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Sept. 7, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
21:24
Why Does Laurie Penny Hate Steve Bannon？
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Well we're joined now by the spike columnist Ella Whelan and by the writer Laurie Penny who has pulled out the Economist's Open Future Festival herself because Steve Bannon will also be a guest.
Isn't that interesting?
Laurie Penny cannot share a stage with Steve Bannon.
She can't possibly bear to talk to him about anything for some reason.
I wonder why.
It's very interesting isn't it?
I'm going to start with you for that reason.
We heard from Sally Minton Better, she's the economist editor tonight, explaining why the festival was going ahead, why Steve Bannon was invited, about espousing liberal values, pluralist values.
Why did you feel that you didn't want to attend?
Acts like Steve Bannon is the Prince of Darkness or something.
Here comes something evil, an existential change that is in some way irresistible.
I'm not sure that's true.
I'm not sure Bannon is correct on everything he says.
I'm not sure that he is as an unstoppable force as they think.
But that's certainly how they're acting.
Sauron has arrived.
Well, as soon as I heard that Steve Bannon was going to be appearing at the festival, actually directly after my panel, I felt that I couldn't in conscience, in good conscience, appear with somebody who I think the only word to describe a man like that is fascist.
Of course that's what you think, Laurie.
Like no one else around you is describing him as a fascist.
So why is it that you feel he is a fascist?
What is it about Steve Bannon what he's actually asking for that is actually fascism?
Which, let's remember, is basically the worship and glorification of the state.
All within the state, nothing outside of the state and nothing against the state.
That's fascism.
Totalitarian control of the entire society.
Is that what Bannon's asking for?
Or is he just suggesting we close the borders and perhaps don't do trade deals in which our countries lose money?
Is that fascism?
He's an open and proud nationalist.
uses the term he told that he told the National Front that he wouldn't call himself an economic nationalist.
I would describe him as in what sense?
Look, this is somebody.
He is anti-democratic.
He literally said he wishes to destroy the state.
Yeah, that would make him an anarchist, not a fascist.
And you know that.
But I'm going to spoil it a bit here, because what this is really about is not fascism or communism so much.
What this really is about is two strains of liberalism, localism and globalism.
And these two strains of liberalism have come into contact, and one has found that it despises the other.
They are contradictory.
You cannot have both.
And one section really doesn't like the other section for many reasons.
Lots of these are cultural.
Many of these are economic.
A lot of them are class-based.
They're kind of condescension towards the lower orders.
Broadly speaking, it is the politically correct, elite left wing against the politically incorrect, common right wing.
and lori penny is unable to adequately explain exactly what bannon has actually done wrong which is why she just resorts to he's a nazi we have to de-platform him and he's he's put in place policies and he has been the architect of policies which have you know what Rather than engage him in a debate which implies that there is some kind that white nationalism is somehow actually on the table to discuss whether that's right or wrong rather than decided, rather than that,
why don't we just put him up and play next to whatever he says, the recording of those kids at the Mexican border being dragged away from their parents.
This is actually what we're talking about here.
Steve Bannon is not a Nazi and your reaction is disproportionate to the actual danger that Bannon presents to a regular person.
But to the elite, progressive, politically correct control of society, Bannon is a demonstrable existential threat.
I mean, after all, he helped get Trump elected.
I'm not here to defend Steve Bannon.
I know he wouldn't call himself a fascist, but why you do this so articulately.
Why don't you do it in your own way, next to him or around him or confront him?
Why would you, why would you remove...
Because she can't.
Bannon will point out things that are true.
Laurie Penny will not be able to deny that these things are true.
Laurie Penny will lose the argument.
She only stands to lose from a confrontation with Bannon.
So she wants to get rid of him.
She is here, after all, arguing for deplatforming.
He's from that.
He is not interested in listening to me.
He's not interested in listening to anybody else.
These people do not want to engage.
Funny thing to say about someone who you're trying to deplatform.
It seems that he was engaging.
In fact, he has engaged quite a lot with the media of late.
And you're the one trying to prevent that from happening.
In fact, Bannon is the one engaging at a speaking event that you are also going to be at.
And you are the one trying to get him de-platformed by pulling out, by deliberately avoiding engaging him.
So it's not that he doesn't want to engage, it's that you don't want to engage.
And you don't want to engage because he will trounce you.
And you know it.
Not only would Bannon trounce you, he will destroy the pillars of your morality to the point where you walk away from that realizing that you act like a bad person to a certain kind of poor working class white person.
You are in fact defending exactly the kind of people that it requires a man like Bannon to overcome.
Why don't you give us a description of the kind of person that Bannon is a response to?
What this is about is using, and they're very clever, they use liberal values against people who espouse liberal values.
