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You’ve heard the names of our Deep State swamp creatures. But the details of their career histories, criminal indictments, and intersecting political activities paint a startling picture.
Alt-right rabble-rouser and pseudo-intellectual, Steve Bannon, was part of the team that salvaged Trump’s floundering 2016 campaign. Like Roger Stone and Mike Flynn, he was in the war room at the Willard Hotel around January 6, 2020—having told his podcast audience that “all hell is going to break loose.”
What happened between those dates is quite a tale. With Trump’s 2024 candidacy looming, Steve Bannon remains poised to bring his nasty visions to life.
*Correction: During this bonus, Julian mistakenly says Trump called it “The Movement.” He meant to say that Bannon did.
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As you may know, this was Steve Bannon's four-month rebound adventure after being fired from the White House as an internally unpopular and divisive figure accused of strategic leaking to the press.
His boss also reportedly disliked his appearing on the cover of Time magazine under the headline, The Great Manipulator, and also being depicted on Saturday Night Live as the Grim Reaper.
Dominating Alec Baldwin's Trump, who at the end of the sketch agrees to go sit at the little table in the Oval Office while Bannon's Grim Reaper sits at the big desk.
We're now in the period of late 2017 to late 2020, or to put that in context, that's between the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on one end and the Capitol insurrection on the other.
What else was Steve doing on this forced hiatus as he licked his wounds and traveled the globe?
Well, he went to Brazil to align himself with proto-fascist presidential hopeful Jair Bolsonaro and his son, and did in fact serve as an informal advisor to that victorious campaign.
As an aside, our episode titled Steve Bannon, Mystic, features a long-form conversation with Benjamin Teitelbaum.
You might remember he's the author of War for Eternity.
This is based on 20 hours of interviews with Bannon during this exact period that we're talking about.
And the book shows how the religious philosophy called Traditionalism, with a capital T, unites Influential far-right populist thinkers from Hungary to Russia to the US to Brazil.
The book begins, as I remember, with Bannon's eight-hour meeting with Putin's infamous advisor, Alexander Dugin, in a Rome hotel in 2018, and this resonates with Bolsonaro's advisor, Olavo de Carvalho, as well as one-time Hungarian opposition leader, Gábor Vona, all of whom are inspired by traditionalism.
Now, I've covered these ideas somewhat obsessively as well as their political implications in a pair of episodes titled Kali Yuga Chess and Empire of Lies, but here's the thumbnail.
Traditionalism's two most significant proponents are French mystic René Guénon, born in 1886, and Italian philosopher Julius Evola, born in 1898.
The latter was something of a student of the former.
Evola's ideas influenced Mussolini's fascism, he also moved in Nazi circles in the early days of the Reich, and he felt Mussolini was too compromising, not fascist enough.
Essentially, Traditionalism calls for a return to a more old-world ordering of societies based on something akin to the Hindu idea of a caste system defined by inborn spiritual virtue.
It also borrows the idea of cycles of cosmic time from Hinduism and sees our supposedly dark era, the Kali Yuga, as you may have heard it called in yoga circles, as ruled over by an upside-down decadence in which the impure slave caste has risen to power.
Traditionalists believe that a forced cataclysm can reignite the golden age of priestly, quasi-monarchical rule that eschews what current major proponent Alexander Dugin describes as the unipolar Western imposition of universal human rights and pluralist democracy.
Dugan has also forged ties via in-person meetings and dialogue with right-wing parties in France, Hungary, Bulgaria, Austria, and Greece.
Bannon is his man in America.
In addition to Bannon publicly describing at CPAC, that's the Conservative Political Action Committee, in 2017, that Trump's first hundred days in office under his guidance were focused on dismantling the administrative state, literally destroying anything about government set in place to help those in need, to protect the environment and to put limits on corporate greed, he has elsewhere also referred to him as a blunt instrument.
And a man out of time.
Now that last bit about being a man out of time is actually a reference to the kind of figure that traditionalists believe can aggressively bring about their mythic golden age.
But, you know, that's Steve Bannon for you.
It's a lot of pseudo-intellectual and quasi-religious political ideas as a delivery system for far-right authoritarianism and his own fantasies of ultimate power.
On Wednesday, several small planes flew over New York's Hudson River, trailing banners that read New Federal State of China.
Fugitive Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and former White House adviser Steve Bannon said on Wednesday they plan to establish a new federal state of China.
So far, there hasn't been much response.
During this gap period that we're exploring, our boy Steven also befriended Guo Wengui.
He's the exiled Chinese billionaire I talked about in the very first episode of Swamp Creatures as we previewed Bannon.
Perhaps you remember Guo and Stevie's excellent adventure on that $37 million dollar superyacht in Upper New York Bay where they signed a contract in blood that declared allegiance to the so-called New Federal State of China?
