Steve Bannon

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

“Speak in the vernacular”: Mike Davis, “Ten Immodest Commandments: Lessons from a Fumbling-and-Bungling Lifetime of Activism,” Truthout, November 20, 2011. “deplorables”: Steve Bannon, host, “Biden Chaos; Easy Money Destroys the Deplorable’s,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,517, December 28, 2021, posted on Rumble. “Never again will they be able to other you”: Steve Bannon, host, “Independence Day!!; Naomi Wolf’s Coup,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,506, December 23, 2021, at 17:30, posted on Rumble. his “community”: Bannon, “Independence Day!!,” at 19:53. “heads on pikes”: Dan Mangan, “Steve Bannon’s Podcast Barred from Twitter After He Made Beheading Comment About Fauci, FBI Director Wray,” CNBC, November 5, 2020.

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Findings from the 2021 American Values Survey,” Public Religion Research Institute, November 1, 2021. “muscle memory”: Steve Bannon, host, deleted episode, War Room: Pandemic (podcast). “Step 3. Develop a thug caste”: Naomi Wolf, “Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps,” The Guardian, April 24, 2007. “Warrior Moms” … “Army of Moms”: Steve Bannon, host, “Parents Are Still Taking to the Streets,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,387, November 3, 2021, posted on Rumble; Steve Bannon, host, “Army of Moms Have Been Mobilized,” War Room: Pandemic (video), October 29, 2021, at 0:45. She warns him gravely … a president who forcibly separated: Bannon, “Independence Day!!

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But while I was there, organizers asked me to give a short talk about the shock of the 2008 financial crisis and the raging injustices that followed—the trillions marshaled to save the banks whose reckless trades had caused the crisis, the punishing austerity offered to pretty much everyone else, the legalized corruption that all of this laid bare. These were the seeds of discontent that right-wing populists in dozens of countries would eventually exploit for a fiercely anti-immigrant and anti-“globalist” political project, including Donald Trump, under the tutelage of his chief advisor, Stephen K. Bannon. At the time, however, many of us still held out hope that the crash could catalyze a democratic revival and a new era of left power, one that would discipline corporate might and empower flailing democracies to address our many surging emergencies, including the climate emergency. That’s what my speech at Occupy was about.

War for Eternity: Inside Bannon's Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers
by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum
Published 14 May 2020

were a problem for leftists: See Richard Hughes Seager, Buddhism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Chapter 3: The Jedi Master a sign of phoniness: David Von Drehle, “Steve Bannon Is a Swiss-Cheese Philosopher,” Washington Post, September 12, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/steve-bannon-is-a-swiss-cheese-philosopher/2017/09/12/3a45f43c-97e7-11e7-82e4-f1076f6d6152_story.html. “an adviser who hearkens back to Julius Evola”: “Steve Bannon at DHI,” Soundcloud (BuzzFeed News), 2014. https://soundcloud.com/buzzfeednews/steve-bannon-at-dhi. Chapter 4: Killing Time the hidden world of their own psyches: See Natalya Tamruchi, “Bezumie kak oblast svobody,” NLO 100 (2009), http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2009/100/ta33-pr.html.

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v=blYxwdG8dBo. I have edited this translation of the speech. He had met with Eduardo Bolsonaro: “Steve Bannon Endorses Far-Right Brazilian Presidential Candidate,” Reuters, October 26, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-election-bannon/steve-bannon-endorses-far-right-brazilian-presidential-candidate-idUSKCN1N01S1. advising the Bolsonaro election campaign: “Brazil: Steve Bannon to Advise Bolsonaro Presidential Campaign,” Telesur, August 15, 2018, https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Brazil-Steve-Bannon-to-Advise-Bolsonaro-Presidential-Campaign-20180815-0003.html. occultist magazine Planète: This magazine was founded by Louis Pauwels, who later collaborated with Alain de Benoist of the French New Right.

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“not to criticize far-right activists”: Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, “Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster,” New York Times, August 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/politics/steve-bannon-trump-white-house.html. courageous refusal to bow to media: Jonathan Swan, “What Steve Bannon Thinks About Charlottesville,” Axios, August 16, 2017, https://www.axios.com/what-steve-bannon-thinks-about-charlottesville-1513304895-7ee2c933-e6d5-4692-bc20-c1db88afe970.html. critics blamed the incident on Bannon’s influence: Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on Charlottesville; Again Blames ‘Both Sides,’” New York Times, August 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Published 17 Jul 2017

“He was not a rebel”: Matt Viser, “Harvard Classmates Barely Recognize Bannon of Today, Boston Globe, November 26, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/11/26/look-steven-bannon-and-his-years-harvard-business-school/B2m0j85jh5jRKzKbMastzK/story.html. Chapter Four: “A Dangerous Way to Look at the World” Bannon started a production company: Daniel Miller, “Inside the Hollywood Past of Stephen K. Bannon, Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2016, www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-stephen-bannon-donald-trump-hollywood-20160830-snap-story.html. a shady, little-known Italian: David McClintick and Anne Faircloth, “The Predator: How an Italian Thug Looted MGM, Brought Crédit Lyonnais to Its Knees, and Made the Pope Cry, Fortune, July 8, 1996, archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1996/07/08/214344/index.htm.

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,’” Breitbart.com, August 9, 2015, www.breitbart.com/video/2015/08/09/megyn-kelly-if-you-cant-get-past-me-how-are-you-gonna-handle-vladimir-putin/. “Mr. Trump is an interesting man”: Megyn Kelly, “Megyn Kelly Addresses Donald Trump’s Remarks,” The Kelly File, August 10, 2015, video.foxnews.com/v/4412819805001/?#sp=show-clips. “The Arrogance of Power”: Stephen K. Bannon and Alexander Marlow, “The Arrogance of Power: Megyn Kelly’s ‘Good Journalism,’” Breitbart.com, August 11, 2015, www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/08/11/the-arrogance-of-power-megyn-kellys-good-journalism/. “Roger Ailes just called”: Donald J. Trump, Twitter post, August 10, 2015, 8:35 A.M., twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/630764447716540417.

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He’s like an organism that could have grown and blossomed only under a precise and exacting set of conditions—a black orchid. This book is the backstory of how those conditions came to be—it’s the part of the movie you haven’t seen. To understand Trump’s extraordinary rise, you have to go all the way back and begin with Steve Bannon, or else it doesn’t make sense. TWO “WHERE’S MY STEVE?” The Trump-Bannon partnership, like so much else in Trump’s life, has a bizarre and winding lineage that traces back to a lawsuit. In the mid-1990s, Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, was looking to move in on Atlantic City, New Jersey, a possibility that threatened the livelihoods of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, the Trump Taj Mahal, and other gambling establishments along Atlantic City’s Boardwalk.

Siege: Trump Under Fire
by Michael Wolff
Published 3 Jun 2019

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. To the Memory of My Father Lewis A. Wolff Acknowledgments * * * Immediately after Fire and Fury was published, the president publicly and furiously broke with Stephen K. Bannon, the man arguably most responsible for making him president, over remarks he had made in the book. Donald Trump’s wrath helped cost Bannon the backing of his patrons, billionaire Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and forced his departure from Breitbart News, the news site that Bannon led and the Mercers controlled.

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My book Fire and Fury was the resulting account of the organizational chaos and constant drama—more psychodrama than political drama—of Trump’s first seven months in office. Here was a volatile and uncertain president, releasing, almost on a daily basis, his strange furies on the world, and, at the same time, on his own staff. This first phase of the most abnormal White House in American history ended in August 2017, with the departure of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and the appointment of retired general John Kelly as chief of staff. This new account begins in February 2018 at the outset of Trump’s second year in office, with the situation now profoundly altered. The president’s capricious furies have been met by an increasingly organized and methodical institutional response.

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Donald Trump’s wrath helped cost Bannon the backing of his patrons, billionaire Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and forced his departure from Breitbart News, the news site that Bannon led and the Mercers controlled. It is a measure of Bannon’s character that he stood by his remarks in Fire and Fury without complaint, quibbles, or hurt feelings. In all my years in this business, I have encountered few sources who, after revealing themselves, didn’t blame the person who exposed them. Steve Bannon, as the most clear-eyed interpreter of the Trump phenomenon I know, as the Virgil anyone might be lucky to have as a guide for a descent into Trumpworld—and as Dr. Frankenstein with his own deep ambivalence about the monster he created—is, in this volume, back again, and on the record, with my thanks for his trust and cooperation

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
Published 5 Jan 2018

This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s first hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events barreled on without natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain coming down on the first act of Trump’s presidency only with the appointment of retired general John Kelly as the chief of staff in late July and the exit of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later. The events I’ve described in these pages are based on conversations that took place over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn spoke to. The first interview occurred well before I could have imagined a Trump White House, much less a book about it, in late May 2016 at Trump’s home in Beverly Hills—the then candidate polishing off a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of topics while his aides, Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, and Jared Kushner, went in and out of the room.

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He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.” By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility. The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his own money in it.

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Bob Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable presidential mythmaking—wrote a long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential actions seemed part of an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision making. Only the most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part of this awesome pageant. Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer. * * * But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential character and power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what created Steve Bannon’s opportunity. The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced, his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely ones go to the more likely candidates.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

“The idea,” he told Wired: Noah Shachtman, “How Andrew Breitbart Hacked the Media,” Wired, March 11, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/03/ff-andrew-brietbart/. That December Breitbart attended: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017), 85–87. See also Joshua Green interview with Matthew Boyle, “Exclusive—A Devil’s Bargain: How Steve Bannon Met Andrew Breitbart, Then Put Conservatives on Path to Destroy Hillary Clinton Once and For All,” Breitbart, July 19, 2017, https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/07/19/exclusive-a-devils-bargain-how-steve-bannon-met-andrew-breitbart-put-conservatives-path-destroy-hillary-clinton-once-for-all/. From its very origin: “#WAR—Breitbart 1st Installment,” YouTube (video), 1:41, August 6, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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He quietly created Breitbart.com in the likeness of the Drudge Report in late 2005, just half a year after HuffPo’s launch, when BuzzFeed was still just a twinkle in Peretti’s eye. But Breitbart still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with it. That December Breitbart attended the Liberty Film Festival, where a film called Reagan’s War was set to debut. The young blogger was casting about for like-minded culture warriors. He saw in the film’s director, Stephen K. Bannon, a kindred spirit. As the audience filed out after the Q&A, he approached Bannon. “Brother, we’ve got to change the culture,” he said. “You’re one of us.” Breitbart liked to say that politics was downstream from culture, and as Joshua Green recounts in Devil’s Bargain, he and Bannon were in an upstream position at the moment, equipped to assert themselves at the center of a new right-wing media wave.

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“I think Donald Trump”: Joy Behar Show, CNN (transcript), April 19, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1104/19/joy.01.html. Using a tool called Prism: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html. Long before he would take: Scott Shane, “Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump,” New York Times, November 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/us/politics/steve-bannon-white-house.html. A Columbia Journalism Review study: Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT 400,000 farmers in his supply chain: Cyril Gilson, “Blockchain Tech May Allow Developing World to Leapfrog Developed World: Brock Pierce,” CoinTelegraph, November 20, 2017. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT more than $5 million a month: Shawn Boburg and Emily Rauhala, “Stephen K. Bannon Once Guided a Global Firm That Made Millions Helping Gamers Cheat,” Washington Post, August 4, 2017. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Bannon secured a $60 million investment: Ibid. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “These guys, these rootless white males”: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin, 2017), 146. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Willett wrote in 2012: J.

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Within a few years, 450,000 people were playing EverQuest, millions more had joined a similar game called World of Warcraft, and virtual items were, by one estimate, a $2 billion a year business. Pierce’s IGE opened an office in Shanghai to get closer to Chinese gold farmers. Pierce has said he had as many as 400,000 farmers in his supply chain. By 2005, IGE was taking in more than $5 million a month. That year, former Goldman Sachs banker—and future Donald Trump consigliere—Steve Bannon was hired to help take Pierce’s virtual-gold company public. Bannon secured a $60 million investment in the company from Goldman Sachs and a group of investment funds. Pierce netted $20 million and stepped down. Bannon took over the company, which soon failed due to a more effective crackdown on virtual-item sales by game makers.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

Chapter 8 Delete Facebook On March 17, 2018, the New York Times and the Observer of London broke front-page stories about a company called Cambridge Analytica that had obtained profile information, records of likes and shares, photo and location tags, and the lists of friends of tens of millions of Facebook users. A whistleblower within the UK-based political consulting firm had brought the story to the news organizations with a stunning claim that the firm, funded by Trump supporter Robert Mercer and led by Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, had created a new level of political ad targeting using Facebook data on personality traits and political values. But the jaw-dropping detail was that Cambridge Analytica had harvested the Facebook data without users’ permission. “The breach allowed the company to exploit the private social media activity of a huge swath of the American electorate, developing techniques that underpinned its work on President Trump’s campaign in 2016,” the New York Times reported.1 The Observer wrote that the “unprecedented data harvesting, and the use to which it was put, raises urgent new questions about Facebook’s role in targeting voters in the US presidential election.”2 It was the latest breach of trust in Facebook’s repeated pattern of data privacy abuses.

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And the article published as a result of those conversations, on the morning of Monday, May 9, 2016, delivered. Titled “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,”4 the bombshell story appeared to confirm suspicions long held by conservatives and long voiced by far-right political pundits like Glenn Beck and Trump campaign leader Steve Bannon. It claimed that Facebook and other gatekeepers of information on the internet were putting their thumbs on the scale. The piece had a controversial reception, with some questioning its agenda. And within Facebook, members of the Trending Topics team were furious at how the article portrayed their work.

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They created numerous iterations of a single ad, changing colors and tweaking a word here and there to appeal to specific demographics and voters in microtargeted geographies. The Facebook ads were often responses to negative narratives about Trump in the mainstream media. His actual political rival was less important, Trump’s former senior adviser Steve Bannon had explained in a Bloomberg interview in February 2018. “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media,” he said. “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Sandberg wasn’t taking part in Kaplan’s dinners. Her focus was on improving relations with other critics.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

Michael Shearer of the Post argued something similar: Like several other Senate candidates eyeing 2020, Warren has endorsed a suite of expensive policy proposals that have made some in the party nervous… For this reason, some Republicans have signaled that they would welcome a Warren run in 2020. Stephen K. Bannon, a former aide to Trump, dismisses Warren as “the weakest candidate the Democrats could put up.” The easiest way to predict what kinds of “electability” stories you’ll see in an election season is to look at the field of candidates and see which ones have a lot of lobbying and ad money behind them.

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Shouldn’t we want the best qualified people to run government just as we want the best qualified to fly airplanes, perform surgery, design buildings, etc? Trump politically was and is a million miles from the ideals of the original Populists. However, in 2016, he constantly invited ridicule from smarty-pants national media figures of the Boot type, knowing it could only burnish his “populist” credentials. That August, with Steve Bannon as his campaign manager, Trump added a twist, selling himself to audiences as a savior of African Americans. “I thought about Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln is a pretty good Republican,” Trump cracked that day in Iowa. “It brings me to a subject that is important and personal for me. Nothing means more to me than making our party the home of the African-American vote…” Snickers shot through the press section.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

See also www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/arron-banks-nca-quote-17-19/; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 36 Alastair McCall and Robert Watts, ‘Five of UK’s richest men bankrolled Brexit’, Sunday Times, April 2017. 37 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 38 ‘Arron Banks, Better for the Country and others referred to the National Crime Agency for multiple suspected offences’, The Electoral Commission, November 2018. 39 ‘Arron Banks faces Brexit referendum spending probe’, BBC, November 2018. 40 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2017), p. 84. 41 Harry Davies, ‘Ted Cruz using firm that harvested data on millions of unwitting Facebook users’, Guardian, December 2015. 42 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 43 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2016), p. 84. 44 Martin Shipton, ‘Controversial Ukip funder and Brexit supporter Arron Banks was Cardiff’s Honorary Consul from Belize’, WalesOnline, July 2018. 45 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London, 2016), p. 9. 46 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 47 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Revealed: Arron Banks Brexit campaign’s “secret” meetings with Cambridge Analytica’, openDemocracy, December 2018. 48 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit’, Guardian, February 2017. 49 Elaina Plott, ‘Five Questions for Gerry Gunster, the DC Strategist Who Ran the “Leave” Campaign’, Washingtonian, June 2016. 50 Peter Geoghegan, ‘Brexit bankroller Arron Banks, Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon – explosive emails reveal fresh links’, openDemocracy, November 2018. 51 Peter Geoghegan and Jenna Corderoy, ‘Revealed: Arron Banks Brexit campaign’s “secret” meetings with Cambridge Analytica’, openDemocracy, December 2018. 52 Ed Caesar, ‘The Chaotic Triumph of Arron Banks, the “Bad Boy of Brexit”’, New Yorker, March 2019. 53 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Written testimony to the Fake News Inquiry’, House of Commons.

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Chapter 10: Making Europe Great Again 1 Silvia Sciorilli Borrelli, ‘Matteo Salvini plans return as PM, wants alliance with Trump’, Politico, December 2019. 2 Jacob Bojesson, ‘Trump Does Meet And Greet With Italian Nationalist Party Leader, Mussolini Defender’, Daily Caller, April 2016. 3 Corinna Harrison, ‘Salvini meets Trump in Philadelphia’, the Italian Insider, April 2016. 4 Dan Mangan, ‘Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon hits Rome as far-right candidate runs for prime minister of Italy’, CNBC, March 2018. 5 SourceMaterial, Stefano Vergine and Claudia Torrisi, ‘The heretic in the Vatican: How Pope Francis became a hate figure for the far right’, Source Material, April 2019. 6 Steve Bannon, ‘Matteo Salvini’, Time, 2019. 7 Nandini Archer and Claire Provost, ‘Revealed: dozens of European politicians linked to US “incubator for extremism”’, openDemocracy, March 2019. 8 Claire Provost, ‘How the far right is weaponising “the family”’, The Face, April 2019. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Maya Oppenheim, ‘Verona protests: Tens of thousands of campaigners march against “medieval” anti-LGBT+ and anti-abortion conference’, Independent, April 2019. 12 Claudia Torrisi, Claire Provost and Mary Fitzgerald, ‘A deep dive into “dark money”’, The Face, August 2019. 13 ‘Up to 150 feared dead in “year’s worst Mediterranean tragedy”’, Al Jazeera, July 2019. 14 Nandini Archer, Claudia Torrisi, Claire Provost, Alexander Nabert and Belen Lobos, ‘Hundreds of Europeans “criminalised” for helping migrants – as far right aims to win big in European elections’, openDemocracy, May 2019. 15 Isobel Thompson, ‘Europe’s aristocratic elite in the fight against women’s and LGBT rights’, openDemocracy, March 2019. 16 Jason Horowitz, ‘The “It” ’80s Party Girl Is Now a Defender of the Catholic Faith’, New York Times, December 2018. 17 ‘The Guardian view on the rise of Christian-nativist populists: a troubling sign of things to come’, Guardian, December 2019. 18 Mattia Ferraresi, ‘How the Catholic Church Lost Italy to the Far Right’, New York Times, July 2019. 19 Tom Kington, ‘World Congress of Families: Russia plays happy Christian families with Europe’s populists’, The Times, March 2019. 20 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, ‘Ready to Fight Gay Marriage at Court Door’, New York Times, March 2013. 21 J.

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Arron Banks, an insurance broker with interests in gold mines and a sprawling business empire registered in tax havens around the world, had become the biggest campaign donor in British electoral history. Banks was eventually investigated – and exonerated – by the National Crime Agency, amid concerns about the sources of his record Brexit contributions. The trail continued, stretching far beyond Britain’s shores – from Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon and leading figures in Donald Trump’s America to Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán and Europe’s insurgent far right. There were corporate-funded think tanks and lobbyists with access to the highest levels of government and networks of keyboard warriors in suburban bedrooms churning out hyper-partisan news stories that spread like digital wildfire.

Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower's Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again
by Brittany Kaiser
Published 21 Oct 2019

At that time, a poll had shown that about seven in ten voters nationwide, including 52 percent of all voters said they would definitely not vote for him.15 I was fairly certain that he was a threat to neither CA’s other clients nor me. He would never win. Alexander agreed. That’s why we were in DC on June 16. We had come to see Steve Bannon, who, Alexander said, could help us get to Trump, a useful cash cow for commercial purposes, and an experiment for politics. The only thing I knew about Steve Bannon when I met him was that he was the guy who had founded CA with Alexander and the Mercers, and that he was “big” in media and film production. Alexander always spoke about “Steve” with such reverence: He was a power broker, the go-between for CA and Mercer money, the person who made campaigns happen.

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Alexander had set up a meeting with Corey Lewandowski in June 2015, before the fateful day Trump descended that escalator in Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid. The two had been introduced by Steve Bannon, and the parties involved had known long before that some kind of campaign was coming. Regardless of whether Donald planned to run for president or build a bigger commercial empire, we followed the lead with steadfast efforts to get in there somehow. Over three months since June, we had gone back and forth with Corey, without confirming a meeting. But now Donald himself was asking aloud on Steve Bannon’s phone for us to come to Trump Tower and help him out. How could Corey say no to the boss? Corey Lewandowski could meet us at Trump Tower early the next morning, Trump told us.

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What was the difference between the SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica? Did they share information and resources? Why was a controversial American figure like Steve Bannon on the company’s board? Alexander took each question and fumbled it. The company wasn’t fear-based. It presented the clients it represented in the best light possible. It didn’t single out voters; it was selective to whom it sent messaging, in order not to be wasteful. It had an in-house legal team that was thorough in making certain the company observed laws in other countries. Steve Bannon had advised the company on how to work in America. Alexander then likened the circumstances with Leave.EU as a series of dates that hadn’t resulted in a “value proposition” leading to a marriage.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

In examining all the complex relationships between all of these people and entities—Vote Leave, AIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Steve Bannon, the Mercers, Russia, and the Trump campaign—Cadwalladr saw that I was right in the middle of all of them. Seeming to pop up everywhere, I looked like the Zelig of 2016 to her. At first, I didn’t want to talk to Cadwalladr. I had no interest in being at the center of some massive Guardian exposé. I was exhausted, I had been burned over and over, and I wished that I could just put the Cambridge Analytica ordeal in the past. On top of that, Cambridge Analytica was no longer just a company. My old boss Steve Bannon was now sitting in the White House and on the National Security Council of the most powerful nation on earth.

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As the former director of research, I’ve brought with me evidence of how Facebook’s data was weaponized by the firm, and how the systems they built left millions of Americans vulnerable to the propaganda operations of hostile foreign states. Schiff leads the questioning. A former federal prosecutor, he is sharp and precise with his lines of inquiry, and he wastes no time getting to the heart of the matter. Did you work with Steve Bannon? Yes. Did Cambridge Analytica have any contacts with potential Russian agents? Yes. Do you believe that this data was used to sway the American electorate to elect the president of the United States? Yes. An hour goes by, then two, then three. I chose to come here of my own accord and to answer these questions about how a liberal, gay twenty-four-year-old Canadian found himself part of a British military contractor developing psychological warfare tools for the American alt-right.

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But with the advent of the Internet, it became possible to create commodities out of our lives—our behavior, our attention, our identity. People were processed into data. We would serve as the raw material of this new data-industrial complex. One of the first people to spot the political potential of this new reality was Steve Bannon, the relatively unknown editor of right-wing website Breitbart News, which was founded to reframe American culture according to the nationalist vision of Andrew Breitbart. Bannon saw his mission as nothing short of cultural warfare, but when I first encountered him, Bannon knew that something was missing, that he didn’t have the right weapons.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

“to an extraordinary degree”: Anne Applebaum, “100 Years Later, Bolshevism Is Back. And We Should Be Worried,” Washington Post, Nov. 6, 2017. “the godfather of what commentators”: Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 2017), 3. Steve Bannon, Trump’s now estranged: Ryan Lizza, “Steve Bannon Will Lead Trump’s White House,” New Yorker, Nov. 14, 2016. The conservative billionaire: Jane Mayer, “The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind the Trump Presidency,” New Yorker, Mar. 27, 2017. “He offered simple solutions”: Sebestyen, Lenin, 3. Hitler devoted whole chapters: “Propaganda: Goebbels’ Principles,” physics.smu.edu/​pseudo/​Propaganda/​goebbels.html; Michiko Kakutani, “In ‘Hitler,’ an Ascent from ‘Dunderhead’ to Demagogue,” New York Times, Sept. 27, 2016; Michiko Kakutani, “ ‘How Propaganda Works’ Is a Timely Reminder for a Post-Truth Age,” New York Times, Dec. 26, 2016.