They weaponize people's own values.
And for me, it's about drawing a line in the sand.
Everybody has to make their own choice, but for me, this is where I stand.
I am an anti-fascist.
Brilliantly said, Laurie.
You are a member of Antifar.
You are a communist revolutionary.
And you see fascists under every rock.
And yes, you are part of a movement that weaponizes a person's values against them.
By, say, using the term racist or homophobe or Islamophobe or sexist.
You are weaponizing those good intentions, people's liberal values, one might say.
There's a fantastic job of pointing out exactly what the communists have done.
Is that if we get into a situation in which we are saying that Steve Bannon's point of views are too hot to handle, that the audience can't handle it, that his fellow speakers can't handle it, I think that's a real admission of cowardice on the side of the left or whoever it is.
That was Spiked magazine's Ella Whelan, I think it is.
And she's exactly right.
It is an admission of cowardice.
And it's an admission of cowardice because they know that they're going to lose.
They know that they are going to have to admit to causing the suffering of their fellow citizens who happen to be poorer and weaker than they are.
Less elite, less well-educated, less well-connected.
People who can't just up and leave when they don't like the way things are going.
And yes, the progressive elites of which Laurie Penny is a part have all played their role.
Yes, I bet indeed that Steve Bannon is too hot for these people to handle because these people will have to come to terms with the monster they have created.
And it's so strange because nobody seems to have paid attention to anything Bannon's saying.
He's not doing anything wrong.
He's just not an elitist.
Whereas Laurie Penny is.
That the mainstream media isn't putting up all the voices and all the main arguments that we should be giving in all of the.
No, no, no.
The point is that white nationalism should not be one of the main arguments we're talking about in a prestigious public space like The Economist.
I have no doubt that they will hold him to account.
And this isn't easy.
I understand why The Economist has come to their decision.
I disagree with it, and I will not be appearing.
The host really should have corrected her here because we're not talking about white nationalism.
We are talking about economic and cultural localism.
We are saying that local communities across the Western world that have been suffering under the burdens imposed on them by globalism of the sort Laurie Penny supports is bad and is causing trouble for people who didn't ask for it.
And it's got to the point now where their lives are becoming tangibly worse.
And it's at this point that we say, right, okay, we'll ease off on the globalism.
We'll just stop it for a while.
Maybe we will follow a bit of a policy of national interest for the little people within the country.
That doesn't mean genocide, Laurie.
It just means not opening the borders quite as much as they're currently open.
Perhaps think about how we can cut back some of their taxes, maybe.
Nobody is asking for the veneration of the state.
No one is asking for a white-only country.
We're asking to be left alone by a class of people who have designs on the whole world.
I know that being one of these people, it's tough to understand.
So why don't you just give me another description of a social justice warrior?
These people, what they want is attention.
When they are given airtime, they've already won.
I think actually what you want is attention, Laurie, and I think the people who are boycotting this want is an attention.
It's a kind of virtue-singling process.
It doesn't really do anything to combat the night.
Nicely done, Ella.
That's exactly what she's doing.
The idea that she's got any room to talk in this regard.
And thing is right.
I don't even dislike Laurie Penny on a personal level.
I'm looking at thinking she's probably not ill-meaning.
She's just part of a system that's given her privileges.
And she doesn't want to give those privileges up.
And Steve Bannon is coming to take them away.
And she doesn't like that.
I guess it's a rough world, Laurie, when you're born a rich kid.
None of the rest of us know.
I mean, it doesn't make the point that you don't need to hear what white nationalists think.
You know, if we were doing it.
It's a discussion about race.
You wouldn't need to get a racist on.
If you were doing one about domestic abuse, you wouldn't need to get a wife beater on.
I mean, there is a limit.
Do you want anyone to be able to do that?
I mean, you have to hear the same argument.
What argument does a wife beater make?
Like, what are they saying?
Look, I'm pro-wife beating because it's written in the Quran.
What is it?
What's the pro-wife-beating argument?
Just out of interest.
I was under the impression that domestic violence was generally out of passion, and it wasn't like a reasoned position.
But let's hear the, obviously you have to have these people on.
If you're going to discuss these issues, you should probably have a representative of those issues on the program to be discussed.
Wouldn't that make sense?
And if you are afraid of these ideas, get someone who isn't.
If you don't think you can knock them down, find someone who can.
I'm like, hang on, hang on, Laurie.
I'm like you.
I'm no fan of Steve Bannon.
But I would question the idea that he's a fascist.
I think that the word fascist gets thrown around too much, and the seriousness of fashion fascism is being kind of called into question here by labelling him that.
The point is, you have an opportunity to hold someone's politics to account on a public platform.
