order showed Biden “was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” special counsel Smith noted that the former president’s statements “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to the law enforcement agents.” But neither the debunking of the assassination claim nor the potential danger to FBI agents is slowing down the likes of Bannon and Jones.

And they aren’t alone — Julie Kelly, the self-proclaimed “J6 conspiracy theorist” who launched the story in the first place, is still at it.

IFrame Content

This is sadly typical. The MAGA right is a constant font of zombie conspiracy theories which are spun up and maintained indefinitely, unaffected by the emergence of contrary facts.

The fervor ignited by their unhinged claims can have serious consequences, as Smith noted — consequences measured in massacres and an insurrection, a shot-up pizza parlor and gym bomb threats, threatened legislators and an assault on an FBI office. And at the end of that yearslong drumbeat, a Trumpist plot to overturn the 2024 election results if Trump loses is looming.

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5 24

fox News and the MAGA media are lining up their shot at American democracy

The bullet is in the chamber

WRITTEN BY MATT GERTZ

PUBLISHED 05/14/24

With the presidential election less than half a year away, evidence is everywhere that the right is planning to end the American experiment in representative government if it fails to legitimately return Donald Trump to the White House.

It was clear just a few months after Trump’s seditious plot to subvert the 2020 presidential election concluded with a violent mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol that the right-wing propaganda apparatus was laying the groundwork to try again in 2024. Fox News and the rest of the MAGA media, which spent the weeks after the 2020 election fabricating and amplifying a host of election fraud lies and conspiracy theories to undermine the results, had begun working to institutionalize Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him and to construct an alternative path to the presidency in which compliant party officials would secure a Republican victory by any means necessary.

Fox had become a loaded gun aimed at American democracy. Three years later, the bullet is in the chamber.

The disinformation ecosystem which revolves around Fox is telegraphing a plan to reject the results of the 2024 election if Trump loses. The former president’s propagandists will once again use baseless allegations of widespread fraud as a pretext to seek to overturn the vote — and GOP leaders are publicly signaling their willingness to comply.

IFrame Content

Ultimately, this preordained coup scheme may not matter. As in 2020, Joe Biden might win by too large a margin in too many states for the plot to succeed. Or, as in 2016, Trump might win outright.

But in the event that Biden triumphs in a close election, the MAGA faithful have developed and road-tested a plan to steal it.

Fox stars aided Trump’s 2020 subversion plot. They were lying. And they’ll do it again.

It is sometimes unclear whether Fox’s falsehoods are deliberate lies. But filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit, which the network settled in April 2023 for $787.5 million, demonstrate beyond dispute that Fox’s coverage of the 2020 election results was rooted in malicious fabrication.

Fox’s top executives and biggest stars knew for a fact that Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, even as the network’s coverage sought to undermine the legitimacy of the vote. The network, filings show, was intentionally peddling conspiracy theories in support of Trump’s stolen-election deception in order to compete with its far-right rivals.

These lies mattered. Communications revealed by the suit show that top Fox executives were aware the network was “uniquely positioned to state the message that the election was not stolen” but did not out of fears of losing viewers. They further show that when then-Fox Corp. Chair Rupert Murdoch asked his employees for evidence Fox had “fed the story that the election was stolen and that January 6 [was] an important chance to have the results overturned,” he received a list of 50 examples in response.

But the only lesson Fox’s executives apparently learned from fueling an attempted coup is that they need better lawyering to keep their damning internal emails and text messages off the front pages and avoid paying a record settlement.

Fox retained and even promoted some of its most unhinged election deniers, while punishing or even firing employees who fought the false narratives. In the years that followed, the network restocked its prime-time lineup with Trump loyalists who parrot whatever the former president says, put Trump allies and even a family member on the payroll, and replaced “news side” veterans with GOP operatives.

It’s no wonder that former employees keep loudly warning that Fox is a dangerous cesspool that produces Trumpian propaganda. The cogs who remain on the job, meanwhile, know without a doubt that they are part of a machine that manufactures lies. The pressure the network faces to hold on to its audience — including by promoting voter fraud conspiracy theories and other right-wing extremism — is stronger than ever. And so if Trump demands that Fox’s propagandists again focus on building him a pretext to overturn an election, they will do it.

The emerging right-wing scheme to overturn the 2024 election

Trumpists in the media and elsewhere have spent the years since Trump’s defeat laying the groundwork to rerun his subversion plot, systematically removing the guardrails that helped stymie the scheme in 2020, and helping him back to the Republican nomination. The result is a turnkey operation prepared to generate false election fraud claims and convert them into a rationale for Republican political leaders to reverse the results of the election and reinstall Trump in the White House.

MAGA propagandists are priming their audiences to disbelieve the election results and take action in response. They keep viewers in a state of terror with incendiary warnings that Biden is a jack-booted dictator who is deliberately trying to endanger their families, ensuring that some fraction would seek his removal by any means necessary. They valorize the January 6 insurrectionists as honorable patriots who did what they thought was right and were smeared by the media and punished by “deep state” malefactors. They flood the right-wing information ecosystem with lies and conspiracy theories about Democrats tainting past election results.

And they have already begun warning that the 2024 election will be rife with election fraud — and that only such cheating could explain a Trump defeat.

Video

CitationFrom the March 25, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): There are no “issues" with the 2020 election — they stole it. Let me repeat that. They stole it. And they hate when we say this. They stole it. And they're on notice. They're not going to be able to steal it again. People are doing a ton of work on this, and that's still not enough, but it's going to get better. The hairy eyeball is going to be on them.

The only way they defeat Trump is to steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. The only way they defeat Trump is they steal it. He is unstoppable.

We saw how this played out in 2020: Trump’s coup plan relied on blanketing right-wing media with stolen-election lies in order to provide cover for GOP partisans to reverse the outcome in states Biden won. Under pressure from the Fox-addled rank and file, Republican election officials would refuse to certify results in key areas, GOP state legislators would overturn the results, and GOP members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence would hand Trump the election.

This scheme failed in part because too many Republican officials were unwilling to aid the effort. But since then, Trumpist propagandists like War Room host Steve Bannon and Fox’s lineup of right-wing stars have helped make election denial a core GOP value, and now, the guardrails are collapsing:

Republicans purged their ranks of the sorts of GOP officials who resisted Trump’s subversion effort at the local, state, and federal level.

Election lies seem to have become a benefit in GOP primaries and effectively a job requirement at the Republican National Committee, one enforced by the MAGA chorus.

Prominent election deniers are recruiting their followers to take positions within the election infrastructure.

In the House, Rep. Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) zealous efforts to overturn the election helped garner him the speakership, while in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is on his way out of the leadership after voting to certify the electoral votes and criticizing Trump’s role in the insurrection.

Pence is effectively a party outcast after rejecting Trump’s entreaties to overturn the 2020 election results, and the politicians seeking to replace him on the GOP ticket are pushing voter fraud lies and refusing to say they will accept the results of the 2024 election.

Donald Trump will once again stand as the Republican presidential nominee this fall, less than four years after he attempted a coup to remain in office. He still maintains, unbowed by time, notoriety, or criminal charges, that the 2020 election was stolen. At the same time, he has embraced the January 6 offenders, regularly describing them as “hostages,” promising to consider blanket pardons for their actions, and treating their attack on the Capitol as “not a moment of national shame but of celebration,” as NPR described it.

None of this seemed to give right-wing propagandists much pause as Trump romped to the nomination. The Murdochs may have begun the primary season with other plans, but Fox had spent years crafting a political environment in which any criticism of Trump was inherently illegitimate, and its stars ultimately rallied to his side.

As Trump’s victory became inevitable, his vanquished rivals were reduced to complaining — accurately — that Fox and its ilk had taken Trump’s side, while the few right-wing commentators who had criticized Trump and endorsed his primary opponents bent the knee.

If he loses in 2024, Trump will reject the results and seek to overturn them, as he has throughout his political career. Indeed, he began laying the groundwork for such a strategy during the GOP primaries, warning that only Democratic “cheating” could explain such an outcome. And he has no apparent qualms over whether his deliberate radicalization of his supporters leads to right-wing political violence. Indeed, he is signaling that is exactly what he wants.

No one can say they didn’t know what was coming

Here’s part of an interview with Trump that Time magazine published on April 30, six months before Election Day:

Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?

Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election. I don't believe they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time. I don't think they'll be able to get away with it. And if that's the case, we're gonna win in record-setting fashion.

Polls suggest that the 2024 presidential election will be close. But according to Trump, he’s “way ahead” and on track to win “in record-setting fashion.” The only thing that can prevent that outcome, Trump claims, is “the things that they did the last time,” i.e. the Democratic election fraud conspiracy theories he’s been hocking since before the 2020 vote. And if that happens, Trump says, his supporters might respond to such a result with violence.

None of this is even remotely subtle.

In the lead-up to the 2020 election, some political commentators expressed doubts over whether Trump would really respond to defeat by refusing to accept the election results and taking action to try to remain in office.

But that is precisely what Trump did. Now he is saying quite clearly that he will do it again if given the chance. And his propagandists in the right-wing media will have had four years to lay the groundwork to ensure his plot’s success.

Five days after the Time interview dropped, Semafor founder Ben Smith published a Q-and-A with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. The interview began like this:

Ben Smith: Dan Pfeiffer, who used to work for Barack Obama, recently wrote of the Times: “They do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.” Why don’t you see your job as: “We’ve got to stop Trump?” What about your job doesn’t let you think that way?

Joe Kahn: Good media is the Fourth Estate, it’s another pillar of democracy. One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters. If you believe in democracy, I don’t see how we get past the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election.

To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda. It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.

It’s also true that Trump could win this election in a popular vote. Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair. And there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

> It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?

That exchange generated a lot of smart responses. Critics pointed out that Smith’s question mischaracterized Pfeiffer’s critique; that Kahn’s response ignores the actual criticisms mounted by his paper’s critics, including Biden himself; that the Times’ business interests lead Kahn to endorse “a kind of performative neutrality in politics coverage”; and that, contra Kahn’s claims, the Times does not generally base its coverage decisions on polling and, if it did, the result should be a greater focus on the impact of Trump’s policy proposals on inflation and immigration than the paper actually provides.

What strikes me most about Kahn’s answer is his apparent lack of urgency. A former president left office after using the lie that the election he lost had been rigged to try to reverse the outcome, culminating in a violent assault by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. He has all but promised to try again, and after transforming his party into a personality cult which treats the insurrectionists as heroes and his election lie as unvarnished truth, he very well could succeed.

That is the central reality of the 2024 presidential election, one that should be foregrounded to the readers and viewers on news outlets at every opportunity but often fades from the discourse. The former president’s media allies are foreshadowing their eagerness to take every possible opportunity to participate in his scheme. And the leader of the nation’s most powerful mainstream press organ gives no indication that he has considered those implications in any but the shallowest way. We are all in a lot of trouble.

Fox News propagandists and GOP leaders are pushing the country toward the abyss

11/06/20

Fox News is a loaded gun aimed at American democracy

05/14/21

They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them

===}:

Steve Bannon promotes January 6 organizer Amy Kremer’s run for Georgia Republican National Committeewoman | Media Matters for America

random mma

Steve Bannon on Speaker Johnson: "If your congressman votes to keep this worm in office, they're just as guilty as he is" | Media Matters for America

### Steve Bannon says Trump is “dead wrong” to support Speaker Mike Johnson

05/07/24 1:56 PM EDT

### Steve Bannon says Senator Joseph McCarthy “did a fantastic job”

05/07/24

===

jordan caved

Bannon praises Rep. Jim Jordan's investigation into Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg and lawyer Matthew Colangelo

04/30/24

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Right-wing media defend those in indicted in Arizona fake-electors scheme through false comparisons and debunked election-fraud claims | Media Matters for America (https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/right-wing-media-defend-those-indicted-arizona-fake-electors-scheme-through-false)

We're gonna force it to go away”: Steve Bannon and Christina Bobb complain about her indictment for fake elector scheme in Arizona (https://www.mediamatters.org/christina-bobb/were-gonna-force-it-go-away-steve-bannon-and-christina-bobb-complain-about-her)

04/29/24

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===

alternet-424 no lnx

Extreme apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere

Steve Bannon speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. Image via Gage Skidmore.

Lindsay Beyerstein April 23, 2024

Judging by her 100,000-follower X account, Danielle Johnson was a typical astrology influencer. She chided Cancers to stop being chaotic and Tauruses to lay off the carbs. She burned candles, cast spells and peddled energy healing sessions.

It was your standard sunny apolitical pseudo-spiritual shtick, but her tone darkened abruptly in the days leading up to the solar eclipse.

Jones started sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories and QAnon verbiage. She retweeted far-right conspiracy mogul Alex Jones, antivax loon Naomi Wolf and a Jew-hating flat-earther.

As an astrologer, Johnson was primed to believe that celestial bodies influence daily life, but this was different. She seemed to believe something terrible was coming and that real-life action was needed.

She begged her fellow spiritual healers to keep their people safe. On April 5, she tweeted, “WAKE UP WAKE UP THE APOCALYPSE IS HERE.” The coming eclipse, she said, was the epitome of spiritual warfare. It was time to pick a side.

In the early morning hours of eclipse day, Johnson plunged a knife into the heart of her boyfriend, threw her children from a speeding car, and plowed into a tree at a hundred miles an hour. Johnson is dead, as is her boyfriend and her infant daughter. We are left with grief and questions.

In light of her social media and the tarot cards strewn around the crime scene, investigators initially suspected that the apocalyptic anxiety may have been a factor in the killings, but now they say we’ll never know. Johnson and her boyfriend are dead and it’s hard to explain what went wrong. Neither Johnson nor her partner had a record of domestic violence. Johnson’s mother confirmed that her daughter had a history of postpartum depression.

Johnson’s case isn’t as clear-cut as that of Taylon Celestine who announced that God had commanded her to start shooting people because of the eclipse before she opened fire on I-10 in Florida, hitting two drivers.

Extreme apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere. Most of us shrug it off and get on with our lives, minding our carbs and keeping the chaos in check, but some people are vulnerable. Maybe they’ve been spiritually or politically radicalized, maybe they’re suffering from mental illness.

Politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene, operatives like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones, and clerics like demoted bishop Joseph Strickland flooded the zone with eclipse-related bulls—t. They spoke of martial law, demonic portals and the urgent need to repent before the judgment of God. Donald Trump routinely tells his followers that he is their retribution and promises to lead them in the Battle of Armageddon. This kind of talk has become so normalized it’s hard to draw causal connections between rhetoric and violence. That’s the point.

These far right eclipse influencers probably didn’t mean to incite violence — this time. The eclipse was just more low-effort content. They keep themselves rich and powerful by keeping their audience in a constant state of terror and rage. They’ll exploit whatever’s in the news to do it. Stoking this turmoil is useful because these people can be activated, like when the faithful were called to the Capitol on January 6 for “spiritual warfare” against the seat of American democracy.

Terrified true believers are a fertile field for stochastic terrorism. That’s when a demagogue with a huge platform demonizes an enemy knowing that in a country with any number of disturbed people and who knows how many guns, something terrible could easily happen.

The gym chain Planet Fitness has received bomb threats at 38 locations across the country after the anti-trans Twitter account LibsofTikTok (LoTT) put the establishment on blast for canceling the membership of a patron who photographed another guest in the women’s locker room and shared on to social media, accusing the person of being a man. Schools and hospitals have also been hit with bomb threats after negative attention from LoTT.

If someone follows through on one of these bomb threats, it will probably be impossible to prove that LoTT is to blame. That’s the nature of stochastic terrorism. It creates a climate of fear where people and businesses may not speak out for fear of being targeted.

It’s too late to help Danielle Johnson, or even to fully understand what drove her crime spree. But it’s not too late to repudiate the apocalyptic clout-chasing that she was tapped into.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

Alex Jones is 'a dangerous kind of mentally ill' and even 'more unhinged and weirder' in person: Ex-wife ›

How Steve Bannon uses his Capitol Hill 'cavelike studio' to fuel House GOP chaos: report ›

Watch: Marjorie Taylor Greene accused of kicking woman after telling activist to 'move to another country' ›

Right-wing media figures exploit anti-immigrant riots in Ireland to demonize migrants and Muslims, and attack legal immigration

Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and others pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and falsely portrayed immigrants as threats to public safety

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES, SOPHIE LAWTON & JACK WHEATLEY

PUBLISHED 11/30/23

Right-wing media figures reacted to anti-immigrant riots in Ireland by demonizing Muslims, falsely accusing migrants of being a risk to public safety and attacking the very idea of legal immigration. Their response is an escalation of the xenophobic rhetoric that right-wing media frequently direct at unauthorized migration, and is a clear attempt to push for policies that would drastically reduce legal immigration levels.

The riots in Dublin were sparked after early reports on November 23 that an Irish citizen who allegedly stabbed five people, including three children, was believed to have been born abroad — thus highlighting the suspect’s perceived foreignness. Subsequent reporting found that although the alleged attacker was apparently born in Algeria, he has lived in Ireland for at least 20 years, according to Irish authorities. Numerous studies have found that increased levels of immigration do not cause a rise in crime rates either in the United States or European countries.

