What’s the Truth About Steve Bannon?

The demonization of Stephen K. Bannon from all angles as soon as he was named Trump’s chief strategist was unlike anything I can recall. It was even worse than what the media said about Trump throughout his campaign, which immediately made me wonder — is this guy really as horrible as they say?

If I, someone who reads news constantly, can’t be sure what to make of Bannon, how is it possible that millions of Americans on Twitter and Facebook could be so sure he’s a “white nationalist” and anti-Semite? The simple answer is that the media told them so, which is extremely dangerous. As such, I decided to start reading as much as I could about Bannon.

Unlike 90% of these overnight Steve Bannon experts, I had already read the lengthy 2015 Bloomberg article on him, This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America. I remember finding it so interesting that I tweeted it out to my followers, imploring them to take a read. I can’t recall the details of the piece, but I remember my major takeaway was that this man is a force to be reckoned with. Of course, reading one article about Bannon a year ago gives you very little real knowledge about him. As such, given all the recent scrutiny, I went on a hunt for both pro and anti-Bannon articles. I figured I might be able to come to some sort of better, although naturally still quite imperfect, conclusion.

Let’s start with some of the claims, namely that he is a “white nationalist, anti-Semite.” The second claim seemed ridiculous on its face from what I know, which is why I immediately wondered about what’s really going on. From what I can tell, the main thrust of the argument stems from a claim his ex-wife made in a judicial proceeding. Here’s what he supposedly said about where to send their daughters to school:

“The biggest problem he had with Archer is the number of Jews that attend,” Piccard said in her statement signed on June 27, 2007.

“He said that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiny brats’ and that he didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews,” Piccard wrote.

“I told him that there are children who are Jewish at (a competing school), and he asked me what the percentage was. I told him that I didn’t know because it wasn’t an issue for me as I am not raising the girls to be either anti-Semitic or prejudiced against anyone,” she wrote.

Steve Bannon denies the comments (apparently his kids went to the school anyway), so it’s a matter of he said, she said. So did he say it? Who knows, but for someone who doesn’t want his daughters being around Jews, he certainly spends a lot of time with Jews.

For example, he was close friends with the site’s founder, the late Andrew Breitbart. A Jew. Then there’s the current CEO of Breitbart, Larry Solov. Also a Jew. Finally, the site’s current senior-editor-at-large, Joel Pollak is an orthodox Jew who keeps the sabbath. The list goes on. Moreover, Jews who no longer work at Breitbart, and don’t even particularly like Steve Bannon, insist he’s not an anti-Semite. The most credible evidence comes from Ben Shapiro, who actually quit Breitbart due to his distaste for Bannon. Nevertheless, here’s what he had to say about him at the Daily Wire:

So, in a not-unexpected move, Donald Trump has elevated former Breitbart News CEO Steve Bannon to chief strategist of the White House.

When I left Breitbart back in March, I accused Bannon of turning Breitbart News into Trump Pravda; as I wrote, “Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter.”

That decision paid off for Bannon – in August, he became Trump’s campaign “CEO.” At that point, I wrote this piece describing who Bannon was, and this one for The Washington Post describing his probable impact on the campaign.

With Bannon’s accession to a top White House role, it’s time to answer some brief questions about the man and what he’s likely to do.