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* * * — Although Trump frequently criticized the decision to invade Iraq during the 2016 campaign, his White House has learned nothing from the Bush administration’s handling of that unnecessary and tragic war. Instead, it has doubled down on reverse-engineered policy making and the repudiation of experts. For instance, the State Department has been hollowed out as a result of Steve Bannon’s vow to fight for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the White House’s suspicion of “deep state” professionals. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a thirty-six-year-old real-estate developer with no government experience, was handed the Middle East portfolio, while the shrinking State Department was increasingly sidelined.

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In the three decades since the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine (which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues) and the two decades since Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, right-wing media has grown into a sprawling, solipsistic network that relentlessly repeats its own tropes (the dangers of immigration, the untrustworthiness of mainstream media, the evils of big government, and so on), and it’s succeeded in framing many debates in the national conversation through its sheer shamelessness and decibel level. Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon described as a “platform for the alt-right,” and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which reaches an estimated 38 percent of American households through local news broadcasts, have expanded the right-wing media universe, along with countless online sites, YouTube channels, and radio broadcasts. In an Orwellian move, Sinclair has even forced local news anchors to read a scripted message about “false news” that echoes President Trump’s own rhetoric undermining real reporting.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2019

Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: How US Billionaire Helped to Back Brexit,” Guardian, February 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit. 15. Jane Mayer, “New Evidence Emerges of Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica’s Role in Brexit,” New Yorker, November 17, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/new-evidence-emerges-of-steve-bannon-and-cambridge-analyticas-role-in-brexit. 16. Nigel Farage, “Farage: ‘Brexit Could Not Have Happened without Breitbart,’” interview by Alex Marlow, Turning Point USA Student Action Summit, December 20, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following photographs: 1: Courtesy of Lee Neuwirth © Lee Neuwirth 2: Courtesy of Seth Rumshinsky 3: Photo by Rick Mott, taken at the NJ Open Go Tournament, provided with permission, courtesy of Stefi Baum 4, 5: Courtesy of Brian Keating 6: Courtesy of David Eisenbud 7: Courtesy of Wall Street Journal and Jenny Strasburg 8: Patrick McMullan/Getty Images ISBN 9780735217980 (hardcover) ISBN 9780735217997 (ebook) ISBN 9780593086315 (international edition) Jacket design: Karl Spurzem Jacket image: (equations) Virtualphoto / Getty Images Version_1 CONTENTS Also by Gregory Zuckerman Title Page Copyright Dedication Cast of Characters A Timeline of Key Events Introduction Prologue PART ONE Money Isn’t Everything Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven PART TWO Money Changes Everything Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Epilogue Photographs Acknowledgments Appendices Notes Index About the Author To Gabriel and Elijah My signals in the noise CAST OF CHARACTERS James Simons Mathematician, code breaker, and founder of Renaissance Technologies Lenny Baum Simons’s first investing partner and author of algorithms that impacted the lives of millions James Ax Ran the Medallion fund and developed its first trading models Sandor Straus Data guru who played key early role at Renaissance Elwyn Berlekamp Game theorist who managed the Medallion fund at a key turning point Henry Laufer Mathematician who moved Simons’s fund toward short-term trades Peter Brown Computer scientist who helped engineer Renaissance’s key breakthroughs Robert Mercer Renaissance’s co-CEO, helped put Donald Trump in the White House Rebekah Mercer Teamed up with Steve Bannon to upend American politics David Magerman Computer specialist who tried to stop the Mercers’ political activities A TIMELINE OF KEY EVENTS 1938 Jim Simons born 1958 Simons graduates MIT 1964 Simons becomes code breaker at the IDA 1968 Simons leads math department at Stony Brook University 1974 Simons and Chern publish groundbreaking paper 1978 Simons leaves academia to start Monemetrics, a currency trading firm, and a hedge fund called Limroy 1979 Lenny Baum and James Ax join 1982 Firm’s name changes to Renaissance Technologies Corporation 1984 Baum quits 1985 Ax and Straus move the company to California 1988 Simons shuts down Limroy, launches the Medallion fund 1989 Ax leaves, Elwyn Berlekamp leads Medallion 1990 Berlekamp departs, Simons assumes control of the firm and fund 1992 Henry Laufer becomes full-time employee 1993 Peter Brown and Robert Mercer join 1995 Brown, Mercer achieve key breakthrough 2000 Medallion soars 98.5 percent 2005 Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund launches 2007 Renaissance and other quant firms suffer sudden losses 2010 Brown and Mercer take over firm 2017 Mercer steps down as co-CEO INTRODUCTION You do know—no one will speak with you, right?”

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His efforts, while valuable, raise the question of whether one individual should enjoy so much influence. So, too, does the clout of his senior executive,* Robert Mercer, who is perhaps the individual most responsible for Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Mercer, Trump’s biggest financial supporter, plucked Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway from obscurity and inserted them into the Trump campaign, stabilizing it during a difficult period. Companies formerly owned by Mercer and now in the hands of his daughter Rebekah played key roles in the successful campaign to encourage the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Mike Pence: no one-on-one meals with female coworkers Jia Tolentino, “Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women from Power,” New Yorker, March 31, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/​culture/​jia-tolentino/​mike-pences-marriage-and-the-beliefs-that-keep-women-from-power. The Ranking of Human Life Steve Bannon and abuse allegations Santa Monica Police Department, crime report, January 1, 1996, http://www.politico.com/​f/​?id=00000156-c3f8-dd14-abfe-fbfbbe310001. Elizabeth Chuck, Ali Vitali, Andrew Blankstein, and Katie Wall, “Trump Campaign CEO Steve Bannon Accused of Anti-Semitic Remarks by Ex-Wife,” NBCNews.com, August 27, 2016, http://www.nbcnews.com/​politics/​2016-election/​trump-campaign-ceo-steve-bannon-accused-anti-semitic-remarks-ex-n638731. Hadas Gold and John Bresnahan, “Trump Campaign CEO Once Charged in Domestic Violence Case,” Politico, August 25, 2016, http://www.politico.com/​story/​2016/​08/​steve-bannon-domestic-violence-case-police-report-227432.

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General Dynamics and Boeing to head the department of defense. And the Goldman Sachs guys for pretty much everything that’s left. The handful of career politicians who have been put in charge of agencies seem to have been selected either because they do not believe in the agency’s core mission, or do not think the agency should exist at all. Steve Bannon, Trump’s apparently sidelined chief strategist, was very open about this when he addressed a conservative audience in February 2017. The goal, he said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” (by which he meant the government regulations and agencies tasked with protecting people and their rights).

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If these kinds of protests spread, more developers could decide to de-Trump themselves. And it’s a fair bet that if his golden name starts disappearing off giant phallic symbols from Vancouver to Manila, Trump would not take it well, nor would his sons, who are reportedly already worried about the damage that senior advisors like Steve Bannon may have done to the family name. In a parallel tactic, when the White House closed down its call-in comment lines in January 2017, one group—whitehouseinc.org—suggested voters phone Trump hotels and resorts and tell whoever answered that they were upset about the president’s plans to take away their health insurance, or any other policy grievances they had.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019
by Stewart Lee
Published 2 Sep 2019

If he had his way every politician would be slung in prison and given a taste of what they deserved’ (The Right Honourable Skinhead, Richard Allen, 1981).8 Indeed, Steve Bannon seems to be carrying vast sections of dialogue from The Right Honourable Skinhead around in his head, which spill unbidden from his careless face. Bannon said, off air, to the LBC presenter Theo Usherwood, who had queried his support for Tommy Robinson, ‘Fuck you. Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.’9 And on page 103 of The Right Honourable Skinhead, the news magnate Steve Mannon, Robbie Tomlinson’s chief cheerleader, who differs only from Steve Bannon in that he is a Welsh born-again Christian, addresses radio presenter Leo Isherwood thus: ‘Flip you, boyo!

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These aren’t the times for self-loathing liberals to seek to understand the leaders of the global far right, or their supporters. That ship sailed when Trump put Breitbart into the White House.8 We should be in crisis-management mode. It’s time to reassert a fundamental principle, namely that there’s no excuse for bigotry, whichever alt-right buzzword you get Boris or Steve Bannon to rebrand it with. And if that means no more free green-room bacon sandwiches on Sunday morning for me, then so be it. We are all going to have to make sacrifices. The role of a comedian is to entertain with humour, not to preach his politics in the misguided belief that they are anything other than a professional entertainer.

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It did, but I have changed the names, and I have changed them to different names on different occasions. 7 Every Remain voter has observed evidence of the sudden shift in gear regarding what racists feel they can say in public since the referendum. Someone needs to compile some kind of archive of all this anecdotal material, so we can remember what we were like after Vote Leave uncorked the rage flask. It could be the Domesday Book of low-level anecdotal race hate. 8 In January 2018, just over twelve months later, Trump had Breitbart’s Steve Bannon removed from the White House for criticising him in the book Fire and Fury. As a result, Bannon was free to pursue his avowed intent of creating a global infrastructure for right-wing populism, which appeared to be based on his reading of Richard Allen’s 1970s Skinhead novels. My Paul Nuttalls routine has floated back up the U-bend 4 December 2016 I believe it was a frog who wrote, ‘Explaining a joke is like dissecting the American writer Elwyn Brooks White.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

Bannon’s ideology and films: Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘A Leninist’ Who Wants to ‘Destroy the State,’ ” DB, Aug. 22, 2016; Jeremy Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming,’ ” NYT, April 8, 2017; Owen Matthews, “Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s Ideological Ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” NW, April 17, 2017; Christopher Dickey and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Steve Bannon’s Dream: A Worldwise Ultra-Right,” DB, Nov. 13, 2016. Bannon’s films were simplistic Bannon quotation: Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon.” Views: Radosh, “Steve Bannon”; Peters, “Bannon’s Views”; Matthews, “Alexander Dugin.” Bannon on the “treasonous” behavior of Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr.: David Smith, “Trump Tower meeting with Russians ‘treasonous,’ Bannon says in explosive book,” TG, Jan. 3, 2018.

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Bannon, David Bossie, and Citizens United: Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement,’ ” Hollywood Reporter, Nov. 18, 2016. Bannon and Mercers: Matthew Kelly, Kate Goldstein, and Nicholas Confessore, “Robert Mercer, Bannon Patron, Is Leaving Helm of $50 Billion Hedge Fund,” NYT, Nov. 2, 2017. Bannon’s extreme-Right ideology Bannon quotation: Owen Matthews, “Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s Ideological Ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” NW, April 17, 2017. Bannon’s ideology and films: Ronald Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘A Leninist’ Who Wants to ‘Destroy the State,’ ” DB, Aug. 22, 2016; Jeremy Peters, “Bannon’s Views Can be Traced to a Book That Warns, ‘Winter Is Coming,’ ” NYT, April 8, 2017; Owen Matthews, “Alexander Dugin and Steve Bannon’s Ideological Ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” NW, April 17, 2017; Christopher Dickey and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Steve Bannon’s Dream: A Worldwise Ultra-Right,” DB, Nov. 13, 2016.

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Right down to the last, Manafort showed the touch of a true Russian political technologist, not so much denying the facts as changing the subject to a spectacular fiction. On the day the story of his cash payments broke, August 14, 2016, Manafort helped Russia to spread an entirely fictional story about an attack by Muslim terrorists on a NATO base in Turkey. Manafort was replaced as campaign manager by the right-wing ideologue and filmmaker Steve Bannon, whose qualification was that he had brought white supremacists to the mainstream of American discourse. As the director of the Breitbart News Network, Bannon made them household names. America’s leading racists, to a man, admired Trump and Putin. Matthew Heimbach, a defender of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, spoke of Putin as the “leader of the anti-globalist forces around the world,” and of Russia as “the most powerful ally” of white supremacy and as an “axis for nationalists.”

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent
by Nesrine Malik
Published 4 Sep 2019

guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAD7POnjWq-aPJ8FxLdeplMTPn2tKzwIxqeEqeVywFBMl6GwkQEQc67pQNvFPNVdRH1pqFxJxv2l2AglC7g-Tw5wuk0cYkF1EuOuT8l8ilx_vbSuX78A3Kufu3hatRCURvz0qZdv75ViU-VripSv2bdvg5Oyc5t9g7vAcI7bbEnda [accessed on 25 July 2019] 116 ‘Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out’: Sarah Marsh, ‘Steve Bannon calls for Tommy Robinson to be released from prison’ (Guardian, 15 July 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/15/steve-bannon-tommy-robinson-released-from-prison-trump-strategist-lbc-radio-interview [accessed on 25 July 2019] 116 ‘This is exactly the argument they like’: Mark Townsend, ‘#FreeTommy – the making of a far-right English “martyr”’ (Guardian, 29 July 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/29/tommy-robinson-far-right-resurgence-steve-bannon-us-support [accessed on 25 July 2019] 118 ‘free speech grifters’: Mari Uyehara, ‘The Free Speech Grifters’ (GQ, 19 March 2018), https://www.gq.com/story/free-speech-grifting [accessed on 25 July 2019] 118 ‘Given the myopic focus on liberals’: ibid. 119 ‘Free Speech University Ranking’: Tom Slater, ‘Free Speech University Rankings’ (Spiked Online, 24 February 2019), https://www.spiked-online.com/free-speech-university-rankings/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 119 ‘misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential’: Carl Thompson, ‘Free Speech Rankings: misleading, ill-informed and worryingly influential’ (Times Higher Education, 17 February 2018) https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/free-speech-rankings-misleading-ill-informed-and-worryingly-influential [accessed on 25 July 2019] 119 ‘You’d have to have been living under a rock’: Tom Slater, ‘The poshos pushing campus censorship’ (Telegraph, 19 January 2016), https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/12108340/The-poshos-pushing-campus-censorship.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 120 ‘Spiked received six figure donations from the Charles Koch Foundation’: George Monbiot, ‘How US billionaires are fuelling the hard-right cause in Britain’ (Guardian, 7 December 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-billionaires-hard-right-britain-spiked-magazine-charles-david-koch-foundation [accessed on 25 July 2019] 120 ‘… overall public support for free speech has in fact, risen over time’: Matthew Yglesias, ‘Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong’ (Vox, 12 March 2018), https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/12/17100496/political-correctness-data [accessed on 25 July 2019] 121 ‘There is no campus free speech crisis’: Jeffrey Adam Sachs, ‘There is no campus free speech crisis: a close look at the evidence’ (Niskanen Center, 27 April 2018), https://niskanencenter.org/blog/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 123 ‘… suicide by boycott tactic’: Stephanie Saul, ‘The Conservative Force Behind Speeches Roiling College Campuses’ (New York Times, 20 May 2017), https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/college-conservative-speeches.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 123 ‘… a perceived “chilling” of free speech on university campuses’: Rachel Pells, ‘Anti-terror laws “to blame for campus free speech concerns”’ (Times Higher Education, 11 January 2018), https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/anti-terror-laws-blame-campus-free-speech-concerns [accessed on 25 July 2019] 124 ‘… echoed Amos’: Benjamin Kentish, ‘Universities hit back at Government claims they are restricting free speech’ (Independent, 10 January 2018), https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/university-free-speech-restrictions-hit-back-government-a8152376.html [accessed on 25 July 2019] 124 ‘speaker disinvitation attempts have a higher success rate’: Sean Stevens, Campus Speaker Disinvitation Trends (Part 2 of 2) (Heterodox Academy, 7 February 2017), https://heterodoxacademy.org/campus-speaker-disinvitations-recent-trends-part-2-of-2/ [accessed on 25 July 2019] 126 ‘Today this speech restriction, tomorrow the Inquisition’: Magdalena Jozwiak, ‘Internet, Freedom of Speech and Slippery Slope Argument – The Case of the “Right to Be Forgotten”’, (SSRN, 22 March 2018), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

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He was aware that he would go to prison if he broke the law again. It was suicide by contempt of court. What ensued was a campaign for his release that was based on the lie that his freedom of speech had been violated. A petition drew half a million signatures and far-right European leaders came to his support. Steve Bannon, former Trump strategist and alt-right publisher, almost came to blows with a London radio journalist who challenged him on his support for Robinson. ‘Fuck you,’ Bannon barked. ‘Don’t you fucking say you’re calling me out. You fucking liberal elite. Tommy Robinson is the backbone of this country.’

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Even David Duke, a KKK grand wizard (I repeat this point because it bears repeating) was scandalised by the suggestion that race had anything to do with his campaign. Allegations of racism were a ‘smear’, he responded to his supporters. ‘Remember,’ he told them at rallies, ‘when they smear me, they are really smearing you.’ There’s an uncanny echo of that in a speech by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former strategist, to a crowd at a French National Front rally in Lille almost thirty years later: ‘Let them call you racists,’ he said. ‘Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honour.’ Allegations of racism, according to Bannon, speaking to supporters of a far-right party that had proposed that jobs be first offered to ‘native’ French people before immigrants (a measure that is thought by constitutional experts to be unconstitutional and has been judged by French law to be unlawful), were just bad faith slurs.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

Jonah didn’t understand that the company’s reputation in media circles was, well, trashy, and that Kenny and Arianna were just humoring him in letting him carry on exploratory conversations with a rotating series of British executives whose names he never learned. (Jonah was awful with names.) His pitch: The Huffington Post and the Mail could “take over the English-speaking world.” He was proud when the Daily Mail seemed ready to invest. But Jonah was learning to tell a story. One person who was listening was Steve Bannon, a friend of his old partner Andrew Breitbart. Bannon, a banker turned right-wing activist with an interest in the internet, would be inspired by the angry stirrings and unhinged memes of Chris Poole’s 4chan. He had met Andrew back in 2004 and grown close to him, and now Bannon surveyed the left-wing media landscape for things to copy.

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Andrew realized he’d “forgotten a most blatant missing puzzle piece,” and that hint, along with Weiner’s claim that he’d been hacked, prompted Andrew to publish a piece under the grand byline “publius” with the memorable lede “Hacked or hung?” A week later, Andrew was on the phone with Meagan Broussard, a Texas woman who was—it emerged—one of many with whom Weiner had exchanged lewd messages. As he paced the sidewalk in front of the offices his new friend Steve Bannon had rented for him, Andrew persuaded her to text him five photographs. They were unmistakably Weiner, and unmistakably sexual. He sprinted upstairs to the office of Breitbart lawyer Joel Pollak, whom he’d brought in to prevent another Shirley Sherrod mess, and gleefully pressed his iPad against Pollak’s glass door, laughing.

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It seemed perfectly logical if you were working on the internet then, doing your best to make your own posts generate engagement and go viral. Trump wasn’t doing anything to game Facebook. He simply was what Facebook liked. A few weeks before the election, I got a lesson on this phenomenon in person from Steve Bannon, who had taken over breitbart.com when Andrew died, then left it to go chair Donald Trump’s campaign. He’d been interested in Jonah since his first glimpse at the business of The Huffington Post, so I’d been invited to Trump Tower to exchange notes with him. I walked past the golden escalator and rode an elevator up to an empty conference room to find the chairman alone, and not in any particular rush.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Charles and David Koch: Suzanne Goldenberg, “Tea Party Movement: Billionaire Koch Brothers Who Helped It Grow,” The Guardian, Oct. 13, 2010, theguardian.com/​world/​2010/​oct/​13/​tea-party-billionaire-koch-brothers; Tim Mak, “Koch Brothers, Behind Tea Party Wave, Face Democrats’ Rising Tide in 2018,” All Things Considered, NPR, Jan. 30, 2018, npr.org/​2018/​01/​30/​581730998/​koch-brothers-behind-tea-party-wave-face-democrats-rising-tide-in-2018/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT when Steve Bannon took over: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin Books, 2017), 146. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “envisioned a great fusion”: Ibid., 146. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “God Emperor,” Donald Trump: Alex Krasodomski-Jones, “What Does the Alt-Right Do Now That ‘God Emperor’ Trump Won?

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In the case of the 2008 crash, it followed in the wake of other government debacles—most notably, the Bush administration’s failure, in the weeks before 9/11, to act on intelligence warnings that al-Qaeda was planning an imminent attack; its disastrous decision to invade Iraq predicated upon the existence of weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist; and its bungled handling of Hurricane Katrina, which resulted in more than eighteen hundred deaths and more than $160 billion in damage. Trump and his allies actually wanted to amplify people’s mistrust in government or what they called the “deep state”: They wanted to conduct what Trump adviser Steve Bannon called the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” which translated into the mass jettisoning of regulations (including the rollback of more than a hundred environmental rules), and budget proposals that slashed social safety net programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and anti-poverty initiatives.

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As Sarah Palin—another harbinger of Trump—became the new face of the GOP and representatives like House majority leader Eric Cantor were ousted in primary contests, many more centrist Republicans retired or tried to reinvent themselves as hard-liners and outsiders. * * * — Even as the Republican Party was assimilating Tea Party priorities and rhetoric, another wave of radicalization was under way—just in time for the 2016 election. In his revealing book Devil’s Bargain, the journalist Joshua Green wrote that when Steve Bannon took over Breitbart News in 2012, he set about courting a new audience for the right-wing site: the alienated, tech-savvy young men who spent hours a day playing MMO games like World of Warcraft. From an earlier stint running an internet gaming company, Bannon knew the sort of internet traffic “these rootless white males” could generate, and, according to Green, he “envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude.”

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

v=Ouo7Q6Cf_yc a term first used in 1994 by the cryptographer Nick Szabo: Nick Szabo, ‘The Idea of Smart Contracts’, 1997, http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/rob/Courses/InformationInSpeech/CDROM/Literature/LOTwinterschool2006/szabo.best.vwh.net/idea.html Steve Bannon believes in Bitcoin as a means to drive a ‘global populist revolt’: Billy Bambrough, ‘Donald Trump And Steve Bannon In Surprise Bitcoin Split’, 5 Aug. 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2019/08/05/donald-trump-and-steve-bannon-in-surprise-bitcoin-split/ 13. Raiding the Raiders investment banks like Goldman Sachs began flirting with the idea of starting crypto trading divisions: https://www.wsj.com/articles/goldman-sachs-explores-a-new-world-trading-bitcoin-1506959128 and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-02/goldman-sachs-said-to-explore-starting-bitcoin-trading-venture ‘blockchain’ solutions for any form of interbank co-ordination, from securitisation: See for example William Suberg, ‘Blockchain Meets Securitization Market In New Chamber Of Digital Commerce Partnership’, Cointelegraph, 1 March 2017, https://cointelegraph.com/news/blockchain-meets-securitization-market-in-new-chamber-of-digital-commerce-partnership A team from J.

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In many ways these platforms have offered homes for those on political extremes. For example, in The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism Professor David Golumbia argues that the technology combines libertarian economics with far-right populism. Indeed, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon believes in Bitcoin as a means to drive a ‘global populist revolt’. The underbelly of the scene is also rife with anti-Semitism and anti-feminism. At a Vienna crypto gathering I met an outright neo-Nazi, who openly advocated for eugenics while a group of men listened, and remember fighting a core Bitcoin Cash developer who was insistent on his racist views.

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Most of what we call money is bank-issued or corporate-issued IOUs, and Tether was a crypto variation on this exact same principle. Tether was founded by – among others – Brock Pierce, a charismatic serial entrepreneur (and formerly a child star in the nineties Mighty Ducks film franchise). Pierce made his original millions by trading in-game currencies on online games like World of Warcraft (and worked with Steve Bannon on these gamer currencies), but later shifted his persona into a hippy libertarian crypto-guru. In 2017 he set out to develop ‘Puertopia’, a ‘crypto-utopia’ in Puerto Rico, painting a glamorous picture of the island as a future low-tax playground for jet-setter crypto-entrepreneurs. Tether, however, became embroiled in controversy, because its bosses ran another crypto company that lost millions in a major hack, after which they allegedly raided Tether’s bank account reserves to cover those losses.

The Fifth Risk
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Oct 2018

They only ever rejected one person, Paul Manafort’s secretary.” The first time Donald Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team, led by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office, on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find the governor of New Jersey seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, actually yelling, You’re stealing my money!

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The national security team inside the Trump transition—staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials—had thought that an especially bad idea. Flynn’s name wasn’t on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he’d like to have. Before Christie could intercede, Steve Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie. It’s really quick, said Bannon. You’re out. Why? asked Christie, stunned. We’re making a change. Okay, what are we changing? You. Why? It’s really not important.

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The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life. The surprise was that it was being done now, just when the work of the transition team was most critical. Only when Christie threatened to go down and tell reporters that Steve Bannon had fired him did Bannon concede, “It was Jared.” In the days after the election, the people in the building on Seventeenth and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown Washington, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered.