This manufactured panic and demonization of a marginalized group echoes a similar episode from last week, when Fox News invented a terrorism scare over a car crash at the U.S.-Canada border and used the nonexistent plot to paint Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, and their supporters as the culprits, only to retract its reporting hours later. Anti-Muslim hate incidents have also skyrocketed during Israel’s bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ attack on October 7.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon exploited the Dublin attack to spread his anti-immigrant message across multiple platforms, including his own War Room podcast as well as Tucker Carlson’s show on X (formerly Twitter) and Donald Trump Jr.’s streaming show on Rumble, a far-right competitor to YouTube. In several of these segments, Bannon and his interlocutors endorsed versions of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that liberal elites are attempting to change the demographics of white-majority countries through mass migration from the Global South to maintain political and economic dominance.

Prior to Fox News’ firing of Carlson, he was the network’s — and perhaps the entire country’s — most visible proponent of the great replacement theory. During Bannon’s appearance on Carlson’s show on November 27, both figures pushed openly nativist bigotry alongside the racist conspiracy theory.

Bannon referred to migrants to the United States and Ireland as “alien invaders,” adding that Irish politicians have “sold out the sovereignty of the Irish” and that the riots were “natural blowback.”

“The Irish government is trying to replace the population of Ireland with people from the Third World, obviously,” Carlson responded. “But why? What's the justification for that?”

“You talk about the great replacement theory and people are — oh, you know, people get very upset when you talk about it, but just look at the math,” Bannon answered.

“It’s not a theory,” Carlson interjected.

“This has happened across Europe,” Bannon continued. “It's happened in Germany.”

“In 100 years, there'll be a minority of Irish people in Ireland,” Carlson said. “That's a big change, and it's on purpose.”

Later in their conversation, Bannon endorsed mass deportations, saying: “I think illegal alien invaders are coming because they've gamed the asylum system. My belief is those people have to go home. They have to be returned, they have to leave our country or we're not going to have a country.”

Later that day, Bannon appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s Triggered to celebrate Hungary’s far-right authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán and Irish mixed martial arts fighter Connor McGregor, who had come under police investigation following anti-migrant social media posts.

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CitationFrom the November 27, 2023, edition of Triggered, streamed on Rumble

Former President Donald Trump fought “for the sovereignty, not just of nation-states, but the sovereignty of the individual citizens in those nation-states,” Bannon said. “I think it's inspired Orban in Hungary. I think McGregor in Ireland standing up the other day was inspired by Donald Trump.”

The discussion then turned to the knife attack in Dublin, with the host claiming Arab and Muslim cultures celebrate anti-social violence.

“In their culture, they can stab people in the streets. It's fine. We must allow them to do that to our children,” Trump Jr. facetiously said, adding, “I mean, the government is taking an actively hostile position against their citizens in favor of, like, seemingly savages in many cases.”

Bannon returned to the subject the next day on his War Room podcast, calling for the “deportation of the 9 million — at least 9 million to 10 million — illegal alien invaders coming in the Biden regime.”

“What happened in Ireland — it's all coming here, folks,” Bannon warned ominously. “It’s all coming here.”

His guest the following hour was conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been increasingly embraced by right-wing media in recent years. Jones falsely claimed that “illegal aliens or migrants” are responsible for “the majority of muggings, rape, and murder in every European country."

That evening, Bannon discussed the violence in Ireland in another episode of War Room, where his guest, author Michael Walsh, again pushed the great replacement conspiracy theory.

“This was the spark that set off what’s become a powder keg across the country, which is the notion — widely held among the Irish people — that they’re being replaced by foreigners,” Walsh said. He added that the Irish government “is committed to this program of quiet replacement and has demonized what we would have called Irish patriots,” referring to the far-right mobs.

Several other right-wing media figures also used the riots to spread anti-migrant bigotry.

BlazeTV’s Steve Deace defended the mob, arguing that “the Irish Proud Boy wannabes” are “not the villain here,” suggesting they “have had enough” and feel like “I’ve already lost my culture to Islam. Now our daughters are getting raped and assaulted” by the “rape-fugees we brought in.”
“Concerned citizens in Dublin, Ireland look on helplessly as busloads of undocumented migrants are brought into their community,” anti-LGBTQ social media account Libs of Tik Tok posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Salem Media’s Charlie Kirk questioned “how Ireland allowed so many foreigners and Third-Worlders into the beautiful country of Ireland?"
Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer blamed the attack on a “Muslim migrant."

"Across the West, the status quo has become intolerable,” Loomer added. “The endless waves of immigrants, the devastation of our culture, and the crackdown against anyone who dares to stand against it has all become too much to bear.”

“There can be no doubt that the average person is, at last, awake to the gravity of the situation, and their anger is brewing,” Loomer continued. “White people, in particular, have taken all of this on the chin for the last few decades, but that appears to be coming to an end.”

Former Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis argued that regardless of the suspect’s citizenship status, he “was an immigrant nonetheless,” claiming the incident was further evidence that “Europe is at the precipice of falling."

Following the riots, some observers of the far right argued that anti-immigrant sentiment had become a major issue in Ireland in recent years, and that politicians needed to do more to address the rising xenophobia. Right-wing media figures are determined to stand in the way.

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Steve Bannon refers to migrants as "locusts" who are "going to destroy everything in their path" | Media Matters for America

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Bannon Flings Spaghetti At The Wall As He Tries To Wriggle Out Of Contempt Conviction

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Bannon’s “War Room” is the media home of Project 2025 and Trump’s retribution plans

Bannon’s show is a staging ground for Trump’s plans to gut the civil service and normalize deploying the military against civilians

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

RESEARCH CONTRIBUTIONS FROM JACINA HOLLINS-BORGES

PUBLISHED 11/09/23

The podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is the media home of a sprawling right-wing effort, known as Project 2025, that’s designed to prepare policy papers and staffing assignments should a Republican win the presidency in next year’s election.

Bannon’s show, War Room, is a hub of election denialism, anti-immigrant bigotry, and promises to carry out retribution against insufficiently loyal Republicans — all hallmarks of former President Donald Trump’s first term in office and his campaign to retake the White House. Although Bannon has at times found himself isolated from Trump, he is once again “one of Trump’s most important advisers,” according to ABC News’ Jonathan Karl.

As a leading advocate for the MAGA wing of the conservative movement, Bannon has been a champion of Project 2025, organized by the increasingly far-right think tank The Heritage Foundation. The initiative has brought together more than 80 groups to provide hard-right personnel and white paper proposals for Trump — or another Republican administration — should he win next November.

According to The Washington Post, Trump and his allies at Project 2025 “have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.”

From his perch at War Room, Bannon has sought to normalize all of those ideas: deploying the military against protesters, weaponizing the Department of Justice against critics, and replacing the federal civil service with loyalist reactionaries.

Jeffrey Clark, who Trump attempted to install as acting attorney general in January 2021, has been on War Room several times this year and is also reportedly “leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025,” according to the Post. A Heritage spokesperson told the Post that “there are no plans within Project 2025 related to the Insurrection Act or targeting political enemies.”

Heritage’s denial notwithstanding, Clark — who is widely believed to be an unindicted co-conspirator in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election — has a record of supporting the use of the military to quash dissent. In July, Clark appeared on War Room to explain how he had advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act in response to the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“I was actually summoned up to a meeting, you know, to discuss how to proceed in terms of that — what I would call an insurrection, because it was happening night after night,” Clark recalled to Bannon.

“Remember that [former Attorney General William] Barr is the one who had participated, when he was attorney general, in using the Insurrection Act against the L.A. riots, after the Rodney King case,” Clark said. “Why wasn’t that same aggressiveness used against the riots that were all across the country in the summer of 2020?”

Referring to a memo he’d written to Barr that included “some very creative ideas about how to enforce the law against those rioters,” Clark added, “If you want to see the legal advice I gave, it’s all blacked out,” strongly suggesting he’d supported deploying the military against civilian protesters.

The next month, Smith indicted Trump for his actions to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Clark was reportedly referred to in the indictment as “unindicted co-conspirator 4,” and is alleged to have suggested Trump use the military against civilians. On January 3, 2021, White House Council Patrick Philbin told Clark — who had just accepted the job of acting attorney general — that if the Trump-Clark coup plans went forward, “there would be riots in every major city in the United States."

“Well … that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark responded.

In the Bannon interview from July, Clark also rejected the conventional wisdom that the Department of Justice is — or should be — independent from political pressure from the White House. In Clark’s telling, the DOJ shouldn’t be walled off, as it has been by most presidents following Richard Nixon’s targeting of his enemies during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the July 3, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Past administrations put in “post-Watergate ‘norms’ that say the president actually can’t make decisions about law enforcement,” Clark said. “It’s ridiculous, it’s unconstitutional, and the reason why they’re having a meltdown, Steve, is that the queen position in the administrative state is the Justice Department.”

“To say that the Justice Department is not independent is sort of the ultimate heresy,” Clark added. “This is all just post-Watergate ‘norms.’ Who cares about post-Watergate norms?”

Clark is a fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA-aligned think tank run by Christian nationalist Russ Vought — another major player in Project 2025 and frequent War Room guest. Vought wrote the second chapter of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a combination manifesto and outline detailing how the coalition would approach the next Republican administration. In his chapter, Vought levies a broad critique of career staffers at executive branch departments and agencies, writing that “many agencies are not only too big and powerful, but also increasingly weaponized against the public and a President who is elected by the people and empowered by the Constitution to govern.”

Vought’s argument flows directly from Bannon’s long-running goal of a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” In an interview on War Room, Vought advocated for a change to budgeting rules that would allow Congress to target individual government workers, potentially canceling their funding, slashing their salary, or even firing them. He’s also a proponent of using so-called “Schedule F” to reclassify federal employees as at-will workers, an open attack on public unions and career staffers.”

Vought is especially interested in remaking the DOJ into a more explicitly reactionary institution, and his think tank has been clear that its goal is to unleash the FBI against its political enemies. As he told the Post: “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”

On November 6, Bannon floated a name for attorney general who would fit the bill: “Jeff Clark, you're on the short list of being attorney general for Trump, and I mean the very short list.” Bannon pitched Clark for the role at least once earlier this year and has suggested disgraced former national security advisor and QAnon adherent Michael Flynn serve as secretary of defense.

Bannon isn’t just engaging in a fantasy football-style draft though — he has interviewed Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, several times this year. Although that’s a long way from installing Flynn as secretary of defense, it’s a sign that Bannon’s personnel preferences shouldn’t be dismissed simply as the rantings of a crank.

:{:{Video}:

CitationFrom the June 16, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“Let me just say to the [War Room] posse: The posse has landed at Heritage, and, you know, I really respect what your program does,” Dans gushed during an appearance in June. “I’ve been a devotee since 2020.”

Dans added, with a hat tip to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: “He brought me in in April. I started playing the War Room in May. We learned the word ‘based,’ and it's been spreading around the building. But we’re really taking over and infusing America First throughout the whole movement.”

Dans was back on the show in September with a promise to decimate the federal civil service by firing thousands of workers. “With 2025, we’re going to flood the zone,” Dans said, “It’s going to be more than 3,000 people.”

“Schedule F is one of our tools, but really the proposition of Schedule F is just saying: Look, when you come into the office, federal worker, each morning, and you’re in charge of policy, you’re not guaranteed your job when you walk out that afternoon,” Dans continued, “You have to perform. You’re going to become an at-will employee like the rest of us in real life, you know? Let’s make it look a lot more like America."

“Amen,” Bannon repeated as Dans spoke.

According to the Post, one of the top goals of another Trump administration and Project 2025 is investigating “onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former Attorney General William P. Barr.” War Room frequently indulges in these impulses.

On June 12, Bannon baselessly argued that FBI director Christopher Wray and former Attorney General Bill Barr had suppressed evidence that proved Joe Biden and his family had committed financial crimes, thereby installing him in the presidency as the result of an illegitimate election.

“You are freaking guilty of treason,” Bannon said, addressing an imaginary Barr.

Back in January, former Trump advisor and right-wing pundit Sebastian Gorka went after Kelly on War Room. “You are an insult to Quantico,” Gorka said, referring to the Marine base. “You were never a Marine.”

“Go to hell, John Kelly,” he concluded.

“Wow,” Bannon responded.

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AN 11 23

Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

More than crazy bluster

This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Fascists, then, see violence as noble and intoxicating. For example, Julius Evola, a far-right intellectual active in Italy from 1920 to 1970 and the author, among other things, of “Fascism Viewed from the Right” and “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” writes that violence “offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero that sleeps within him.”

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death,” Maistre writes. Indeed, without an executioner, the man who kills other men, Maistre claims society could not exist. For violence is necessary to satisfy “men’s natural desire to be destructive,” he writes; it leaves them feeling “exalted and fulfilled.”

Patriot Front – labeled a ‘white supremacist group’ by the Anti-Defamation League – marches in Washington, D.C., in May 2023.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Social disruption and destruction

These comments make clear that fascists see violence as something to be used for more than just personal retribution and intimidation. It is to be used to create wider social disruption and destruction. Not only are individuals to be subject to attack, but institutions and norms as well.

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

The idea is that history moves in cycles, the first one being the best and each one thereafter representing a further decline. The fourth cycle is the worst, and it ends only when all existing social institutions are destroyed. This, in turn, is an application of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “one can build only in a space which has been previously razed to the ground.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Trump appears to embrace these ideas too. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great,” he says.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

Mark R. Reiff, Research Affiliate in Legal and Political Philosophy, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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On Steve Bannon's show John Solomon calls the Republican National Committee “a cancer” | Media Matters for America

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AN 11 23

Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump supporters storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

More than crazy bluster

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

Violence as noble and intoxicating

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

Patriot Front – labeled a ‘white supremacist group’ by the Anti-Defamation League – marches in Washington, D.C., in May 2023.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Social disruption and destruction

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

Mark R. Reiff, Research Affiliate in Legal and Political Philosophy, *University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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rick Wilson, one of the Never Trump Republicans behind the popular Lincoln Project political action committee (PAC), weighed in with his opinion of President Donald Trump's former advisor Steve Bannon and why he "must be destroyed."

During an interview with AdAge, Wilson discussed his ad development process for the political organization, and, at one point, he also offered his take on Bannon beginning with their long history.

"Bannon and I have a lot of history," Wilson admitted.

He went on to explain what led to his opposition with Bannon. According to Wilson, the rift deepened in 2015 when he publicly denounced Trump during his first presidential bid. At the time, Bannon was serving as the chief executive officer of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Wilson received details about a Slack conversation where Bannon plotted to take him down. Based on the context of the conversation, Bannon was out to get him over his decision to distance from Trump.

"In 2015, when I came out against Trump, a person inside Breitbart News sent me an internal Slack from Bannon."

He added, "And Bannon said, 'I want you to go after Wilson. I want you to go after his kids, his family, his wife, his business, everything. I want to destroy him.'

Bannon was reportedly warned that Wilson would not go down easily and would likely retaliate but he welcomed the challenge. Now, Wilson has made it a point to continue going after Bannon.

He added, "So, since then, I have pursued Steve Bannon like a wild animal. And I will never — Steven Bannon will never be off the hook for me. Once he goes back to prison, once he gets into prison, I'm gonna... I'm only just starting."

Wilson's latest interview comes months after Bannon found himself at the center of a fraud investigation over the "We Build the Wall" campaign where he allegedly swindled Trump supporters into donating funds that were not used for the intended purpose. While Bannon is behind bars, Wilson also plans to troll him.

"I'm gonna send him stuff like—I'm gonna send him stuff that it's gonna make sure that every time he gets a letter, it's gonna cause him to have a disciplinary hearing," Wilson said laughing. "He's a truly repugnant individual who was, you know, kidding aside."

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Steve Bannon: Rep. Mike Johnson was "one of the intellectual architects of pushing back on the stolen election" | Media Matters for America

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Steve Bannon tells his audience they must stop Rep. Tom Emmer's speakership bid | Media Matters for America best of 9

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jones praise 10 23 mma

Alex Jones praises Steve Bannon: "You have the best analysis of anybody out there" | Media Matters for America

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Bannon falsely claims there’s “not one penny for quote-unquote border security” in new spending bill for Ukraine, Israel | Media Matters for America

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mediaite 8 23

far-right Georgia state Senator Colton Moore (R) appeared on Steve Bannon‘s War Room podcast where he claimed voters will be “fighting it in the streets” unless Fani Willis is stopped from prosecuting former President Donald Trump and his 18 co-conspirators on fake elector scheme charges.

“We’ve got the ability to subpoena documents, to subpoena witnesses, and at the end of the day, we’ve got the legislative authority to call in the state troopers and bring these people in,” Moore said of the prosecutors.

Moore has called for Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) to call a special session of the Georgia legislature to defund Willis’ office on the state level, and for Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) to handle things in Washington.

“I mean, now that we’ve got 19 people who are facing the rest of their life in prison because they spoke out against an election?” Moore said, continuing:

I mean, you know, I told one senator, I said, listen, I said, we’ve got to put our heads together and figure this out. We need to be taking action right now. Because if we don’t, our constituencies are gonna be fighting it in the streets. Do you want a civil war? I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle. I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so.

And the first step to getting that done is defunding Fani Willis of any Georgia tax dollars and hopefully Rep. Jordan and Rep. Biggs will follow suit in Congress and strip her of her federal dollars, too. Because she is not upholding her oath to the Constitution.