Is Bannon Anti-Semitic And Racist? I have no evidence that Bannon’s a racist or that he’s an anti-Semite; the Huffington Post’s blaring headline “WHITE NATIONALIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE” is overstated, at the very least. With that said, as I wrote at The Washington Post in August, Bannon has openly embraced the racist and anti-Semitic alt-right – he called his Breitbart “the platform of the alt-right.” Milo Yiannopoulos, the star writer at the site, is an alt-right popularizer, even as he continuously declares with a wink that he’s not a member. The left’s opposition to Trump, and their attempts to declare all Trump support the alt-right have obfuscated what the movement is. The movement isn’t all Trump supporters. It’s not conservatives unsatisfied with Paul Ryan, nor is it people angry at the media. Bannon knows that. He’s a smart man, not an ignorant one. The alt-right, in a nutshell, believes that Western culture is inseparable from European ethnicity. I have no evidence Bannon believes that personally. But he’s happy to pander to those people and make common cause with them in order to transform conservatism into European far-right nationalist populism. That means that the alt-right will cheer Bannon along as he marbles Trump’s speeches with talk of “globalism” – and that Bannon won’t be pushing Trump to dump the racists and anti-Semites who support Trump anytime soon. After all, they love Bannon – actual white supremacists like Peter Brimelow called his August appointment “great news,” and Richard Spencer explained, “Breitbart has elective affinities with the Alt Right, and the Alt Right has clearly influenced Breitbart. In this way, Breitbart has acted as a ‘gateway’ to Alt Right ideas and writers. I don’t think it has done this deliberately; again, it’s a matter of elective affinities.” That doesn’t mean Bannon will push racist or anti-Semitic policy, or that he’ll be anti-Israel himself – unless it serves his interests.

From what I have learned in my limited research, Ben Shapiro is on the money. Bannon deserves criticism, but he doesn’t deserve to be called a white nationalist, anti-Semite. That’s merely “crying wolf” and it’s a very dangerous thing to do, as was explained in the incredible, must read article I highlighted yesterday, You Are Still Crying Wolf.

Where I take exception to Shapiro’s comment is the implication that the actual white nationalist, anti-Semetic community is some sort of large force to be reckoned with. As was pointed out in the “crying wolf” article mentioned above:

The alt-right is mostly an online movement, which makes it hard to measure. The three main alt-right hubs I know of are /r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board.

The only one that displays clear user statistics is /r/altright, which says that there are about 5,000 registered accounts. The real number is probably less – some people change accounts, some people post once and disappear, and some non-white-nationalists probably go there to argue. But sure, let’s say that community has 5,000 members.

Stormfront’s user statistics say it gets about 30,000 visits/day, of which 60% are American. My own blog gets about 8,000 visits/day , and the measurable communities associated with it (the subreddit, people who follow my social media accounts) have between 2000 – 8000 followers. If this kind of thing scales, then it suggests about 10,000 people active in the Stormfront community.

4chan boasts about 1 million visits/day. About half seem to be American. Unclear how many go to the politics board and how many are just there for the anime and video games, but Wikipedia says that /b/ is the largest board with 30% of 4Chan’s traffic, so /pol/ must be less than that. If we assume /pol/ gets 20% of 4chan traffic, and that 50% of the people on /pol/ are serious alt-rightists and not dissenters or trolls, the same scaling factors give us about 25,000 – 50,000 American alt-rightists on 4Chan.

Taking into account the existence of some kind of long tail of alt-right websites, I still think the population of the online US alt-right is somewhere in the mid five-digits, maybe 50,000 or so.

50,000 is more than the 5,000 Klansmen. But it’s still 0.02% of the US population. It’s still about the same order of magnitude as the Nation of Islam, which has about 30,000 – 60,000 members, or the Church of Satan, which has about 20,000. It’s not quite at the level of the Hare Krishnas, who boast 100,000 US members. This is not a “voting bloc” in the sense of somebody it’s important to appeal to. It isn’t a “political force” (especially when it’s mostly, as per the 4chan stereotype, unemployed teenagers in their parents’ basements.)

That being said, I do think Breitbart uses intentionally divisive and hyperbolic headlines in order to generate traffic. I don’t think this is especially helpful or ethical, but that doesn’t make Steve Bannon an anti-Semitic white nationalist, nor does it make Breitbart a anti-Semitic white nationalist website.