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong
by James O'Brien
Published 2 Nov 2018

Their private beliefs about people from countries or cultures other than their own are demonstrably racist, they just don’t like being told so. I’m not sure why, and I suspect the next chapter in these ludicrous, social media-fuelled ‘culture wars’ will see more and more people take the advice that Donald Trump’s former consigliere, Steve Bannon, gave to French fascists to wear the accusation of racism with ‘pride’fn1. For now, the kindest thing you can do in the circumstances is invite them to say whatever they want with a promise that you won’t call them names. Three or four years after I first assumed the position behind the microphone, I was told by a caller from the London borough of Hounslow that he wasn’t allowed to say what he really thought about immigration because of political correctness.

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Muslim listeners generally respond to calls like this by pointing out that they’re too busy doing the school run to be waging war against the kuffir. Or that they were going to do a bit of jihad, but something good dropped on Netflix. It is, for my money, the British way to respond to such misguided fury – with disarming humour, but Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have shown what a powerful political force that misguided fury can be when properly harnessed. James: And you think they’ll say yes. Frank: No. James: So what do we do with all the ones who say no? The ones who don’t cough immediately to being secret jihadists, hellbent upon destroying Western civilisation.

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But Trump, for me, is more symptom than disease. His political success was made possible by creating an environment of fear and loathing into which he could insert himself as saviour and protector. Historians of the future will marvel at how the malign influence of ‘news’ sources like Breitbart, run by Trump’s consigliere Steve Bannon, could have gone unchecked for so long. They will point out that nobody really objected when Trump decried facts as ‘fake news’ but anointed the Infowars loon, Alex Jones, as reliable even after Jones had described the Sandy Hook school massacre as a hoax and the parents of dead children as hoaxers.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

The move helped turn a tide of negative press and added to the coffers of a campaign that would buy a barrage of targeted Facebook advertisements as part of a voter suppression strategy designed to discourage potential Clinton supporters. After the election, Thiel was feted by Trump’s inner circle and given an office in Trump Tower, along with the latitude to install his allies in the new administration. “He was something unique,” recalled Steve Bannon, who became CEO of the campaign in August. He praised Thiel for bringing intellectual credibility and seriousness to a campaign that struggled at times to convey either. To Bannon and others on the Trumpist right, Thiel was a hero, a key enabler of Trump’s unexpected win. To the left, Thiel was uniquely villainous—a Silicon Valley power broker who’d helped hook Americans on a collection of tech services, then used his influence over those services to elect a candidate who promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

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Despite the haughty-sounding name, the company had little to do with Cambridge University—in fact, its office was in London—but Nix’s plan had been to market ideas that had been developed at Cambridge about using people’s Facebook data to guess their personality type. He would raise money from Steve Bannon and the ultra-conservative Mercer family, led by the patriarch Bob, who’d gotten rich at a quantitative hedge fund, and his daughter Rebekah. The Mercers were backers of Bannon’s news outlet, Breitbart, and had invested in Nix’s pitch to adapt the Facebook concept for use in electoral politics, enabling political campaigns to scan someone’s social network profile, predict who they were going to vote for, and serve them ads to get them to show up to the polls.

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He would suddenly have a chance to spend it. 15 OUT FOR TRUMP In his initial assessment of the jockeying for the Republican nomination for the 2016 presidential race, Thiel had thrown his weight behind Carly Fiorina, a well-known tech executive who’d been on the cover of Fortune magazine’s “Most Powerful Women” issue in 1998 when she was a senior executive at Lucent Technologies, the telecommunications equipment business spun off from AT&T, and who had later served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. “She was the only one who understood what a fucking algorithm was,” said Steve Bannon. “That’s his kindred soul.” But Thiel hadn’t been entirely enamored of Fiorina. Her business career had ended disastrously in 2005, after she pushed HP to acquire Compaq, just as the personal computer industry was beginning to contract. The merger is now considered by many to be one of the worst business deals in modern history and coincided with several waves of layoffs.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

print=1. 12Tremblay, “Intro to Gender Criticism for Gamers.” 13Lien, “No Girls Allowed.” 14Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate,” Games and Culture 13, no. 8 (2016): 787–806. 15Paulo Ruffino, “Parasites to Gaming: Learning from GamerGate” (paper, Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee, UK, 2016). 16Cherie Todd, “Commentary: GamerGate and Resistance to the Diversification of Gaming Culture,” Women’s Studies Journal 29, no. 1 (2015): 64. 17Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games,” 14. 18Jake Swearingen, “Steve Bannon Saw the ‘Monster Power’ of Angry Gamers While Farming Gold in World of Warcraft,” New York, July 18, 2017, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html. 19Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017), 81. 20Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017); Matt Lees, “What Gamergate Should Have Taught Us about the ‘Alt-Right,’” Guardian, December 1, 2016, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump. 21Robert Purchese, “ArenaNet Fires Two Guild Wars 2 Writers over Twitter Exchange with YouTuber,” Eurogamer, July 7, 2018, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-07-06-arenanet-fires-two-guild-wars-2-writers-over-twitter-exchange-with-youtuber. 22Quoted in Keith Stuart, “Richard Bartle: We Invented Multiplayer Games as a Political Gesture,” Guardian, November 17, 2014, www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/17/richard-bartle-multiplayer-games-political-gesture.

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In 2014, it became covered more widely in the media, which began to discuss a “culture war” taking place over videogames.16 The “Gamergaters” thus formed a virtual mob, directed against alternative voices, criticism, and new forms of representation in videogames. That Gamergate transpired highlights that “playing games is not an isolated event.”17 While these events made little sense to people outside of videogames, they did make sense to some of the people on the periphery of the industry. For example, Steve Bannon, who helped to run Breitbart News and then joined the Trump administration, developed a close knowledge of gamer culture through his involvement in the World of Warcraft gold-mining company Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE).18 The company employed Chinese workers to grind through repetitive tasks to earn ingame money and items, which would then be sold to wealthier players, mainly in the US.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right
by Angela Nagle
Published 6 Jun 2017

It is perhaps the single biggest success story of right-wing alternative media, with celebrities like Milo, its editor Steve Bannon rising to the top of US politics and figures like Allum Bokhari rising from relative obscurity to having meetings with the president. Bannon himself described the site as a ‘platform for the alt-right’, though he undoubtedly meant this in the looser sense of a new anti-establishment right, aligned with the European populist right and the US Trumpian right. After the election, Buzzfeed published a transcript of a long interview Steve Bannon gave to the Vatican from 2004. Presumably thinking this was a ready-made hit-piece that would destroy his reputation, Bannon came across in the interview as darkly fascinating and, relative to many Buzzfeed listicle writers, as quite a serious and intriguing person.

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But what few on the left were paying attention to in the years leading up to Trump’s election, and really throughout the entire Obama administration, was the alt-light building a multilayered alternative online media empire that would dwarf many of the above. This stretched from white nationalist bloggers in its sparsely populated corners to the charismatic YouTubers and Twitter celebrities in its more popular form. These included right-wing outsiders such as Steve Bannon who, through building a publication like Breitbart, became chief strategist to the US president. YouTube vloggers produced an abundance of popular commentary videos and ‘SJW cringe compilations’, while alt-light celebrities like Milo built careers from exposing the absurdities of the kind of Tumblr identity politics that had gone mainstream through listicle sites like Buzzfeed and anti-free speech safe space campus politics.

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics
by Elle Reeve
Published 9 Jul 2024

v=k24IlkFOVIY Christian yelled, “Free speech or die, Portland”: “Suspect in Fatal Portland Attack Yells about ‘Free Speech’ at Hearing,” Reuters, May 30, 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-muslims-portland/suspect-in-fatal-portland-attack-yells-about-free-speech-at-hearing-idUSKBN18Q11F “On 8chan you are free”: Infinitechan, Twitter, 2014. https://archive.ph/Fg3i6 The headline was: Fredrick Brennan, “Hotwheels: Why I Support Eugenics,” Daily Stormer, December 30, 2014. https://archive.ph/ftgkC In response to criticism: Fredrick Brennan, “Infinitechan Comments on Hotwheels Gets Invited to Write an Article O…,” Reddit, 2014. https://archive.ph/oi2EJ Steve Bannon, who cofounded: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (Penguin, 2017). When Breitbart reported on leaked: Milo Yiannopoulos, “Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite,” Breitbart, September 17, 2014. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2014/09/17/exposed-the-secret-mailing-list-of-the-gaming-journalism-elite/ “I was, without a doubt”: Joshua Goldberg, “First Public Statement from Joshua Goldberg,” Medium, March 18, 2020. https://medium.com/@MoonMetropolis/first-public-statement-from-joshua-goldberg-8bb061aa56a0 “I have been on the Internet”: Joshua Goldberg, “How Social Justice Warriors Are Creating an Entire Generation of Fascists,” Thought Catalog, December 5, 2014. https://thoughtcatalog.com/joshua-goldberg/2014/12/when-social-justice-warriors-attack-one-tumblr-users-experience/ If there was anything:v Joshua Goldberg, “Why Censoring Speech Creates Extremists and Causes Atrocities Instead of Stopping Them,” Thought Catalog, November19, 2014. https://thoughtcatalog.com/joshua-goldberg/2014/11/why-censoring-speech-creates-extremists-and-causes-atrocities-instead-of-stopping-them/ On Fox & Friends: Katherine Fung, “Fox News Panel Flips Out Over Father’s Day Hoax,” HuffPost, June 16, 2014. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fox-news-endfathersday_n_5498861 A few years later, Russia’s troll farm: Scott Shane, “How Unwitting Americans Encountered Russian Operatives Online,” New York Times, February 19, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/18/us/politics/russian-operatives-facebook-twitter.html Though he said everything: MoonMetropolis, Twitter. https://archive.ph/0EV5F One of Goldberg’s personas: United States v.

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The alt-right recognized “very early on that the individuals who, let’s say, live on /r 9k/ or live on 4chan, were very misogynist, but did not necessarily have a political ideology to attach to that,” Fred said. It could have gone the other way. He’d seen incels demand “government girlfriends.” Steve Bannon, who cofounded the conservative news site Breitbart, told a reporter in 2017, “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever, and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” Breitbart’s coverage of Gamergate was led by Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay alt-right personality who, not coincidentally, grew his brand with the slogan, “FEMINISM IS CANCER.”

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But the term “alt-right” was catchy, one white nationalist wrote, because it signaled distance from mainstream conservatism without endorsing national socialism or white nationalism. Through 2016, ownership of the alt-right was still up for grabs. It wasn’t clear if it would be run by explicit white nationalists, or Trumpy right-wingers who agreed that the Holocaust happened. At the Republican National Convention, Steve Bannon said Breitbart had become a “platform for the alt-right” under his leadership. “Are there anti-Semitic people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely,” Bannon told Mother Jones. “Are there racist people involved in the alt-right? Absolutely. But I don’t believe that the movement overall is anti-Semitic.”

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
by Julia Ebner
Published 20 Feb 2020

Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-47335414. 11‘Trump supporter attacks BBC cameraman at El Paso rally’, BBC, 12 February 2019. Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47208909. 12See for example Sophie McBain, ‘What Steve Bannon Really Believes In’, New Statesman, 12 September 2018. Available at https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2018/09/what-steve-bannon-really-believes. 13Betsy Woodruff, ‘The Secret Heiress Funding the Right-Wing Media’, Daily Beast, 13 September 2016. Available at https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-secret-heiress-funding-the-right-wing-media. 14Paul P. Murphy, Kaya Yurieff and Gianluca Mezzofiore, ‘Exclusive: YouTube ran ads from hundreds of brands on extremist channels’, CNN, 20 April 2018.

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Around 4,000 protesters gathered outside the BBC headquarters in Manchester on a Saturday afternoon in February 2019 to watch his ‘Panodrama documentary’ and call for the BBC licence fee to be scrapped.10 Just days before the ‘Panodrama’ premiered, a Trump supporter attacked a BBC cameraman covering a rally in El Paso, Texas.11 Tommy Robinson is just one of many self-framed journalists who are confronting the ‘lying press’ with innovative and transgressive means. Alternative news outlets and right-wing YouTube vloggers are increasingly well networked – with initiatives like Steve Bannon’s The Movement attempting to empower and connect them,12 and right-leaning donors such as the Horowitz Foundation and the Mercer Family Foundation supporting them financially.13 But a big proportion of alternative media’s funding sources, as with all popular websites, comes from advertising.14 When German brand strategist Gerald Hensel sat down one Saturday morning in 2016 to pen a blog piece about brands buying ads and banners on far-right websites, he did not expect that this would set in motion a life-changing series of events.

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Notes 1: whites only 1For analysis see Elisabetta Cassini Wolff, ‘Evola’s interpretation of fascism and moral responsibility’, Patterns of Prejudice 50(4–5), 2016, pp. 478–94. 2Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 3Richard Drake, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 4Jason Horowitz, ‘Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Facsists’, New York Times, 10 Febuary 2017. Available at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/world/europe/bannon-vatican-julius-evola-fascism.html. 5Ibid. 6Antonio Regalado, ‘2017 was the year consumer DNA testing blew up’, MIT Review, February 2018. Available at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610233/2017-was-the-year-consumer-dna-testing-blew-up/. 7Aaron Panofsky and Joan M.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Katherine Bolan Forrest Yannick Losbar, “Ross Ulbricht Silk Road Trial Judge Facing Death Threats on Dark Net,” October 20, 2014, cryptocoinsnews.com; Rich Calder, “Judge in Silk Road Case Gets Death Threats,” October 24, 2014, nypost.com. His name became more familiar J. Lester Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” November 15, 2016, buzzfeed.com; Jason Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” February 10, 2017, nytimes.com. Dale Carrico Amor Mundi, “Anissimov’s Jolt to the Far Right,” March 5, 2014, amormundi.blogspot.com. Chapter VIII: Onward, Robot Soldiers Page invited Kurzweil to join the company David J.

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He was the PayPal founder, Facebook board member, major shareholder in a CIA-funded company, Donald Trump delegate, distinguished Stanford alumnus, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Here was a rich, powerful man, regarded by many as a public intellectual, who, three years before White House adviser Steve Bannon declared war on “the administrative state,” was willing to say, regarding the “monolithic monstrosity” of government, that “breaking it down is probably an improvement.” Tech’s most dangerous billionaire was born in Germany to conservative Christian evangelicals. His father was a chemical engineer who worked for international mining companies.

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A favorite of postwar fascist terrorist groups throughout Europe, Evola had written a book called Fascism Viewed from the Right, in which he argued that Hitler and Mussolini failed because they were not extreme enough, and too populist. Evola favored a return to aristocracy. His name became more familiar in the American mainstream after then Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon (who would go on to become Trump’s campaign strategist and White House adviser) mentioned the heretofore obscure writer’s name in a BuzzFeed interview. As one scholar of right-wing traditionalism later told the New York Times, “The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant.” It was more than significant—it was alarming.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Published 14 Sep 2020

Cast of Characters The Al Saud King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the kingdom’s founder and father of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Mohammed’s younger brother and former ambassador to the United States Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, King Salman’s first wife Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, King Salman’s third wife and mother of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and briefly heir apparent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Al Saud, King Salman’s nephew and a longtime antiterrorism official close to the US government King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and predecessor Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, King Abdullah’s son and former chief of the Saudi Arabia National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the seventh son of King Abdullah Prince Badr bin Farhan Al Saud, a prince from a distant branch of the family, minister of culture, and a longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman Prince Abdullah bin Bandar Al Saud, another prince and longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman and head of the National Guard Prince Sultan bin Turki Al Saud, the son of one of King Salman’s brothers, and an outspoken prince whose criticisms got him into trouble with more powerful members of the family The Palace Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the head of King Abdullah’s Royal Court Mohammed al-Tobaishi, King Abdullah’s chief of protocol Rakan bin Mohammed al-Tobaishi, Mohammed bin Salman’s protocol chief and the son of Mohammed al-Tobaishi The MBS Entourage Bader al-Asaker, a longtime associate of Mohammed who runs his private foundation Saud al-Qahtani, an advisor to Mohammed who specializes in quashing dissent Turki Al Sheikh, a longtime companion of Mohammed who has brought foreign sports and entertainment events to Saudi Arabia The Region Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Tahnoon bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi national security advisor Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt Saad Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey Residents of the Ritz Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a cousin of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s most prominent international businessman Adel Fakeih, a Saudi businessman who became minister of economy and planning Hani Khoja, a Saudi management consultant Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman with holdings in Ethiopia Ali al-Qahtani, a general Bakr bin Laden, scion of the bin Laden construction family The Critics Jamal Khashoggi, newspaper columnist with a long history of working for and sometimes criticizing the Saudi government Omar Abdulaziz, Canada-based dissident who criticizes Saudi leadership in online videos Loujain al-Hathloul, women’s rights activist who violated Saudi law by trying to drive into the kingdom from the United Arab Emirates The US Government President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an advisor to the president Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, later US secretary of state The Businessmen Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker Kacy Grine, independent banker and confidant of Alwaleed bin Talal A note on naming: In the Saudi convention, a man is identified through a patrilineal naming system.

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Chapter 8 Little Sparta December 2016 Discarding his white robes for a buttoned-up dress shirt and aviator sunglasses, the muscled crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed, arrived for a secret meeting at Manhattan’s Trump Tower looking like an Arab James Bond. The group receiving him was unlike anything he’d seen in his years of diplomacy with the United States, his closest Western ally and protector. On one side was Steve Bannon, the former banker and right-wing media executive whose fraying fleeces over two or three layers of collared shirts, reddened cheeks, shaggy gray hair, and tendency to pontificate on the ancient past gave him the air of a rumpled, though deeply reactionary, professor. Then there was Jared Kushner, the trim real estate heir married to Ivanka Trump, who once told Bannon on a flight that he didn’t think experts with a deep understanding of the past were necessarily the best people to plot out the geopolitical future.

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Skeptical Westerners were still writing with ridicule about Abdulaziz bin Baz, the former Saudi grand mufti who denied that the Earth orbits the sun until a Saudi, King Salman’s older son Sultan, returned from a voyage on a US space shuttle and assured bin Baz that the Earth does indeed rotate on its axis and revolve around the sun. Mohammed’s two willing partners in the remade US alliance would be the same men MBZ met in Trump Tower, Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. They realized they needed to erase the Islamophobia charge to get Arab support for their top Middle East priorities. For Bannon that was punishing Iran, while Kushner needed backing for a Palestine peace deal. The young real estate executive loved the idea that he could find a way to bring peace to the Middle East with old-fashioned business sense and horse trading.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

The media whom Trump called his enemy acted like his best friend, airing his rallies in full, letting his lies linger, and treating the prospect of his win as a joke or a ratings boon. Throughout 2016, hate crimes rose as Trump rebranded racism as populism and recruited white supremacists from the dregs of the GOP (like Jeff Sessions) and the extreme right (like Steve Bannon) to join his campaign. All anyone needed to see Trump as a potential American autocrat were their own eyes. His desire to dismantle democracy was out in the open. He did not bother to hide his goals because he knew few believed he could achieve them. That sort of thing does not happen here, commentators scoffed, citing checks and balances and centuries of democratic stability.

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In summer 2014, writers Shafiqah Hudson and l’Nasah Crockett launched the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing to expose accounts impersonating black users and making obnoxious political claims.16 Many of these accounts were later revealed to be Russian troll accounts seeking to map the US political landscape and prepare to influence the 2016 election.17 Other trolls were right-wing users in the United States linked to the Russian effort: Steve Bannon (then the editor of Breitbart) and Cambridge Analytica were experimenting with social media to see how social groups could be manipulated online for political gain. According to Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, Bannon asked employees to “test messaging around Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian expansion.”18 However, few in power paid attention—in part because social media companies almost never took seriously the most common targets, women of color.

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New right-wing websites trafficked in racist propaganda, which was then echoed by the Tea Party at rallies and online. The website Breitbart, established in Israel in 2007 by the American libertarian Andrew Breitbart,27 became more bigoted and conspiracy-oriented after Breitbart died suddenly in 2012 and was replaced with future Trump campaign manager Steve Bannon. But the peddling of the birther myth was not limited to right-wing extremist sites. As I mentioned in chapter 2, in the early days of the internet most news sites were a replication of print. While flawed in many ways, this system still employed fact-checking as a standard practice. During the 2000s, print media and online media coexisted uneasily, with the latter often being dismissed as inherently unreliable.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

“refutes the overall stance”: “Gish Gallop: When People Try to Win Debates by Using Overwhelming Nonsense,” Effectiviology, accessed May 11, 2022, https://effectiviology.com/gish-gallop/. “This is about disorientation”: Brian Stelter, “This Infamous Steve Bannon Quote Is Key to Understanding America’s Crazy Politics,” CNN, November 16, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html. “hammer away”: JK Ames’s answer to “How do you respond to a Gish Gallop? Can one defend, attack or escape?,” Quora, June 6, 2022, https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-respond-to-a-Gish-Gallop-Can-one-defend-attack-or-escape.

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The leftist author and essayist William Rivers Pitt, who refers to Trump as “the reigning world heavyweight champion of the Gish Gallop,” describes the former president turning up to debates, interviews, and speeches to issue “dollops of galactic nonsense delivered in an avalanche of jumbled verbiage, all of which is abandoned without correction or refutation as the next avalanche comes sliding down the hill.” From the other end of the spectrum, Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, in an interview with journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, summed up the rationale behind the then president’s approach. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told Lewis. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” That is exactly what the Gish Gallop is designed to do in any argument: to leave you gasping for air, sunk in a flood of falsehoods and fabrications; drowned in a deluge of distortions, deflections, and distractions.

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It’s impractical, if not impossible, to go line by line. Instead, single out the weakest claim or argument made by the Galloper. Pick on that. Highlight and mock it, and present it as representative of their overall strategy. Doing so will put them on the defensive. 2. Don’t budge Referring to Steve Bannon’s quote about “flooding the zone with shit,” the writer and author Jonathan Rauch once remarked: “This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.” He’s right. When the likes of Trump and Gish engage in the Gallop, their purpose is often not to try to win people over but to muddy the argument for everyone involved.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

TUESDAY, 28 FEBRUARY Breakfast at the Hay-Adams hotel near the White House with Gary Cohn, former second-in-command at Goldman Sachs, now head of President Trump’s National Economic Council. Cohn is a savvy operator, a Wall Street trader by temperament. He beat dyslexia as a kid but he’s never experienced anything quite like the Trump White House. Especially former campaign strategist Steve Bannon, ‘the wildest of the wild cards’. Many of the staffers are barely 30, they all have an opinion and there’s next to no process. Cohn’s job is to instil discipline and set priorities. The president’s agenda is staggeringly ambitious: tax reform, a bonfire of regulations, a $1 trillion infrastructure programme and the repeal of Obamacare.

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I assumed he was talking about the economy, but Trump, the real-estate developer, is in fact referring to the decor. ‘Do you know who that is,’ says the president, pointing to a portrait. LB: ‘Yes. Sir, it’s Teddy Roosevelt.’ Trump (deflated) LB: ‘And, Mr President, you know that Teddy Roosevelt carried a big stick but he also spoke softly.’ Our conversation with Steve Bannon, Trump’s consigliere, is illuminating but in a very different way. Dishevelled with longish, curly grey hair, he cuts a charismatic figure. His sentences are dotted with references to martial history, especially the Civil War. On opposite walls: a whiteboard chock-a-block with policies and a six-column list of campaign pledges under the words ‘Make America Great Again’.

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May must make good on the pledges she made on the steps of Number 10 after her leadership win, to make Britain a country ‘that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us’. Timothy is a self-styled radical thinker with a vision of a new working-class conservatism; but he comes across as very defensive compared to Steve Bannon, his White House counterpart. Bannon only plays offence. I ask Timothy about the prime minister. How is she faring? What about President Trump grabbing her hand and leading her through the Rose Garden to a joint press conference inside the White House. A friendly gesture or the moment of subjugation?