Tuesday, Willis told the court she was ready to try all 19 co-defendants on Oct. 23. Judge Scott McAfee will make the final ruling on whether the defendants should be tried together, and whether October is too soon to begin.

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right-wing media this week responded to former President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment — this time, for conspiring to subvert the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia — by arguing that the charges signal the end of American democracy and the start of a potential civil war.

On August 14, Trump and 18 of his allies were indicted in the state of Georgia on charges of felony racketeering and conspiracy for their attempts to subvert the 2020 election. The 98-page indictment was handed down by a grand jury that reviewed evidence gathered during a two-and-a-half year investigation headed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Right-wing media have defended Trump using inflammatory rhetoric, accusing Democrats of sedition and totalitarianism. The extreme reactions from the right echo previous attempts by conservative media to shield the former president from accountability for his various charges.

Right-wing media bemoaned the indictment as an attack on democracy, a display of tyranny, and a constitutional crisis

Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool responded to a post claiming that the “Fulton County DA went insane” with the comment “Civil war.” He later posted that “the only path forward is escalation. Either Trump is a cult leader trying to overthrow the US Or Democrats are engaged in seditious conspiracy to steal power.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23, 8/15/23]
On Hannity, Fox News contributor and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich decried the consequences of the indictment for the future of the country, comparing it to “the rise of secession and the Civil War.” He said, “I think what you're seeing tonight is one tree in a forest and I think we are drifting toward the greatest constitutional crisis since the 1850s and the rise of secession and the Civil War. I don't mean that as hyperbole.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [8/14/23]
Article III Project founder Mike Davis argued on Steve Bannon’s War Room that “there's no way they can come up with this before the election if he’s going to get a fair trial.”He then claimed that “this is going to have a very chilling effect on democracy” because “you can't get more dangerous than telling people if you dare to question elections in America, you face going to prison for many, many years.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [8/15/23]
Fox News host Mark Levin said indictments of Trump are “an attack on the people. Every indictment is an attack on our freedom, our ability to vote.” Levin claimed, “Every indictment is an attack on our freedom, our ability to vote. The Democrats don't care about voting. They care about winning at all costs. The Democrat Party wants to be the monopoly party in this country.” Fox News, *Hannity*, [8/15/23]
Far-right troll Mike Cernovich claimed the indictment was evidence that Democrats are forming “a totalitarian regime.” He posted, “We are occupied by the same totalitarian regime that we used to read about. It’s here. They are emboldened. Evil never stops. It’s going to get worse.” Twitter/X, [8/14/23]
Levin similarly claimed that “Stalin would be proud. I'm sure Putin’s proud. I’m sure our enemies are celebrating.” He continued, “Congress is supposed to make all these final decisions. You're not supposed to criminalize the challenging of electors or dual electors or counting of votes and that sort of thing." Fox News, *Hannity*, [8/14/23]
Breitbart Senior Editor-at-Large Joel Pollak decried the indictment as “political persecution of the opposition.” He posted that the indictment “recalls trials by totalitarian regimes” and that prosecutors are “doomed to fail.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23]
Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro posted, “Whatever you think of the Trump indictments, one thing is for certain: the glass has now been broken over and over again.” Shapiro added, “Political opponents can be targeted by legal enemies. Running for office now carries the legal risk of going to jail -- on all sides.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23]
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk labeled Trump’s indictment as “an attempt to nullify the United States Constitution.”He also called the charges “psychological warfare.” Salem Media Group, The Charlie Kirk Show, [8/15/23]
Former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs labeled prosecutors as “Marxist” and claimed that they have “trampled President Trump's rights and the Constitution.” He then argued that “the Left is an evil force that must be held accountable.” Twitter/X, [8/15/23]
:{:{Failed Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake said on}::{ Steve Bannon’s War Room, }:“I think we’ll end up seeing another indictment,” before claiming that “:{they’ll eventually come for you.”}::{ She continued, “They’re going to go after grandmas and grandpas and people who were these alternate electors. }:This is :{political persecution of people who support America. … And if you don't think they'll eventually come for you, you are living in a fantasy land. They will eventually be coming after all of us}:.” :{Real America’s Voice, War Room:(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}:, [8/15/23]}:

---

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-and-guests-have-meltdown-over-defeat-ohios-issue-1-ballot-initiative

BANNON (HOST): You’ve had Kansas, Michigan, and now Ohio, right, excuse me, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Ohio, Michigan I don’t know that well. You’ve had three in a row, where that case hasn’t been made or it’s not resonating. And these are not close, these in modern American politics these are blowouts, these are blowouts.

…

You’ve had three shots. These are not left-wing places. Kansas and Ohio? Brother, I mean you’re not going to get more MAGA. And I realize Kansas has got its own -- the way it was worded, and it’s all this, it’s a little different [INAUDIBLE] Kansas on some issues, I got that.

But Ohio is the bastion of MAGA, right? And so how do you guys -- I mean, this is a warning shot. I don’t know what it takes, when you say ego and organize and everything like that, you guys have hung together for 50 years, you’ve finally got the Supreme Court, you know, you finally, with Trump’s victory.

…

You’ve got the judges and you’ve got the victory. And now, quite frankly, you guys, I’m telling you that if it doesn’t get organized, and I mean organized quickly, there’s a lot of voices in the donor community and others are saying hey, what are we doing here? Because these guys -- they’re a drag right now when we can’t afford -- and I hate to be so blunt. Caroline, let me come in, am I being overly harsh on this Caroline Wren?

CAROLINE WREN (GUEST): No, even Trump’s spoken openly about how he’s frustrated by this and there’s not a clear cohesive messaging strategy here.

…

We’re not resonating with anyone because we’re not really having any sort of cohesive ideology as to what we want moving forward.

…

I was in Ohio for two days, I knew, I could see what was -- there was no message. It was just vote for Issue 1, and the Democrats made it all about abortion. We made it about this kind of complicated 60 percent threshold. Regular people don’t understand that.

…

BANNON: We love you guys but I will be blunt. There’s not a donor and a big donor, even the pro-life donors going to give a penny after this fiasco in Ohio given what’s happened and given what’s [INAUDIBLE] until you guys come together with a coherent, understandable plan that you can then back up with the muscle that you can then deliver for the grassroots. There’s no doubt you guys have the ground game and have the ability to deliver that.

---

Bannon: Trump “was doing his duty” to “make sure that the 2020 election had been fairly decided – and we know it was not”

08/02/23

(( note gingrich gop memo, parrot bannon, memo on steroids --> SOP demonization

:{:{}:

term was sorta fading for WHILE? 3 23 common w/o"cultural " prefix , dropped when/why?

cpac once has legit policy presented?

https://www.alternet.org/**2022/08**/cpac-speakers/

According to a report from Rolling Stone, the speeches thus far at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas have been larded with "dark" threats of coming violence as the speakers brushed aside any discussion about the Jan 6 Capitol riot.

With Donald Trump --who instigated the Capitol insurrection -- taking the stage on Saturday, Tim Dickinson wrote that in many cases the speeches, "...menaced America with what seemed to be thinly veiled calls for violence."

Case in point, he notes, was a speech given by recently convicted former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon who proclaimed to the crowd, "We are at war."

"Repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,Bannoninsisted that Joe Biden is an 'illegitimate imposter.' Calling on Republicans to send 'shock troops' to Washington, Bannon promised the crowd they had an opportunity to 'shatter the Democratic party as a national political institution'." he wrote. "He alleged that the party has been overrun by 'radical, cultural Marxists' and 'groomers' who 'want to destroy the Republic.' Bannon insisted the GOP must pursue absolute victory over 'power-mad and lawless' Democrats, asserting: 'There can be no half measures anymore'."

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) doubled down on Bannon's heated rhetoric, exhorting the crowd with the claim, "It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians. As they say in the military world, it is a target-rich environment.”

"The rhetoric of revolution and frontline confrontation went hand-in-hand with other speakers and presenters who cast the American left as demonic, evil, and destructive — in other words the kind of enemies who deserve to be dealt with harshly," the report states before adding, "CPAC has long been a political circus, a relatively harmless sideshow. But its latest incarnation has become manifestly dangerous — more fascist than farce. It is holding up alleged perpetrators of political violence as martyrs. It is demonizing its domestic political opponents as diabolical 'enemies within.' And it is giving MAGA supporters a militaristic frame for their charge to the 'front lines' of America’s culture wars."

"In short it is playing with fire. But it’s the rest of us who may get burned." Rolling Stones' Dickinson concluded.

note gingrich gop memo, parrot bannon

an 7 23

from June 29-July 2, the far-right MAGA group Moms for Liberty held its annual summit in a city so Democratic that it hasn't had a Republican mayor since Bernard Samuel left office in January 1952: Philadelphia. The four-day event, held at the Philadelphia Marriott near Reading Terminal Market and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, was greeted by angry protesters who slammed the group for its campaign to exclude books by gay, lesbian and African-American authors from public schools.

Moms for Liberty (M4L) touts itself a "parental rights" group, but to critics, their real mission is to purge schools of as many Black and gay authors as possible.

In an article published by the Daily Beast on July 5, journalist Kate Briquelet offers an in-depth account of what she observed at the M4L gathering in Philly — where the speakers included Republican presidential hopefuls such as former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Far-right radio host Dennis Prager was also there.

Briquelet notes that while attending the summit, she didn't go out of her way to broadcast the fact that she was a Daily Beast reporter.

"My mission was to blend in and get the full experience of this ideological sisterhood, one that came with a swag bag holding a Trump air freshener, comic book on the Pilgrims' journey aboard the Mayflower, and 'awake not woke' sticker with a passage of scripture," Briquelet explains. "Throughout the summit, once people asked where I was from and whether I was with a M4L chapter, they didn't dig much further. Only one person, a fellow infiltrator, asked about my profession."

Briquelet reports that DeSantis railed against "wokeness" during his speech, while Trump promised to "liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and pervertswho have infested our educational system" if elected president in 2024.

Trump told the crowd, "On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order tocut federal fundingfor any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children…. For any public schools that are engaged in these militant and country-destroying practices, I will instruct the DOJ to pursue them as violators of the establishment clause, of the free exercise clause, of our constitution.:...

===))

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:{:{}:

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-has-spent-years-promoting-rfk-jr-and-his-crackpot-anti-vaccine-theories

:{:{}:

no lnx vid mma 6 23

Steve Bannon has spent years promoting RFK Jr. and his crackpot anti-vaccine theories

Bannon used his War Room podcast to help Kennedy spread conspiracy theories and undermine public health efforts well before he announced his 2024 candidacy

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 06/26/23

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has spent nearly two years promoting anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and Democratic presidential primary candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his War Room podcast in a mutually beneficial relationship that could have disastrous public health consequences for the country and the world.

Both men have used their substantial platforms to spread incorrect information about vaccines and COVID-19, which could now reach an even wider audience given Kennedy’s longshot campaign.

Bannon reportedly encouraged Kennedy to run against President Joe Biden in the Democratic Party primary, believing he could be “both a useful chaos agent in [the] 2024 race and a big name who could help stoke anti-vax sentiment around the country,” according to CBS’ Robert Costa. Other right-wing pundits have similarly exploited Kennedy’s run as an attempt to undermine Biden’s support among Democrats with the aim of weakening him in the general election.

Costa’s reporting aligns with Bannon’s public support of Kennedy on War Room. Since July 2021, Bannon has interviewed and provided a platform for Kennedy, his publisher, and colleagues involved in his anti-vaccine work. In addition, Bannon has repeatedly hyped Kennedy’s book, a discredited diatribe against Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the face of the United States’ effort to mitigate the risks of COVID-19. Even the magazine of the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute concluded that “Kennedy’s book has all the objectivity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Even relative to other right-wing media, Bannon’s podcast is a hotbed of conspiracy theories, many of which relate directly to COVID-19 and vaccines.He frequently pushes junk science from discredited charlatans like Naomi Wolf, has celebrated efforts to disrupt vaccine distribution, and claimed the pandemic was everything from a way to eradicate religion to a form of global war deliberately unleashed by China.

Given this feverish and paranoid atmosphere, it’s not surprising that Bannon amplified Kennedy’s longstanding efforts to discredit safe and effective vaccines, including those that protect against COVID-19, and has now latched onto his nascent campaign. Both are ecumenical and opportunistic in their conspiracism, including pushing QAnon messages and influencers.

As the son of Robert Kennedy and nephew to John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unusually well-positioned to attract attention in his almost certainly doomed challenge to Biden. But Kennedy can benefit from even a failed campaign by selling more books and raising the profile of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization he founded.

Bannon likewise benefits from hyping Kennedy’s run. He can use Kennedy to sow chaos in the Democratic primary and push vaccine denialism as a tool to further undermine what he refers to as the “administrative state,” a longstanding goal which would result in a collapse of public capacity to address future pandemics, among other consequences. And although Bannon has provided a platform for Kennedy, it would be a mistake to give him too much credit for the candidate’s larger purchase in the political ecosystem. As is often the case with Bannon, he’s bodysurfing a wave and mistaking himself for Poseidon.

Bannon sows the ground for Kennedy’s eventual candidacy

On July 24, 2021, Bannon interviewed Kennedy twice over the course of two hour-long shows. Although Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci wouldn’t be released for months, Bannon was already hyping it. Tony Lyons, the book’s publisher, would make frequent appearances on War Room in the coming months.

Bannon mentioned the book and disparagingly referenced a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that listed Kennedy as one of the 12 biggest spreaders of misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.

Video

CitationFrom the July 24, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“When you make your speeches, do your analysis, you’ve got your center, you put out information, you put out reports — do you think that you’re adding to, or your focus is on digital hate?” Bannon asked. “Does that concept apply to any of the work that you’re doing?”

“Not only does it not have anything to do with digital hate, it has to do — we don’t put out any misinformation,” Kennedy responded.

Sound difficulties forced Bannon to cut the interview short and return to it during the following hour’s broadcast. In reintroducing Kennedy, Bannon again promoted the upcoming book, referring to it as something “I know our audience is going to want to pile into.” The interview lasted for roughly half of that episode.

Kennedy’s book was published in mid-November 2021. That month, Stephanie Locricchio — Kennedy’s colleague at Children's Health Defense — appeared on War Room to hype the book and call for a “worldwide walkout” to oppose vaccine mandates. In December, Bannon devoted an entire hourlong episode to an interview with Kennedy to promote the book and his broader anti-vaccine work.

Bannon’s efforts to spread Kennedy’s message only increased in 2022. That April, Bannon reaired their hourlong discussion from the previous December. The following month, Lyons — Kennedy’s publisher – appeared twice on War Room to hype the book. Locricchio also returned in May 2022, once again to promote Kennedy’s anti-Fauci book. Mary Holland, the president and general counsel at Children’s Health Defense, was on War Room a day later and also pushed the book. That August, Bannon praised Kennedy alongside other anti-vaccine advocates like Wolf and Robert Malone.

Between October 2022 and the end of the calendar year, Lyons appeared on War Room at least 8 times, each time mentioning or plugging Kennedy’s book. Producer Jeff Hays, who adapted Kennedy’s book into a film, was a guest on War Room twice in October to promote the movie, once with Lyons and once on his own.

In the lead-up to 2023, Bannon’s War Room had helped lay the groundwork for an old school ratfucking. The next step would be gassing up a spoiler candidate to serve as a “chaos agent.”

Bannon champions Kennedy’s “crusade” to win the Democratic nomination

Kennedy filed his statement of candidacy on April 5. Bannon and his guests immediately began framing Kennedy as a fellow traveler who shared their same enemies, even if not all of their exact policies.

On April 10, days before Kennedy’s official launch announcement on April 19, Bannon and Wolf discussed the opposition he would face from the Democratic National Committee.

Video

CitationFrom the April 10, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“Any campaign that made a crusade of Wuhan lab, Tony Fauci, the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and the vax and everything about vaccines, right, all the science and logic of it, would be something that would help the American people. Do you agree with me on that?” Bannon asked. “And look, he’s a very progressive, liberal Democrat and I’m a right-wing populist, but something like that would help the country just basically sort through these issues that have come up so big over the last couple of years, ma’am?”

“Yeah, I’m actually scared to answer that publicly because when you like him, the entire legacy media gets angry at both of you,” Wolf replied.

After outlining how great a Kennedy challenge would be for Democrats, Wolf painted him as a victim of the party’s structures.

“I am not at all persuaded that the DNC, which I see as a group of criminals at this point, are going to let any challenger who’s not wholly owned by the DNC, and wholly owned by whoever owns the DNC, bring up those issues,” Wolf said. “I think there’s going to be a massive mobilization against a campaign like his, and a campaign like Marianne Williamson’s.”

Two days later, Bannon devoted an entire episode to discussing a speech Kennedy had just made at Hillsdale College, interspersing long clips of his remarks with obsequious praise.

Then on April 24, Bannon escalated his rhetoric, arguing that if failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake wasn’t available to be Trump’s future running mate, that Kennedy would make a great choice.

