![]() Senior notes how Bannon advocates the ‘precinct strategy’ (first developed by the Republican lawyer Dan Schultz, which encourages interested citizens to sign up for the grunt work of elections) to advance his agenda, which is to hoodwink ordinary citizens and convince them to ‘work the system’ on behalf of Republican lies and therefore become loyal compatriots of his ‘citizen army.’ Bannon is brilliant at this kind of grassroots scheme, and his show is a goldmine for Republican fundraising. This is for the hard-cores, okay? … The people who say, “No, no, no, no, no, not on our watch.”’ He goads his followers into action with a combination of praise, flattery, and drill-sergeant phrases he repeats like a catechism: Put your shoulder to the wheel! Be a force multiplier! And especially: Use your agency! ‘The show’s not about entertainment,’ he told his audience in one of his typical pep talks. With almost every episode, he hopes to transform his audience into an army of the righteous – one that will undo the ‘illegitimate Biden regime’ and replace the current GOP infrastructure, still riddled with institutionalist RINO pushovers, with adamantine Trumpists who believe that 2020 rightfully belonged to them. She describes Bannon asĪ televangelist, an Iago, a canny political operative with activist machinations. In her brilliant Atlantic article, Senior draws much of her material from personal communications with Bannon, and she manages to draw out pieces of Bannon’s madcap personality, his dark pugnacity and magnificently crafted malevolence that reminds me of a more sophisticated version of Scientology’s belligerent squirrel busters. It’s a bit like Father Coughlin stumbled into Wayne and Garth’s basement. The audio occasionally cuts out or sounds like it’s bubbling through a fish tank two of Bannon’s phones buzz throughout the show the segment openers aren’t always ready when he needs them. The whole operation has an amusing shoestring quality to it. It’s still available in the far-right online ecosphere, and it’s streamable on various TV platforms, including Channel 240 of Pluto TV, but that seems like its own sad metaphor – War Room as a small, demoted planetoid, available mainly in the icier regions of the broadcast cosmos. Senior writes that when YouTube pulled his show (Bannon insists that his talk show is not a podcast but a tv show, and one of the most sophisticated at that!) for spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, viewing his storied War Room has become much more difficult: And, last of all, perhaps above all else, straight-up megalomania, which even those who profess affection for the man can see, though it appears to be a problem only for those who believe, as I do, that he’s attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy.’ Garden-variety hypermania (with a generous assist from espressos). Also, the mania: logomania, arithmomania, monomania (he’d likely cop to all of these, especially that last one – he’s the first to say that one of the features of his show is ‘wash, rinse, repeat’). Of his character, she writes: ‘The chaos and the focus, the pugnacity and the enthusiasm, the transparency and the industrial-grade bullshit. Bannon’s character is perfectly suited to what she calls ‘this id-favourable internet age.’ And she is right. Jennifer Senior has written about Steve Bannon with stunning alacrity and insight, ‘He says he has five phones, two encrypted, and he’s forever pecking away, issuing pronunciamentos with incontinent abandon – after midnight during commercial breaks for his show, War Room sometimes while the broadcast is still live.’ He’s obviously a busy man. He has a podcast called War Room that has its chains wrapped around the pillars of the temple of American democracy, and he believes that he has the strength of Samson that will enable him to bring those pillars down. He exercises his charm through cultspeak, by pretending to be part of the conspiracy cognoscenti, by charming his opponents with dime-store intellectual banter (embarrassing for a Harvard and Georgetown graduate) and by appearing earnest when he is the most crookedly deceptive. ![]() But Bannon himself is neither stupid nor foolish – nor, for that matter, earnest. Steve Bannon is a towering figure among his audience, some of whom are earnestly seeking the truth surrounding issues of the day, and many others who are axe-grinding nincompoops and conspiracy nuts.
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