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All
by Laura Bates
Published 2 Sep 2020

, The Conversation, 14 November 2017 29 ‘Betsy DeVos Plans to Consult Men’s Rights Trolls About Campus Sexual Assault’, Slate, 11 July 2017 30 ‘The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general’, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012 31 ‘Steve Bannon: Five Things to Know’, ADL 32 ‘How Donald Trump’s New Campaign Chief Created an Online Haven for White Nationalists’, Mother Jones, August 2016 33 ‘White Nationalists Rejoice Trump’s Appointment of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon’ Southern Poverty Law Center, 14 November 2016 34 ‘The horror, the horror’, Tortoise, 3 April 2019 35 ‘Only a proper Brexit can spare us from this toxic polarisation’, Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2019 36 ‘Steve Bannon: ‘We went back and forth’ on the themes of Johnson’s big speech’, The Guardian, 22 June 2019 37 ‘MPs’ fury at Boris Johnson’s “dangerous language”, BBC, 25 September 2019 38 ‘Man arrested outside office of Labour MP Jess Phillips’, The Guardian, 26 September 2019 39 ‘Trump defends response to Charlottesville violence, says he put it “perfectly” with “both sides” remark’, USA Today, 26 April 2019 40 ‘Dominic Cummings: Anger at MPs “not surprising”, PM’s adviser says’, BBC, 27 September 2019 41 ‘Labour MP calls for end to online anonymity after “600 rape threats” ’, The Guardian, 11 June 2018 42 ‘Ukip MEP candidate blamed feminists for rise in misogyny’, The Guardian, 22 April 2019 43 ‘Police investigate Ukip candidate over Jess Phillips rape comments’, The Guardian, 7 May 2019 44 ‘Under Siege For His Comments About Rape, UKIP’s Star Candidate Carl Benjamin Has Recruited Milo Yiannopoulos To Join His Campaign’, BuzzFeed, 8 May 2019 45 ‘Steve Bannon Targeted “Incels” Because They Are “Easy To Manipulate,” Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Says’, Newsweek, 29 October 2019 46 ‘Reddit’s TheRedPill, notorious for its misogyny, was founded by a New Hampshire state legislator’, Vox, 28 April 2017 47 ‘Red Pill Boss: All Feminists Want to Be Raped’, Daily Beast, 29 November 2017 48 ‘New Hampshire State Rep Who Created Reddit’s “Red Pill” Resigns’, Daily Beast, 22 May 2017 49 ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, New York Review of Books, 19 March 2019 50 ‘Op-Ed: Hate on Jordan Peterson all you want, but he’s tapping into frustration that feminists shouldn’t ignore’, Los Angeles Times, 1 June 2018 51 ‘Jordan Peterson: “I don’t think that men can control crazy women” ’, The Varsity, 8 October 2018 52 ‘Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson Is Saying?’

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Some of these men are cashing in on trends driven by manosphere communities, perhaps without even realising who they are appealing to. For others, the decision to appeal to certain groups seems to be more deliberate. For political figures like Donald Trump and his advisers, such as former chief strategist Steve Bannon, there are gains to be made by issuing dog whistles to the alt-right and manosphere communities. Such rhetoric, like Trump’s derisive advice to four Democratic American citizens and congresswomen of colour to ‘go back’ to the countries from which they originally came, is greeted with wild applause across the masses frequenting extremist websites.1 But a buffer of plausible deniability is also important, in order to avoid alienating a more mainstream base: a feat achieved by publicly disavowing racism and white supremacy, even while his own statements seem to send a very different message.2 For many of the other figureheads idolised, quoted and supported by the foot soldiers of the manosphere, it is also richly profitable to maintain the sympathy and loyalty of these communities, while actually holding them (either genuinely or performatively) in contempt.

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In particular, d’Ancona suggested a direct link between Bannon’s apparent strategic input and Johnson’s Islamophobic and misogynistic newspaper piece. Soon afterwards, d’Ancona later revealed, he was bombarded with angry calls from Johnson. ‘I stopped counting at 15 – though the calls continued,’ he wrote in an article for news outlet Tortoise.34 ‘Boris Johnson was furious with me for writing about his contact with Steve Bannon.’ Specifically, according to d’Ancona, Johnson was furious that the journalist had linked Bannon’s advice to his column. In other words, he seemed desperate to avoid the inference that Bannon’s input had led him to spout classic manosphere and alt-right rhetoric in the mainstream press. Writing in his column, Johnson bristled that claims of any association between him and Bannon were a conspiracy theory and a ‘lefty delusion’.35 ‘Of course I met Mr Bannon a couple of times when I was foreign secretary and he was Trump’s chief of staff,’ Johnson wrote, ‘but not since.’

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Mueller III, “Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election,” 2 vols., issued by the Department of Justice, March 2019 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Bookstore, 2019). 5.Jane Mayer, “The Danger of President Pence,” New Yorker, October 16, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/the-danger-of-president-pence, accessed September 23, 2021. 6.The phrase “deep state” was appropriated and then deployed by Steve Bannon while he was writing for Breitbart. Alana Abramson, “President Trump’s Allies Keep Talking about the ‘Deep State.’ What’s That?,” Time, March 8, 2017, https://time.com/4692178/donald-trump-deep-state-breitbart-barack-obama/, accessed September 23, 2021; Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, “Why Steve Bannon Wants You to Believe in the Deep State,” Politico, March 21, 2017, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/steve-bannon-deep-state-214935/, accessed September 23, 2021. See also Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). 7.Tom McCarthy, “Why Has Trump Appointed So Many Judges—And How Did He Do It?”

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Ron Paul has published several short books outlining his political beliefs including The Revolution: A Manifesto (New York: Grand Central, 2008) and Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (New York: Grand Central, 2011). 29.Donald Trump would become a follower of Breitbart soon after it launched, and he was an amplifier in his speeches and tweets of its “reporting.” After Andrew Breitbart’s sudden and premature death in 2012, Steve Bannon became Breitbart’s guiding force. See Breitbart.com, passim; Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017); David Carr, “The Provocateur,” New York Times, April 13, 2012, , accessed December 15, 2021; Rebecca Mead, “Rage Machine: Andrew Breitbart’s Empire of Bluster,” New Yorker, May 17, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/05/24/rage-machine, accessed September 8, 2021; James Rainey, “Breitbart.com Sets Sights on Ruling the Conservative Conversation,” Los Angeles Times, August 1, 2012, https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-xpm-2012-aug-01-la-et-breitbart-20120801-story.html, accessed June 28, 2021.

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick
by J. David McSwane
Published 11 Apr 2022

That Friday, January 31, the White House announced it would bar entry of foreign nationals who’d visited China, a move pushed by Navarro. Navarro was not yet aware of what was happening with Bright at HHS and Bowen at Prestige Ameritech, but the three were on a collision course to becoming uneasy allies, for a time. The force that would bring them together? None other than Steve Bannon. Because of course Steve Bannon. By the first days of February, Bowen realized that his friend Bright didn’t have the sway needed to escalate the nation’s preparation effort. So he turned to the press, securing an interview with the New York Times, some broadcast interviews, and a write-up at Wired.com. As word of his travails spread, Bowen got a call from a producer at War Room, the podcast hosted by Bannon, a former top adviser to Trump who still held clout in the administration, despite leaving the White House in a delightful tizzy and saying on his way out that the president was “like an eleven-year-old child.”

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Hatfill, at this point Navarro’s brain trust, helped negotiate the contract awarded to Phlow. This is remarkable because Hatfill did not work for or represent the federal government in any way. He was an adjunct professor at George Washington University, a private school, who frequently talked on the podcast by Steve Bannon, who just happened to be an ardent advocate of an antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID. Hatfill was given office space in the White House, where he coordinated with high-ranking officials and bragged to friends that he worked “an average of 10 hours a day, 7-days a week, unpaid, as the senior medical advisor to one of the President’s senior advisors.”

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the White House announced it would bar “Proclamation on Suspension of Entry as Immigrants and Nonimmigrants of Persons Who Pose a Risk of Transmitting 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” White House, January 31, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation-suspension-entry-immigrants-nonimmigrants-persons-pose-risk-transmitting-2019-novel-coronavirus/. “like an eleven-year-old child” Gabriel Sherman, “ ‘I Have Power’: Is Steve Bannon Running for President?” Vanity Fair, December 21, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/bannon-for-president-trump-kushner-ivanka. Bright presented to HHS and CDC officials Bright, Complaint. gained fame for being wrongly suspected Eric Lichtblau, “Scientist Officially Exonerated in Anthrax Attacks,” New York Times, August 8, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/washington/09anthrax.html.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

That was the legal backdrop, but the details of Tether’s executive team were also entertaining: Their public spokesperson was their Chief Technology Officer (CTO), a hotheaded Italian guy named Paolo Ardoino. One of Tether’s cofounders was a colorful figure named Brock Pierce. A former child actor, Pierce had starred in The Mighty Ducks films before segueing into various business ventures in online video and video games. Pierce worked alongside such notable corporate luminaries as Trump strategist Steve Bannon, as well as a guy named Marc Collins-Rector. Pierce was living with Collins-Rector in Spain in 2002, when the two men were arrested in a house that contained guns, machetes, and child pornography. Pierce was eventually released, but Rector pled guilty to charges of child enticement, spent time in Spanish prison, and registered as a sex offender.

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While Brock had no current involvement with the company, we had heard from a source that he had at one point tried to buy back into Tether’s ownership group for the laughably low amount of $50,000. A source had also told us Brock dangled his political connections to the Trump White House in the hopes of getting back into the good graces of Tether executives like CFO Giancarlo Devasini. Brock had some Trump-world associations, having run a company, Internet Gaming Entertainment, with Steve Bannon, who succeeded Brock as CEO. That spring, people close to Bannon were now reportedly advising Brock on his Senate bid in Vermont. Some of these gambits were successful, others ended ignominiously. (The improbable run for Senate followed an unsuccessful 2020 presidential run in which he received a grand total of 49,764 votes.)

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National Security Council and things . . .” I may have involuntarily laughed at that point. Obviously Brock Pierce would not have attended an NSC meeting! The whole ruse was absurd, a flashback to my Hollywood days. Here was a bullshitter practicing a craft he’d honed for years. Then again, Pierce was connected to former Trump aide Steve Bannon, and the Trump administration wasn’t exactly known for discretion or choosing the highest caliber of people. So who was to say? Could the source who told us Pierce dangled his relationship to the Trump White House to get back in business with the Tether guys actually be right? Had Brock Pierce, the former-child-actor-turned-crypto-insider, who was trailed by a disturbing list of easily googleable rumors and accusations, made inroads with the office of the Fraudster-in-Chief?

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Chapter 11: The Mindset in the Mirror 144   Klaus Schwab’s vision : Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret, Covid-19: The Great Reset (Cologny, Switzerland: Forum, 2020). 145   “fixed traditional sentiments” : Robbie Shilliam, “How Black Deficit Entered the British Academy,” https:// robbieshilliam .wordpress .com /2017 /06 /20 /how -black -deficit -entered -the -british -academy /, retrieved June 19, 2019. 146   At the university level : Adam Kirsch, “Technology Is Taking Over English Departments,” New Republic , May 2, 2014, https:// newrepublic .com /article /117428 /limits -digital -humanities -adam -kirsch. 148   Feeling blamed for society’s ills : Adi Robertson, “The FBI has released its Gamergate investigation records,” Verge , January 27, 2017, https:// www .theverge .com /2017 /1 /27 /14412594 /fbi -gamergate -harassment -threat -investigation -records -release. 148   Gamergate : Michael James Heron, Pauline Belford, and Ayse Goker, “Sexism in the Circuitry,” ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society 44, no. 4: 18–29, https:// doi .org /10 .1145 /2695577 .2695582. 149   “He wanted to destroy” : Ronald Rodash, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘a Leninist,’ ” Daily Beast , April 13, 2017, https:// www .thedailybeast .com /steve -bannon -trumps -top -guy -told -me -he -was -a -leninist. 149   Bannon may believe : Jeremy W. Peters, “Bannon’s Worldview: Dissecting the Message of ‘The Fourth Turning,’ ” New York Times , April 8, 2017, https:// www .nytimes .com /2017 /04 /08 /us /politics /bannon -fourth -turning .html. 149   1960s science fiction novel : Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light (New York: Harper Voyager, 2010). 149   “In Silicon Valley” : Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: How a Fringe Philosophy Predicted the Future We Live In,” Guardian , May 11, 2017, https:// www .theguardian .com /world /2017 /may /11 /accelerationism -how -a -fringe -philosophy -predicted -the -future -we -live -in. 150   “It’s a fine line” : Max Chafkin, QAnon Anonymous podcast, December 10, 2021. 150   “cognitive elite” : Mark O’Connell, “Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand,” Guardian , February 15, 2018, https:// www .theguardian .com /news /2018 /feb /15 /why -silicon -valley -billionaires -are -prepping -for -the -apocalypse -in -new -zealand. 150   Thiel also funded : Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin, 2021).

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Feeling blamed for society’s ills , hopelessly unemployed, sexually frustrated, yet armed with laptops and The Mindset’s propensity for remote attacks, this disparate network has always been ready to rumble and came to prominence during Gamergate , a series of highly coordinated online harassments against female game designers and journalists. While these young men may have been inscrutable to the establishment, the leaders of the emergent alt-right saw its members as the foot soldiers in their digital infowar against politics as usual. Steve Bannon, the media executive and political strategist who eventually served as an advisor to Donald Trump, welcomed the new population of discontents. Already skilled at meme creation, trolling, and pranking, the frustrated and shunned young men under Bannon’s thrall would be encouraged to experience themselves as a new clan of revolutionary tech bros, righting the wrongs of the castrating, politically correct left—as well the woman at their helm.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

The Guardian story opened with a bang: The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box. A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica—a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon—used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles.

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In the world of market research, there is considerable doubt about how well psychographics work in their current form, but that issue did not prevent Cambridge Analytica from finding clients, mostly on the far right. To serve the US market, SCL needed to obey federal election laws. It created a US affiliate staffed by US citizens and legal residents. Reports indicated that Cambridge Analytica took a casual approach to regulations. The team of Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon financed and organized Cambridge Analytica, with Alexander Nix as CEO. The plan was to get into the market within a few months, test capabilities during the 2014 US midterm elections, and, if successful, transform American politics in 2016. To be confident that their models would work, Nix and his team needed a ton of data.

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Kaiser transferred into Cambridge Analytica and went to work bringing in clients. Her early clients were in Africa, but in 2015 she and Nix shifted their focus to the United States in anticipation of the presidential election cycle. Kaiser asserted that Nix was not a political ideologue—unlike his patrons Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon—and hoped to create a “famous advertising company in the US market.” As quoted in The Guardian: “Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people’s data,” Kaiser says. “I’ve been telling companies and governments for years that data is probably your most valuable asset.

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)
by Nick Clegg
Published 11 Oct 2017

Through articles and public platforms, such bodies63 have played a part in supporting and promoting the likes of Nigel Farage, far-right French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen and her Dutch counterpart, Geert Wilders. Following Donald Trump’s election as US President, this ideology now echoes strongly on both sides of the Atlantic. When Trump became President, he employed Steve Bannon as his White House Chief Strategist (he has since departed). Bannon previously ran the alt-right media outlet Breitbart in Washington and helped to set up its London branch, where he appointed one Raheem Kassam (later a chief of staff to Farage, and briefly a candidate to succeed him as UKIP leader) to edit the site.

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Neilan, ‘Business Leaders to Push David Davis for Clarity Tomorrow at Chevening Meeting’, City A.M., 6th July 2017 63. Such groups include the Heritage Foundation, the Gatestone Institute and the David Horowitz Freedom Center 64. L. Kaufman, ‘Breitbart News Network Plans Global Expansion’, www.nytimes.com, 16th February 2014 65. J. Lester Feder, ‘This is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World’, www.buzzfeed.com, 15th November 2016 66. For the full transcript of the interview with Donald Trump, see www.thetimes.co.uk, 16th January 2017 67. J. Pickard and J. Garrahan, ‘Rupert Murdoch Secretly Sat in on Interview with Donald Trump’, Financial Times, 9th February 2017 68.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 26 Nov 2020

Sales were helped by an excerpt published before its release by Wolff’s old employer New York Magazine, which contained details such as Steve Bannon claiming that Trump didn’t trust John Bolton because of his moustache. Wolff had unprecedented access for Fire and Fury, which was said to be based on two hundred interviews with Trump and his senior staff. Although Trump tweeted that Wolff never had access to the White House, Sarah Huckabee Sanders admitted that Wolff had more than a dozen ‘interactions’ with officials at the White House, at the request of Steve Bannon. The White House quickly pushed back on the book, in which Bannon described Donald Trump Jr’s 2016 meeting with Russians at Trump Tower as ‘treasonous’ and ‘unpatriotic’ and called Ivanka ‘dumb as a brick’.

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Otherwise, the next world war might begin with a grainy, contested image launched online from some distant and inaccessible outpost right onto the pages of a newspaper that has recently sacked all its journalists.’ ‘FLOOD THE ZONE WITH SHIT’ The phrase is attributed to the former head of Breitbart News, Steve Bannon, who briefly had a role in the inner circle of the Trump White House. ‘The Democrats don’t matter,’ Bannon reportedly said in 2018. ‘The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.’ As explained by Vox’s Sean Illing: ‘The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices.

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The hacking and leaking of internal Democratic Party communications during the 2016 US election were simply one high-profile symptom of the new warfare, which saw widespread covert political disinformation as well as the use of troll farms and bots to infiltrate and sway public debate. In some ways Putin’s agenda was not dissimilar from the tactics used by Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and other populists in seeking to undermine faith in any kind of evidence-based reality. If you can, for instance, convince enough people that the New York Times is completely fake, then (they imply) you might as well believe Bannon’s reality, and Trump’s alternative facts. The targets of disinformation are not always the obvious ones.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

This cultivated ambiguity, this hedging of a serious political agenda with statements ostensibly made just for the lulz, indicates where trolling could fit into the psychic and political economy of the alt-right. Breitbart, the far-right website which subsequently became Yiannopoulos’s regular outlet until his downfall, was also annexed to the Trump campaign. Steve Bannon, then chair of Breitbart News, signed up to the campaign after former Fox executive Roger Ailes became a Trump adviser. And it arguably pioneered a form of in-real-life trolling that serves its reactionary purposes, with its two best-known scoops: the sting against the liberal civil society organization, ACORN, and the framing of African-American Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod.

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Notably, while much alt-right trolling reheats anti-communist paranoia along with traditional fascist ideas, pro-Trump trolling campaigns are often aimed at conservatives who are critical of the alt-right. When The Daily Beast reported that Breitbart incited ‘hate mobs’ to threaten and dox critics on the Right, then editor Steve Bannon disavowed any responsibility. Trolling is an effective weapon precisely because responsibility for it is diffuse and ambiguous. Nonetheless, Bannon gloried in the site’s reputation for thuggishness. When an insider described Andrew Breitbart as ‘the kind of people who, if you accidentally brushed against their shopping cart in the supermarket, their response is to burn down your house’, Bannon was delighted.58 He explained: ‘If a guy comes after our audience. . . we’re going to leave a mark.

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On his trade war with China, he has raised tariffs, but the total levels still remain historically low. Much of what he has achieved required the connivance of Congressional Republicans, such as the standard Republican tax cut for the rich, or the promotion of a hard-right Federalist Society judge to the Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly, by the summer of 2017, Trump’s ousted ally Steve Bannon lamented that the presidency the far right ‘fought for, and won, is over’. The difficulty faced by the far right is that political success has outrun social and political organization. Historically, the far right has succeeded by building roots in thick networks of civic associations, from fraternal organizations in the US South to veteran and military clubs in Germany.55 It has, in this context, developed a ‘grass-roots’ paramilitary presence to control the streets.

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

Bendery, “John Boehner on Debt Ceiling: Let’s Pay China First, Then US Troops,” Huffington Post, May 8, 2013. 55. J. Cohn, “Don’t Blame the Tea Party for the Shutdown. Blame Boehner,” New Republic, September 30, 2013. 56. S. M. Burwell, “Impacts and Costs of the Government Shutdown,” White House archives, November 7, 2013. 57. R. Radosh, “Steve Bannon, Trump’s Top Guy, Told Me He Was ‘a Leninist,’” Daily Beast, August 22, 2016. 58. A. Crooke, “Steve Bannon’s Apocalyptic ‘Unravelling,’” Consortium News, March 9, 2017. 59. G. Steinhauser, “Europe Enjoys ‘Shutdownfreude’ over US Debt Troubles,” Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2013. 60. M. Hujer and D. Sander, “US Fumbling Puts China at Risk,” Der Spiegel, October 22, 2013. 61.

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Levy, “Robert Lighthizer’s Global Trade Governance Critique,” Forbes, December 12, 2017. 108. “US Broadside Leaves WTO Meeting in Tatters,” Deutsche Welle, December 12, 2017. 109. K. McNamara, “Trump Takes Aim at the European Union: Why the EU Won’t Unify in Response,” Foreign Affairs, January 24, 2017. 110. E.-K. Symons, “Steve Bannon Loves France,” Politico, March 22, 2017, and C. Alduy, “The Novel That Unites Marine Le Pen and Steve Bannon,” Politico, April 23, 2017. 111. D. Frum, “Trump’s Trip Was a Catastrophe for US-Europe Relations,” Atlantic, May 28, 2017. 112. J. Henley, “Angela Merkel: EU Cannot Completely Rely on US and Britain Any More,” Guardian, May 28, 2017. 113.

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The radical right wing of the Republican Party, xenophobic nationalists, many of them evangelical zealots, motivated by a worldview fashioned by the alt-right, or Pat Buchanan’s extreme America-first nationalism, a group whose hard core accounted for 10 percent of the House of Representatives, had threatened to paralyze the most important nation-state in the global system. As Steve Bannon, the editor of the Breitbart news site, a cheerleader of the Tea Party and a rising star of the alt-right, gushed to a Daily Beast journalist in November 2013: “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”57 For the likes of Bannon, the crisis of 2008 and the bailout had marked a fundamental caesura in American history.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

‘[The] new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull,’ writes Peter Pomerantsev. ‘Most [Russians] are happy with the trade-off: complete freedom for complete silence.’63 Short of martial law, the US media is highly unlikely to be silenced, or co-opted, by Trump. When Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior White House adviser, who helped pioneer much of the fake news that helped Trump to win, told Washington’s journalists to shut up, he was met with derision.64 Yet he was echoing a popular view in the heartland about an industry that has suffered an even steeper fall in its credibility than the political classes.

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Part Three: Fallout 1 Jake Sherman, ‘Poll: voters liked Trump’s “America First” address’, Politico, 25 January 2017, <http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/poll-voters-liked-trumps-inaugural-address-234148>. 2 Dana Priest, ‘The disruptive career of Michael Flynn, Trump’s national-security adviser’, New Yorker, 23 November 2016, <http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-disruptive-career-of-trumps-national-security-adviser>. 3 J. Lester Feder, ‘This is how Stephen Bannon sees the entire world’, Buzzfeed, 16 November 2016. Transcript of a 2014 speech by Bannon via Skype to a conference in the Vatican in 2014: <https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world>. 4 I am indebted to Jonathan David Kirshner, of Cornell University, whose paper ‘Keynes’s Early Beliefs and Why They Still Matter’ (Challenge, 58:5 (October 2015)) brilliantly elucidates the evolution in Keynes’s thinking. 5 Graham Allison, ‘The Thucydides Trap: Are the US and China Headed for War?’

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

The idea was to figure out how to apply these techniques to politics – and especially to help the Republican Party, which Mercer felt had fallen behind the Democrats in their digital campaigning.9 Mercer invested a load of money into the new company. Cambridge was also part of a tight pro-Trump network: Steve Bannon, until recently boss of Breitbart and Trump’s first head of strategy, was also a board member of Cambridge Analytica until he joined the administration. From their inception Cambridge Analytica followed the Mercer bible. They built up a database of around 5,000 data points on some 230 million Americans.

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Baldwin-Philippi (2017), ‘The myths of data-driven campaigning’, Political Communication, 34(4), 627-633. 23 Tamsin Shaw, ‘Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind’, New York Review of Books, 20 April 2017. 24 Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay, (Profile, 2014). 25 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote Leave donations: the dark ads, the mystery “letter” – and Brexit’s online guru’, www.theguardian.com, 25 November 2017. 26 Tom Hamburger, ‘Cruz campaign credits psychological data and analytics for its rising success’, www.washingtonpost.com, 13 December 2015. 27 Matea Gold and Frances Stead Sellers, ‘After working for Trump’s campaign, British data firm eyes new U.S. government contracts’, www.washingtonpost.com, 17 February 2017. 28 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warefare tool’, Observer, 18 March 2018. 29 Nina Burleigh, ibid. 30 Lucy Handley, ‘Personalized TV commercials are coming to a screen near you; US marketers to spend $3 billion on targeted ads’, www.cnbc.com, 15 August 2017. 31 E. Goodman, S. Labo, M. Moore and D. Tambini, ibid. 32 Vyacheslav Poonski, ‘How artificial intelligence silently took over democracy’, www.weforum.org, 9 August 2017. 33 Jonathan Albright, ‘Who Hacked the Election?

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

Social media nations and their members will cast doubt on experts who oppose the hidden core, insulate themselves from challengers through clickbait populism, and unwittingly support policies detrimental to their own well-being. In some ways this has already happened, with companies like Cambridge Analytica and the propaganda machine of Steve Bannon coming together during the election of 2016 to convince poor, working-class southern and midwestern whites to vote for a New York City real estate developer and reality TV star named Donald Trump. The “hidden core” conducting social inception will win over key influencers by mapping their every purchase, chat, post, and picture, creating a targeting profile to nudge unwitting “useful idiots”—those enticed by money and ego—to advance scripted narratives.