Video

CitationFrom the April 24, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

“Somebody asked about Robert F. Kennedy, and the great speech at Hillsdale, and his opening speech, and what did I think about his prospects,” Bannon said, describing a recent public appearance he’d made. “I said, ‘Look, I’m a Kari Lake person, but if Kari Lake becomes governor, as she should, with this court case, or if not, if she runs for the Senate — if she’s not available to be Trump’s VP, that Bobby Kennedy would be, I think, would be an excellent choice for President Trump to consider.' It was a standing ovation.”

He reiterated the point the following day on Charlie Kirk’s podcast.

“I see a very compelling reason — although I know Bobby Kennedy is terrible on guns, he ain’t great on Ukraine — but he talks about going after the administrative deep state in a very significant way, led by the pharmaceutical industry,” Bannon said. “If we put together a unity ticket of Trump and Kennedy, it would be insurmountable.”

On April 28, Bannon criticized an ABC News segment that fact-checked Kennedy, claiming the network thought “it’s too dangerous to have Bobby Kennedy up there answering a question” and further framing him as a persecuted truth-teller. Bannon went on to praise a separate interview Kennedy did on Fox News for “laying down about how you deconstruct the administrative state.”

Bannon’s guest, the right-wing pundit Darren Beattie, agreed that Kennedy was “introducing a really important topic into the broader sort of campaign discourse, and that is the COVID issue, that is the vaccine issue, that’s the lockdown issue.”

Beattie then suggested Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was another example of a politician who “flanked the system,” but claimed that Kennedy is “so superior to Bernie.”

“It’s not even close,” Bannon agreed.

The same day, Bannon argued that the Republican National Committee should act more like the DNC and rule out primary debates, as is customary for the party that holds the presidency. To support his argument, Bannon claimed Kennedy was polling better than Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and so the RNC should follow the DNC’s lead and shut down the main challenger to Trump.

Bannon continued praising Kennedy throughout May. Early in the month, he repeatedly referred to Kennedy’s campaign as a “crusade,” a description he’d used before. On May 9, Bannon interviewed Rasmussen’s Mark Mitchell to discuss a poll his organization had just released that showed 54% of likely U.S. voters held a favorable view of Kennedy, but also that a majority of Democrats would support Biden in the primary. Bannon described Kennedy as “kind of surging,” which Mitchell agreed was “not a bad first showing.”

The story has been the same in June.

As is often the case with Bannon, he’s bodysurfing a wave and mistaking himself for Poseidon.

“The only two people in a presidential race who are saying anything important and doing anything important is Donald J. Trump, and he’s putting these policy things out every day, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” Bannon said on June 7. “This Twitter Space he did with Elon Musk the other day — the New York Times headline the next morning was ‘Kennedy promotes right-wing ideas and misinformation.’ And what was he talking about? The exact things we talk about on War Room every day.”

The next day, Bannon doubled down on his claim that Trump and Kennedy are the only relevant presidential candidates.

“There are two people here — President Trump in his policy statements and his rallies and his movement, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — that are actually speaking in a modern nomenclature of politics and what the issues are of the country,” Bannon said. “I realize Bobby Kennedy Jr. is not everybody’s cup of tea. I understand that he doesn’t have policies on life and guns that are absolutely perfect and aligned with MAGA, there’s no doubt about that, but he’s talking about the central issues facing the country, as Donald Trump is, and that’s why the other stuff is irrelevant.”

On June 19, Bannon interviewed conservative radio show host John Fredericks, another fan of Kennedy. Fredericks said Kennedy had “taken on the entire Democrat, warmonger, pro-vax, government top-down, tell-you-what-to-do, tell-you-what-to-eat — he’s taken them on lock stock and barrel.”

Fredericks then framed Kennedy — who he praised as being “very sane” — as having potential bipartisan appeal due to his purported support from Democrats who had a negative view of federal investigations into Trump.

“What Robert F. Kennedy has done in taking on the vax establishment, big government, is — he is a very sane, noted alternative to what is going on out there,” Fredericks said.

Like Beattie and Bannon, Fredericks also favorably compared Kennedy to Sanders.

“What RFK is doing — he’s bridging the gap of the populist movement of people that are on the left, and he’s not a socialist like Bernie Sanders, right? He’s not a communist.” Fredericks said. “The guy is a moderate Democrat. Pro-business guy.”

On June 21, Bannon braided together several of the strands that jointly animate Trump and Kennedy supporters, flowing seamlessly from anti-vaccine paranoia to a coded embrace of QAnon messaging by praising a new QAnon-aligned film about child trafficking called Sound of Freedom. (The film’s lead actor, Jim Caviezel, recently openly embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory during an interview on War Room.)

Bannon claimed that the country is going through a “massive realignment of American politics” spurred by Trump, that has destroyed the partisan categories of Republican and Democrat. He proceeded to introduce and then play a lengthy clip of NBC misinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny on All In with Chris Hayes debunking various false claims Kennedy had made.

“This is about this realignment — and guess what it’s about, it’s what I’ve been talking about — the anti-vax, the vaccine-hesitant, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian,” Bannon said. “You say, ‘Well, why would you be anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian?’”

“Go watch the film Sound of Freedom,” Bannon continued, before referencing wildly disingenuous claims that the Biden administration is aiding a global child trafficking ring. “It’s about DHS officers that are on this professionally, your tax dollars, and they’re pulled off it when it gets to be too uncomfortable to people in power.”

After playing the segment, Bannon again addressed his audience.

“This is not about a spoiler candidate, that’s what they’re trying to throw out,” he said, later adding, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign is getting traction for one reason: He’s speaking truth to power.”

Charlatans will reap what they sow

Bannon can’t make Kennedy the Democratic nominee. Whether War Room’s constant cheerleading will have a lasting effect on the Democratic electorate remains to be seen. What is already clear, though, is that Bannon and Kennedy are engaged in a mutually beneficial joint “crusade” – to borrow Bannon’s term — to spread misinformation about vaccines and other effective public health measures. They’re both also helping to further entrench QAnon-style conspiracy theories into mainstream discourse. Both efforts present themselves as being in the best interests of children, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Kennedy’s primary run will almost certainly convince some number of people to reject vaccines. Bannon is playing a key role in promoting that campaign. Both will share culpability when the country reaps the inevitable consequences of the chaos they are sowing.

===

always same schtick we insurgents rock and are competent and you estb suck: also fail to punish will be punished

https://www.alternet.org/steve-bannon-jim-jordan/

===

hostage fail

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-close-your-checkbooks-republican-party

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-reportedly-gave-vital-assistance-miles-guos-allegedly-fraudulent-schemes

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/anatomy-smear-campaign-how-right-wing-media-neutralized-pentagon-effort-address-white

no lnx vids

Anatomy of a smear campaign: How right-wing media neutralized a Pentagon effort to address white supremacy in the military

Right-wing media smeared the Pentagon official mitigating white supremacy in the military. Now his unit has been abandoned.

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 05/25/23

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed atmilitary veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

Garrison was tasked with identifying and addressing the type of extremist views that would be later espoused by Jack Teixeira, who recently stole and leaked a trove of classified information to impress his private online community. Teixeira, currently in custody and potentially facing a 25-year sentence, reportedly believed that the United States was heading toward a “race war” that would pit white people against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ people.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

The U.S. military has a long history of white supremacism in the ranks, including among veterans who have started or joined far-right terrorist groups after their service. More than 80 people charged with participating in the January 6 insurrection had ties to the military, primarily as former service members, according to CBS News.

The apparently successful right-wing effort to sideline Bishop’s group follows the standard conservative playbook of smearing Democratic government officials who are Black, LGBTQ, Muslim, or from other marginalized groups as internal enemies, and it will also likely serve as a template for future, similar campaigns. Right-wing media outlets have spent months convincing their consumers that the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the IRS are persecuting conservatives, with the clear aim of operationalizing these federal agencies against these media figures’ opponents — exactly what they wrongly accuse the Biden administration of doing. This programming dovetails exactly with Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-OH) subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which claims to be exposing a governmentwide conspiracy to throttle conservative activists and ideas. The committee has so far failed on its own terms, but Jordan remains undeterred.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

:{:{}:

Then on May 5, conservative website Revolver published a story headlined “Meet Bishop Garrison: The Pentagon’s Hatchet Man in Charge of Purging MAGA Patriots and Installing Race Theory in The Military.” The site's founder, Darren Beattie, tweeted the piece out, highlighting the quote “The Biden administration has just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military." (Beattie was fired from the Trump administration in 2018 after CNN discovered that he had attended a white nationalist conference two years prior.)

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment,describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."

Video

CitationFrom the May 6, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Hegseth then referred to Garrison as “the Pentagon's newly minted MAGA purge man” and cribbed Revolver’s line nearly verbatim but without attribution.

“How do I put this?” Hegseth asked. “The White House just put the equivalent of Ibram X. Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, in charge of vetting the entire U.S. military, past, present, and future."

A day later, Beattie appeared on Hegseth’s program to discuss Revolver’s piece, which largely consisted of Garrison’s tweets and other writings and social media posts.

Video

CitationFrom the May 7, 2021, edition of Fox News' Fox News Primetime

Beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media websiteJust the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

Despite the quotation marks in the headline, the piece doesn’t include any evidence that Garrison wrote or spoke that exact phrase. Instead, the piece links to an op-ed Garrison published about the dangers of ideological polarization in news consumption leading to the spread of bad information, a fitting if ironic topic given Revolver’s mischaracterization of his stance. It’s true he described what he characterized as partisan echo chambers as a “digital black plague” that poses a danger to social cohesion, a relatively pedestrian observation common among mainstream commentators.

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Roompodcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly.

Video

CitationFrom the May 14, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Underscoring the siloed, self-perpetuating conservative media echo chamber, Bannon introduced the topic by claiming, “I’m seeing it everywhere — Just the News has got it, the great Pete Hegseth had it, then he had a second night with you on it,” before asking Beattie for an update.

Beattie then recycled his website’s misleading framing with a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, substituting Garrison’s actual point about information silos with the false claim that he opposed free speech protections more broadly.

Beattie described Garrison’s purported role “in the Biden administration’s dark war on the First Amendment. We’ve uncovered a article of his calling, basically, the free speech digital environment that would include War Room, that would include Revolver, but also in his words includes the Sinclair Network and Fox, as a ‘digital black plague’ — those are his words to describe the digital free speech environment that enables the American people to see narratives that oppose the official narratives on COVID, on the election, and now on [the insurrection of] 1/6.”

One day later, Fox News’ Jesse Watters picked up the story, interviewing Hegsethabout Beattie’s reporting, adding another link in the human-centipede-esque food chain of bad information.

Video

CitationFrom the May 15, 2021, edition of Fox News' Watters' World

Watters introduced Garrison as being “in charge of bringing critical race theory into our Armed Forces,” adding, “They’re calling him the Pentagon's hatchet man because his job is to purge patriots from the ranks.”

“This is about, Jesse, as scary as it gets,” Hegseth responded. “I mean, really this is, this truly is a purge of patriots. They're using January 6 as the ultimate justification.”

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Two days later, former Fox News marquee star Tucker Carlsondiscussed Garrison on his prime-time show.

Video

CitationFrom the May 17, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Carlson referenced Revolver’s posts before characterizing Garrison as “an activist type” and “a lunatic.”

“Now — and this is the point — he is one of the most powerful officials in the U.S. military,” Carlson added. “Democrats in Congress are thrilled as they watch this. Their party now has all the tanks and drones.”

The campaign against Garrison continued at that pace for weeks, misleading framing and bad information congealing into an impenetrable narrative of conservative persecution. Beattie returned to War Room, right-wing Epoch TV covered the story, Carlson aired another segment on it, and Hegseth continued to beat the drum on Fox News.

As late as October 2022, Beattie referenced Garrison on War Room as an antecedent to a supposedly even more “outrageous” Pentagon commission on recommending changes to military bases named after members of the Confederacy.

Taken as a whole, this process clearly demonstrates how right-wing media will vigorously oppose efforts to mitigate widespread white supremacy and later defend the subsequent, predictable outcomes that ideology and set of power relations produces. As but one example, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson defended Teixeira’s actions by misleadingly casting him as a whistleblower when in fact there is no reporting to suggest he ever meant for the information he stole to be made publicly available. The fact that Teixeira’s bigoted beliefs went unnoticed and undisciplined by the military is a feature, not a bug, of this dynamic.

There are fair criticisms to be made about the larger White House initiative, such as asking what it would mean to root out white supremacy from an institution that has been at the forefront of U.S. empire expansion, directed primarily at nonwhite populations, since at least the Mexican-American War. Needless to say, conservatives were making the exact opposite critique, arguing that attempts to decrease the spread of white supremacist beliefs among service members are inherently illegitimate.

That the boilerplate backlash was successful despite being led by such mediocrities as Pete Hegseth and Darren Beattie — whom Bannon recently derided as a man-child— does not speak particularly well of the Biden administration. It also suggests that these demonization campaigns can potentially succeed absent any shimmering talent leading the charge, instead relying on mid-level functionaries in the larger conservative ecosystem repeatedly hammering the point home.

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some lnx

Right-wing media outlets and personalities leveled repeated attacks against a modest Pentagon initiative created in 2021 to address high levels of white supremacy in the military, ultimately neutralizing the effort and leading to the unit’s abandonment. The conservative campaign was directed at military veteran Bishop Garrison, who led the Countering Extremism Working Group, which has now “vanished virtually without a trace,” according to a recent report from CNN.

CNN reports:

As the Pentagon grapples with the aftermath of the leak, the working group’s stated objectives look eerily prescient, and, in some cases, tailor-made to zero-in on the sort of anti-government, White supremacist behavior and views espoused by Teixeira.

CNN interviews with multiple sources familiar with the working group reveal that the Pentagon largely abandoned the effort to combat extremism in its ranks, as senior officials folded under political pressure from Republicans who lashed out at the initiative as an example of so-called wokeism in the military.

Anatomy of a smear campaign

On February 16, 2021, Garrison was appointed to a newly created role to advise Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on how to reduce and mitigate the threat of white supremacy in the U.S. military. The announcement went largely unremarked upon in both mainstream and conservative media for several weeks.

The following day, Fox News Primetime’s host Pete Hegseth devoted a segment to Garrison’s appointment, describing Garrison’s effort as “a purge, a purge of the Defense Department led by a new, and now powerful, radical leftist, a 1619 Project activist, a hardcore social justice Democrat, a man who believes all Trump supporters are racist and extremists."...

beattie framed the issue by calling Garrison’s working group an example of “the most disturbing trend in American politics,” which is “that increasing swathes of our own national security apparatus have been repurposed and redeployed domestically against American citizens.”

Days later, conservative media website Just the News published a story that highlighted Hegseth’s comments from his initial segment.

On May 13, Revolver published another piece on Garrison with the factually incorrect headline “‘Free Speech Is A Digital Black Plague’: Bishop Garrison is Key Mercenary in Biden’s Dark War Against The First Amendment.”

The next day, Beattie appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast to discuss Garrison’s purview more broadly...

===

bannon pardon but state?

an 4 23

former president Donald Trump's border wall was used by an associate of his former campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, to fraudulently raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for himself. That associate has now been handed a four-year prison sentence.

Brian Kolfage, a veteran of the United States Air Force, reportedly admitted to conspiring to defraud those who contributed to an online campaign to build a wall along the border of Mexico. Bannon, who also served as a White House strategist under Trump, received a presidential pardon by Trump after being charged in connection with the same case, according to the Guardian.

"Bannon remains a prominent presence in far-right media and politics. In September, he was indicted in New York state court in Manhattan on money laundering and conspiracy charges over the planned wall," the outlet reported. "He pleaded not guilty. Trump's pardon of Bannon covered federal crimes but not alleged state crimes."

The Guardian further said that Kolfage, who lost his legs and a hand in Iraq, pleaded guilty last year in the federal case to misappropriating money meant for the "We Build the Wall campaign."

"On Wednesday a US district judge, Analisa Torres, announced the 51-month sentence at a hearing in federal court in Manhattan," the Guardian wrote.

In 2021, it was reported that the the embattled "We Build the Wall" group admitted it couldn't pay lawyer fees despite raising millions of dollars.

Another former Bannon associate, Andrew Badolato, also pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison, according to the Guardian's article.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/social-security/right-wing-media-provides-safe-space-house-republicans-call-cuts-social-security

right-wing media figures and activists continue to call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare, even as leaders of the Republican Party deny that slashing benefits for seniors is a goal. Conservative pundits are making these demands against the backdrop of ongoing debt ceiling negotiations between the White House and the Republican-controlled House, perpetuating the myth that federal spending is out of control as an excuse to push austerity policies.

Conservative orthodoxy has long held that Social Security and Medicare need to be “reformed,” a euphemism for cutting benefits or the raising eligibility age for future enrollees of either program. Nearly 90% of people over 65 were receiving Social Security checks as of the end of last year, representing about 30% of their income, according to official figures. As of last September, more than 65 million people were on Medicare. Slashing federal spending for either of those programs is politically unpopular, and some conservatives have changed their messaging — if not their underlying ideology — as a result.

Former President Donald Trump, for example, recently released an ad attacking Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – who is expected to announce his candidacy shortly – for backing cuts to the programs. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has also promised not to include the programs in the massive spending reductions his party is seeking.

But old habits die hard, and there is no shortage of recent examples of conservative media figures, activists, and politicians who have made it clear that their goal is to weaken and undermine these programs, often under the pretext of protecting them in the long term.