As a journalist, that's something that would really excite me.
I'd love to be on that panel because I tell you, it wouldn't take me long to tear him down.
He is going to carry on interviewing Steve Bannon.
They haven't said that they're just going to be able to do it.
How's that going?
Can I let me finish my point?
Let me finish that point.
Laurie, let me finish my point.
It wouldn't take me long to take him down, and I'm not a political heavyweight.
His views are not legitimized by society.
We do not have nations of people who believe in Muslim bads.
Yes, but we do.
Why are you so freaked by him?
I'm not freaked at all.
I'm just telling you about him.
Will you let me finish?
Okay, I'm just going to jump in here because actually Laurie's right.
We actually do have nations of people just like Steve Bannon.
I think Ella's mistake here is the fact that she is actually conflating herself with someone like Laurie Penny.
And I don't think they're the same.
I don't think Ella Whelan is an internationalist who thinks that nation states should be ended and who thinks that capitalism is the world's greatest evil.
I don't think she does.
But Laurie Penny will definitely believe something similar to that.
That we operate in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that's holding everyone down.
It's definitely going to be something along those lines.
And I think there are a lot more people like Bannon than there are Penny as well.
I am not freaked out.
I am disgusted.
I'm disgusted that we treat people like this with respect and dignity and still dignity.
Laurie Penny is disgusted that we treat someone with respect.
When you're disgusted that we're treating anyone with respect, is it possibly time to re-evaluate one's own politics?
If respect is a problem, no matter who it's towards, maybe, just maybe, the fault lies with you.
Dignify them by letting them in to prestigious public.
I was honored to be invited to be part of the Economist Festival.
I don't believe a person like Steve Bannon deserves that honour.
Whatever people think of his, that, you know, we're going to challenge his views.
How is challenging the views of racists and white nationalists going in Europe right now?
That's what I don't think.
I don't think it's going very well.
Laurie Penny believes that Europe is about to be overrun by Nazis who are going to come out of small local communities away from vast metropolitan areas.
And these people are going to be angry, very angry, because of the hundreds of thousands of millions of migrants that the left has brought into the countries so they can feel like white saviours.
No, excuse me.
You talked about letting, how about letting me finish here?
We're running out of time.
It's not going well.
My final point is that in a free society, you hold freedom of speech as the baseline.
That is the thing you always have to defend.
If you don't defend it, you are a coward and you are an enemy of faith.
What about society?
We have run out of speech.
Free speech is the key.
Well, Ella nailed it and Laurie Penny changed the subject.
For Laurie Penny to then bring up human rights is rather ironic, given how free speech is a human right.
But as far as the far left are concerned, the only way to stop a fascist is to become a fascist.
And so they readily become fascists in an instant.
They don't care about your rights.
And then they will claim that you don't care about human rights.
So a lot of people are probably thinking, okay, what the hell does Bannon even say?
So I'm going to end this video with a selection of clips from him from various different interviews, just explaining his opinion and his view of the world.
Today is actually the day that you've released the trailer for your new film.
Now, it depicts the coming election as a violent battle.
Why so extreme?
Well, I think if you look at what's happening in the streets with Antifa and these neo-Nazis, everything, that the country is really almost like the 1960s.
To a degree, because of the two sides of what's arguing, you see, the country is coming apart.
And I think all these issues have to be put on the table.
Really with fear and anger.
Do you think that you can rely on the deplorables to come out again this time?
I'm not so sure as fear and anger as rationality.
I think working class people and middle class people in this country realize that something's wrong.
Upon their shoulders rests the entire tax burden and upon their shoulders really rest this kind of liberal post-war international order, the kind of globalist system that's out there, right?
They are quite rational.
So now what you're going to see, I think, in this election is there's still a lot of anger out there.
And I think that this anger can be harnessed.
You know, this anger can be harnessed to have another big victory for Trump.
The one thing different in 16, the Clinton campaigns, we were joking beforehand, we were fairly disorganized, except on the ground.
We had a terrific ground game.
In addition, Trump had this kind of powerful populist message, which she missed.
She really went for identity politics.
They also didn't take us very seriously.
They saw a collection of kind of quasi-amateurs.
We had a lot of people just kind of fill in the gaps there.
And they didn't take it seriously.
The difference in this election is that these groups are what I call fully woke.
They understand exactly what's going on.
They're looking at the right congressional districts.
So this one's going to have to go in kind of full consciousness.
You're not going to sneak up on them like we did last time.
Here's what shocks me.
Here's what shocks me.
The party at Davos loves democracy until it starts going against them.
And here's what's so stunning.
These elections are not even close now.
The rejection of the party of Davos in Italy is two-thirds of the vote.