Finally, I have a personal friend who sometimes writes for Breitbart. His name is Matt Tyrmand, and he is a self-described Polish-Jewish-American populist, who had paternal-side relatives murdered in the Holocaust. This is not a person who would be writing for a white nationalist, anti-Semitic website, I can tell you that with certainty. Here’s a snippet of how he describes his own political beliefs when I asked:

I consider myself a libertarian populist which I view as an Edmund Burke classical liberal (modern day conservative- more centrist conservative than polarized neos/ paleos). To me this connotes single standard rule of law (classical republicanism) as the end goal that if/when corrupted (as has been last 25-30 years by cronyism) democratic principles of legitimacy by popular will need to be utilized to recalibrate the republican ideals (period we are now in). I am also a nationalist in what I term the “soft” sense which is quintessentially patriotic and concerned with the preservation of nation state sovereignty and delineated national borders. Nation state sovereignty is sacrosanct as free citizens vote in their nation state- not the globally considered iteration.

Moving along, there’s also the opinion of Alan Dershowitz, a man who is certainly not enamored with Steve Bannon. Dershowitz recently proclaimed Bannon is not an anti-Semite in a Haaretz piece.

As such, I think the verdict is clear. Steve Bannon is not anti-Semetic. Is he a “white nationalist,” though? Again, there seems to be very little evidence of this. Let’s start with this segment hosted by Don Lemon. Don and several of his guests claim they can prove Bannon is both anti-Semitic, and a white nationalist, but such proof never emerges.

In order to make sure I see all sides on this issue, I’ve been imploring my Twitter followers all morning to send me any and all factual articles bolstering the thesis that Bannon is a anti-Semetic, white nationalist. I received no replies on the anti-Semitic part, and very few on the white nationalist part. The most interesting bit I got was the following excerpt from a Washington Post article. For some context, this is from an interview Bannon conducted with Donald Trump in 2015:

Last November, for instance, Trump said he was concerned that foreign students attending Ivy League schools have to return home because of U.S. immigration laws.

“We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country,” Trump said. He paused. Bannon said, “Um.”

“I think you agree with that,” Trump said. “Do you agree with that?”

Bannon was hesitant.

“When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

Trump said he would build a border wall, but still wanted to let highly educated foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges to be able to stay in the country.

“I still want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”

Bannon stopped himself, but he seems to think that a large percentage of Silicon Valley CEOs being from Asia is a threat to civil society. This seems consistent with his worldview that American values are more than just a commitment to the U.S. Constitution, but that much of the good in America depends on an adherence to a Judeo-Christian heritage. Not only do I disagree with this worldview, I think it’s very dangerous. It implies that those from an Asian background are inherently less committed to constitutional government than Americans who have been here for generations. I see no evidence of this, particularly given the millions of U.S. citizens who were more than willing to sacrifice freedom for safety in the wake of 9/11. If that’s not a betrayal of civic society, I don’t know what is.

However, to really get into the mind of Bannon, it’s imperative that you read the Buzzfeed transcript from a 2014 talk he gave via Skype to the Human Dignity Institute, which was hosting a conference on poverty at the Vatican. Buzzfeed summarizes (accurately in my opinion), a main thrust of Bannon’s worldview as:

Bannon suggested that a racist element in far-right parties “all gets kind of washed out,” that the West was facing a “crisis of capitalism” after losing its “Judeo-Christian foundation,” and he blasted “crony capitalists” in Washington for failing to prosecute bank executives over the financial crisis.

Since we’ve already spent a lot of time on the part about racism, I want to focus on the other points emphasized. On the former, I very much disagree, on the latter I am in total solidarity. So what do I find objectionable about the former?

I am of the view that if you want to be a true populist and fight for the benefit of all Americans, you need to be a uniter. Focusing too heavily on the restoration of “Judeo-Christian” principles is a really bad way of going about that. I’m a perfect example. I try to be as ethical as I can in my everyday life, and I’m a strong supporter of the U.S. Constitution. It’s these principles that made America great, not religion. So when I see someone whose worldview seems to be centered around the belief that we are in the state we are in because of a loss of Judeo-Christian values, I see a divisive message, as opposed to something that can bring us together.