Townhall editor Katie Pavlich illustrated this dynamic last week on Fox News, when she referenced the national debt as a justification for cutting benefits to seniors. “The bottom line is that for either party in Washington, if they want to actually address this $32 trillion problem, someone is going to have to propose spending -- legislation that takes on reforming social security and Medicare,” Pavlich said. “Those are the things that are driving the debt." vid]

fox News anchor John Roberts showed how the Republican talking point infiltrates the network’s so-called straight news coverage.

“There’s all this talk about how to get spending under control, and I think people on both sides rationally know there is no way to get spending under control unless you start to implement reforms to things like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, but neither side wants to come forward unilaterally and say, ‘Here’s our plan to do it,’” Roberts said. “There needs to be cooperation, they need to reach out across the aisle and until they do that, that debt ceiling is just going to keep bumping up and bumping up and bumping up — look at where it is now, more than $31 trillion, it's stunning.”

Roberts’ argument rests on the unstated and incorrect assumption that the US budget is analogous to a household budget, a fallacy that has been repeatedly debunked.

Earlier this month, Fox News host Mark Levin called for cuts on his radio show, even as he denied he was doing so. “Now, this isn't about cutting them,” Levin said. “This is about changing certain variables in these programs for future generations.”

“One of the proposals that was made several years ago, and I think what DeSantis voted for, and I would have voted for it too, was to raise the retirement age to 70, to grandfather in all current beneficiaries and those who will be beneficiaries within the next 10 years, so anybody 55 and older, because it's not gonna exist,” he continued.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk similarly advocated for reducing benefits to seniors in the future, also positioning himself as telling a harsh but necessary truth. “Current beneficiaries, I don't think anything should be touched, but yes, there need to be some adjustments for future retirees,” Kirk said. “And if you even say that, it's like the third rail.”

The right-wing outlet The Epoch Times positively covered presidential candidate Nikki Haley’s calls to gut Social Security and Medicare as well, with the headline: “Haley Promises Supporters She Will Address the Nation’s Huge Deficit.”

Speaking in a barn in the legislative district where she got her political start, Nikki Haley, former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor, said the nation needs to get its fiscal house in order.

…

And that work, she said, will include reforming entitlements.

“Social Security will be bankrupt in 10 years. Medicare will be bankrupt in five,” she said.

Fellow Republican presidential primary candidate Mike Pence also advocated for reductions to Social Security and Medicare, saying “we’ve got to put them on the table in the long term.”

On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) broke from the official leadership line to consider reducing seniors’ benefits. “I believe that we have to have a discussion about raising the age of Social Security,” Gaetz said.

Right-wing site The Daily Caller was more honest than most in a story from earlier this month headlined: “Despite The Establishment’s Best Efforts, Some Republicans Want To Reform Entitlements.”

National Review, which has long positioned itself as the intellectual vanguard of the conservative movement, has also been open about their desire to weaken Social Security and Medicare.

In a blog post pegged to Trump’s attack ad, senior writer Noah Rothman defended DeSantis on the grounds that “the longtime Republican lawmaker once evinced support for longtime Republican positions: specifically, the urgent and undeniable national imperative for reforming America’s unfunded entitlement programs before they collapse.”

In another, contributor Jack Salmon called for “raising the retirement age to at least 68, indexing retirement age to life expectancy, and adopting chained Consumer Price Index [CPI] as the preferred metric for measuring annual cost-of-living adjustments.” Research shows that moving to chained CPI would reduce benefits for seniors.

Russ Vought, a Christian nationalist sympathizer and the founder of the right-wing think tank the Center for Renewing America, has been at the center of the debt ceiling debate, including pushing for massive cuts to social welfare programs. Like McCarthy, Vought’s official line is that his organization isn’t targeting Social Security or Medicare, but diverges from the House leader in acknowledging that those programs are only off the table for the short term.

“The House Republicans are not making Social Security and Medicare a fight on this debt limit,” Vought said on Fox News last month. He added that his organization’s budget targeted Medicaid, while also admitting that when it came to Social Security and Medicare, “We have to reform those programs over time.”

While Social Security and Medicare are universal programs that benefit seniors, and are incredibly politically durable as a result, Medicaid is a targeted anti-poverty program whose recipients conservatives are happy to demonize. There is no small irony that the faux-populist wing of the Republican Party — which includes Bannon and Vought — are doing their best to deny health care to the working class.

Vought frequently expresses his eagerness to slash Medicaid coverage by implementing work requirements. Public health experts call that a “terrible idea,” but it is nonetheless one that conservatives keep proposing. “You’ve been talking about the work requirements,” Bannon said to Vought on an April 24 edition of War Room.

Vought responded, arguing to get significant fiscal reductions in spending “you have to really begin to reform Medicaid, as I’ve proposed, and get people who are adults without children off of the Medicaid program.”

Bannon has repeatedly advocated for reducing the federal budget by cutting Medicaid. On April 18, he reiterated that “Medicare and Social Security are off the table,” but “you can get there” by “getting into Medicaid.” He similarly called for “massive cuts” to Medicaid earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, citing Vought’s work.

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that the House GOP plan to add work requirements to Medicaid would result in 10 million people losing their coverage.

The through-line from all of these statements are clear. Conservatives in government and right-wing media are laying the foundation to eviscerate the limited but important social programs for seniors and the working class. Their denials are paper-thin, when they’re even offered at all.

===

an 3 23

no lnx

Pro-Trump social media site backed by arrested billionaire Bannon ally looks to rebrand: report

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement March 16, 2023

A pro-Trump social media company is looking to recreate its business model, possibly becoming a marketplace for people who want sperm from men who were not vaccinated against the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

“Fighting to survive in the crowded ecosystem of far-right social media companies,” Gettr, Rolling Stone reports, “has in recent weeks held high-level deliberations on the oddest of business pivots: remaking the site to add an online clearinghouse for human sperm.”

“Like eBay, but for making major reproductive choices based on bullshit online conspiracy theories,” is how Rolling Stone classifies the potential change.

Gettr, considered an “alt-tech” or alt-right platform similar to Twitter, was founded by former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller, who is now a senior advisor for the ex-president’s 2024 campaign. It is reportedly backed by the Chinese billionaire known as Steve Bannon’s “sugar daddy,” Ho Wan Kwok, who was arrested Wednesday morning. Kwok, who uses numerous aliases including Guo Wengui, is facing charges in an alleged $1 billion scheme involving wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering, according to the Dept. of Justice.

Citing four sources, Rolling Stone reports there have been “repeated discussions about creating the online anti-vax semen market, in which unvaccinated men would self-advertise and sell sperm to the highest bidder.”

READ MORE: Ben Shapiro Slammed for Suggesting It’s Better to Send Kids to Child Services Than Give Them Free School Lunches

One of the sources added, “it’s just so embarrassing, man,” and another called it “the most ludicrous fucking thing to come out of pro-Trump social media in a long time, and that is saying something.”

Rolling Stone explains that a “version” of the unvaccinated sperm marketplace “idea was recently floated by one of Gettr’s most prominent backers: Guo Wengui, a billionaire fugitive from the Chinese Communist Party. A major Trumpworld ally, Guo was an early bankroller for the platform, apparently through his ‘family foundation,’ as The Daily Beast first reported in 2021.”

“Though Gettr and Guo have, at times, tried to publicly downplay Guo’s involvement, Guo has repeatedly livestreamed himself talking about his strong influence over the company.”

Earlier this month Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman tweeted, “Here’s Steve Bannon’s boss Guo Wengui detailing his new plan to make Gettr (which he claims in bankruptcy court to have no stake in) ‘into a global platform where the unvaccinated people can use digital currencies to trade their sperm and eggs.'”

Just days ago he added: “Hearing Guo is really trying to go forward with this plan to use the right wing social media site Gettr to sell ‘unvaccinated’ sperm and eggs. He plans a pilot run this month and a launch in June. May be a sign that Gettr is going down the tubes.”

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

'He was fine with the sedition and the bigotry': CNN analyst torches Steve Bannon for his criticism of Trump ›

Trump indictment expected 'weeks' after midterms — and Bannon makes a threat ›

Steve Bannon slams 'oligarch' Murdoch and Fox News in CPAC speech for cutting Trump's 'newsworthy' speech ›

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===

no lnx

https://www.alternet.org/news-politics/steve-bannon-2659601759/

the U.S. Dept. of Justice has announced a twelve-count indictment charging Ho Wan Kwok with crimes including wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering in what it alleges is a more than “$1 Billion Dollar Fraud Conspiracy.” Kwok, who uses numerous alias including Guo Wengui, was arrested Wednesday morning.

Last year The Daily Beast referred to Kwok as Steve Bannon’s “Sugar Daddy,” reporting the Chinese businessman would “have to pay massive contempt fines for moving the yacht where federal agents busted Steve Bannon in 2020.”

“The financier famed for bankrolling some of Steve Bannon’s best-known ventures, as well as the far-right strategist’s jet-setting lifestyle, is in deep trouble for steering a $28 million yacht—the same boat where federal agents arrested Bannon in 2020—out of American waters.”

Bannon is Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman, who later became his White House Chief Strategist, and was named Senior Counselor to the President. After his exit from the Trump White House Bannon returned to the far-right wing website Breitbart, which he infamously once bragged was “the platform for the alt-right.” Today, Bannon runs the far-right extremist podcast, Bannon’s War Room.

The New Yorker last year published an article on Kwok titled, “How a Tycoon Linked to Chinese Intelligence Became a Darling of Trump Republicans.” It mentions Bannon 38 times.

READ MORE: George Santos: Drag Queen, Congressman, Yacht Broker – FBI Investigating Role in $19 Million Sale Between Donors

According to The Daily Beast, that best-known venture is the “supposed consulate for the ‘New Federal State of China,’ declared by ex-White House strategist Stephen Bannon and his flamboyant Chinese patron, fugitive businessman Guo Wengui,” also known as Ho Wan Kwok.

“Since 2017,” The Daily Beast adds, Kwok “has lived in luxury, setting up residence in a $68 million Central Park penthouse and underwriting numerous right-wing projects, from nonprofits with Bannon to dodgy media operations to bogus COVID-19 studies to would-be Twitter competitor GETTR.”

ABC News adds that “Bannon is currently being prosecuted by the Manhattan district attorney for defrauding donors to the We Build the Wall online fundraising campaign.”

Last year NewsNation profiled Kwok in a segment about “Billionaires pulling the strings in US elections.”

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

How long could Steve Bannon's prison sentence be if he is convicted on all charges in New York State? ›

Watch: Steve Bannon says Republicans will teach Democrats a lesson 'by bayonet' ›

Marjorie Taylor Greene tells Steve Bannon she plans to impeach Joe Biden over renewable energy ›

Bannon stiffs lawyers as legal woes mount

Travis Gettys Raw Story

February 13, 2023

Steve Bannon has been stiffing his lawyers who represented him in a series of criminal cases.

The former White House chief strategist is trying to find new attorneys to defend him against money laundering...

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j6 ch 5

:{:{}:

January 5, 2021: Bannon Publicly Amplifies the Pressure on Vice President Pence.

:{:{}:

:{:{While President Trump misrepresented the Vice President’s agreement with Eastman’s theory, his on-again, off-again political advisor, Steve Bannon, pressed President Trump’s campaign against Vice President Pence in public. Bannon echoed the public pressure on Pence that the President continued to propagate by talking about his purported authority. The Select Committee learned from phone records that Bannon spoke to President Trump at least twice on January 5th.220}:

During a January 5, 2021, episode of War Room: Pandemic, Bannon and his guests openly berated Vice President Pence. Bannon cited an erroneous news report claiming that Senator Grassley would preside over the certification of the electoral college vote—instead of Vice President Pence.221 Bannon’s cohost, Raheem Kassam, took credit for the public pressure placed on Vice President Pence. “I want to remind people who has been sitting here, saying ‘Light Pence Up’ for the last couple of weeks. Right? That would be Raheem Kassam.” They then discussed President Trump’s speech in Georgia the previous evening. “I think the President of the United States took your advice last night, wrote a line in there,” Bannon said. To which Kasseem responded: “. . . and yours . . . hold the line.”

Jack Posobiec, an alt-right personality with a large Twitter following, chimed in quoting a member of their audience as saying that “Pence will betray Donald Trump.” 222 In response, Bannon stated: “Call the play. Run the play.” 223

The “play” was Bannon’s version of the “Green Bay Sweep”—a plan to subvert the transfer of power on January 6th named for a brutally effective power running play developed in the National Football League (NFL) in the 1960’s. Steve Bannon’s political version of the sweep was intended to undermine the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.

One account of Bannon’s “Green Bay Sweep” comes from Peter Navarro, Director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. Navarro refused to cooperate with the Select Committee and was subsequently indicted for contempt of Congress. Although he doesn’t fully explain in his book, In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year, how Bannon’s sweep was intended to work, Navarro writes that Vice President Pence was envisioned as the “quarterback” who would “assert his constitutional power” to delay certification.224 Navarro writes that his own role was to “carefully document the fraud and myriad election irregularities,” while Bannon’s “role was to figure out how to use this information—what he called the ‘receipts.’” 225

Navarro’s account helps explain why Trump and his loyalists became so fixated on Vice President Pence. They saw Vice President Pence as their last hope for keeping President Trump in office. Navarro writes of Pence’s supposed “betrayal.” 226 In a telling sentence, Navarro likens Vice President Pence to Brutus, a Roman politician and the most famous assassin of Julius Caesar. Navarro writes:

On this cold, momentous day, I shiver as I think to myself, “January 6 will be either Mike Pence’s finest hour or the traitorous ‘Et tu, Brute?’ end of both his and Donald Trump’s political careers.” 227

The goal of these Trump allies was clear: to overturn the election result.228 Statements by participants in this effort indicate there were several different endgame strategies in mind. One was to get the Vice President to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other States, then simply declare that Trump had won a majority of the electors actually submitted. The other major possibility was to reject or “return” the Electoral College votes of these States and then declare there was no majority in the Electoral College process, thereby triggering a so-called contingent election under the 12th Amendment.229

This would have meant that the House of Representatives had chosen the president not on the basis of one-member-one-vote, but on the basis of one-State-one-vote, pursuant to the 12th Amendment. Donald Trump’s strategists emphasized repeatedly that the GOP had a 27-to-22 margin in control of the States’ Congressional delegations, with Pennsylvania being tied at 9-to-9, therefore presumably a non-factor.

5.3 President Trump and his Allies Continue to Pressure the Vice President on January 6th, Threatening His Life and Our Democracy.

===

https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-simple-divide-politics-between-patriots-and-traitors

:{:{}:

:{:{https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-says-president-joe-bidens-handling-chinese-spy-balloon-was-high-crime-and}:

===

mma `1 23

STEVE BANNON (HOST): Their complete meltdown over all these investigations. I think the a — you've got Oversight, you have Judiciary, you got House Intel, we're now going to have a special committee on the COVID virus and particularly Wuhan lab, MTG is on that. But, the jewel of the crown, I think, at least right now, has got to be Weaponization of Government. This is going to a classic like Church, maybe even harder-hitting.

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===

mebbe sparked by

The Liberty Trail...From Philadelphia to Georgia (w/ Amanda Head, Ben Bergquam,

Laura Baigert

, Vernon Jones,

Darren Beattie,

Patrick O'Donnell)

https://www.audible.com/pd/Episode-956-The-Liberty-TrailFrom-Philadelphia-to-Georgia-w-Amanda-Head-Ben-Bergquam-Laura-Baigert-Vernon-Jones-Darren-Beattie-Patrick-ODonnell-Podcast/B09566JBW9

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https://www.mediamatters.org/brazil/new-right-pretends-be-isolationist-their-rhetoric-brazil-shows-couldnt-be-further-truth

no lnx vid

The new right pretends to be isolationist. Their rhetoric on Brazil shows that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Right-wing pundits are increasingly embracing the Monroe Doctrine, one of the oldest expressions of US imperialism, and looking to manufacture a new cold war against China in the process

WRITTEN BY JOHN KNEFEL

PUBLISHED 01/13/23

Right-wing media personalities are increasingly embracing a two-century-old expression of U.S. imperialism called the “Monroe Doctrine,” and exposing their own militaristic impulses in the process.

Fox News’ top star Tucker Carlson and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have both recently endorsed the Monroe Doctrine as a guiding principle, undercutting their supposedly isolationist views on U.S. military policy. In both cases, the conservative pundits invoked the doctrine as a means of opposing what they see as China’s increasing political and economic importance in South America, specifically in Brazil.

Bannon and Carlson both position themselves as antagonists towards the neocons, a faction of the conservative movement that ascended during the presidency of George W. Bush and was a driving factor in the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The so-called America First ideology that Bannon, Carlson, and others in the Trump-aligned wing of the conservative movement identify with is sometimes described, incorrectly, as isolationist. Their recent invocations of the Monroe Doctrine suggest that, far from being isolationists, these conservatives are increasingly interested in dominating China militarily, especially in the Western Hemisphere.

Carlson, Bannon, and their allies have adopted a new Cold Warrior posture, with China replacing the great boogeyman of the USSR, and Brazil — for now — taking the place of Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and other countries where the U.S. waged proxy wars against the perceived communist threat. But whatever investments China has made in South America don’t, or shouldn’t, justify the recent insurrection in Brazil, which right-wing media in the United States celebrated.