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Republicans already openly push for their own apps to bring supporters to an online world of their own design. The National Rifle Association, the pro-Trump political action committee America First, and Senator Ted Cruz’s Cruz Crew seek a conservative social media world similar to their Fox News television universe.43 Curiously, Cambridge Analytica cofounder and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon not only echoes these sentiments but called for nationalizing Facebook.44 For me, this seems like an odd position for a voracious capitalist who seeks the end of the administrative state. Taking down the tech giants opens enormous space for the strongest manipulators to take hold of unwitting minds; Bannon would be one of those best positioned to gain from their demise.

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utm_term=.3446fd4e2ff3. 40. https://www.wired.com/story/how-whatsapp-fuels-fake-news-and-violence-in-india/. 41. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/22/election-security-bill-congress-437472. 42. https://www.politico.eu/article/internet-governance-facebook-google-splinternet-europe-net-neutrality-data-protection-privacy-united-states-u-s/. 43. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/20/technology/politics-apps-conservative-republican.html. 44. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/steve-bannon-big-data-facebook-twitter-google. About the Author CLINT WATTS is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East as well as a senior fellow at the Center for Cyber and Homeland Security at the George Washington University. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction
by David Enrich
Published 18 Feb 2020

The world’s oldest bank had been reduced to ruins, and Deutsche’s fingerprints were all over the wreckage. Chapter 32 Rosemary Is the Boss The American presidential campaign was entering its homestretch, and the man in charge of Donald Trump’s chaotic candidacy was happily anticipating the mayhem that would be unleashed if Deutsche continued to unravel. Steve Bannon, who had made a small fortune working at Goldman Sachs, was an unlikely populist, but he had watched with boiling fury as millions of people lost their homes and their savings during the financial crisis. His father was one of the victims, having seen his retirement fund wiped out. Triggered, Bannon recast himself as a fiery destroyer of the globalist order.

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He added that he was eager for emails or documents related to Renaissance Technologies—the huge hedge fund that Deutsche had worked with to help save it billions in taxes. Simpson was especially curious about any materials on Renaissance’s enigmatic leader, Robert Mercer, who along with his daughter Rebekah had become a leading financier of Trump, Steve Bannon, and Breitbart News. “Be safe and I will see you tomorrow,” Simpson signed off. The weather in Saint Thomas was balmy, and Val and Glenn alternated between sifting through Bill’s files in a hotel suite and sitting at a picnic table on the beach, drinking beers and smoking cigarettes. Simpson was slightly manic, chattering constantly about Trump and Fusion’s financial struggles and the high likelihood that, at that very moment, they were under government surveillance.

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Foundation’s yearly distribution had shriveled: Rachel Sanderson, “Siena Faces Life after 500 Years of Monte dei Paschi Largesse,” Financial Times, August 2, 2016. 32. Rosemary Is the Boss Interviews with Mike Offit, Tammy McFadden, other Deutsche employees and executives, and journalists who interviewed several characters (and related emails and transcripts). Bannon’s radicalization: Michael C. Bender, “Steve Bannon and the Making of an Economic Nationalist,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2017. Kushner’s biggest lending facility: Kushner financial documents, reviewed by New York Times. Kushner’s loan for old New York Times building: Will Parker, “Jared Kushner Looks to Be Still Tied Up in 229 West 43rd Street Retail Condo,” The Real Deal, March 6, 2017.

The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move
by Sonia Shah

In the novel “swarthy hordes” of Indian migrants, described as “grotesque little beggars from the streets of Calcutta” who eat feces, invade France, force white women to work in brothels, and engage in orgies involving men, women, and children. The far-right French leader Marine Le Pen kept a dedicated copy in her desk. The former Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon considered the novel prescient and visionary. He suggested that the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea would create a similarly horrific social meltdown. He called it an “almost Camp of the Saints–type invasion.” Tanton’s organizations reconstructed the Fortress America55 that Grant and Osborn had built.

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His Treasury secretary agreed: “He’s got perfect genes.” The Trump family, one of Trump’s sons said, subscribed to the “racehorse theory” of inheritance, which “places a high value on bloodlines.” They referred to the inferior biology of people of African descent, as Linnaeus had. “Some people,” noted Trump adviser Steve Bannon, in reference to black people shot by police, are “naturally aggressive and violent.” “Laziness is a trait in blacks,” Trump said. “Some people cannot, genetically, handle pressure,” he added. “Go out in nature,” said a Republican nominee for Illinois representative, “and you don’t find equality anywhere … I don’t believe in this doctrine of racial equality.”59 They implied that mixing biologically distinct peoples60 disrupted the natural order, as early twentieth-century eugenicists had. “ ‘Diversity’ is not our strength,” one of President Trump’s national security officials wrote.

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Brower and a faction of anti-immigration activists Leon Kolankiewicz, “Homage to Iconic Conservationist David Brower Omits Population,” Californians for Population Stabilization, March 25, 2014, https://www.capsweb.org/blog/homage-iconic-conservationist-david-brower-omits-population. The Camp of the Saints Cécile Alduy, “What a 1973 French Novel Tells Us About Marine Le Pen, Steve Bannon, and the Rise of the Populist Right,” Politico, April 23, 2017; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists”; K. C. McAlpin, “ ‘The Camp of the Saints’ Revisited—Modern Critics Have Justified the Message of a 1973 Novel on Mass Immigration,” Social Contract Journal, Summer 2017. Tanton’s organizations reconstructed the Fortress America DeParle, “Anti-Immigration Crusader”; Normandin and Valles, “How a Network of Conservationists.”

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities
by Eric Kaufmann
Published 24 Oct 2018

The party establishment, used to weathering insurgent outsiders before getting its preferred candidate in place, was in shock. In July, at the Republican National Convention, Trump officially became the Republican nominee. Trump named Indiana governor Mike Pence, an evangelical, as his running mate and in August appointed Steve Bannon, head of the right-wing news website Breitbart, to run his campaign. Bannon, a former investment banker and media industry executive, moved in transnational right-wing circles by the 2000s. In 2007, he wrote an eight-page treatment for a documentary entitled Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism [sic] in America.

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Though the alt-right had only limited reach, a less radical but more influential restrictionist elite emerged online and in the right-wing media. Popular right-wing bloggers like Ann Coulter or Mike Cernovich, with followers numbering in the millions, routinely flag violent incidents involving illegal Hispanic immigrants and Muslims. At the institutional level, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, though forced out of both Trump’s White House and Breitbart News, helped lay the groundwork for the new cultural nationalism. Bannon was influenced by Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel about a Third World immigrant invasion of France called The Camp of the Saints (1973) and was well versed in ‘counter-jihadist’ currents of European thought.135 All successful nationalist movements require cultural elites, and while the new online right is less anchored in class and institutions than the patrician Immigration Restriction League of Henry Cabot Lodge’s day it still constitutes a coherent network.

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Trump argued that his comments reflected the fact that the far-right demonstration was legal while the counter-demonstration was not. Much of the media and many politicians struck back, claiming the counter-protesters’ cause was ethical while the far-right’s wasn’t, and this was an important difference. Moreover, the fatality was on the counter-demonstrators’ side. Trump’s strategist Steve Bannon was accused of being behind the strategy of drawing a moral equivalence between the rival groups.1 In polling conducted after the event, whites, by a 59–18 margin, blamed the far right for the violence; however those who backed Trump said by a 35–27 margin that the counter-demonstrators were at fault.2 A non-binary question discovered a more even picture: 31 per cent said both sides were responsible, 28 per cent said white supremacists were, and 10 per cent blamed the anti-fascist left.3 In this chapter we’ll observe what happens when left-modernism and a rising ethno-traditional nationalism collide.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

For decades, Turkish politicians who wished to push their country in more Islamic directions would be balked—or even sometimes overthrown—by Kemal’s heirs in the armed forces. Western political scientists adopted the term deep state to describe the power of the Kemalists after Kemal. Over time, the term was extended to describe other Third World societies with overmighty military and intelligence establishments, especially Pakistan. Steve Bannon absorbed the term somewhere and introduced it to Trump. Trump then diffused it through the conservative media, and especially to his pal Sean Hannity at Fox News. In Turkey and Pakistan, the term deep state described how those with secret power used clandestine means to thwart the regular government.

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Americans are ready for reform, but they are left alienated and frightened by the Great Awokening that has seized activist progressives. Donald Trump cannot win reelection in 2020 by his own efforts. But the election can be thrown away by people who will not meet voters where they are. Trump and his supporters appreciate the potentially destructive power of the ultra-progressive Left better than anyone. When Steve Bannon praises Bernie Sanders and when Fox & Friends promotes Tulsi Gabbard, they are not expressing sincere admiration. They are grasping the life vest that can save them from the shipwreck. One credible poll has found that 12 percent of those who supported Sanders against Clinton in 2016 switched to Trump in the general election.23 If the ultra-progressives are thwarted from foisting an unelectable candidate upon the Democratic Party from the inside, perhaps they can be coaxed and manipulated to boost a Trump-rescuing third-party candidacy from the outside.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

If people had really believed what Trump said, would they have voted for him? That would have been a very brave act, given the risks of total civil breakdown. Maybe they voted for him because they didn’t really believe him? It took me about fifteen minutes to acclimatise to the idea that this rhetoric was the new normal. Trump’s speechwriters, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, had put no words in his mouth that were explicitly anti-democratic. It was a populist speech, but populism does not oppose democracy. Rather, it tries to reclaim it from the elites who have betrayed it. Nothing Trump said disputed the fundamental premise of representative democracy, which is that at the allotted time the people get to say when they have had enough of the politicians who have been making decisions for them.

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His Secretary of Defense and Chief of Staff decide they have no alternative but to try to kill him, because all other options – resigning, refusing to obey or public denunciation – would simply make the problem worse, by giving the president an excuse to round on his enemies. In the meantime, the president’s chief strategist, loosely based on Steve Bannon, gets wind of the assassination attempt and decides to use it to frame an Islamist conspiracy, allowing for a further crackdown on anyone perceived as un-American. All of this happens behind closed doors, under the cover of the deafening chatter of the social media age. While members of the public are screaming conspiracy and coup from all sides, the real acts of subversion happen in the places social media cannot reach.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
by Bandy X. Lee
Published 2 Oct 2017

Also in those first ten days, Trump issued various executive orders that demonstrated his mental inability to comprehend the following: what is and is not legal (the immigration ban); what he can and cannot do without getting funding approval from Congress (building a border wall with Mexico); and what is and is not in the best interest of our country’s security (Steve Bannon is in, and certain Cabinet-level officers are out). Trump alienated Mexico; alienated nations across the world with his immigration ban; displayed an inability to vet issues and actions with appropriate parts of the U.S. government before taking action; and displayed a total inability to anticipate (or even consider) the impact of his statements and actions.

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Using his proposed federal budget as a lens, Jessica González-Rojas writes, “It outlines President Trump’s spending priorities and program cuts that make clear his utter contempt for communities of color, and it edges this country and its moral compass closer to the nativist vision espoused by the likes of White House advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions” (González-Rojas 2017). His mental health symptoms, including impulsive blame-shifting, claims of unearned superiority, and delusional levels of grandiosity, have been present in his words from his very first campaign speech: “They’re bringing drugs.

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The fact that innocent people were being harmed, they said, was an unfortunate but necessary side effect. Conversely, a few Jewish patients I treat who are children of Holocaust survivors fear that another Holocaust is more likely because of Trump’s policies and his association with the likes of Steve Bannon. They are afraid that those in bed with white nationalists send a message to anti-Semitic people that it is safe to act out their racist and prejudiced agendas. I recently spent the Jewish holiday of Passover with my family at a resort where a conservative political writer had been hired to speak.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

(It was the smooth-talking Nix who was later caught in a Channel 4 undercover reporting sting where he was recorded offering a range of dirty tricks to discredit a political candidate.) Then, in 2016, CA took its social media campaigning to America. The firm first worked on Ted Cruz’s campaign to become the Republican presidential candidate. Mercer was so impressed with CA he became a major shareholder while Trump’s then chief strategist, Steve Bannon, joined the company board. Perhaps inevitably, given these connections, the Trump campaign ended up paying almost £5 million to the company to help it target swing voters. Buoyed by their initial success in the US presidential primaries, the firm had also turned its attention to the EU referendum.

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As chair of Stop the War, Murray also played a crucial role in the largest political demonstration in British history, the 2003 rally against the war in Iraq. He stood down in June 2011 to be succeeded by Corbyn. After Labour’s surprising showing in the 2017 general election, when Corbyn clawed back Theresa May’s parliamentary majority, Murray, who was seconded from the Unite trade union, was described as the ‘hard-left’s Steve Bannon’. Both men are regarded as keepers of the flame of their respective ideologies who are able to rally great numbers to the cause. Murray’s daughter Laura was also an important figure in Momentum, building close links with Schneider and Corbyn’s sons Ben and Sebastian. Following a stint as a Labour political adviser covering the communities brief, she was made Corbyn’s ‘stakeholder manager’ in June 2017, giving her a key role connecting with groups linked to the Labour leadership.15 Lansman’s eldest son Max, a barrister, was also reported to have a key role with Momentum.16 Corbyn’s second son, Sebastian, worked on his father’s leadership campaign before becoming John McDonnell’s chief of staff.

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His two other children with Ivana, Donald Trump Junior (Buckley School, New York) and Eric (Trinity School, New York), and his daughter by second wife Marla, Tiffany (Viewpoint School, California), all received equally privileged and expensive educations. The man most credited with influencing Trump the presidential candidate is the product of a very similar education. Steve Bannon, Trump’s trusty campaign director and former Whitehouse chief of staff, spent his formative years at a military academy in Richmond, Virginia called the Benedict College Preparatory. The school mixed monastic life with a strict military prospectus that echoed the Christian morality of the Victorian English public school.

Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman
by Ben Hubbard
Published 10 Mar 2020

And while American watchdogs sought to make sure that Trump and his family were not using his presidency to benefit their businesses, that didn’t bother the Saudis. Their whole country bore the name of the royal family, and there had never been a clear line between family and state funds anyway. At one point, Steve Bannon, a Trump adviser who had run the Breitbart News Network, a website that often published anti-Muslim views, was caught chatting with a bearded cleric who happened to be the Minister of Islamic Affairs. A video spread online of a senior prince teaching Ivanka to jiggle her coffee cup so that the servers would stop refilling it, a Saudi tradition.

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Wielding a Twitter account with more than a million followers, al-Qahtani emerged as a major force on the platform, celebrating his boss’s every move while marshaling attacks on enemies, from foreign news organizations, to Iran, Qatar, and Saudis who were insufficiently supportive of the prince. Al-Qahtani’s attacks spurred offensives by hundreds of sympathetic accounts that critics referred to as “electronic flies” because of how they swarmed their targets. His detractors called him “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon” and the “Lord of the Flies.” After the Qatar boycott, al-Qahtani turned up the heat, spearheading a frenzied online McCarthyism. He announced an official hashtag, #The_Black_List, and called on his followers to suggest names for it. “Saudi Arabia and its brothers do what they say. This is a promise,” he wrote.

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Dated July 1, 2015. https://wikileaks.org/​hackingteam/​emails/​emailid/​1118843 guy seemed paranoid: Ibid. “bad cop and lesser bad cop”: Author interview, Dennis Horak, Nov. 2018. “pro-active thought authoritarianism”: Author interview, Alexi Abrahams, Oct. 2018. “Lord of the Flies”: “Who is Saudi al-Qahtani, Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon,” The New Arab, Aug. 23, 2017. suggest names for it: Saud al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “al-hashtaaq ar-rasmi # al-qaaima as-sawda” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17. 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898265869368807424 “starting now”: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “as-sa‘udia wa ashiqaauha” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898259368696725504 would be punished or prosecuted: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “wa‘ad: santajalla al-ghimma ‘an al-khaleej” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898257245183463424 state could unmask them: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “hal al-ism al-musa‘aar yaHmeek” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 18, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898379274788491265 “the faithful crown prince”: Saudi al-Qahtani (@saud1978), “wa ta‘taqid ani aqdaH min rasi” (Ar.), Twitter post, Aug. 17, 2017. https://twitter.com/​saudq1978/​status/​898273541367451648 to guide their coverage: Author interviews, Saudi journalists, 2017–18, and American officials, May 2019.

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning
by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
Published 31 Oct 2019

It is one thing for Kaczyński to say that migrants are bringing diseases into his country, however. It is another thing for Trump to say the same. It is one thing for Kaczyński to say to Orbán that ‘You have given an example and we are learning from your example.’48 It is much more significant and ominous for Steve Bannon to describe Orbán as a ‘hero’, an inspiration and ‘the most significant guy on the scene right now’.49 A non-negligible degree of sympathy with Orbán’s anti-EU politics can be found in almost every country of Western Europe. This is why critics of Brussels subsidies to Hungary and Poland blame the EU, to paraphrase Lenin, for giving Orbán and Kaczyński the rope with which to hang the West.50 The fact that politicians in the West are now adopting the xenophobic nationalism of the East contains a final vengeful twist.

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Otherwise, as it transpired at the time with North Africa under the extinction of the ancient Christian culture, Italy would have been incorporated into the Islamic world.’ Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation (Telos Press, 2015), pp. 17–18. 47. Valerie Hopkins, ‘Hungary’s Viktor Orbán blasts “ United States of Europe” ’, Financial Times (16 March 2019). 48. Foy and Buckley, ‘Orban and Kaczynski’. 49. Jason Horowitz, ‘Steve Bannon Is Done Wrecking the American Establishment. Now He Wants to Destroy Europe’s’, The New York Times (9 March 2018). 50. Griff Witte and Michael Birnbaum, ‘In Eastern Europe, the E.U. faces a rebellion more threatening than Brexit’, Washington Post (5 April 2018). 51. Vaclav Havel, ‘Ce que j’ai cru, ce que je crois’, Le Nouvel Observateur (19 December 19, 2011). 52.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

Instead, it operated in an unfocused way against a perceived elite that was shutting gamers out of gaming. This was reinforced by Yiannopoulos and the right-wing media ecosystem that he plugged Gamergate into, most notably Breitbart, a far-right website launched by right-wing firebrand Andrew Breitbart, and which was helmed at the time by Steve Bannon, the man who went on to be Trump’s chief strategist and later convicted of various money laundering, fraud and conspiracy offences. Yiannopoulos’s Gamergate revelations told followers what they already believed: the gaming establishment was secretly coordinating against them. One headline read: ‘Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite’.

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From the moment he emerged as a real candidate in the Republican primary, Donald Trump became the alt-right’s dream candidate – and then their dream president. The alt-right became his foot soldiers, creating pro-Trump memes, boosting his online image and increasingly staffing his campaign – which was run by none other than Breitbart’s former executive chair Steve Bannon. Breitbart had once sat on the fringes of US politics, providing a home for Gamergate and the alt-right while the establishment ignored it. Now its boss was running a presidential campaign and staffing it with his site’s former fanbase. In its early days, the rise of the online far right was largely ignored by mainstream observers, but there were some exceptions.

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

There seems little doubt that for many of Thatcher’s followers the free market experiment hasn’t gone far enough. As long as there is an NHS, a welfare state and a public sector that is more European than American in scale, we will never truly discover what the British people are made of, because they will never be forced to find out. Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist, has often voiced the opinion that America’s only hope of moral cleansing lies in war. Tory Brexiteers tend not to go that far, but they may well be holding out for a milder version of the same idea, an extreme of economic hardship that means government is no longer capable of picking up the pieces.

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A common thread linking ‘hard’ Brexiteers to nationalists across the globe is that they resent the very idea of governing as a complex, modern, fact-based set of activities that requires technical expertise and permanent officials. Soon after entering the White House as President Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon expressed the hope that the newly appointed cabinet would achieve the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. In Europe, the European Commission – which has copious governmental capacity, but scant sovereignty – is an obvious target for nationalists such as Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way
by Steve Richards
Published 14 Jun 2017

If Trump’s presidency has a house publication, it will not be The New York Times, which Trump attacks regularly on Twitter and in press conferences. It will be Breitbart, a right-wing opinion and news website formed in 2007, which one former editor has described as ‘Trump Pravda’. Trump appointed the website’s executive chairman, Steve Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs banker, as his White House strategy chief. The fast-growing Breitbart opinion and news website has become a rallying point for Trump’s nationalist, sometimes racist and often angry, ‘alt-right’ support base. It campaigned hard for Trump throughout the primaries, waging war against the candidacy of the Florida senator Marco Rubio, before becoming Trump’s supportive voice during the presidential election.

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. ______ POLITICAL PARTIES AND POLITICIANS / ADVISERS Tony Abbott: former Australian PM AfD Party: right-wing Alternative for Germany party Esperanza Aguirre: Spanish politician Jonathan Aitken: former Conservative MP Austrian People’s Party David Axelrod: adviser to Barack Obama Ed Balls: former Labour shadow chancellor Steve Bannon: Trump’s White House strategy chief Tony Benn: left-wing Labour MP Silvio Berlusconi: former Italian PM and leader of the Forza Italia party John Boehner: former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Willy Brandt: former German chancellor Gordon Brown: former PM George W. Bush: former US president Jeb Bush: Republican presidential candidate Jim Callaghan: former PM David Cameron: former PM Alastair Campbell: Tony Blair’s press secretary Gianroberto Casaleggio: co-founder of the Italian M5S party Mário Centeno: Portugal’s finance minister Jacques Chirac: former French president Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) Ken Clarke: former UK chancellor Nick Clegg: former deputy PM and Lib-Dem leader Bill Clinton: former US president Hillary Clinton: US presidential candidate Robin Cook: former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Corbyn: Labour leader António Costa: Portugal’s socialist leader and PM Jon Cruddas: Labour MP Ted Cruz: Republican presidential candidate Dominic Cummings: one of the architects of the victory in the Brexit referendum Danish People’s Party Alistair Darling: former UK chancellor David Davis: Brexit secretary Democratic Party (PD): Italy Democratic Party: US Bob Dole: US presidential candidate Bernard Donoughue: adviser to Jim Callaghan Iain Duncan Smith: former Conservative leader Recep Erdogan: president of Turkey Íñigo Errejón: Podemos’ political secretary Nigel Farage: former leader of UKIP Werner Faymann: former Austrian chancellor François Fillon: former French PM Five Star Movement (M5S): Italy Forza Italia party: Italy Norman Fowler: former Conservative minister Free Democratic Party: Germany Freedom Party (FPÖ): Austria Front National: France Colonel Gaddafi: former Libyan dictator Alexander Gauland: AfD politician Julia Gillard: former Australian PM Philip Gould: Labour adviser and guru Michael Gove: former Justice Secretary and leading ‘Out’ campaigner Green Party: Austria Beppe Grillo: founder of the Five Star Movement, Italy William Hague: former Conservative leader Joe Haines: press secretary for Harold Wilson Philip Hammond: UK chancellor Pauline Hanson: leader of the One Nation party in Australia Ted Heath: former PM Norbert Hofer: far-right-wing presidential candidate in Austria, Freedom Party François Hollande: French president Michael Howard: former Conservative leader and Home Secretary Tristram Hunt: former Labour MP Pablo Iglesias Turrión: leader of Podemos in Spain Diane James: briefly UKIP leader Roy Jenkins: former leader of the SDP Jobbik party: Hungary Boris Johnson: Foreign Secretary Lyndon B.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World
by William Drozdiak
Published 27 Apr 2020

“There is a conspiracy of all the radical right-wing nationalists everywhere, apparently with the help of the Kremlin, or of oligarchs around the Kremlin, to disrupt this European Union,” said Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister and leading member of the European Parliament, on the eve of the European elections.22 The axis of illiberalism that threatens to destabilize Europe’s political order goes beyond Russia’s links with Europe’s populist nationalists and includes conservative political allies in the United States, including President Trump and the alt-right movement led by Steve Bannon, the president’s former adviser. Bannon has raised funds among ultra-conservative supporters in Europe and the United States to establish an “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West”—a far-right “gladiator school” housed in a thirteenth-century monastery not far from Rome for the purpose of grooming future right-wing political leaders across Europe.

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As Europe suffers the consequences of its inaction, Macron hopes that his EU partners will start to recognize the need for Europe to shape a common approach to the outside world. He has openly challenged the intrusion of outside forces that he claims are seeking to disrupt Europe’s internal politics, citing the activities of Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon as an example. “For the first time, I see connivance between nationalists and foreign interests whose aim is to dismantle Europe,” Macron said. Bannon is not alone in trying to manipulate Europe’s constellation of forces. The governments of Russia, China, and the United States are all trying to shape Europe’s political course.