Was it also a loss of these values that led to the excesses and pillaging of the robber baron era? We’ve had plenty of decadent, deplorable periods in this country’s history, and they were caused by a loss of ethics and corrupt government, not some decline in religious-based belief. Periods of grandeur and decay also come in cycles, and we need to understand that this is the way of human civilization. In order to react to the current debased state of things (and I agree that they are debased), I find it counterproductive and simplistic to say everything is a function of losing a Judeo-Christian foundation.

This does appear to be the lens through which Bannon views the world, which could lead him to some very aggressive and dangerous foreign policy conclusions. He seems to see the planet as currently engaged in a fiery existential battle between the West and radical Islam. In that sense, he reminds me of a lot of neoconservatives. Here’s some of what he said to the aforementioned Vatican gathering.

Bannon: We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.

If you look at what’s happening in ISIS, which is the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, that is now currently forming the caliphate that is having a military drive on Baghdad, if you look at the sophistication of which they’ve taken the tools of capitalism. If you look at what they’ve done with Twitter and Facebook and modern ways to fundraise, and to use crowdsourcing to fund, besides all the access to weapons, over the last couple days they have had a radical program of taking kids and trying to turn them into bombers. They have driven 50,000 Christians out of a town near the Kurdish border. We have video that we’re putting up later today on Breitbart where they’ve took 50 hostages and thrown them off a cliff in Iraq.

That war is expanding and it’s metastasizing to sub-Saharan Africa. We have Boko Haram and other groups that will eventually partner with ISIS in this global war, and it is, unfortunately, something that we’re going to have to face, and we’re going to have to face very quickly.

Questioner: One of my questions has to do with how the West should be responding to radical Islam. How, specifically, should we as the West respond to Jihadism without losing our own soul? Because we can win the war and lose ourselves at the same time. How should the West respond to radical Islam and not lose itself in the process?

Bannon: From a perspective — this may be a little more militant than others. I think definitely you’re going to need an aspect that is [unintelligible]. I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam. And I realize there are other aspects that are not as militant and not as aggressive and that’s fine.

I hope I’m wrong, and maybe Bannon himself can correct me, but someone who sees the world in such a way would probably advocate for the sacrifice of civil liberties in the name of fighting radical Islam. That isn’t an American value, so I hope I’m wrong, but Trump was pretty blatantly anti-civil liberties even on the campaign trail.

If one half of Bannon’s worldview is that we are in a battle between the West and radical Islam, and that the West can be loosely defined as Judeo-Christian values, what is the other half of his worldview?

When it comes to Wall Street and capitalism, I tend to agree with Bannon’s perspective, and it is here where I hope he exerts the most influence on Trump. Once again, from the Buzzfeed article:

There’s a strand of capitalism today — two strands of it, that are very disturbing.

One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. I believe it’s what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.

The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement — whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.

However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.”

So I think the discussion of, should we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?”

I think it really behooves all of us to really take a hard look and make sure that we are reinvesting that back into positive things. But also to make sure that we understand that we’re at the very beginning stages of a global conflict, and if we do not bind together as partners with others in other countries that this conflict is only going to metastasize.

One thing I want to make sure of, if you look at the leaders of capitalism at that time, when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the Jewish faith, they were active participants in the Christians’ faith, and they took their beliefs, and the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored. I can see this on Wall Street today — I can see this with the securitization of everything is that, everything is looked at as a securitization opportunity. People are looked at as commodities. I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

Look, we believe — strongly — that there is a global tea party movement. We’ve seen that. We were the first group to get in and start reporting on things like UKIP and Front National and other center right. With all the baggage that those groups bring — and trust me, a lot of them bring a lot of baggage, both ethnically and racially — but we think that will all be worked through with time.