A much better approach would be to support interstate partnerships following the “pink tide” that has surfaced across Latin America since 2018. Leftist leaders have been elected across the region in recent years, most recently in Colombia and Brazil. The ability of these left-of-center governments to fulfill their promises toward greater social equality remains in question, as their countries are still shackled with the conditions created and defined in many ways by the Monroe Doctrine.

“The United States deployed this doctrine [the Monroe Doctrine] to keep Latin America subordinate to U.S. interests, whether through direct interventions like coups, invasions, and assassinations or institutional arrangements like free-trade agreements and painful structural adjustment programs,” write David Adler and Guillaume Long in The American Prospect. “As a result, Latin American countries remain highly dependent on exporting raw materials to large powers like the U.S., and importing high-value products and sophisticated technology.”

The two argue that “Latin America must be free to build the independent institutions that it deems necessary to guarantee health, security, and a strong economy in an increasingly turbulent world.” The Biden administration could — but hasn’t — adopted this approach, which would likely have the added benefit of building regional resiliency against a potentially unwanted Chinese incursion. But because the Latin American leaders who could implement this policy are various stripes of socialists, they face strong headwinds from U.S liberals and overt hostility from conservatives.

Carlson, the Monroe Doctrine, and “our hemisphere”

Last year, Carlson’s team made a documentary-style film about Brazil that conspicuously avoided discussing whether then-President Jair Bolsonaro would respect the results of the upcoming election, or if he’d attempt to stay in power using extrajudicial means.

Carlson began the film by offering his definition of the Monroe Doctrine, and explicitly claiming U.S. imperial domain over the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

Video

CitationFrom the September 22, 2022, Tucker Carlson Original The China Takeover: Brazil

“In 1823, President James Monroe announced a policy that has been the center of American foreign policy for the last 200 years, called the Monroe Doctrine,” Carlson began.

“Great powers would not be allowed to control nations in the Western Hemisphere,” he continued. “That would be a direct threat to the interests of the United States. And for 200 years, we haven't allowed it.”

Carlson then accused President Joe Biden of changing that policy, saying the doctrine was “no longer enforced,” in part because the administration was overly focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“The Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility and into the void left by the United States moves a new superpower,” he concluded. “We've come to Brazil to see for ourselves the rise of China and how the government of China is replacing the United States as the dominant power in our hemisphere.”

Carlson’s use of the first-person plural, possessive phrases here — “our hemisphere” — is key. The “our” clearly refers to the United States, not a broader collective of self-governed countries in the hemisphere. In Carlson’s rendering, the fight is between the United States and China for dominance over Brazil – not for Brazilian sovereignty in itself.

The rest of the movie is a series of fearmongering accusations leveled against China, all in support of Carlson’s primary thesis: that the Chinese Communist Party is attempting to turn Brazil into a de facto colony. Carlson appears more upset that China is supposedly taking on this role (instead of the United States) than that any country is engaged in this kind of imperial project in the first place. “There is one government left in South America that is sympathetic to the United States, and it's this one here in Brazil,” Carlson said to conclude his film. “But it's being ignored by the Biden administration for ideological reasons. When the smoke clears, China may control Brazil too.”

Carlson has casually asserted the United States’ rightful domain over Latin and South America before. In February, he reported that China had “announced a partnership with Argentina, in part on currency.”

“Argentina's president also said his nation would join China's Belt and Road Project,” he continued. “Again, it's in our hemisphere. Monroe Doctrine, anyone? But it's happening, and nobody is even mentioning it.”

Bannon’s New Cold War

:{:{}:

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon is almost monomaniacally obsessed with China’s rise and the threat he believes it poses to U.S. hegemony, both globally and specifically in the Western Hemisphere. As one small but telling example, his show’s bumper music is a rap song by Chinese dissident — and Bannon-backer — Miles Guo whose hook is: “Let’s take down the CCP.”

Shortly after pro-Bolsonaro forces staged an insurrection by storming multiple Brazilian governmental buildings, Bannon invoked the Monroe Doctrine to justify the rioters’ actions. Bannon falsely characterized President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, as nothing but a puppet of the Chinese government, and argued that China is attempting to seize power across the region.

:{:{}:

The CCP aims to create “Latin America as a communist superstate backed by the Chinese Communist Party directly aimed at the United States,” Bannon said. “This is what the Monroe Doctrine is about.”

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“Our founders, our framers warned us, ‘Don’t go searching for monsters to slay in Ukraine — watch what they do here in the Western Hemisphere,’” he continued.

“We’re not in a great position, and now we have it in our hemisphere,” his guest,Matthew Tyrmand,responded. “China, under Lula, will have control of the entire wealth, and power, and geopolitical strategic positioning of South America.”

South America “will be a Marxist superstate should the Brazilians accept Lula as their leader,” Tyrmand added.

Video

CitationFrom the January 9, 2023, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Bannon and Tyrmand had previously had almost the exact same discussion, including the invocation of the Monroe Doctrine, on the night of Bolsonaro’s loss in late October.

“The communists, the CCP foothold in this hemisphere has been growing already, and this would be very deleterious,” Tyrmand said. “And of course we’ve got corrupt, senile, comatose vegetable in the White House fiddling as our Rome-hemisphere burns.”

“And so, all of MAGA should understand, these are our allies in Brazil,” Bannon responded, referring to Bolsonaro and his supporters.

“Remember, this hemisphere was kept orderly because of the Monroe Doctrine,” Bannon continued. “We absolutely had a line in the sand from the beginning of this republic that there would be no foreign interference in this, in this — and by the way, for 200 years we've been adamant about that.”

He added that now “the CCP” is “deeply involved in a takeover” of “the most significant country in Latin America, South America.”

Video

CitationFrom Steve Bannon's Gettr account, streamed October 30, 2022

In the summer of 2021, Bannon spoke with conspiracy theorist and neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec at least twice about China’s role in the Western Hemisphere. As protesters took to the streets in Cuba, cheered on by right-wing U.S. media, Posobiec expressed his outrage that foreign countries would warn the United States not to meddle in the demonstrations. Like Carlson, he referred to “our hemisphere” in describing U.S. dominion over sovereign countries.

“Yesterday you had China, Iran and Russia — came out and they put out a statement jointly saying the United States needs to not interfere in Cuba,” Posobiec said. “I'm sorry. No, you don't get to tell us in our homes what happens in our hemisphere. This is the Monroe Doctrine."

“That was U.S. policy, bipartisan for generations in this country,” he continued. “Who are you to say that you were going to tell us what's going on in our backyard? No, I don't think so. Are we a great power or not?”

As in the more recent case with Brazil, Posobiec invoked the Monroe Doctrine explicitly as a justification to counter hypothetical Chinese expansionism. “What's Joe Biden going to do? What's [Secretary of State Tony] Blinken going to do when you've got Chinese subs off the coast of Havana?” Posobiec asked. “Because you know that's coming next. You know, what are you going to do? Are you going to stand up and defend our hemisphere, to defend our national interest or not?"

When they returned to the topic that October, the two were even more explicit in their comparisons to the Cold War. During the segment, Bannon’s producers showed a graphic that was reminiscent of anti-communist propaganda from the 1950s, lest the point get lost on any War Room viewers.

Video

CitationFrom the October 20, 2021, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

Bannon asked Posobiec to “talk about the Chinese Communist Party, what they are doing in South America and the Caribbean, and the direct impact on the United States of America.”

“The United States has largely, you know, in the past been sort of seen as sort of the hegemon when it comes to the Western Hemisphere,” Posobiec replied. “This goes back to Monroe Doctrine.”

“This is classic U.S. policy,” he continued. “It's the idea of when the Soviet Union wanted to get a foothold in Cuba and plant their missiles.”

Posobiec then argued that “now you're seeing China come in to play that role,” before claiming that “of course they're going to Cuba; of course they're going to Venezuela, but they're doing everything they can to get into these countries like Colombia, like Brazil, like Bolivia, Argentina.”

He added that then-President Bolsonaro is “the guy that's fighting back against what China is doing” and that if China “can take over Brazil, they are going to be able to use that to control the entire South American continent.”

America First means MAGA empire

Carlson and Bannon both exert considerable influence over the shape of the Republican Party. They are not simply talk show hosts, but political operators whom Republican politicians often seek to curry favor with. Both played significant roles in the GOP’s approach to the midterms, for example. Carlson provided Republicans with messaging support, endorsed candidates in primaries, and then attempted to help those candidates win. The same is true for Bannon, who dedicated his show to pushing an unrelenting stream of election denialism prior to last November’s contests.

Both Carlson and Bannon — as well as the rest of the Republican Party — fared poorly in the midterms, but that doesn’t retroactively negate their influence. Indeed, the early days of the new House GOP majority suggest that hardliners in the Carlson and Bannon mold are as empowered within the caucus as they’ve ever been. When the two of them show their true colors as imperialist neo-Cold Warriors, they can be seen as a stand-in for a much larger element within the broader conservative movement.

For Carlson, Bannon, and their fellow travelers, America First isn’t a call for directing public policy to benefit people living in the United States, no matter their protestations. It is instead a rearticulation of a standard ideology based on U.S. dominance, both in the Western Hemisphere and in what they see as the larger geopolitical battle with China. In this way, their philosophy is not nearly as different from the neocons as they claim it is.

Where the neocon project was largely justified under a flimsy pretext of spreading democracy, America Firsters are reimagining and recreating Cold War-style global power struggles. This context is key to understanding and deciphering conservative foreign policy goals and rhetoric in the coming election cycle. The Trump wing of the movement may pay lip service to opposing U.S. foreign wars, but their chauvinistic invocation of the Monroe Doctrine shows they believe in maintaining U.S. military and political hegemony, just like their factional rivals.

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Appearing on CNN the morning after he had a major falling out with his client before a judge and asked to be allowed to resign from the case, attorney Doug Schoen explained the "irreconcilable" differences he has with his soon-to-be former client Steve Bannon.

Speaking with "CNN This Morning" co-host Kaitlan Collins, Schoen said that his client was not allowing him to present the best possible defense and that he has no choice but to step aside.

As the Associated Press reported, Schoen is representing Bannon in a case where he is charged with money laundering, conspiracy, and fraud related to the “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign.

AP reported, "Bannon, a conservative rabble-rouser and longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, has until a Feb. 28 hearing to find new counsel, Judge Juan Manuel Merchan said. His current lawyers, David Schoen and John Mitchell, must stay on the case until then, the judge said."

Appearing on CNN, Schoen, said he still talks to his client -- but that he uses another attorney as an intermediary.

"I guess the first question I have for you, is when was the last time that you and Steve Bannon spoke?" host Collins prompted.

"We spoke, we just don't speak about this case," Schoen explained. "I concluded that we had irreconcilable differences about the approach to the case, the defense of the case, the strategy in the case, the resources for the case. So the best policy was not to talk about it anymore. I talked to him through a third-party lawyer. I still represent him in the case in D.C. and I speak to him."

"So you still talk to him about other cases, but when it comes to this border wall case he's facing, you speak through a third-party attorney to talk to Steve Bannon?" Collins pressed.

"Yeah, there's no point any further in discussing issues surrounding this case," he elaborated. "We have very different views of how it should be handled. When I take on a case, I need to be able to handle it in the way I see is appropriate. Frankly, there was a bit of a breakdown in the D.C. trial. I disagreed with the trial strategy in the case. When the trial came, I refused to participate in the examination of witnesses and arguments. I just handled the legal issues in that case, even though I had been hired to be the lead lawyer."

After stating that he needs to follow "...the rules of professional conduct as well," he later added, "I can't go into those details, as I know you know, and Steve Bannon may well be right and I may be wrong. But it's his case, it's his life and he deserves to be able to proceed with a defense he thinks is appropriate."

Watch below or at this link.

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Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has spent more than two months denying the results of last year’s Brazilian presidential election, helping to lay the groundwork for the attacks on government buildings over the weekend carried out by supporters of defeated former President Jair Bolsonaro. The mob violence from Bolsonaro’s supporters bore a striking resemblance to the attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol two years ago, which Bannon also helped to foment.

The day after the pro-Bolsonaro, anti-democracy riot, Bannon defended the protesters’ perceived grievances on his War Room podcast. “The key is legitimacy, you must show you are legitimate,” Bannon said. “There were millions and millions — tens of millions of people in the street, working class people, and particularly … Evangelical Christians that are not prepared to sit there and let an atheistic, Marxist, communist criminal like Lula steal the election and steal their country.”

Bannon has been questioning the legitimacy of the Brazilian election process since former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, was declared the winner on October 30. In the immediate aftermath of Bolsonaro’s loss, Bannon baselessly claimed on his podcast that the vote totals couldn’t be trusted and urged Bolsonaro to fight on. He was frequently joined by Matthew Tyrmand, a conservative activist who has claimed to discover mathematical anomalies that call the Brazilian election results into question. (An analysis from the Brazilian military did not find evidence of fraud in the election.)

Despite Bannon’s pleas, Bolsonaro ultimately acknowledged the results on November 2, 2022, although he didn’t technically concede. In late December, Bolsonaro traveled to Florida, where he remains, while still facing mounting investigations in his home country.

Bannon and Tyrmand continued to cast doubt on the vote totals even after Bolsonaro had at least nominally accepted defeat. On November 3, Bannon invited Tyrmand on War Room to discuss the pro-Bolsonaro street protests following his electoral defeat. “The piece was amazing,” Bannon said, referring to an article Tyrmand had recently published. “You can see how they stole this.”

The pro-Bolsonaro forces are “up against a transnational criminal class that has both partnerships with the party of Davos, the World Economic Forum, and the Chinese Communist Party. That’s what’s trying to take over Brazil,” Bannon continued. Those remarks echoed an argument also put forward by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson claiming that the CCP is using Lula to turn Brazil into a de facto Chinese colony.

“What you see in the streets is the people of Brazil saying, ‘We don’t want that,’” Bannon concluded.

Tyrmand then speculated about a military audit in the case of fraud, “which you and I certainly believe there is, based on what we’ve seen with our own eyes,” he told Bannon[vid]

later that month, Tyrmand returned to the show to discuss the ongoing protests, which he described as “the largest street demonstrations in human history.”

“This brings back memories of the people in the streets fighting Soviet communism in the late ‘80s, when the Berlin Wall was coming down,” Tyrmand claimed. “You know what, this is orders of magnitude bigger.”

“It’s the Brazilian Spring,” Bannon added.

Tyrmand then claimed that social media posts showed voting machines had been improperly transported from their storage areas and insinuated that it was evidence of potential tampering or fraud.

“The election was stolen,” Bannon replied[vid]

two days later, Tyrmand again appeared on War Room to cast further doubt about the vote totals.

“People know they’ve been defrauded, they know that the mathematics behind what the machines demonstrated is patently ludicrous, it doesn’t pass any empirical analytical test when you know people all over the country voted for Bolsonaro,” he said[vid]

tyrmand was back on Bannon’s show in early December, describing the Bolsonaristas as “Constitutionalists” who “believe in the peaceful process and transitions of power.” He then expressed his hope that “the military will do their job that’s afforded them in the Constitution” and carry out an audit of the election results.

Bannon also regularly denied the results of the Brazilian election his Gettraccount. On November 2, he referred to the rolling unrest in the country as the “beginning of a Brazilian Spring,” a phrase he would repeat in the coming days.

The same day, as right-wing figures promoted the idea of a military audit that they hoped would change the results of the election, Bannon appeared to endorse a military coup. “The Military Represents,” he wrote alongside a video of camouflaged trucks driving through the streets.

On November 3, he shared a New York Times article reporting on the Bolsonaristas who wanted the military to intervene. “The People of Brazil will not tolerate the Globalist and the CCP stealing their country,” he wrote.

Later that month, Bannon called Lula a “transnational criminal” who “stole the Brazilian election,” describing it as “very clear.”

Even as it became increasingly obvious that Bolsonaro had no chance to return to power, Bannon kept the drumbeat going. “The People of Brazil will not tolerate a godless atheist Marxist like Lula to takeover illegally and destroy their country,” Bannon wrote on Christmas Eve.

Then on January 8, as the pro-Bolsonaro riot was commencing in Brazil’s capital, Bannon repeatedly posted on Gettr that “Lula stole the election” and referred to the insurrectionists as “Brazilian Freedom Fighters.”

Just as in the January 6 insurrection, the anti-Democratic forces in Brazil were unsuccessful in changing the results of an election they lost. For Bannon, it’s yet another recent failure.

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When Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California was struggling to be chosen as House speaker from January 3-6, it was clear that he wasn’t going to give up easily. McCarthy, thanks to a group of far-right MAGA lawmakers who were dubbed the “Never Kevin” Republicans,” was rejected in 14 roll-call votes in a row. But on Friday night, January 6, McCarthy was finally chosen as House speaker when a 15th roll-vote was held and enough “Never Kevin” holdouts agreed to support him.

McCarthy had to make a lot of promises and agree to a lot of conditions with MAGA Republicans in order to finally make it past the finish line. In a column published by The Bulwark on January 9, Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes warns that House Speaker McCarthy is indebted to way too many extremists for his own good or for the good of the United States.