Antisemitism: Here and Now
by Deborah E. Lipstadt
Published 29 Jan 2019

You can’t fight racism but excuse antisemitism, just as you cannot fight antisemitism while excusing and justifying racism or Islamophobia.”2 Subsequently, additional information about meetings of some leaders of the Democratic Party with Farrakhan have come to light. Here, too, the outrage has been strikingly muted.3 Progressives are not, of course, the only ones who have a less-than-stellar record of addressing racism in their midst. In the fall of 2017, details emerged regarding the far-right leanings of Steve Bannon and Breitbart News. There is no credible evidence that Bannon is himself an antisemite, but it is extremely distressing that right-wing Jewish groups that trumpet his support for Israel ignored the racism, anti-immigrant, and white nationalist views promulgated by Breitbart News when he ran it.4 He helped galvanize the emerging white nationalist movement.

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Shachar Peled, “Bannon Addresses ZOA, Urges Jews to Join ‘Insurgency’ against Anti-Trump Republicans,” Haaretz, November 13, 2017. 5. Weisman, (((Semitism))), p. 144. 6. Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate,” BuzzFeed, October 15, 2017; Melanie Phillips, “The Alt-Right Smear,” MelaniePhillips.com, March 17, 2017; Lloyd Green, “The Zionist Leader Who Can’t Quit Steve Bannon,” Daily Beast, August 30, 2017; Armin Rosen, “ZOA President Meets with Top Trump Aide,” Tablet, January 26, 2017; “White Nationalist Richard Spencer Gives Israel as Example of Ethno-State He Wants in U.S.,” Haaretz, October 19, 2017; Weisman, (((Semitism))), p. 90. 7. Jack Moore, “Israel’s Netanyahu Hasn’t Condemned Hungary’s ‘Anti-Semitic’ George Soros Posters.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

“Mothers and children” from Donald Trump’s inaugural speech, Jan. 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/inaugural-address. “Outright war” and “spiritual and moral foundations” from Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon’s remarks to a Vatican conference in the summer of 2014, transcribed in J. L. Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world. “Global power structure” from “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” final television campaign ad, Nov. 2016, http://blog.4president.org/2016/2016-tv-ad/. Bannon is commonly credited with authoring or coauthoring all three. 2.

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Examples are the European wars of religion (Pinker 2011, pp. 234, 676–77) and even the American Civil War (Montgomery & Chirot 2015, p. 350). 47. White 2011, pp. 107–11. 48. S. Bannon, remarks to a conference at the Vatican, 2014, transcribed in J. L. Feder, “This Is How Steve Bannon Sees the Entire World,” BuzzFeed, Nov. 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world. 49. Nazis sympathetic to Christianity and vice versa: Ericksen & Heschel 1999; Hellier 2011; Heschel 2008; Steigmann-Gall 2003; White 2011. Hitler was not an atheist: Hellier 2011; Murphy 1999; Richards 2013; see also “Hitler Was a Christian,” http://www.evilbible.com/evil-bible-home-page/hitler-was-a-christian/. 50.

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Baskin, “The Academic Home of Trumpism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2017; Lampert 1996. 119. Nationalism and counter-Enlightenment Romanticism: Berlin 1979; Garrard 2006; Herman 1997; Howard 2001; McMahon 2001; Sternhell 2010; Wolin 2004. 120. Rediscovery of early Fascists: J. Horowitz, “Steve Bannon Cited Italian Thinker Who Inspired Fascists,” New York Times, Feb. 10, 2017; P. Levy, “Stephen Bannon Is a Fan of a French Philosopher . . . Who Was an Anti-Semite and a Nazi Supporter,” Mother Jones, March 16, 2017; M. Crowley, “The Man Who Wants to Unmake the West,” Politico, March/April 2017.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

Le Bon himself saw war as a positive antidote to socialism and excessive democracy. Nationalists have long bemoaned the influence of pacifists, “liberal elites” and (more recently) “political correctness” for neutering the unity and fighting spirit of the people. Media executive, outspoken nationalist, and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon holds a dim view of the moral fiber of American society, which he believes has been weakened by globalization and can only be repaired with war. “Is that grit still there,” he asks, “that tenacity, that we’ve seen on the battlefield?”15 The only way to rediscover it, in Bannon’s view, is to take to the battlefield once again.

…

The cultural and political divisions separating centers of expertise from other sections of their societies have created a situation with rhetorical echoes of the colonial one, in which the methods of science and expertise seem like an arm of some foreign Leviathan state. Modern bureaucratic government becomes represented as the enemy, with Steve Bannon (while still working in the White House) declaring that Trump’s cabinet would seek the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” and leading Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg accusing the British Treasury of “fiddling figures” to pursue its own political goals. The nativist idea that the nation needs reclaiming from the elites has echoes of the rhetoric of anti-colonial nationalism.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
by Aja Raden
Published 10 May 2021

These next chapters explore how and why we come to believe and whether it’s possible to reverse our capacity for self-deception by examining three very old cons and their very contemporary counterparts. In the first chapter, we’ll look at the impact and influence of the Guru Con, which exploits the softest of human weak spots—emotional need. From Rasputin to Steve Bannon, from Jim Bakker to Joel Osteen—there have always been, and will always be, willing sheep ready to be sheared … in exchange for promises of all kinds, particularly the intangible. It seems that to the right crowd (and we’re all the right crowd), hope is a commodity you can sell for almost any price.

…

Even though the provisional government he led following the Russian Revolution was quickly dissolved by the vicious, incompetent Bolsheviks—shortly after the Bolsheviks had murdered the vicious, incompetent Romanovs—Kerensky called it like he saw it: blaming the royal family’s Guru problem for the shocking state of the state. “Without Rasputin there would have been no Lenin” is an observation worth keeping in mind, particularly since there are no new lies, only new liars. And from playing at being a populist man of the people to being aggressively physically disgusting, Steve Bannon (an ironically self-professed Leninist) is a creepy Svengali in his own right. The story of his rise is illustrative of how the Guru Con works with politicians as well as holy men, because it’s really not about religion. It’s about control. And for big-league Gurus it’s about getting the ear of the right person (be that Trump, the Mercers, or the GOP) and convincing them that you have special abilities and are therefore both infallible and indispensable.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Politicians on the right often used the phrase “starving the beast” to describe their strategy toward the government. The anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist put it in even more pungent terms: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the Trump revolution, made clear that one of his central goals was the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” For four decades, America has largely been run by people who openly pledge to destroy the very government they lead. Is it any wonder that they have succeeded?

…

In 1991, India, which had long practiced socialism and protectionism, faced an economic crisis that forced it to liberalize. The next year, with Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour,” China revived its stalled capitalist reforms. The financial crisis of 2008 began the process of reevaluation—on both right and left. Steve Bannon argues that the seeds of Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party were sowed by that crash. In the years since, the Right has veered away from its devotion to markets, instead espousing protectionism, subsidies, immigration controls, and cultural nationalism—ideas championed by Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, and other populists around the world.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

James had recommended me to run the Breitbart UK site after the regular guy Raheem Kassam had been seconded to work for Nigel Farage for the upcoming general election in 2015. He told me I’d be called at home one Sunday morning by the company’s chief executive, some American I’d never heard of called Steve Bannon. I looked Bannon up and learned that he was a former US Navy Lieutenant and banker for Goldman Sachs, as well as an executive producer in Hollywood. The more I read the more terrifying he sounded, the epitome of American aggression and kick-ass determination, and I was nervous about the call, even though they were courting me.

…

In recent years there has been a steep rise in the proportion of female students, especially in the humanities, so it would seem logical, therefore, that already heavily Left-leaning institutions filled with single women would be the perfect breeding ground for a progressive movement, one in which members are in competition to display their political zeal.19 In contrast, increasing numbers of men are moving into all-male worlds by dropping out of dating altogether, and the online Alt-Right grew out of a heavily male subculture, where angry single men made ideal recruits to a cause. This was something noticed long ago by Steve Bannon during his venture into World of Warcraft, when the future Breitbart boss said that ‘These guys, these rootless, white males, had monster power.’20 Men are less sociable on average than women, which explains why they are more willing to join political movements seen as beyond the pale. Across twenty-eight different countries, ‘men’s generally lower sensitivity to social cues makes them more likely to vote for stigmatized and small parties’ than women.21 Radical Right-wing groups do far better among men, the Sweden Democrats scoring 10 per cent more support among males, for instance.

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lang=en. 15 https://anepigone.blogspot.com/2017/08/gen-z-is-wests-last-great-hope.html. 16 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/24/democrats-losing-millennial-vote-change-message. 17 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/24/democrats-losing-millennial-vote-change-message. 18 https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1012418245826109440. As Tablet columnist Wesley Yang suggested, ‘viral hate-read clickbait’ may have played a part. 19 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-40504076. 20 http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/07/steve-bannon-world-of-warcraft-gold-farming.html. 21 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/gender-differences-in-vote-choice-social-cues-and-social-harmony-asheuristics/DB58CD40104BABA70AF2917DD5C89AF4. 22 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/why-the-left-is-so-afraid-of-jordan-peterson/567110/. 23 https://www.wsj.com/articles/jordan-peterson-and-conservatisms-rebirth-1529101961. 24 http://quillette.com/2017/11/12/non-believers-turning-bibles/. 25 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7a6b/ad93d88b0158d449881e56749d5443b3ff80.pdf. 26 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/nov/11/nature-or-nurture-debate-three-identical-strangers-film?

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

That was why, notoriously, they provoked both an anti-Islamic demonstration and a pro-Islamic counter-demonstration across the street from each other in front of an Islamic center in Houston.18 A good way to think about such attacks is as environmental. They attack not just individual people or facts but the whole information space. In a famous remark to the journalist Michael Lewis in 2018, Steve Bannon, the Breitbart News chairman who went on to become a senior strategist for candidate Trump and then President Trump, said this: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”19 Flood the zone with shit: although the formulation is crude, there could be no more concise and accurate summation of what modern information warfare is all about.

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Like Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest, but even more brazenly, he savaged mainstream media, even encouraging physical attacks against journalists. He called the mainstream media “disgusting” and “a great danger to our country,” even “the enemy of the American people,” a sentiment with which almost two-thirds of Republicans agreed by August 2017.61 He organized his political messaging around the conceit that, as Steve Bannon had said, “The real opposition is the media.” He applied the label “fake news” to real news, and vice versa. “What you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” he told his supporters. “Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” By contrast, he praised and amplified internet trolls: “The crap that you think of is unbelievable,” he told them—intending “crap” as a professional compliment.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

Come and test all your crazy ideas.” Wylie, at twenty-four, was suddenly research director for the SCL Group. Later, he learned that his predecessor had died in a hotel room in Kenya under suspicious circumstances. It was a hint that SCL might have a shady side. Not long after, Wylie met hard-core conservative warrior Steve Bannon, then editing the notoriously partisan right-wing news site Breitbart. Somehow the gay nerd and the proto–white nationalist bonded. “It felt like we were flirting,” Wylie would later write about their data-wonky intellectual jam sessions. Soon they were hatching a plan for SCL to enter America.

…

Throughout the process, the matter never seemed to reach Sheryl Sandberg or Mark Zuckerberg. * * * • • • AS THE ELECTION season heated up in 2016, Cambridge Analytica was actively working for GOP candidates. After Ted Cruz dropped out, the company began working for the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica’s vice president, Steve Bannon, became a top adviser to the candidate himself. Cambridge had contracted with a Canadian company called AggregateIQ—reportedly a Wylie connection—to implement a set of software services to exploit Cambridge’s voter database, including the apparently undeleted profiles and personality summaries provided by Kogan.

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promotional copy: This brochure was among a cache of documents that Wylie submitted to UK Parliament. Wylie also explains his background and involvement with Cambridge Analytica in his book, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America (Random House, 2019). “We’ll give you total freedom”: Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018. his predecessor had died: Wylie testimony to House of Commons, Digital, Culture Media and Sport Committee, March 27, 2018. The name came from Bannon: Wylie testimony. Obama campaign: Elizabeth Dwoskin and Tony Romm, “Facebook’s Rules for Accessing User Data Lured More Than Just Cambridge Analytica,” Washington Post, March 19, 2018.

This America: The Case for the Nation
by Jill Lepore
Published 27 May 2019

From Killing Lincoln he moved on to writing “killing” books about people who hadn’t actually ever been killed. “O’Reilly’s vast carelessness pollutes history and debases the historian’s craft,” the conservative columnist George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post in 2015. But by then O’Reilly’s history books had already sold 6.8 million copies. Donald Trump’s onetime chief strategist Steve Bannon admired a dystopian 1997 book called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. “This is a book that turns history into prophecy,” its authors boasted. That prophecy? The fourth turning “could mark the end of man,” or “the end of modernity,” or it “could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation,” or it “could find America, and the world, a much better place.”

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem
by Tim Shipman
Published 30 Nov 2017

You have to tell stories.”’ It was an analysis they would have done well to remember when May called her own election. Trump’s victory sent shockwaves through Whitehall and prompted hasty assessments of the damage he might do. Concern focused on his declaration that NATO was ‘obsolete’. Trump’s aide Steve Bannon, the alt-right theorist who ran Breitbart News before revitalising Trump’s campaign, was a vociferous opponent of the EU and had professed the hope that it would break up. EU foreign ministers called an immediate ‘panic meeting’ as if a war had broken out rather than democratic elections in a close ally.

…

In early October the foreign secretary had told a friend, ‘This is an election that is going to expose America’s primal psyche as never before. If it is Trump, it will be a victory of really base daytime TV Redneck America.’ Now the foreign secretary and his advisers had emerged as key contacts for Mike Pence and the ideological end of team Trump – Stephen Miller and chief strategist Steve Bannon – while Hill and Timothy dealt with Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, and Katie Perrior talked to Sean Spicer, her opposite number in the White House. Johnson’s advisers were keen to go to the US to meet the people they had been speaking to on the phone, but it was decreed they could not travel before Hill and Timothy.

…

The main issue for the British was to ascertain how Trump would approach global affairs and whether he was planning to tear up the international order to affect a new partnership with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. There were jaw-on-the-floor moments. When one of the Brits asked, ‘What do you give Russia to get them to the table?’ the reply astonished Johnson. ‘Steve Bannon being mischievous said if they want to move into some Baltic state, “We’re relaxed,”’ a source present said. To suggest that Russia be given carte blanche to march into a NATO state that both countries were sworn to defend on the pretext of protecting the Russian population was astonishing. Johnson leapt in, ‘What?

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 17. 36. Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Robert Mercer:The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media’, The Guardian, 26 February 2017 <https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercerbreitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage> (accessed 1 December 2017). 37. Edward L. Bernays, ‘The Engineering of Consent’, ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 250, no. 1 (1947), 113–20, cited in Zeynep Tufekci, ‘Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics’, First Monday 19, no. 7 (7 July 2014). 38.

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Peter Martinez, ‘Study Reveals Whopping 48M Twitter Accounts Are Actually Bots’, CBS News, 10 March 2017 <http://www.cbsnews. com/news/48-million-twitter-accounts-bots-university-ofsouthern-california-study/?ftag=CNM-00-10aab7e&linkId= 35386687> (accessed 1 December 2017). 18. Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Robert Mercer:The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media’, The Guardian, 26 February 2017 <https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage> (accessed 1 December 2017). 19. See Leo Kelion and Shiroma Silva, ‘Pro-Clinton Bots “Fought Back but Outnumbered in Second Debate” ’, BBC News, 19 October 2016<http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37703565> (accessed 1 December 2017); Amanda Hess, ‘On Twitter, a Battle Among Political Bots’, New York Times, 14 December 2016 <https://mobile. nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-politicalbots.html?

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s e t = 6 0 3 5 8 5 & u t m _ c o n t e n t = bu f f e rd 5 a 8 f & u t m _ m e d i u m = social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Cadwalladr, Carole. ‘Robert Mercer: The Big Data Billionaire Waging War on Mainstream Media’. The Guardian, 26 Feb. 2017 <https://www. theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-onmedia-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage> (accessed 1 Dec. 2017). Calabresi, Guido, and Philip Bobbit. Tragic Choices: The Conflicts Society Confronts in the Allocation of Tragically Scarce Resources. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Bibliography 445 Calvo, Rafael A., Sidney D’Mello, Jonathan Gratch, and Arvid Kappas, eds.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

The tech companies have won most of the cash that used to flow to newspapers for ads and subscriptions. Therefore, there are few genuine, high-integrity primary news sources, compared to antebellum days. There is almost no remaining local investigative reporting. There are occasional bloggers who accomplish real investigative work, but mostly they can only comment. Steve Bannon claimed that “if The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times … That was our opening.”6 He couldn’t have said this before the rise of the New Economy. The investigative press, which is distinct from the commenting class, used to be large and diverse.

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Mayhem was also instigated with rather small amounts of cash, as chronicled in the other examples cited here. This is an example of how even insiders are still finding their way. The online world has become so murky that no one has a complete view. The strange new truth is that almost no one has privacy and yet no one knows what’s going on. 6.   http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747 7.   Described earlier, in the section called “Birth of a Religion.” Netflix uses AI recommendations to create the illusion that the selection of things to watch is larger than it is. 8.   https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World
by Matt Alt
Published 14 Apr 2020

Posted in the midst of Gamergate, this ornate otaku screed would likely have faded into oblivion were it not for a singular fact. It was one of the first articles published by an up-and-coming writer named Milo Yiannopoulos. Nobody knew who the thirty-year-old with the shocking bleach-blond coif was yet, but that was about to change, and fast. Yiannopoulos’s boss was a man named Steve Bannon, who believed that Breitbart could be more than just another news site. He wasn’t satisfied with being a website editor; he hungered to wield real political clout, to really change the dialogue—if only he could tap into the right network of people. “Rootless white males,” he called them. By rootless he basically meant otaku.

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“Japanese culture enjoyed unique purchase”: Milo Yiannopoulos, “The Lost Franchise: Why Digimon Deserves a Glorious Renaissance,” Breitbart, November 20, 2014, https://www.breitbart.com/​europe/​2014/​11/​20/​the-lost-franchise-why-digimon-deserves-a-glorious-renaissance/​. “Rootless white males”: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising (New York: Penguin, 2017), 145. A Pew study: Richard Fry, “For First Time in Modern Era, Living with Parents Edges Out Other Living Arrangements for 18- to 34-Year-Olds,” Pew Research Center, May 24, 2016, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/​2016/​05/​24/​for-first-time-in-modern-era-living-with-parents-edges-out-other-living-arrangements-for-18-to-34-year-olds/​.

Open: The Story of Human Progress
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Sep 2020

The Brexit referendum gave an injection of energy to the Trump movement, and Trump’s election energized populists all over Europe – agitators and parties who claim that there is one true, united people whose general will is blocked by a corrupt elite. So did money and media assistance from Putin’s Russia, which is eager to show that Western liberalism is obsolete. Meanwhile Western anti-liberals look to Putin as a source of inspiration because he ‘is standing up for traditional institutions’, as Steve Bannon puts it.9 We can’t live without openness, but the question is whether we can live with it. In the second half of the book, I examine why openness is always under threat, historically and right now. I will argue that the modern world was not intended, it almost happened by accident. It happened because there were too many gaps in the control of princes, priests and guilds to stop people’s creativity entirely.

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Had natives back then known that six of the eight judges on the present US Supreme Court had been raised as Roman Catholics (and the remaining two Jews), they would surely have concluded that we live in a tragic future where despotism has won. Had they known that the Irish would by 2020 have captured the vice presidency (Mike Pence), the Senate (Mitch McConnell), the House Republicans (Kevin McCarthy), and were represented among former and present advisors to the president (Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway), they would probably have assumed that there had been a hostile takeover of the Republican party by anti-American globalists. Anti-Irish sentiment back then were so strong that it spawned a briefly successful political party, the ‘Know-Nothings’, so named because its early adherents refused to answer questions about the party.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

Here he is speaking at American University, part of his “Dangerous Faggot Tour” of college campuses, where he holds forth against feminists, SJWs, and “cuckservatives.” A tense back-and-forth with a Black student makes this particular speech memorable, good YouTube fodder. Another student in a red Make America Great Again cap giggles at the spat. Steve Bannon had taken over Breitbart News after a meandering career as a Hollywood financier and video game executive. He used deputies like Yiannopoulos to “activate” an army of disaffected, extremely online supporters. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump,” Bannon told the journalist Joshua Green.

…

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Black YouTube animator: Viewers adored Thorne too, although he later confessed to YouTube brass that his videos with animated thumbnails did better than those showing his face. It seemed people clicked less on Black faces and the algorithm followed suit. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT told the journalist: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A later study: Bernhard Rieder, Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, and Òscar Coromina, “From Ranking Algorithms to ‘Ranking Cultures’: Investigating the Modulation of Visibility in YouTube Search Results,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24, no. 1 (January 10, 2018): 50–68.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics
by Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce
Published 5 Jun 2018

But while Trump may represent the negation of the liberal parts of this heritage, his accession also signals the renewal of an older version of Anglo-America which reaches back to the ethno-nationalism associated with the Anglo-Saxonist movement of the 1890s, and which regards both countries as linked by their shared ethnic and cultural origins. This, broadly, is the outlook promoted by the influential alt-right website Breitbart News and advanced by Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon. It coheres around support for stronger immigration controls, an aggressively anti-Muslim form of identity politics and greater protectionism for the jobs of the indigenous working class. Writing on the Breitbart site in 2016, James Pinkerton elaborated this position, invoking the Anglosphere as a potential alliance upon which an anti-Islamic Western order could be rebuilt.18 And, according to the former UKIP advisor (and one-time editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London) Raheem Kassam, ‘The whole Breitbart thing and the whole Trump narrative is about the Anglosphere, about free trade agreements with all the English speaking nations of the world.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

utm_term=.f857ac42b2e9; “Facebook: ‘No Evidence’ Conservative Stories Were Suppressed,” CBS News, May 10, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-no-evidence-conservative-stories-trending-suppressed-gizmodo/. 88. Josh Sternberg, “Layoffs and Local Journalism,” Media Nut, May 14, 2020, at https://medianut.substack.com/p/layoffs-and-local-journalism. 89. Rachael Revesz, “Steve Bannon’s Data Firm in Talks for Lucrative White House Contracts,” Independent, November 23, 2016, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cambridge-analytica-steve-bannon-robert-rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-conflicts-of-interest-white-a7435536.html; Josh Feldman, “CIA Concluded Russia Intervened in Election to Help Trump, WaPo Reports,” Mediaite, December 9, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/cia-concluded-russia-intervened-in-election-to-help-trump-wapo-reports/. 90.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published 7 Jan 2020

Between Trump’s election and the end of his first year in office, for example, Charles Blow published eighty-eight columns in the Times, fifty-six targeting Trump specifically. Of the remainder, most tore into various reprobates who fleetingly passed through Trump’s orbit, including Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Omarosa Manigault, and Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci. On those rare occasions when Blow refrained from going after Trump or his associates, he devoted himself to promoting the anti-Trump resistance, for which he served as a vocal cheerleader. Throughout, Blow’s tone was unremittingly contemptuous of the president and anyone in his employ.

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle
by Jeff Flake
Published 31 Jul 2017

A report on the tech website Gizmodo quoted a former Facebook “news curator” who said that conservative viewpoints were sometimes “black-listed,” which, if true, was a very disturbing allegation. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied the claim but, recognizing the seriousness of the issue, convened a roundtable in May 2016 with conservative media figures, including Glenn Beck, S. E. Cupp, Dana Perino, and Brent Bozell (Breitbart.com, then still run by Steve Bannon, was invited but declined to attend) to give assurances and seek solutions. Zuckerberg released a statement, which read in part: “To serve our diverse community, we are committed to building a platform for all ideas. Trending Topics is designed to surface the most newsworthy and popular conversations on Facebook.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

Johnson’s Conservatives won the British election in 2019 on a platform of spending more on just about everything (just less than Jeremy Corbyn). At the end of June, Johnson delivered a speech comparing himself to FDR in his desire to “build, build, build.” In America Trumpism rejected decades’ worth of Republican orthodoxy on free trade and small government. Steve Bannon, the mastermind of Trump’s election victory, has long thought limited-government conservatism is old hat.16 For him the idea that you can remain dependent on China for vital goods like medical supplies while pushing back against that country’s geo-strategic ambitions is absurd. His former colleague in the White House, Peter Navarro, has declared that “never again should we have to depend on the rest of the world for our essential medicines and countermeasures.”17 Even conservatives are asking: what good was globalization in the crisis?