The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run.

I will tell you that the working men and women of Europe and Asia and the United States and Latin America don’t believe that. They believe they know what’s best for how they will comport their lives. They think they know best about how to raise their families and how to educate their families. So I think you’re seeing a global reaction to centralized government, whether that government is in Beijing or that government is in Washington, DC, or that government is in Brussels. So we are the platform for the voice of that.

The tea party in the United States’ biggest fight is with the the Republican establishment, which is really a collection of crony capitalists that feel that they have a different set of rules of how they’re going to comport themselves and how they’re going to run things. And, quite frankly, it’s the reason that the United States’ financial situation is so dire, particularly our balance sheet. We have virtually a hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities. That is all because you’ve had this kind of crony capitalism in Washington, DC. The rise of Breitbart is directly tied to being the voice of that center-right opposition. And, quite frankly, we’re winning many, many victories.

On the social conservative side, we’re the voice of the anti-abortion movement, the voice of the traditional marriage movement, and I can tell you we’re winning victory after victory after victory. Things are turning around as people have a voice and have a platform of which they can use.

And you’re seeing that whether that was UKIP and Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, whether it’s these groups in the Low Countries in Europe, whether it’s in France, there’s a new tea party in Germany. The theme is all the same. And the theme is middle-class and working-class people — they’re saying, “Hey, I’m working harder than I’ve ever worked. I’m getting less benefits than I’m ever getting through this, I’m incurring less wealth myself, and I’m seeing a system of fat cats who say they’re conservative and say they back capitalist principles, but all they’re doing is binding with corporatists.” Right? Corporatists, to garner all the benefits for themselves.

Harnwell: I think it’s important to understand the distinction that you’re drawing here between what can be understood as authentic, free-market capitalism as a means of promoting wealth that [unintelligible] involves everybody with a form of crony capitalism which simply benefits a certain class. And we’ve watched over the course of our conference, we’ve watched two video segments produced by the Acton Institute about how development aid is spent internationally and how that can be driven away from — it damages people on the ground but it also perpetuates a governing class. And the point that you’re mentioning here, that I think that you’re saying has driven almost a revolution movement in America, is the same phenomenon of what’s going on in the developing world, which is a concept of government which is no longer doing what it is morally bound to do but has become corrupt and self-serving. So it’s effectively the sa—

Bannon: And the tea party is using this as an example of the cronyism. General Electric and these major corporations that are in bed with the federal government are not what we’d consider free-enterprise capitalists. We’re backers of entrepreneurial capitalists. They’re not. They’re what we call corporatist. They want to have more and more monopolistic power and they’re doing that kind of convergence with big government. And so the fight here — and that’s why the media’s been very late to this party — but the fight you’re seeing is between entrepreneur capitalism, and the Acton Institute is a tremendous supporter of, and the people like the corporatists that are closer to the people like we think in Beijing and Moscow than they are to the entrepreneurial capitalist spirit of the United States.

The 2008 crisis, I think the financial crisis — which, by the way, I don’t think we’ve come through — is really driven I believe by the greed, much of it driven by the greed of the investment banks. My old firm, Goldman Sachs — traditionally the best banks are leveraged 8:1. When we had the financial crisis in 2008, the investment banks were leveraged 35:1. Those rules had specifically been changed by a guy named Hank Paulson. He was secretary of Treasury. As chairman of Goldman Sachs, he had gone to Washington years before and asked for those changes. That made the banks not really investment banks, but made them hedge funds — and highly susceptible to changes in liquidity. And so the crisis of 2008 was, quite frankly, really never recovered from in the United States. It’s one of the reasons last quarter you saw 2.9% negative growth in a quarter. So the United States economy is in very, very tough shape.