Sykes’ column is headlined, “What Could Go Wrong?” That expression is typically delivered with major sarcasm, and Sykes warns that with McCarthy having needed the support of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and former President Donald Trump, a lot could go wrong. Greene and Trump both urged the Never Kevin Republicans to reconsider when they were voting against him repeatedly.

“In the last several weeks,” Sykes notes, “Donald Trump: (1) expressed solidarity with the January 6 insurrectionists, (2) dined with a Neo-Nazi, (3) flung racial slurs at the wife of the Senate GOP leader, and (4) called for the termination of the Constitution so that he could be restored to power. And yet, within minutes of being elected to the third highest constitutional office in the land — in the early morning hours after the second anniversary of the attack on the Capitol — this is what My Kevin had to say…. ‘I do want to especially thank President Trump. I don’t think anybody should doubt his influence. He was with me from the beginning. He was all in.’”

Sykes notes that McCarthy also took a “selfie” with Greene.

“What, exactly is the GOP’s plan?” Sykes writes. “Wielding the threat of a catastrophic default on the national debt, the GOP’s Real Men of Genius ‘agreed to drive a hard line in upcoming budget talks, potentially including demands for significant changes to Social Security and Medicare.’ Punchbowl also reports that ‘three of the first 12 bills that the House will vote on are designed to tighten abortion restrictions.’ Really, what could go wrong?”

Sykes continues, “But as Republicans are about to find out, it’s one thing for the right to rail against wokeness and demand endless investigations of the FBI and Hunter Biden’s laptop. It’s quite another to go after Social Security and Medicare, programs that were popular even among Tea Party supporters, and which Trump famously promised to protect. Besides Social Security and Medicare, Republicans are also threatening deep cuts to the military budget, which will also be a strange new flex for the party of Fire and Fury…. The politics of all of this is, shall we say, deeply problematic.”

The conservative columnist laments that having to kowtow to extremists is nothing new for Republicans who want to be successful in the Trumpified version of their party. Sykes comments, “All of this seems so familiar: the nihilism, truckling toadyism, recklessness, and extremism that The Bulwark has been writing about for the last four years on days that end in ‘y’….Dysfunction is the point. So strap in, because the chaos theater is about to become very real.”

In his January 9 column, Sykes also points out that some of Trump’s MAGA allies have been applauding a coup attempt in Brazil that is being described by many pundits as a “Brazilian January 6.” On January 8, 2023 in Brasilia, supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro invaded Brazil’s Congressional and Supreme Court Buildings and surrounded the Brazilian Presidential Palace. The insurrectionists were demanding that far-right Bolsonaro be reinstated, and leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva vowed to fight back against the “fascist forces” trying to overthrow his presidency. Lula was sworn in as president on New Year’s Day.

Sykes comments, “No points for subtlety here. Steve Bannon is openly applauding the coup, calling the rioters ‘Brazilian freedom fighters.’”

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Right-wing political activist and neo-Nazi sympathizer Jack Posobiec suggested at a Turning Point USA conference on Tuesday that he and other conservatives are victims and that he is no longer going to "turn the other cheek."

Posobiec is one of many loud, fringe provocateurs that are grooming young people into considering committing acts of violence against the United States government as well as their fellow citizens. A principal gripe among this community is the national shift toward tolerance of individuals whom they view as inferior or threatening to so-called "traditional" values, such as LGBTQ+ Americans, Jews, non-whites, and, especially, liberal voters within the Democratic Party.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon also spoke at the event, but his remarks were aimed at punishing President Joe Biden and other federal officials whom he falsely claims have led a vast, covert conspiracy against ex-President Donald Trump.

But Posobiec delivered a Christmas message with a notably more sinister tone.

"Ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen and ladies, and also to the deplorables in the audience: I come here before you with a message, a simple message. It is Christmas time, and we are saying 'Merry Christmas' again. That's right. But, but, I'm a Christian. But I'm done turning the other cheek," he said.

"Because now is the time for action. Now is the time for victory. Now is the time to take back our country," Posobiec continued. "And we're doing it. We're taking it all back."

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

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had to go harder rt (with young ppl?) b/c groyper spat?

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Christian nationalist U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene‘s remarks at the New YorkYoung Republican Club’s Saturday night gala have elicited massive response – and condemnation – from many after she insisted had she been “in charge” of the January 6, 2021 insurrection the rioters “would’ve been armed” and they “would have won.”

“I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, we would’ve been armed,” Greene, a Republican from Georgia, told the group (video below). Some of the rioters and attendees were armed.

In addition to Greene and Bannon, Donald Trump, Jr. and far-right agitator Jack Posobiec were also in attendance, as was disgraced former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

The Southern Poverty Law Center described the New York Young Republican Club’s gala attendees as a “collection of radical right figures including white nationalists and ultranationalist European leaders” and noted the “group’s president declared ‘total war’ on perceived enemies.”

Some are questioning how Greene can retain her congressional seat given the oath of office she swore to, which in part reads: “I, __, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

Former Democratic U.S. Senator from California Barbara Boxer tweeted: “If you’re in Congress and swore to protect the Constitution & you’re asked if you had anything to do with 1/6 insurrection, you say something like: I would NEVER partake in violence against America. You wouldn’t say something like: if I did it I would’ve been armed!”

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) quoting Greene, tweeted that winning is “overturning an election,” and “Being armed = using force to do it.”

Congresswoman Greene “represents today’s Republican party and defines a coup as ‘winning,'” she stressed.

“This is un-American and dangerous,” Escobar added. “And Republican silence is complicity.”

Veteran journalist and SiriusXM Progress host Michelangelo Signorile called Greene’s remarks, “Treason out loud.”

“Marjorie Taylor Greene tells extremist confab that if she organized Jan 6 ‘we would’ve won’ and ‘we would’ve been armed.’ Take it as a plan for the next assault on democracy, which Trump is right now inciting,” he warned.

Gun violence prevention activist Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action observed this is a “Member of Congress fantasizing about killing her colleagues.”

Former Obama White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod, now the director of the non-partisan University of Chicago Institute of Politics, quoted Greene and called her one of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s “new top apparatchiks.”

Watch the video via Kyle Mazza below or at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/judge-stays-steve-bannons-sentence/

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No recurringright-wing conspiracy theory is more threatening to the very foundation of American democracy than falsehoods about widespread electoral fraud. The majority of Republicans falsely believe the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, and his supporters staged a coup attempt. Today, half of all Americans expect there to be fraud in the 2022 midterms, according to one recent national poll. It’s bad.

There’s plenty of blame to go around for this tragedy among right-wing media culprits — but chief among them must be former Trump strategist Steve Bannon’s War Room, ground zero for conspiracy theories about the election being stolen in 2020. To this day, the show’s central reason for existence is to keep these conspiracy theories alive to fuel the further radicalization of the Republican Party and its base.

Even before Trump lost, Bannon was saying the election would be stolen from him. In September 2020, he launched a national tour titled “The Plot to Steal 2020” to demonstrate how Democrats would use “digital muscle” and “lawfare” in collaboration with the Chinese government, The New York Times, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and “street thugs of antifa and the radical parts of Black Lives Matter” to “foist an illegitimate regime onto the republic of the United States.”

On Election Day 2020, Bannon declared that Trump would claim victory “right before the 11 o’clock news” (a sentiment he also shared in private). Through the post-election period, Bannon continued to mold his platform into a central propaganda hub for the MAGA movement to radicalize Trump supporters on the idea that the election was stolen, using violent rhetoric to whip them into a frenzy and even calling for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray. This continued in the days leading up to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Here we are again. Bannon is once more trying to organizehis conservative audience around falsehoods and conspiracy theories about supposed election fraud. But this time, he has taken the last two years to regroup and strategize, rather than riding the reactive rollercoaster that was the final days of the Trump presidency. Almost immediately after the January 6 disaster, Bannon began hosting local Republican Party activist Dan Schultz to recruit and train election deniers to work as precinct officers. The responsibilities of these positions vary by state; according to ProPublica, they can “have a say in choosing poll workers” in some states and even “help pick members of boards that oversee elections.”

In the last few months, the plan of attack has expanded. In late August, Bannon declared that Democrats were planning to steal the 2022 midterms while broadcasting live from Mike Lindell’s “Moment of Truth” Summit. (Bannon does MyPillow ad reads multiple times an hour for four hours a day, five days a week, with an additional two hours on Saturday. He recently told The New York Times Lindell is “the most significant financier in all of conservative media.”[vid]

echoing 2020, this falsehood is now a constant refrain on the show, a slightly updated backdrop to Bannon’s protestations from two years ago. What’s different this time is the pro-Trump election denial movement is now more prepared. As Bannon told his audience in September: “It’s going to be MAGA in the room, counting the votes, because only MAGA can count fair.”

“We are prepared this time. We are trained this time.”

On October 28, he again warned the midterms are “a whole different game” because “we are prepared this time. We are trained this time."

To execute, War Room hosts a virtual parade of extremist activists pushing election denial efforts across the country. One of the most prominent is Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who collaborated with Trump to attempt to overturn the 2020 election. She is now leading an election denial group called the Election Integrity Network, which recruits and trains people to work as poll watchers and other positions in election administration. (At one recent training hosted by Mitchell’s group, coup memo author John Eastman told volunteers to “document what you’ve seen, raise the challenge” and “get it all written down” because “that then becomes the basis for an affidavit in a court challenge after the fact.”)

Mitchell has also instructed the War Room audience to volunteer in Democratic stronghold counties previously subjected to destructive conspiracy theories during the Trump campaign in 2020, including ones they don’t live in. One of the counties she highlighted is DeKalb County, Georgia, one of four counties that make up the metropolitan Atlanta area and which also has the second largest population of Black voters in the state.

Republican National Committee head Ronna McDaniel has also made War Room her home base to promote the RNC’s first time “election integrity” efforts, now that it has been freed from a consent decree that limited the group’s ability to organize due to concerns over racially motivated voter suppression and intimidation. On November 1, McDaniel told Bannon her recruitment efforts saw a “jump” after her appearance on War Room.

In addition to partnering with the RNC and a laundry list of other election denial organizations, Bannon is now aligned with Alex Jones. This is a relatively new development -- Jones was not much of a character at all in the 2020 rendition of this song and dance. Jones recently appeared on the show to tell Bannon’s audience that they should be “documenting everything” to prevent supposed fraud in the upcoming election. In turn, Bannon has appeared on Infowars to recruit viewers to become poll workers, asking them on October 26 to join in “an overwhelming show of force” aiming “to destroy the groomer party, to destroy the globalist party.”

Bannon’s violent and revolutionary rhetoric

Undermining public confidence in the midterms is just the first part of Bannon’s agenda; to really set his listeners on fire, they are also inundated with repeat calls to violence. Bannon has referred to Mitchell’s election denier recruitment efforts as a “call to arms.” He recently promised to threaten members of Congress “by bayonet” if they don’t fall in line with the extremist right. He later doubled down on this statement, reposting the video on his GETTR page and promising “the Battle to reign in an out-of-control Government [commences] immediately upon Victory.”

Perhaps most concerning is Bannon’s repeated defense of men wearing camouflage and carrying guns while loitering outside ballot drop boxes in Arizona as a part of an effort by QAnon support Melody Jennings, who has repeatedly appeared on War Room recruiting volunteers to “monitor” drop boxes in the state. Defending the armed men from reports that they were intimidating voters, he said, “It’s not intimidation to put a set of eyeballs on these things.”

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CitationFrom the October 25, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

For the more hardcore elements of the War Room audience, some of whom showed up at the Capitol on January 6 and repeated his calls to violence verbatim, Steve Bannon’s bizarre circus of a show is not one of many measured perspectives they’re taking in to account before drawing a larger conclusion on how they should vote or otherwise act politically. The show is exclusively available on right-wing platforms, whether it’s streamed directly from Real America’s Voice, the network home of the show, or on Rumble, described as “the right-wing’s go-to video site” that claims to have reached 78 million monthly users in August, more than 10 times that of Trump’s Truth Social platform. They are angry, unpersuadable, digitally walled off, and slurping up four hours of conspiratorial ranting a day. It’s the true definition of a fever swamp, where disease festers undisturbed.

Bridging the (small) gap between Alex Jones and the heights of the Republican Party establishment, War Room thrives off the same toxic combination of election denial and violent rhetoric that we saw in 2020. This time, the critical difference that two years of planning makes could have devastating consequences.

The recent assassination attempt at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s home in San Francisco, where her husband remains in the ICU, should set off alarm bells. According to NBC News, alleged assailant David DePape told investigators the attack was intended to “show other Members of Congress there were consequences to actions,” echoing Bannon’s recent rhetoric. DePape also reportedly professed to be a transhumanism conspiracy theorist who credited the Gamergate harassment campaign for radicalizing him, a hallmark example of the violent consequences of online harassment campaigns that Bannon had a direct role in promoting during his time heading Breitbart.

Much attention was paid to Bannon’s contempt of congress trial, conviction, and sentencing. There were good reasons for this -- it was a historic conviction and sentencing and a cathartic moment for those of us who watched the circle of criminals supporting Donald Trump’s presidency escape virtually unscathed. But while the mainstream media has always had a very close eye on Bannon’s legal problems, the daily drumbeat of his show, even after the January 6 committee put its influence on full display in front of the entire country, has not received the same attention outside of Media Matters and very few others.

War Room is filled to the brim with leads for journalists tracking how the extreme right is attempting to disrupt and undermine the midterm elections. Of the various campaigns and activists that appear on War Room, most will fail to have an impact. That is par for the course when you’re flooding the zone with shit, according to Bannon’s own characterization. But some, like rallying at the Capitol on January 6, will have consequences that will reverberate for generations. Every day, Bannon is laying out, in specific detail, tied to specific calls to action, the strategy to create chaos at the polls and in the streets, on Election Day and beyond. Two years since Bannon started saying the 2020 election would be stolen and he is still running this same play.

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Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, suffered a stroke earlier this year. While doctors say that Fetterman is recovering well and has “no work restrictions and can work full duty in public office,” the Senate hopeful still struggles with auditory processing, especially when it comes to interpreting spoken words, and has therefore been using a closed captioning device in interviews and during a recent debate.

But to Steve Bannon, the use of closed captioning is a sign that Fetterman has become something else. When Bannon appeared on the “Diamond & Silk Chit Chat Live” program last Friday, the former Trump adviser accused Fetterman of being a “cyborg” because of his use of closed captioning.

“You have a convergence now of advanced chip design, robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology,” Bannon. “You have the merger of all these technologies at one time onto a point; that point is called the singularity. On this side of that point is Homo sapiens, is God’s creation as defined in the Bible, and as we’ve known for many millions of years.”

“So, you have Homo sapiens made in the image and likeness of God, inspired by the breath of the Holy Spirit, and on the other side of that you have Homo sapien-plus or you have enhanced man, you have something that’s not the original creation,” Bannon continued. “That is the merger of man and actually machine, the computer.”

“What you see in Fetterman and why Fetterman is so dangerous and why Fetterman as a concept is dangerous is here, he had a stroke,” Bannon declared. “What you saw the other night … is that he has a machine in front of him. It’s not a closed caption like you would watch TV and want it to be quiet while you were working on something else and have the closed caption on. No, this is a machine that actually helps his brain think through. Without the machine, he can’t understand human conversations, he can’t engage with people. So, we actually had—we call it a cyborg—you actually had a man-machine merger on that stage the other night.”

:{Bannon has long been fearmongering about so-called “transhumanism:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:”:{ and has been attacking Fetterman for months. In August, he}:accused:{ Fetterman of having a “satanic” vibe and of exuding “pure evil.”}:

Fetterman is in a tightening race against TV celebrity Dr. Oz, who won the Republican nomination thanks to Trump’s endorsement. While Fetterman leads by 5 percentage points according to the latest polling, Oz was able to shrink Fetterman’s lead by attacking his health ad nauseum, a strategy that has been aided by far-right media personalities like Bannon

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/rnc-head-repeatedly-appears-steve-bannons-podcast-cast-doubt-elections-recruit-poll

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-promises-threaten-every-member-congress-bayonet-if-they-dont-fall-line

...

From the October 27, 2022, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): What word of advice would you give to leadership in the House in the next two weeks and then after they take power?

KASH PATEL (GUEST): It's simple. I said, I have no problem going around the country campaigning for you because you care about America First values. And you better not forget the things that you campaigned on: accountability, destroying the two-tiered system of justice, and ending the politicization of law enforcement in our military. Gone are the days where you force individuals who are brave enough to serve this country to choose between faith and a fake China virus jab. These things have to be front and center. Reinstating those law enforcement military personnel that were removed from their positions because they chose faith over a jab that wasn't fully tested.

But what I'm going to remind these people of that we're sending to Washington -- the Laxalts, the Blakes, the J.D.s, and everybody else -- is that you guys, on these committees, with the majority, have to come in andsubpoena everybody and every record and put them out for the American people, not keep them to yourselves. Two, you got to kick all these people off the committees like they did to us. Watermelon head Schiff, Swalwell and company, AOC and the whole squad have no business touching the American Constitution because they have lit it on fire for the last five years. And they will not be permitted to have leadership positions of any kind.