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Donald Trump Solved It,” New York Times, April 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/magazine/cnn-had-a-problem-donald-trump-solved-it.html?_r=0. 19. See Wil S. Hylton, “Down the Breitbart Hole,” New York Times Magazine, August 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/magazine/breitbart-alt-right-steve-bannon.html; Michael M. Grynbaum and John Herrman, “Breitbart Rises from Outlier to Potent Voice in Campaign,” New York Times, August 26, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/business/media/breitbart-news-presidential-race.html; David van Drehle, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?” Time Magazine, February 2, 2017. 20. “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement,” Newsbreakshere, September 27, 2016, https://newsbreakshere.com/pope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-donald-trump-president-releases-statement. 21.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

Santelli implored the country to return to its bootstrap roots.46 On April 15, 2009, tax day, “Tea Party patriots” energized by Santelli’s speech held protests around the country demanding a return to fiscal conservatism. The Tea Party, like Occupy, spawned a cluster of new right-wing figures and movements that have their own systemic critique blending cultural, political, and economic factors. Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign manager and briefly the chief strategist for the White House, calls for economic nationalism, infrastructure programs, and closing the borders to immigration to prevent the collapse of both capitalism and the “Judeo-Christian West.” Bannon’s worldview echoes that of the paleoconservative William Lind, who warns of a “fourth-generation war” in which, instead of being invaded by armies, the United States will be invaded by immigrants, sucked under by the “poisonous ideology of multiculturalism.”47 White supremacy has seen a resurgence, evidenced by the popularity of Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute, a white supremacist think tank.

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World
by Peter Frankopan
Published 14 Jun 2018

This was one reason why Trump upbraided the Saudi crown prince when the latter visited Washington in the spring of 2018, telling Mohammad bin Salman that he should have increased his spending and that sums of several hundred million dollars ‘are peanuts to you’.6 Saudi Arabia is ‘a very great friend’, Trump said when receiving the crown prince, because it is ‘a big purchaser of equipment and lots of other things’.7 This explains why Saudi had been singled out for special treatment, as is clear from the fact that when Mike Pompeo was appointed CIA director in 2017 he lost no time in telling his hosts in Riyadh that his first overseas trip was to Saudi Arabia, just as President Trump’s had been.8 Trump’s visit to Riyadh in 2017 had certainly been memorable. Indeed, said the president later, it was ‘one of the most incredible two-day meetings that I’ve ever seen – that anybody has ever seen’. Those who saw Trump, secretary of state Rex Tillerson and his then chief strategist Steve Bannon attend exhibitions of sword-dancing and hop about uncomfortably as they took part in festivities alongside their Saudi hosts would agree.9 Trump’s alignment with Saudi has consequences for proposed arms sales elsewhere in the region. In 2017, visiting Qatar, the president had addressed the Gulf state’s leader and told him, ‘We are friends.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

His bosses had hoped his articles would inform Breitbart’s small, far-right readership on tech issues. Instead, they tapped into a new and much larger audience that they hadn’t even known existed—one that was only coming together at that moment. “Every time you write one of your commentaries, it gets 10,000 comments,” Steve Bannon, Breitbart’s chief, told Yiannopoulos on the site’s radio show. “It goes even broader than the Breitbart audience, all over.” Within three years, the angry little subculture Yiannopoulos championed would evolve into a mainstream movement so powerful that he was granted a keynote slot at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the most important event on the political right.

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Berger, George Washington University Program on Extremism, September 2016. 11 “The trolls are winning”: “The Trolls Are Winning the Battle for the Internet,” Ellen Pao, Washington Post, July 16, 2015. 12 “Every time you write one of your”: “How Stephen Bannon Made Milo Dangerous,” Keegan Hankes, Southern Poverty Law Center, February 23, 2017. 13 “If rape culture was real”: Ibid. 14 “I realized Milo could connect”: Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising, Joshua Green, 2017: 147. 15 “Finally doing my big feature”: “Here’s How Breitbart and Milo Smuggled White Nationalism into the Mainstream,” Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed News, October 5, 2017. 16 “The alt-right is a movement”: “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, March 29, 2016. 17 The portmanteau is thought to have originated: “Behind the Racist Hashtag That Is Blowing Up Twitter,” Joseph Bernstein, BuzzFeed News, July 27, 2015. 18 “They call it ‘meme magic’”: “Meme Magic: Donald Trump Is the Internet’s Revenge on Lazy Elites,” Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, May 4, 2016. 19 “The unindoctrinated should not”: “This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook,” Ashley Feinberg, HuffPost, December 13, 2017. 20 “He has a character and a style”: Bokhari and Yiannopoulos. 21 a Harvard study later found: Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

At the height of New Labour’s success, Young even wrote an article in the Guardian taking the Labour leader to task and remaking his case with renewed urgency.32 The Best and the Brightest stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-six weeks and influenced a whole generation of young activists, who graduated from protesting against the Vietnam War to becoming Democratic Party stalwarts. His book also exercised influence in a surprising quarter: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief strategist and one of the heroes of the global populist right, was spotted reading it in February 2017.33 A Theory of Justice became required reading not only in philosophy departments but also in law schools across the world, not least in Harvard Law School, which has educated a disproportionate number of America’s senior judges.

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Crosland, ‘The Transition from Capitalism’, in Crossman (ed.), New Fabian Essays, p. 65 27 Margaret Cole, ‘Education and Social Democracy’, in ibid., p. 109 28 Roy Jenkins, ‘Equality’, in ibid., pp. 85–6 29 Anthony Crosland, The Conservative Enemy (London, Cape, 1962), pp. 173–4 30 David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York, Random House, 1972), pp. 41, 44 31 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 15 32 Michael Young, ‘Down with Meritocracy’, Guardian, 29 June 2001 33 Marc Tracy, ‘Steve Bannon’s Book Club’, The New York Times, 4 February 2017 34 Michael Anthony Lawrence, ‘Justice-as-Fairness as Judicial Guiding Principle: Remembering John Rawls and the Warren Court’, Brooklyn Law Review 82 (2) (2016), https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol81/iss2/5/, argues that the Warren Court adopted many of Rawls’s basic principles before he wrote his book. 35 Peter L.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

It had just one central cluster around the hyperpartisan platform Breitbart, which had been launched in 2005 (the year after Facebook) with the new media environment deliberately in mind. As founder Andrew Breitbart explained, “I’m committed to the destruction of the old media guard . . . and it’s a very good business model.” After Breitbart’s death in 2012, the organization was run by Steve Bannon, a former investment banker turned Hollywood producer, who intimately understood both markets and the power of a good viral headline. Bannon embraced social media as a tool to dominate the changing media marketplace, as well as to remake the right-wing. The modern internet wasn’t just a communications medium, he lectured his staff, it was a “powerful weapon of war,” or what he called “#War.”

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Then there was the data archive of the Republican National Committee, which claimed to have nearly 8 trillion pieces of information spread across 200 million American voters. And, finally, came the massive data stores of a controversial company called Cambridge Analytica. A UK-based firm that Breitbart chairman and Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon had helped form in 2013, Cambridge Analytica had previously been active in conducting information warfare–style efforts on behalf of clients ranging from corporations to the “Leave” side of Brexit. It would later be reported to have provided to the Trump campaign some 5,000 data points on 220 million Americans.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century
by Fiona Hill
Published 4 Oct 2021

Those who described themselves as Republicans in surveys were far more likely than supporters of the Democratic Party to favor shrinking the government. Trump tapped into these sentiments during his political campaign when he launched rhetorical attacks on the government apparatus and called for the “deconstruction of the administrative state.” This was a pet issue of Steve Bannon, one of his early policy advisers, but Trump fully embraced it. In 2018–2019, President Trump forced a government shutdown in a fight with Congress over the budget. It was another of his big shows. He figured that the federal government and its funding were easy political targets that would not elicit much public sympathy.

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device to expel officials: Meredith McGraw, “White House transfers top national security aide after whisper campaign,” Politico, February 20, 2020, https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/20/top-national-security-aide-anonymous-book-116325. trusted the federal government: “Little Public Support for Reductions in Federal Spending,” Pew Research Center, April 11, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/04/11/little-public-support-for-reductions-in-federal-spending/. Steve Bannon: Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state,’ ” Washington Post, February 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

But Alex Jones just believes in selling supplements, Donald Trump just believes in selling Donald Trump, and a remarkable amount of online extremism is a mix of irony memes and pranks and playacting, with anonymous trolls competing with very public grifters to exploit an aging society’s anxieties and a drifting youthful population’s appetite for stimulation. The reason that Steve Bannon achieved—for a brief spell—so much celebrity was that almost alone among Trumpian figures, he seemed to have a coherent philosophy beyond grifting, and I emphasize that “seemed” because there’s a possibility that all his name-checks of fascist intellectuals were part of the grift as well. The reason that the Antifa kids favor masks is that an awful lot of them are playacting their revolution, and they don’t want to put their names and faces to something that’s fundamentally just a game.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

Frustrated politicians and activists blame the deep state for undermining them, and people roll their eyes. The concept of the deep state has been around for years, but the term was unknown to most in the West and especially the United States until recently. President Trump’s alt-right defenders and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon have blamed the deep state for trying to delegitimize the president. Articles in Breitbart News, where Bannon served as executive chairman before and after working for Trump, have invoked the idea repeatedly. Critics balk at this accusation, reaching for tinfoil hats while lampooning alt-righters as paranoid weirdos.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

He brought with him a contradictory set of politics: a right-populist challenge to both NATO and the network of US-led free trade deals, on the one hand, and more traditional pro-business Republican pledges, on the other. The parts that got through, not surprisingly, were those that capital found more acceptable. Paul Ryan–backed tax cuts have been passed, but Trump’s more extreme protectionist plans have gotten stymied, and gone is Steve Bannon, along with his dreams of a massive jobs program built around deficit-financed infrastructure construction. If these are the pressures that rabidly pro-capitalist Trump was under, we can only imagine the forces that could be brought to bear on a President Sanders in 2021. For one thing, he would have to contend with a vicious media offensive—each new policy or proposal would be systematically smeared, with eager help from corporate Democrats.

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives
by David Sumpter
Published 18 Jun 2018

He claimed that he could use ‘hundreds and thousands of individual data points on our target audiences to understand exactly which messages are going to appeal to which audiences’ and implied that the methods he had described were being used by the Trump campaign. The origins of Cambridge Analytica has all the ingredients of a modern conspiracy story. It involves Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, data security, the psychology of personality, Facebook, underpaid Mechanical Turk workers, big data, Cambridge University academics, right-wing populist Steve Bannon who sits on the board, right-wing financier Robert Mercer who is one of its biggest investors, one-time national security advisor Michael Flynn who has acted as consultant, and (in some less reliable versions of the story) Russian-sponsored trolls. I can imagine it as a film with Jesse Eisenberg playing a psychologist who gradually uncovers the true motives of the company he works for: to manipulate our every emotion for political means.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

The power-hungry leaders of Free America used Trump’s presidency and his political failings to squeeze more plunder out of the economy and more breath out of government by the people. This describes what happened under Trump, but it doesn’t account for what made him new and powerful. He represented a social and political phenomenon that eludes standard left/right categories. Was he then a fascist with a Queens accent? Some of Trump’s advisors, like Steve Bannon, claimed inspiration from European reactionaries of the twenties and thirties. At times the cocked-chin Trump seemed to style himself after Mussolini or Franco. In 2017 he gave a speech before a rapturous crowd in Warsaw on the enemies of Western civilization, and you can almost picture him in a white uniform with gold braid and a red sash: “Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society
by Thomas Frank
Published 18 Jun 2018

Other measures would deliver a fleeting sugar high. Still others would have no impact at all, aside from appearances. But any single one of them might just be sufficient to produce the deadly phenomenon we know as Trump’s reelection, while knitting together the new, faux-proletarian Republican Party that Steve Bannon used to fantasize about, that he once dreamed would “govern for a hundred years.” Before you close this book, chuckle cynically, and take a sip of bourbon, think for a second about the cultural and political delusions a roaring economy and rising wages would surely generate—just as the tech mania of the late 1990s did, and just as the bull market of the 1980s did.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy
by Jamie Raskin
Published 4 Jan 2022

Several GOP members and thinkers had actually floated the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as a solution for dealing with the looming dangers of the president’s final troubled weeks, when he came to realize that the party was over. This route did not have the fierce partisan sting of impeachment. Even Trump’s former political strategist Steve Bannon had raised it demurely at one point, suggesting that the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would become a greater danger to Trump than impeachment. Nonetheless, all we could do as Democrats was ask Pence and the Cabinet to get together and act, pressuring them to do the right thing. I resolved that I would suggest to Speaker Pelosi and Leader Hoyer that we pass a nonbinding resolution asking Vice President Pence to assemble the Cabinet and activate Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, to save us from any further violence and chaos.

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They imagined that they had converged on Washington to destroy corrupt politicians of both parties, traitorous police officers, lying media, agents of George Soros, defenders of the Clintons and the Obamas, and other sinister, shadowy forces identified by conspiracy theorists in QAnon and by Trump’s authoritarian polemicists like Steve Bannon. Their foes were anyone who dared get in the way of the perpetual reign of Donald Trump, and their friends were anyone who joined in the festival of merciless violence called to restore Trump to his American throne. But, as we looked farther back in time and to a broader panorama, we could see that the violence was political in a second sense: it was a core part of Trump’s long-running strategic plan to maintain power, and on January 6, it became a specific tactical maneuver.

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu
by Anshel Pfeffer
Published 30 Apr 2018

The website that Solov and Breitbart envisioned, Solov said, “would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street.”3 Most American Jews were horrified by Trump’s victory and by the reports of the alleged anti-Semitic views of Steve Bannon, who had been Breitbart’s editor-in-chief and was now Trump’s chief strategist. But Ron Dermer, who knew Bannon, reported that he was “very pro-Israel.” To Netanyahu, that was all that mattered. Netanyahu and Bannon shared a unique historical belief. Both had been brought up—Bibi by his historian father and Bannon by his Catholic parents and teachers—to view the “Reconquista,” the fifteenth-century Christian victory over the Muslim Moors in Spain, as a key moment in history when “Western civilization was saved” from the Muslims.4 Benzion taught Bibi that this was the precedent for the return of the Jews to their land.

…

Hillary Clinton to Fareed Zakaria: Putin Indirectly Responsible for MH17,” CNN, July 27, 2014, http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2014/07/27/fmr-sec-hillary-clinton-to-fareed-zakaria-putin-indirectly-responsible-for-mh17. 2. Anshel Pfeffer, “The Collapsing Political Triangle Linking Adelson, Netanyahu and Trump,” Haaretz, November 8, 2016. 3. Larry Solov, “Breitbart News Network: Born in the USA, Conceived in Israel,” Breitbart, November 17, 2015. 4. Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), 51. 5. Twitter, @amit_segal, December 12, 2016. 6. Monica Langley, “Trump in Exclusive Interview Tells WSJ He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Obama Health Law,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2016. 7. Barak Ravid, “Trump Declines to Endorse Two-State Solution, Calls on Netanyahu to Hold Back on Settlements,” Haaretz, February 16, 2017. 8.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
by Nicole Perlroth
Published 9 Feb 2021

If their goal had all been to help elect Trump, then the Shadow Brokers had grown disillusioned with their candidate. Attached to their leak was a long list of political grievances: With the ease of a seasoned American pundit, the Shadow Brokers addressed Trump directly. They wanted the president to know they were upset about Steve Bannon’s recent removal from the National Security Council; the Pentagon’s strike on Syria one day earlier; the “deep state”; the Freedom Caucus in Congress; and white privilege. “TheShadowBrokers is wanting to see you succeed,” the Shadow Brokers told Trump. “TheShadowBrokers is wanting America to be great again.”

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He spoke the words matter-of-factly but, given the truth famine we found ourselves in, they landed like the words of a renegade soldier, and Trump and his minions punished him for it. “Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others be able to interfere in our 2020 Election with our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam,” Trump tweeted. Steve Bannon, the president’s far-right-hand man, later called for Wray—and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert—to be beheaded as a warning to federal workers who dared question the president’s propaganda. We had all spent the past four years worried what our foreign adversaries were planning.

Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
by Bill Browder
Published 11 Apr 2022

Ahead of me on the show was Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump’s newest communications director, who, overnight, had gone on a tirade in an interview with the New Yorker. He’d called Trump’s then chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic,” and when the reporter suggested Anthony was being media-hungry, he replied, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” I’d known Anthony Scaramucci, a slick and voluble New Yorker, for a long time. I liked him too. After Red Notice was published, whenever I bumped into him, he’d cup his hands in front of his crotch like he was holding something heavy and say, “Dude, you got some brass fucking balls on you taking on Putin!”

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

George, according to alt-righters, is neither an English street nor a Muslim street—separation is necessary for distinctiveness.” Asked why he supported Trump, Milo replied, “Trump represents the best hope we have of smashing political correctness apart.… I want a new political re-alignment on libertarian-authoritarian lines rather than left and right.” And when Trump hired the CEO of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, to run his campaign, a Washington Post columnist noted that it represented “the dangerous seizure of the conservative movement by the Alt-Right.” But for Milo, Peter Thiel is a hero on par with Trump for funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker. “With his lawsuit,” he wrote, “Thiel has perhaps done more than any man to liberate social media from the terror of left-wing public shaming that prevailed in the golden age of Gawker.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Before it was kicked off Facebook’s platforms for breaching the company’s terms of service (and let’s face it, Facebook probably kicked it off only because of the bad publicity), it vacuumed up data on hundreds of thousands of unwitting users and 87 million of their even less witting networks of friends to fine-tune precision messaging and behaviour manipulation of tiny segments of target populations. Cambridge Analytica had the support of a group of wealthy but highly dubious backers, including conservative muckraker and Trump supporter Steve Bannon and billionaire right-winger Robert Mercer. More ominously, it also had links to the U.K. and U.S. defence establishments. These political and financial supporters helped the company recognize that their psychometric profiling expertise, normally applied to digital marketing, could easily be repurposed for political campaigns, however unethically or illegally.

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
by Tim Harford
Published 2 Feb 2021

Robert Proctor, a historian who has spent decades studying the tobacco industry, calls modern politics “a golden age of ignorance.” Much as many smokers would like to keep smoking, many of us are fondly attached to our gut instincts on political questions. All politicians need to do is persuade us to doubt evidence that would challenge those instincts. As Donald Trump’s former right-hand man Steve Bannon infamously told the writer Michael Lewis: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”15 The history of another term associated with Donald Trump—“fake news”—is instructive here. Originally, it described a very specific phenomenon: websites publishing false articles in the hope of getting clicks from social media and thus advertising dollars.

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell
Published 15 Feb 2009

See also privacy issues antisocial behavior AOL Apple appliances archivists arguments artificial intelligence “As We May Think” (Bush) associative memory astronomy asynchronous logic Atlantic Monthly AT&T audio recordings and files and human development research and legal issues and lifelogging and memex and metadata and note taking and storytelling and total data collection and travelogues auditory learners Augment system autofill features autographs automatic teller machines (ATMs) automation automobiles availability of information. See also searching data avatars Azure B Baby Boomer backing-up data Baldridge, Aimee Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Liam Barclay, Tom battery technology battlefield awareness Bay Area Research Center (BARC) Bell Electric Bickmore, Timothy billing statements See also financial and transaction data biographies biomarker testing biometric sensors and battery technology and cardiac health forerunners of and health management and lifelogging and miniaturization and StartleCam and unified communications BitLocker BlackBerry blocking memories blogs and blogging blood pressure data blood sampling BodyBugg boilerplate forms bookmarks books Brahe, Tycho Brain Age Brain Fitness Program A Brief History of Time (Hawking) British Library British National Health Service Bush, Vannevar and higher learning and lifelong learning and memex on scientific research and “trails,” business card scanners Business Channel C calendars Calvin, John cameras and bio-memory and digitizing images and electronic memory and GPS technology and health data and implementation of Total Recall, and lifelogging and memex and miniaturization and picture-taking mirrors and scanners and SenseCam and smartphones and Soldier Assist System and storytelling and surveillance and travelogues and user interfaces and Wi-Fi Canada Canyon Ranch wellness center Car Talk (radio) cardiac health Carnegie Mellon University Carved in Sand (Ramin) categorization schemes .

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Anti-individual behavioural theory came into vogue with the American Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner after World War Two. Back then it was straightforward Behaviorism. Now it’s Radical Behaviorism, and there are plenty of psychologists helping companies and political groups with their moral reasoning here. Steve Bannon in the USA and Dominic Cummings in the UK are disciples of the new-style Skinnerism that seeks to manipulate ‘individual’ behaviour. (Possible because such behaviour isn’t individual at all – it’s an amalgam of upbringing, bias, assumptions, and fear, reward being the flip-side of fear.) Nudging our behaviour towards desired outcomes, whether it’s what we buy or how we vote, has always been the standard fare of lobbying and advertising.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy
by Talia Lavin
Published 14 Jul 2020

To these extremists, the fact that there wasn’t an Einsatzgruppen shooting minorities and Jews in the streets, and they hadn’t been invited to join, was reason enough to abandon their electoral hopes in Trump as savior of their movement. Trump’s overtly racist campaign, election, and inauguration reinvigorated white-supremacist activity in the United States, both bolstering and expanding extant groups and resulting in a proliferation of new fascist groups. It didn’t hurt that Steve Bannon, an ideologue openly friendly to the alt-right, managed Trump’s campaign in its final days. Yet over the ensuing years, the tenor of fascist rhetoric with regard to the Oval Office has changed from triumphant to disillusioned. While Trumpism awakened and emboldened the movement—enabling white nationalists to feel that they were going to be electorally represented at a federal level—their own impatience, and the ways Trump himself has made peace with the mores of the conservative elite he had once promised to defeat, have steadily chipped away at that hope.

Only Americans Burn in Hell
by Jarett Kobek
Published 10 Apr 2019

But here’s the real significance: Breitbart is the only person, throughout the entire event, who doesn’t insult Drudge or treat him like a child who’s been caught stealing cookies. Breitbart went on to found the Breitbart News Network, a website which by the Year of the Froward Worm had become the dominant voice of the Far Right in America. When Breitbart died in 2012 AD, presumably from a toxic mix of being both a drug freak and a huge fucking asshole, a guy named Steve Bannon ended up in control of the Breitbart News Network. In August of 2016 AD, he became Chief Executive Officer of Donald J. Trump’s Presidential campaign. When Trump assumed the Presidency, Bannon went to the White House. When Blumenthal sued Drudge, Drudge didn’t have any resources to mount a legal defense.

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News
by Eric Berkowitz
Published 3 May 2021

Unregulated speech places responsibility on the population “in the hope that . . . such freedom will ultimately produce a more capable citizenry and more perfect polity.”7 This is lofty rhetoric, and it is probably still true. But when “speech” becomes the enemy of free expression—when citizen speakers are reduced to online “users” whose scarce attention is manhandled for profit; when tsunamis of online garbage are weaponized to drown out voices and dilute truth (what Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, called “flood[ing] the zone with shit”8); when algorithms decide whose voices are heard or magnified; and when corporations frame their buying of elections and burying of climate change information as free speech—it may be time to rethink some cherished assumptions.

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 6 Mar 2018

The problem with Trumpian rule has been one of chaos much more than totalitarianism. Furthermore, the Trump associates who sometimes are considered the “most fascistic” (it is beyond the scope of this essay to evaluate such charges, so here I am simply referring to the perception) largely have been forced out or lost influence, including Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon. Actual fascists these days don’t have extensive experience in government at high levels, and they are unlikely to find such environments conducive to their goals and temperaments. That makes it very hard for a potential fascistic revolution to get off the ground. And the larger, more diverse, and more decentralized the federal government is, the more of a “fascist shock force” would be required to bring about fundamental change.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

—Subcomandante Galeano, “The Method, the Bibliography, and a Drone Deep in the Mountains of the Mexican Southeast” Networks among the nationalist far right are, perhaps paradoxically, increasingly transnational. Brexit cheerleader Nigel Farage appeared at a Trump rally in 2016, former executive chairperson of Breitbart News Steve Bannon became the cochair of the Republican Hindu Coalition in 2019, President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil was the guest of honor at India’s Republic Day celebration hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2020, and the Christ-church shooter as well as Norwegian killer Anders Breivik both glorified the Bosnian Serb army’s ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and the creation of the ethnostate Republika Srpska.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

January 28, 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win. 19. Cadwalladr, Carole. “Robert Mercer: The big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media.” Guardian. February 26, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage. 20. “As many as 48 million Twitter accounts aren’t people, says study.” CNBC. April 12, 2017. http://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/technology/2017/04/10/many-48-million-twitter-accounts-arent-people-says-study/. 21. L2 Analysis of LinkedIn Data. 22. Novet, Jordan.