And by the way, the old paradigm of left and right doesn't even matter anymore because you had both a left-wing populist movement and you had a right-wing populist movement that's number one wants to reject what they're being force-fed.
And so I think, and by the way, those are one was an internet party and the other was doing it on Facebook Live.
Why are you so against the party of Davos?
I mean, you're a member of the elite.
You work for Goldman Sachs.
By the way, I'm a blue-collar kid.
I'm a blue-collar kid that had the great benefit after my naval service.
Why are you traveling up at the moment?
Private police?
Actually, we're going commercial.
Are you?
We're going commercial.
No, but I've had a great opportunity to go to Harvard, to work at Goldman, have my own firm, sell it to SajGen.
And by the way, through the sweat of my own brow to make some money.
But I've been a populist at heart, and I'm dedicated to this populist movement.
The last 10 years, I've dedicated to helping build this populist movement.
So I'm a populist and I'm a nationalist, and wherever I can either observe or give people some advice, I'll be there for them.
So by the way, because I can see the problems of what the elites have, and the elites have this kind of arrogance that their decisions are the right decisions, and that local people, the ruves in the countryside that only have one Syrian, only one Syrian, and are too stupid to understand that they shouldn't have any fear, and so they should just vote for the party of Davos.
This is what kills me.
You know, when you're winning elections, it's okay.
But as soon as you're, listen, it's the rise of fascism, it's a rise of fear-mongering.
You just, just for the simple reason, you can't convince anybody anymore to vote for the party of Davos.
You've got about a third of the people that vote for it.
Two-thirds of the people in country after country.
This continent has voted for lots of different parties in lots of different countries since the Second World War.
And some of them were left-wing, some of them were right-wing, some of them center-left, some of them were center-right, whatever.
It's not just about the party of Davos.
It is about preventing history from repeating itself in the most vicious form.
Well, I say this.
I think people in these countries, I think when you go to Poland, I think you go to Austria, you go to the Czech Republic, Hungary, you don't see people here that are saying, hey, we want to go back to the 1930s.
Remember, it was the elites in those countries.
Those are the elites in the countries that drove people to war, if you go back and look at the history of it.
Not working class people.
Here's the bottom line.
The party of Davos has been arrogant.
The party of Davos hasn't worried about what people's patriotism is, what their love of country is, what their love of their cultures are.
They've tried to dictate it to it.
You see it at country after country after country.
And I think what's happening now is that the tables are getting run on you.
And as the tables get run on you, you're going to throw up everything in the world.
These are fascists.
These are potential Nazis.
They're going to bring another war.
You're going to have the destruction you had 70 years ago.
And aren't we wonderful we protect you from it?
If you're so wonderful and you're protecting from them, where did you make that sale in Italy?
Okay?
Where did you make that sale in Hungary?
I use Davos as the epitome.
No, no, but it's a scientific, managerial, engineering, financial elite, right?
In the city of London and Wall Street, they kind of control that.
These corporatists that don't care about the little guy.
They look at the little guy as just another unit of production, right?
A unit of consumption.
And I think the arrogance of it has been outstanding.
And so, by the way, they had their run.
Okay, they had to run, and now they're being, you know, there's a counter to that.
There's a counter to that in the United States, there's a counter to that in the United Kingdom, there's a counter to that throughout the continent of Europe.
And by the way, there's a counter to that in South Korea.
The populist nationalist message, which focuses on workers and focuses on citizens and focuses on their betterment, okay, is what's going to make this system.
And if you somehow don't start to share that, you're going to have a revolution.
Okay, you can't continue on with the wealthy just taking care of themselves.
You said at the very beginning, the poor rubes in the countryside are too stupid to understand.
I never said that.
That's what I mean.
You implied they're too dumb to understand.
There's only one ceremony in the world.
What I said is they don't get the information that they should get money.
And they're too dumb to go find it.
Well, you know what?
I don't think people are that dumb.
I think people find the information they need.
Just like, hang on, just like the language you say, you know, you guys are the arbiters of what's acceptable and what's not acceptable.
And what you said is this language is racist, it's nativist, it's xenophobic, it's all these terrible things.
Yet, the deplorables, and by the way, the perfect thing was Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton goes on September 10th, goes to Wall Street, okay, with a big fundraiser where she raised $5 million and she has BABS.
Barbara Streisand is going to be the headliner.
She comes out with a written statement, not off the top of her head, a written statement.
And what does she say?
50% of Trump's supporters are deplorable, okay, and they're irredeemable.
Okay, that is the globalist party at Davos.
The contempt they have for the working men and women of our country, the backbone of our civic society, the backbone of our artists.
You need that anger.
You need that rage to win, don't you?
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