And one of the reasons is that we’ve never really gone and dug down and sorted through the problems of 2008. Particularly the fact — think about it — not one criminal charge has ever been brought to any bank executive associated with 2008 crisis. And in fact, it gets worse. No bonuses and none of their equity was taken. So part of the prime drivers of the wealth that they took in the 15 years leading up to the crisis was not hit at all, and I think that’s one of the fuels of this populist revolt that we’re seeing as the tea party. So I think there are many, many measures, particularly about getting the banks on better footing, making them address all the liquid assets they have. I think you need a real clean-up of the banks balance sheets.

In addition, I think you really need to go back and make banks do what they do: Commercial banks lend money, and investment banks invest in entrepreneurs and to get away from this trading — you know, the hedge fund securitization, which they’ve all become basically trading operations and securitizations and not put capital back and really grow businesses and to grow the economy. So I think it’s a whole area that just — and I will tell you, the underpinning of this populist revolt is the financial crisis of 2008. That revolt, the way that it was dealt with, the way that the people who ran the banks and ran the hedge funds have never really been held accountable for what they did, has fueled much of the anger in the tea party movement in the United States.

Questioner: Very simply put, there’s a growing movement among young people here in Europe, in France and in Austria and elsewhere, and they’re arguing very effectively against Wall Street institutions and they’re also appealing to people on an ethnic and racial level. And I was just wondering what you would recommend to counteract these movements, which are growing.

Bannon: One of the reasons that you can understand how they’re being fueled is that they’re not seeing the benefits of capitalism. I mean particularly — and I think it’s particularly more advanced in Europe than it is in the United States, but in the United States it’s getting pretty advanced — is that when you have this kind of crony capitalism, you have a different set of rules for the people that make the rules. It’s this partnership of big government and corporatists. I think it starts to fuel, particularly as you start to see negative job creation. If you go back, in fact, and look at the United States’ GDP, you look at a bunch of Europe. If you take out government spending, you know, we’ve had negative growth on a real basis for over a decade.

I think in Spain it’s something like 50 or 60% of the youth under 30 are underemployed. And that means the decade of their twenties, which is where you have to learn a skill, where you have to learn a craft, where you really start to get comfortable in your profession, you’re taking that away from the entire generation. That’s only going to fuel tribalism, that’s only going to fuel [unintelligible]… That’s why to me, it’s incumbent upon freedom-loving people to make sure that we sort out these governments and make sure that we sort out particularly this crony capitalism so that the benefits become more of this entrepreneurial spirit and that can flow back to working-class and middle-class people. Because if not, we’re going to pay a huge price for this. You can already start to see it.

The bailouts were absolutely outrageous, and here’s why: It bailed out a group of shareholders and executives who were specifically accountable. The shareholders were accountable for one simple reason: They allowed this to go wrong without changing management. And the management team of this. And we know this now from congressional investigations, we know it from independent investigations, this is not some secret conspiracy. This is kind of in plain sight.

In fact, one of the committees in Congress said to the Justice Department 35 executives, I believe, that they should have criminal indictments against — not one of those has ever been followed up on. Because even with the Democrats, right, in power, there’s a sense between the law firms, and the accounting firms, and the investment banks, and their stooges on Capitol Hill, they looked the other way.

And by the way: It’s all the institutions of the accounting firms, the law firms, the investment banks, the consulting firms, the elite of the elite, the educated elite, they understood what they were getting into, forcibly took all the benefits from it and then look to the government, went hat in hand to the government to be bailed out. And they’ve never been held accountable today. Trust me — they are going to be held accountable. 

The purpose of this article was to dig into the mind of Steve Bannon and present what I believe is a honest critique of who is he and how he sees the world. Like each and everyone one of us, Steve Bannon is a complicated individual, with a unique perspective on what’s wrong with the world and how to make it better. I’ve concluded that while he isn’t a white nationalist, or anti-Semite, there are aspects to his worldview that I find concerning. However, when it comes to Wall Street and capitalism we seem to be on the same page, and I hope he focuses on that, and finds himself an open-minded ally in Donald Trump.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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