And we will conduct a full scale overhaul of the intelligence and law enforcement communities, whether it's with -- through a Church-like commission or otherwise. Every member of Congress and every senator needs it be known that when they're sworn in on January 1st, they were sent there for these reasons. This is why the American public sent you there. And if they forget, I'm going to come on your show and remind them, by name.

BANNON: No, we're going to do it by bayonet.

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an 10 22

White nationalist and twice-convicted felon Steve Bannon appeared on Infowars on Wednesday and predicted to War Room host Owen Shroyer that the November midterm elections are the Republican Party's chance to "destroy the Democratic Party" and that right-wing lawmakers will "force" President Joe Biden to forgo seeking a second term in 2024.

"We've expanded thisbattlefieldall over. So what we have to do now, Owen – and that's why I think this vaccine thing, CDC gave us a gift, a political gift last week by this unanimous vote when they didn't have any debate or bring in any facts. I think people are furious about this, about the children – that is the secret weapon going into build this coalition. Everybody in this audience, particularly the Alex Jones Infowars audience that know the fight we've been fighting for decades against the globalists,we're right on the cusp of having the opportunity to destroy the Democratic Party as a national political institution from school boards all the way up to the House and the Senate," Bannon said, claiming that Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives is in disarray.

"And Owen, here's the big tell. Today, in 'The Hill,' the lead story this morning was about how the knives are already out internally at the White House, on the Hill. They're blaming [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi [D-California], [House Majority Leader Steny] Hoyer [D-Maryland], [House Majority Whip Jim] Clyburn [D-South Carolina]," Bannon continued. "The younger progressives are saying these people are in their eighties. They didn't get the right issues. J6 never really mattered. Abortion played out. Climate change is not something somebody's gonna vote on. It's crime, it's inflation, it's the injection, that's what's playing on people's minds right now. They said, and here's the number they gave, that anything thirty seats and above in the House and any flip of the Senate – and that's why Pennsylvania's so big – that immediately all the House and Senate leadership is gonna be broomed immediately. And, that Joe Biden, they're gonna force Joe Biden to announce in like twenty-four to forty-eight hours he's not running again for president because this is a repudiation of his presidency."

Bannon, who served as a White House adviser to former President Donald Trump, also repeated Trump's thoroughly debunked lies about the 2020 election having been stolen from him and called upon people who still believe that Trump won the 2020 election to mass mobilize and sign up to be poll workers.

"Look, this shows so much, number one: Owen you know this and you can do the math. No regime could've collapsed this quickly when we had no money if they actually had eighty-one million votes the first time around. This proves the case more than ever they didn't win in 2020. Okay?" he declared.

"What we have to do now is an overwhelming show of force, everywhere to converge:own your vote, get out the vote, help get out the vote, go volunteer, phonebank, walk a precinct, and in addition, we have to close the deal. Remember, in 2020 we won but we didn't close. It's like in mergers and acquisitions, if you don't close the deal it doesn't matter. The way we got to close -- and we still got the problems with the machines, I understand that -- and you should see the'Wall Street Journal' today, the op-eds, the editorial page talks about we still got problems with the mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. And these are going to be fights, but the way you do that, you get into the room and become a poll worker," said Bannon.

"This is one hundred percent, Owen, within our hands to grasp. This'll never come again. We have a unique opportunity to have something like 1932 or right after the Civil War when you had these massive realignments in American politics. We could blow these people out of the House and Senate for a decade. Okay? If we pick up forty or fifty seats it gets us up to what, two-sixty, two-seventy, and those guys below one-fifty?You kill them for a generation because they're going to sit there with no power. All your great talent is going to leave. They're not gonna sit in DC and just be on a minority in a committee. It doesn't work like that because you have no power," Bannon added. "This is our opportunity to destroy the groomer party, to destroy the globalist party, to back off their Wall Street and their corporate interests, and to go forth. So that's why I say everything's in the next thirteen days, sir."

Watch below via Media Matters for America or at this link.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/alex-jones-democrats-cornered-**rats/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/alex-jones-tells-steve-bannons-war-room-audience-they-should-be-documenting-everything

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mma 10 22

election denier Cleta Mitchell appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room: Pandemic to once again call on the audience to become poll watchers for the 2022 election, this time suggesting viewers volunteer in counties where they do not live.

During an appearance on the October 10 edition of War Room, Mitchell laid out her recruitment efforts to get conservatives to volunteer at polling places across the country, including Maricopa County, Arizona; DeKalb County, Georgia; the Detroit area precincts; Washoe County, Nevada; Wake, Durham, and Mecklenburg Counties in North Carolina; and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin.

Most concerning is her call to action in DeKalb County, Georgia, and Maricopa County, Arizona, as those jurisdictions were previously targeted in 2020 election fraud conspiracies. During her appearances, she informed the War Room audience: “You can be from anywhere in the state in Arizona or anywhere in the state in Georgia and you can go to DeKalb County or you can go to Maricopa County — you don’t have to be from that county.” Mitchell also listed precincts around Detroit as needing more volunteers and stated, “Look, these are not great places to be, but we need to be there."[vid]

deKalb County, Georgia, is one of four counties that make up the metropolitan Atlanta area and has the second largest population of Black voters in the state behind Fulton County. The county was one of many that former President Donald Trump targeted with accusations of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election, though no evidence of fraud was discovered. In 2021, DeKalb sued Trump for legal fees over his unfounded objections to the 2020 election, which the county recovered.

Maricopa County has also been the focus of election fraud-related conspiracy theories since the 2020 election. The conspiracy theories led to a baseless audit of votes in the county promoted by right-wing media and QAnon-connected influencers. The results of the audit not only reaffirmed President Joe Biden's victory in the county, but showed that he won by a larger marginal than originally recorded.

During a previous appearance with Mitchell, Bannon labeled the efforts a “call to arms” for conservatives.[vid]

on October 11, Bannon brought up Mitchell’s recruitment efforts in a conversation with Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who then promoted the RNC’s recent lawsuits against Maricopa County, which have angered state level officials who claim the RNC is promoting misinformation about the upcoming election.

Mitchell is a right-wing lawyer who worked to overturn the results of the 2020 election. She has since begun an effort called the Election Integrity Network, a part of the Conservative Partnership Institute, training and mobilizing conservatives to monitor elections across the country. Mitchell has described her work as creating “a volunteer army of citizens.” The Conservative Partnership Institute, where Mitchell is a senior legal advisor and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is a senior partner, has received $1 million in donations from Trump’s super PAC Save America. CPI has also been linked to Jim Marchant, a QAnon-connected candidate for Nevada Secretary of State.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannon-its-going-be-maga-room-counting-votes-because-only-maga-can-count-fair

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/bannons-war-room-celebrates-mainstreaming-extremist-immigration-group-fair-0

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https://www.mediamatters.org/steve-bannon/steve-bannons-deranged-election-conspiracy-theories-ranked

no lnx vid

Steve Bannon's deranged election conspiracy theories, ranked

WRITTEN BY MADELINE PELTZ

PUBLISHED 11/25/20

I listen to Steve Bannon’s podcast for four hours a day, every day. While its purported focus is the pandemic, at this point the show has devolved into a pro-beheading cesspool of election-related conspiracy theories.

On the show, Bannon frequently brags about the size and diversity of his audience (the show is at the time of publication ranked 55th in Apple Podcast’s rankings). But though he considers himself a leader and a patriot, Bannon has failed his audience by deliberately squandering the opportunity to tell them the truth about urgent matters related to the election and the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he serves them lies and conspiracy theories about voter fraud and other vague, random Breitbart-style brain worms. In these sputtering sunset hours of the Trump legal defense, he’s live on YouTube for four hours every day repeating some combination of the following rabbit holes and falsehoods.

As such, Media Matters has compiled a nonexhaustive list of his various deranged election conspiracy theories and has ranked them from “extraordinarily” to “completely.”

1. “The Great Reset” conspiracy theory

:{:{}:

Derangement rating: Extraordinarily

Bannon has embraced a conspiracy theory about The Great Reset initiative led by the World Economic Forum, the organization focusing on public-private partnership that hosts the world leaders, billionaires, and business leaders at an annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland. Of all his falsehoods, this one is perhaps the most vague and unhinged.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) describes the Great Reset initiative as a collaborative effort among the organization’s sponsors “to build a new social contract that honours the dignity of every human being” in rebuilding a post-COVID world. The language may be vague and slightly creepy, but the initiative has no governance or enforcement mechanism -- its scope doesn’t extend beyond discourse. The Great Reset is also the title of a book written by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive director of the World Economic Forum.

In Bannon-land, the great reset is an opportunity for the elite cabal to “depopulate” the earth to 500 million, then genetically engineer humankind using “the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering.” He explains that the Democrats are attempting to “steal this election” because “if they can thwart the will of the people in this country,” they’ll be able to achieve the great reset by taking down populist movements in other countries as well.

Video Citation From the November 16, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

STEVE BANNON (HOST): You’ve got [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau up there talking about the great reset. This is what the whole deal is. This is what they’re going to try to do. this is globalization on steroids.A system -- I think it’s actually a combination of state capitalism and authoritarian rule that lets your [UNINTELLIGIBLE] betters -- as they depopulate.

…

These oligarchs, and I call them the AI aliens, right, because they’re all on the spectrum, right. They have no human compassion or empathy. They look at the deplorables as just cogs in the machine. They look at lao bai xing as units of production and consumption, and they would like the earth not to have 6 billion people or 7 billion people. They’d like the earth to have 500 million people, which would be all them. And -- I said one time in Italy that the purpose of populism is to make sure that the guys that make the decisions on the world economic system today were not the same people -- that’s why we had to confront it now -- were not the same people making the decisions on the singularity, that convergence -- and that’s what the fourth industrial revolution really is is the convergence of artificial intelligence, advances in chip design and bioengineering. They never want to talk about the bioengineering piece, right. The singularity is on one side homo sapiens, on the other side is something that’s post-homo sapien.

…

That singularity is going to be within the lifetime of our children. Maybe in the next 20, 25, 30, years. They don’t want to talk about that. That’s not conspiracy theory. I don’t have my -- it’s just a Harvard Business School case, right, to be deconstructed. And it’s obvious the direction they’re taking this, the great reset. Listen, we’re winning. But victory begets victory so Jack, I love the speech but hey, if they steal this election, it’s not about Trump. It’s not about Donald Trump as a person. If they steal this election they have basically thwarted the will of the people in the greatest republic in mankind’s history. If they can thwart the will of the people in this country, that’s how they try to break Brazil. That’s how they try to break Italy. That’s how they try to break the lao bai xing, the diaspora of the Chinese.

On November 20, Bannon returned to the conspiracy theory, saying “the deplorables understand” that Democrats are “trying to steal” the election in order to implement the great reset, which will involve “the convergence of advanced chip design, robotics, artificial intelligence with biotechnology.”

Video Citation From the November 20, 2020, edition of War Room: Pandemic

Donald Trump was reelected president

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United States Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) revealed to Real America's Voice talk show host Steve Bannon on Monday that she has drafted articles of impeachment against President Joe Biden over his investments in renewable energy.

"Because they're driving the Green New Deal which is going to plunge America into darkness and that will lead to death and all kinds of issues across America. We simply cannot exist on solar and wind energy at this time. The technology is not there and there's no reason to destroy fossil fuels," Greene said of the Inflation Reduction Act on War Room With Steve Bannon.

"And because of that, Steve, it's such a dangerous threat. No president should be doing that," Greene continued. "I have articles prepared on Joe Biden and we're looking at introducing those possible as early as this week."

Yale University explained last December why such claims are false.

"In reality, it is entirely possible to sustain a reliable electricity system based on renewable energy sources plus a combination of other means, including improved methods of energy management and storage," Yale wrote in its report. "A clearer understanding of how to dependably manage electricity supply is vital because climate threats require a rapid shift to renewable sources like solar and wind power."

Watch below or at this link.

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https://warroom.org/2022/02/19/matt-schlapp-on-his-amazing-new-book-the-desecrators/

random grab schlapp

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Matt Schlapp on His Amazing New Book “The Desecrators”

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Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union, has written a new book called “The Desecrators,” about the forces working to undermine Western Civilization. He says he found out that he was working on the wrong side of the political divide when the very corporations he was working with as a lobbyist started trying to destroy the Judeo-Christian culture and the roots of America.

“They stand against us. They’re now completely focused on destroying America, the church, civilization, gender, girls sports, the state of Israel, anything that’s true, anything that’s holy, anything that brings people joy, anything that creates civilization, they are absolutely active participants in trying to rip it apart, and I apologize for the fact that I was in a stupor… Everyone is in a stupor. The book is a call to arms: ‘Wake up!'”

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Matthew DePerno on War Room

On May 5, 2021, DePerno appeared on Bannon’s show to talk about his ongoing lawsuit in Antrim Countyand what he claimed were Dominion security flaws. (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.) In that interview, he referenced Dominion’s “election management system,” a phrase very similar to the name of one of the files Colbeck allegedly downloaded.

[vid]

We’re the only case in the country that’s been able to look at actual forensic images,” DePerno said. “December 6, 2020, we went into Antrim County and actually collected forensic images of their election management system.” DePerno then claimed that through this work, his team had been able to “just manipulate any database we want.”

Earlier in the interview, he’d claimed that his access to Dominion systems had given his team the capacity, in general, to change the outcome of any election on a hypothetical ballot.

“Looking at this data, looking at the forensic images and conducting our own tests with ballots and the Dominion system, we put out a video this week that shows that we can flip votes in any race, in any election, up ballot, down ballot, from the president's race, all the way down to any school board race,” DePerno said. “We can select certain races to keep clean. We can select certain races to flip votes in from one candidate to another.”

In June, DePerno again referenced Dominion’s election management system on War Room.

“We’ve proved now that there was direct access to the Antrim County election management system,” DePerno said. “We show that on November 5, we can see it in the forensic images, that an anonymous user logged onto the EMS remotely with escalated privileges and made changes to the database when they were trying to retabulate the election.”

Colbeck’s interest in the “election management server” file may have been tied to DePerno’s repeated claims about what access to that system allowed a user to do.

There is no evidence that any votes tabulated by Dominion were changed in the 2020 election. Still, cybersecurity researchers have warned that distributing the kind of data that DePerno and Colbeck had access to could potentially be used in the future to exploit security flaws and engage in precisely the type of activities that Trump supporters are falsely alleging happened in 2020.

Patrick Colbeck on War Room

Colbeck made several appearances on Bannon’s show immediately after Trump’s loss to discuss his efforts to challenge the Michigan election results.

On November 19, 2020, Colbeck described himself as a “bit of a tech geek,” and explained that he wanted to get involved in the recount effort so he could investigate the system’s software.

“I went in there wanting to understand the stuff that people weren't physically seeing or on the ballot,” Colbeck said. “So I wanted to understand the electronic chain of command between vote tallies and and the communications of vote tallies.”

Later the same day, Colbeck again appeared on War Room and falsely claimed that vote counts were not reliable because tabulators had been connected to the internet.

“Then you get to the basics of a vote tally, which is not – there's no chain of custody around that, particularly around paper chain of custody and electronic chain of custody,” Colbeck said. “When you've got the tabulator, it's connected to the internet, there is zero chain of custody around the vote tally.”

“So is it any wonder why we had strange vote flipping happening in the middle of the night?” he added.

[vid]

the following week, Colbeck returned to War Room to again claim, incorrectly, that “the tabulator computers and the adjudicator computers and the local data center … were all networked to each other” and connected to “a cable that connected to the internet.”

“And you could see the proof that they were all connected to the internet,” Colbeck continued. “If you go look in the bottom right hand corner of all your Windows 10-based PCs and you see the little window on the bottom, there is a little icon that if you roll the mouse over there, it says, connected to the internet. But all the Detroit elected officials that I contacted that night refused – they said specifically that it was not connected to the internet. And from my background, I know differently.”

In fact, an audit and report from Michigan Republicans in 2021 found that although some of the machines had been connected to a local area network (LAN), there is no evidence that the tabulators were connected to any outside networks or that any purported internet connection had been exploited to alter any votes. The LAN connection, “which would create the same icon on a computer screen indicating a network connection as is shown by an internet accessible network,” may have accounted for Colbeck’s confusion.

Tracy Wimmer of the Michigan Department of State had previously debunked Colbeck’s false claims as well.

“No ballot tabulation machines were connected to the internet at Detroit’s counting board,” Wimmer told The Associated Press in December 2020. “The machines were networked locally to each other and the adjudication machines by ethernet cable, and so some people suggested they were online. They were not.”

Although it’s not publicly known precisely what information the account linked to Colbeck downloaded, the name of one of the other files he allegedly accessed – “ThumbDrives” – offers a possible clue. In Michigan, when voting is over, officials transfer the final tally generated by the tabulators, which Colbeck incorrectly said were connected to the internet, to the clerk’s office via flash drives. The data Colbeck received could be related to those final vote tallies or other information related to transferring the vote totals.

It’s not clear from the Post’s reporting whether Colbeck or any of the other election deniers who downloaded the Michigan data could face legal exposure. In general, breaching an election system and distributing the data is a serious crime. Colorado county clerk Tina Peters, a hero and repeat guest on War Room: Pandemic, is facing felony charges for allegedly tampering with election equipment and for obstruction following Trump’s loss.

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