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
by Arthur Turrell
Published 2 Aug 2021

Tirone, “Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/nuclear-fusion/2019/06/20/c6bd5682-938d-11e9-956a-88c291ab5c38_story.html. 13. “PayPal Billionaire Peter Thiel ‘Becoming Key Donald Trump Adviser,’ ” Independent (2017), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/peter-thiel-donald-trump-key-adviser-technology-science-paypal-david-gelertner-steve-bannon-a7600471.html; “Peter Thiel’s Other Hobby Is Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2016), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/peter-thiel-s-other-hobby-is-nuclear-fusion. 14. “The Secretive, Billionaire-Backed Plans to Harness Fusion,” BBC News (2016), https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160428-the-secretive-billionaire-backed-plans-to-harness-fusion. 15.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

.[*] Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, described as a “strongman” by the press, was at the head of a growing authoritarian, populist movement across Europe, much like the one Trump had ridden to power in the United States. The American Right admired Orbán as a leader who was beating back progressives and winning the culture wars in his country: He had banned transgender people from legally changing their sex and built a barbed-wire border wall to keep out immigrants. Trump adviser Steve Bannon would later call Orbán “Trump before Trump.” Ton-That, Johnson, and Schwartz wanted to offer him their services. The Smartcheckr team had been busy in the months since Trump took power. Three months after the inauguration, in early April 2017, Hoan Ton-That reached out to a man named Eugene Megyesy, an adviser to Orbán whose contact information Charles Johnson had in his right-wing Rolodex.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Even before the Trumpian takeover, thoughtful Republican stalwarts had disparaged their own organization as “the party of stupid” for its anti-intellectualism and hostility to science.73 Since then, many others have been horrified by their party’s acquiescence to Trump’s maniacal lying and trolling: his game plan, in the admiring words of onetime strategist Steve Bannon, to “flood the zone with shit.”74 With Trump’s defeat, rational heads on the right should seek to restore American politics to a system with two parties that differ over policy rather than over the existence of facts and truth. We are not helpless against the onslaught of “post-truth” disinformation.

The Ones We've Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America
by Charlotte Alter
Published 18 Feb 2020

HOUSE DEFEATS GUN CONTROL BILL: The drive for expanded gun controls abruptly collapsed in the House yesterday, raising doubts that Congress will pass any gun measures this year. . . . CHAPTER 2 Harry Potter and the Spawn of the Boomers The baby boomers are the most spoiled, most self-centered, most narcissistic generation the country’s ever produced. —STEVE BANNON Once upon a time in America, a generation of middle-class young people graduated from publicly funded high schools and went to highly subsidized, rapidly diversifying, and increasingly competitive colleges. They outworked their aristocratic classmates and entered a new “knowledge economy” of lawyers, bankers, and lobbyists, where they made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year helping other rich people stay rich.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac
Published 2 Sep 2019

The swearing-in ceremony in January was painful to watch. He winced as the group of tycoons and robber barons surrounded Trump at the Capitol, celebrating the triumph of evil over good. The travel ban carried out less than a week later seemed sadistic to him. The cruel execution of the announcement perfectly symbolized Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon—two of Trump’s most xenophobic, nationalistic advisors—and their desire to inflict pain on immigrants. But O’Sullivan felt a glimmer of hope as the news reported crowds of people gathering at the airport to protest Trump’s unjust ban. Thousands of other people like him, fed up with fear and anger, were fighting the administration through protest, one of the most American acts there is.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

Cigarette companies succeeded in using these methods to cast doubt on scientific findings that smoking was bad for health; and firms of all kinds succeed in persuading individuals to buy products that they might not otherwise have bought, that upon deeper reflection, they neither need nor want. If you can sell bad and even dangerous products, you can sell bad and even dangerous ideas—and there are strong economic interests to do so. These insights were picked up and used with vengeance by Steve Bannon and Fox News to change perceptions on a host of topics, from climate change to the inefficiency and inequities of government. Selling the majority on policies that are against their own interest That Trump and his clique have an interest in subverting the truth is no surprise. But one has to ask, with so much at stake, including our democracy and the advances in standards of living that have marked the past 250 years, why does this concerted attack on the very institutions and ideas that have done so much for our civilization seem to resonate among so many?

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

If avoiding being cussed out is the overarching goal, of course employees are going to toe the line, but, frankly, that sounds miserable for everyone involved. I mean, it’s demoralizing to be on the receiving end of vitriol, and to be the one doling out that awful wrath does nothing but mess up your skin. Seriously, being a tyrant will have you going from Dorian Gray to Steve Bannon in a New York minute. #ShallowButTrue. But leaders, especially the successful ones (note: Success is not limited to amassing wealth; I’m talking interpersonal skills, encouraging their employees to exceed their potential, etc.), are a different breed. Leaders are inspiring, make their employees feel like they’re in the fight with them, and show they care about more than the bottom line, all of which can cause their employees to exude the most coveted yet illusive quality: loyalty.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Austin Startups (June 15, 2017); Anca Voinea, “Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto Promotes Co-operative Ownership of Digital Platforms,” Co-operative News (August 30, 2016). 27. Lina Khan, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Yale Law Journal 126, no. 3 (January 2017); Jonathan Taplin, “Is It Time to Break Up Google?” New York Times (April 22, 2017); Ryan Grim, “Steve Bannon Wants Facebook and Google Regulated Like Utilities,” Intercept (July 27, 2017). 28. David Talbot, Kira Hessekiel, and Danielle Kehl, Community-Owned Fiber Networks: Value Leaders in America (Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, 2018); for resources on co-op and municipal broadband programs, see muninetworks.org, a project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. 29.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future
by Joseph C. Sternberg
Published 13 May 2019

Paul Taylor, The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017), 22. 13. William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1991). 14. Ibid., 419. 15. Tim Fernholz, “The Pseudoscience That Prepared America for Steve Bannon’s Apocalyptic Message,” Quartz, May 27, 2017. 16. Richard Fry, “Millennials Projected to Overtake Baby Boomers as America’s Largest Generation,” Fact Tank (blog), Pew Research Center, March 1, 2018. 17. Ibid. 18. William H. Frey, “The Millennial Generation: A Demographic Bridge to America’s Diverse Future,” Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings, January 2018, brookings.edu/research/millennials. 19.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

It’s not out of the realm of possibility—and is in fact quite likely—that Conway has considered that no matter what she says or does…she will be criticized in bluntly sexist terms because she is a woman.” I’d add that she also likely knows that, on the terms of contemporary feminism, she will be defended in equally blunt terms, too. Later on, Jennifer Palmieri, the director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, lamented in the Times that Steve Bannon was seen as an evil genius while Conway, equally manipulative, was just seen as crazy. When Saturday Night Live portrayed Conway like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction in a sketch, that, too, was sexist, as were the memes that compared Conway to Gollum and Skeletor. But if you stripped away the sexism, you would still be left with Kellyanne Conway.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce
by Natalie Berg and Miya Knights
Published 28 Jan 2019

Amazon’s dominance has come at a cost – one that most normal retailers could not bear – and now there are growing calls for existing legislation to be rewritten for the digital age. Trump’s tweets may get all the publicity, but Amazon is now facing bipartisan backlash. On the far right, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon has called for tech giants to be regulated like public utilities since they have become so essential to 21st-century life; while Democratic Party leaders pushed for a wider antitrust crackdown in 2018 as part of their ‘Better Deal’ economic platform. ‘We’re seeing this incredibly large company getting involved in almost every area of commerce and I think it is important to look at the power and influence Amazon has’, said Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders in 2018.3 Khan argues that predatory pricing and vertical integration are highly relevant to analysing Amazon’s path to dominance – and that current doctrine underappreciates the risk of such practices.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

Trump, acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, July 21, 2016, www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974. “This is what democracy looks like!”: Anemona Hartocollis and Yamiche Alcindor, “Women’s March Highlights as Huge Crowds Protest Trump: ‘We’re Not Going Away,’” The New York Times, January 21, 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/us/womens-march.html?mcubz=1. “Who was sovereign?”: Steve Bannon, speaking at the victory party for Roy Moore, a white nationalist candidate in the Alabama Republican Senate Primary, on September 28, 2017. Alex Isenstadt, “Moore’s win spells trouble for GOP establishment in 2018: The insurgent’s victory in Alabama is likely to fuel other primary challenges in a year that was supposed to be kind to the GOP,” Politico, September 27, 2017, www.politico.com/story/2017/09/27/alabama-republicans-moore-midterms-strange-243188.

How Long Will Israel Survive Threat Wthn
by Gregg Carlstrom
Published 14 Oct 2017

“A United States that no longer exists” Donald Trump will be the president who breaks the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. It sounds absurd, of course. Aside from Friedman, his Israel advisers also include his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose family runs a foundation that funnels tens of thousands of dollars to West Bank settlements (including at least one extremist yeshiva). Steve Bannon, his top adviser, was invited to speak at a far-right Zionist Organization of America dinner just days after the election. The Israel lobby seems to be on good terms with the new administration. And it is—but only a part of it. The Brookings Institution, one of the more staid think tanks in DC, hosts an event called the Saban Forum, a yearly affirmation of the US–Israel relationship.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

The UK Independence Party (UKIP), a right-wing populist party that successfully campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union. 12. Independent, 21 February 2017 13. Twitter, 17 December 2017, 12.25 p.m.; @PeterSweden7 14. Twitter, 7 August 2016, 8.44 a.m.; @PeterSweden7 15. Twitter, 14 October 2016, 3.21 a.m.; @PeterSweden7 16. petersweden.com 17. Zack Beauchamp, on Vox, noted how Steve Bannon’s website had published an ‘enormous number of pieces’ about the alleged migrant rape crisis in Sweden. 18. Sydsvenska, 20 December 2017 19. The Local, 13 February 2018 20. BBC, Reality Check, 24 February 2017 21. Not all billionaires were the same. The new publisher of the New York Times, A.G.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

In 2013, Trump made a speech to the Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, in which he outlined the themes that would go on to define him – the threat of a rising China, the possibility of 11 million ‘illegals’ being able to vote, and a decline in manufacturing. ‘You’re on a suicide mission,’ he told the delegates. ‘Our country is a total mess – a total and complete mess – and what we need is leadership.’ In the audience was Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of the white nationalist website Breitbart. Bannon liked what he saw in Trump and in particular the unquestioning adulation he could produce in many voters. He reported the speech back to two men who would be crucial in allowing Trump to deliver on his agenda. The first was Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, who had been fighting a battle against immigration for years.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

But the dirty politics of the Trump campaign, coupled with the vast trove of data that could be harvested from Facebook and a variety of other websites and apps, led to something much darker.5 According to a report published in Bloomberg Businessweek that came out a full two weeks before the election, Trump knew he needed a miracle to win, and his campaign team, led by the infamous Steve Bannon; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and other social media–savvy staffers, found that “miracle” in Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.6 Kushner, who had friends in the tech world, reached out to “some Silicon Valley people who are kind of covert Trump fans and experts in digital marketing.”

Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms and the Corruption of Justice
by David Enrich
Published 5 Oct 2022

Through its successful representation of Trump and the installation of its lawyers in the White House, the firm played a crucial role in a once-in-a-generation remaking of the federal judiciary that would long outlast Trump. “Why the Left is triggered by Trump is because they understand they’re in a Kafkaesque nightmare, that Donald Trump is going to be in their personal lives, ten, twenty, and thirty years from now,” a gleeful Steve Bannon explained in 2019. “And the reason is Don McGahn.” Right before McGahn left the White House, Trump sat down with him in the Oval Office and offered to write him a letter of recommendation. McGahn didn’t need Trump’s help. Multiple law firms had already approached him with job offers. McGahn considered other fields, too; some of his predecessors had gone into finance, or run trade associations, or joined the paid-speaking circuit, or written books.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

“Introducing FBLearner Flow: Facebook’s AI Backbone,” Facebook Code, April 16, 2018, https://code.facebook.com/posts/1072626246134461/introducing-fblearner-flow-facebook-s-ai-backbone. 79. Andy Kroll, “Cloak and Data: The Real Story Behind Cambridge Analytica’s Rise and Fall,” Mother Jones, March 24, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/cloak-and-data-cambridge-analytica-robert-mercer. 80. Carole Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018, http://www.the guardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump; Kroll, “Cloak and Data.” 81. Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr, “How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions,” New York Times, March 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html; Emma Graham-Harrison and Carole Cadwalladr, “Revealed: 50 Million Facebook Profiles Harvested for Cambridge Analytica in Major Data Breach,” Guardian, March 17, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election; Julia Carrie Wong and Paul Lewis, “Facebook Gave Data About 57bn Friendships to Academic,” Guardian, March 22, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/22/facebook-gave-data-about-57bn-friendships-to-academic-aleksandr-kogan; Olivia Solon, “Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica May Have Gained 37m More Users’ Data,” Guardian, April 4, 2018, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/04/facebook-cambridge-analytica-user-data-latest-more-than-thought. 82.

…

Kroll, “Cloak and Data.” 84. Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius et al., “Online Political Microtargeting: Promises and Threats for Democracy” (SSRN Scholarly Paper, Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, February 9, 2018), https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3128787. 85. See Cadwalladr, “‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool.’” 86. Charlotte McEleny, “European Commission Issues €3.6m Grant for Tech That Measures Content ‘Likeability,’” CampaignLive.co.uk, April 20, 2015, http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/european-commission-issues-€36m-grant-tech-measures-content-likeability/1343366. 87. “2016 Innovation Radar Prize Winners,” Digital Single Market, September 26, 2016, https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/2016-innovation-radar-prize-winners. 88.

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published 2 Oct 2017

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy in all of its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump inaugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood against Mexican “rapists,” only to be later revealed as a proud violator. White supremacy has always had a perverse sexual tint. It is thus appropriate that Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who mocks his white male opponents as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifically meant to debase by fear/fantasy—the target is so weak that he would submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dictums of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue.

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age
by David E. Sanger
Published 18 Jun 2018

The publication of the DNC material seemed highly coordinated. Russian propaganda was in overdrive; while no one yet understood the extent of the problem, there were reports of fictitious news stories about Clinton’s health, which usually were stuck in an echo chamber, bouncing between the Russian TV network RT and Breitbart News, Steve Bannon’s mouthpiece. “I didn’t realize at the time that two-thirds of American adults get their news through social media,” said Haines, who was among the most thoughtful members of Obama’s team about the impact of social movements on democratic processes. “So while we knew something about Russian efforts to manipulate social media, I think it is fair to say that we did not recognize the extent of the vulnerability.”

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump
by James Naughtie
Published 1 Apr 2020

There had been little notice, but a large crowd turned up, probably 10,000 strong, who waited in the sunshine for the first sight of his plane – with trump emblazoned on the fuselage, of course. They were a cross-section of the local community, ordinary people with kids perched on their shoulders eating ice creams. There were a few hairy bikers who seemed to be from the Steve Bannon part of Trumpland – some white nationalist stickers were on their machines – but in the main this was middle America at play, not even particularly concerned about chanting ‘Lock her up!’ too often. They were normality on display. My Today colleague Jonathan Harvey said, as the plane appeared, ‘He’s going to win, you know.’

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

The invitation came as a result of a memo Pottinger had written about U.S. relations with Asia. He rode a Citibike to the glassy skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. Secret Service had cut off elevator access to the Trump quarters, so Pottinger walked up the remaining stairs, feeling a little disoriented. He emerged in an opulent apartment, slathered in blinding gilt. Steve Bannon, Trump’s political guru, was there, along with Flynn. Jared Kushner wandered in with K.T. McFarland, who would serve briefly as deputy national security adviser, the position Pottinger would eventually hold. There were several other people Pottinger didn’t know, none of whom had anything to do with Asia.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

There are several reasons for this; mainstream parties on the right have in general not managed to boost economic growth, and those on the left are politically vulnerable to new trends such as terrorism and immigration. The new trend in politics will be the rise of new parties. Some of these parties may base their manifestos on cross-border appeal (e.g., green parties or Steve Bannon’s Movement, which seeks to connect far-right groups in the United States and Europe). New parties may begin small, but some of those small parties will become mainstream parties, and they may be built up on principles and issues that existing parties do not address well. For instance, many existing parties eschew the role of religion in public life, few of them can craft and communicate a sense of homeland, or heimat, without seeming right wing, others struggle with how to frame the role of technology in societies and economies, and most have failed to address fault lines in public health provision.

Very Bad People: The Inside Story of the Fight Against the World’s Network of Corruption
by Patrick Alley
Published 17 Mar 2022

Combined with the nature of the ad, it could prove to be an explosive mix. The team knew they were playing with fire. ‘We got a bit giddy about it,’ Naomi said. They were trying to put themselves into the mindset of someone who would do this; it was like trying to inhabit the mind of someone like Steve Bannon. It felt a bit dirty. It also felt very serious and very scary to have those potentially destructive tools so easily at their fingertips. The team double-checked, triple-checked and sense-checked their methodology to make sure that these ads wouldn’t actually go up. ‘We made sure we had multiple eyes on all of this when we were taking things up and down, which speaks to our nervousness about what we were doing,’ Nienke said.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

Cramer (University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 3. Trump said he’d ‘put America first’: Trump said: ‘America first will be the overriding theme of my administration.’ ‘Donald Trump’s foreign policy: “America first”’, Jeremy Diamond and Stephen Colinson, CNN, 27 April 2016. one of his closest advisers complained to reporters: ‘Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots “An Entirely New Political Movement”’, Michael Wolff, Hollywood Reporter, 18 November 2016. I’M NOT “DEPLORABLE” I’M JUST A HARD WORKING: Spotted at: https://digest.bps.org.uk/­2016/­11/14/­we-have-an-unfortunate-tendency-to-assume-were-morally-superior-to-others/.

The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral
Published 14 Sep 2020

“we all know well who created”: Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, speech during the high-level segment of the twenty-fifth session of the UN Human Rights Council, Geneva, March 3, 2014, https://www.mid.ru/​en/​web/​guest/​vistupleniya_ministra/​-/asset_publisher/​MCZ7HQuMdqBY/​content/​id/​72642. 77 percent of Crimeans report Russian: State Statistics Committee of Ukraine, 2001 Census, http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/​eng/​results/. A more recent Crimean census, conducted by Russia in 2014 after the annexation, is disputed. Cambridge Analytica controversy: Carole Cadwalladr, “ ‘I Made Steve Bannon’s Psychological Warfare Tool’: Meet the Data War Whistleblower,” Guardian, March 18, 2018. Mark Zuckerberg to testify: Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and chief executive officer of Facebook, testimony at hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, April 10, 2018, https://en.wikisource.org/​wiki/​Zuckerberg_Senate_Transcript_2018; Mark Zuckerberg, testimony at hearing before the U.S.

Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism
by Jeffrey Toobin
Published 1 May 2023

Representative Andrew Clyde, of Georgia, said the actions of the rioters in the Capitol resembled “a normal tourist visit.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also dismissed the importance of January 6, saying, “A bunch of conservatives, Second Amendment supporters, went in the Capitol without guns, and they think we organized that? I don’t think so.” Greene said her efforts would have been more effective: “If Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would have been armed.” The Republican level of fury was unprecedented. Senator Rick Scott of Florida said the investigation at Mar-a-Lago showed that the FBI was acting like “the Gestapo.” Dan Cox, the Republican candidate for governor of Maryland, called the FBI’s actions “criminal.”

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 6 Nov 2023

But at the time they were also a popular pet, which caused anger from activists, so the “Ossabaw feral swine” was used. They ate chickens and wanted starchy food over scraps. Thus, their final contribution to Biosphere 2 came during Thanksgiving and Christmas 1992. OceanofPDF.com *As an irrelevant but too-weird-to-skip coda, Chris Bannon and his brother Steve Bannon, later director of the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign, were brought in to take over the financially strained experiment as it careened toward its demise. OceanofPDF.com *In fairness, you would lose a lot more calories going from food to liquor than just going from food to wine.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

For example, the “Spider-Man neuron” in the multimodal model CLIP is activated when the model is presented with a photo of a person dressed as Spider-Man, a sketch of Spider-Man, photos of spiders or webs, or the word “spider.” The “Donald Trump neuron” is activated by photographs and cartoons of Donald Trump, the word “Trump,” or pictures of “Make America Great Again” hats. The Trump neuron is even weakly activated for people associated with Trump, such as Steve Bannon and Mike Pence. While large multimodal models still don’t have anything close to the richness and sophistication that humans have in understanding the world, they are suggestive of a direction in future AI research that may prove promising. Many of the problems of the brittleness and narrowness of AI today may stem from the limitations of AI models’ training data.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth
by Elizabeth Williamson
Published 8 Mar 2022

The New York Times, with London’s Observer and The Guardian, had written a series of stories[4] based on a trove of documents proving that Cambridge Analytica, a company controlled by right-wing megadonor Robert Mercer, improperly accessed the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users in 2014. The harvesting amounted to the largest known leak in the company’s history. Stephen K. Bannon, a top Trump campaign official and later White House adviser, sat on Cambridge Analytica’s board. The company used the information it collected to construct psychological profiles of potential voters, which it then tried to sell in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Evidence emerged that Lukoil, a Kremlin-linked oil conglomerate, was among those interested in Cambridge Analytica’s targeting of U.S. voters.

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House
by Ben Rhodes
Published 4 Jun 2018

They ate and talked for three hours, the longest time Obama had spent alone with a foreign leader in eight years. A few of us dined with her staff in an adjoining room. The Germans looked stricken; they spoke with unease about the new world coming, and the burdens on Merkel within it. “To the leader of the free world,” I toasted, ruefully. One aide told me that Steve Bannon’s appointment to the White House staff had been front-page news in Germany. “We know Bannon,” he said, leaning toward me as if passing on a secret in confidence. Outside the window you could see the Brandenburg Gate in a gold light, and the Reichstag building, the replacement for the one that was set on fire as Hitler took power.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

Its constituency subsequently migrated: Eshwar Chandrasekharan et al., “You Can’t Stay Here: The Efficacy of Reddit’s 2015 Ban Examined Through Hate Speech,” (Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction vol.1) November 2017. A later semantic analysis: Trevor Martin, “Dissecting Trump’s Most Rabid Online Following,” FiveThirtyEight.com, March 23, 2017. alt-right synergy: Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency (New York: Penguin, 2017). messages were honed here: Savvas Zannettou et al., “The Web Centipede: Understanding How Web Communities Influence Each Other Through the Lens of Mainstream and Alternative News Sources,” September 30, 2017. Former campaign staffers have admitted: Ben Schreckinger, “World War Meme,” Politico Magazine, March/April 2017.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

He has so annoyed the other guests, expatiating on everything from how ‘to handle the difficulties of French reoccupation of the Ruhr, especially in relation to the general question of the shortage of pig-iron on the world market’ to ‘professional boxing’, his host tells him to shut up: ‘Farebrother, you are talking through your hat.’8 Buyers usually do more than walk around with their copies, in other words: whether he or she is the leader of the free world, a business magnate, college freshman or, apparently, Sarah Palin and Steve Bannon – they also read it. Investigative journalism is not a strength of the paper. What readers expect from the Economist are sharp didactic summaries and surprising numbers, which it provides on a grand scale. In a single issue, one may flit past e-commerce in China, mortgage fallout in Las Vegas, peace negotiations in the Middle East, the search for life on Mars, a new art museum in Qatar, and an obituary for an obscure South African explorer eaten by a crocodile.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

A study looking specifically at the rise of Hungary’s far-right Jobbik Party since the 2008 crisis found support increased most sharply among Hungarians who borrowed in foreign currencies, and then faced much higher loan payments as the Hungarian currency crashed. 21. Michael Wolff, “Ringside with Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement,’ ” Hollywood Reporter, November 18, 2016. 22. The data is from the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, which keeps some of the best data on global trade flows. The Dutch have long taken trade very seriously. 23.

Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism
by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart
Published 31 Dec 2018

Party platforms and manifestos are taken to reflect common principles as blueprints which guide party campaigns and subsequent government programs.14 But these documents may be inadequate guides to collective issue preferences in factionalized and poorly institutionalized political parties with low party discipline, which are common outside of Western Europe. The US Republican Party, for example, has become more authoritarian populist under the Trump administration, exemplified by the influence of Steve Bannon as chief strategist in the White House during the first seven months after Trump took office, the resignation of many moderate Republican House lawmakers in the run up to the 2018 mid-­term contests, and the role of cabinet members in zealously implementing Trump’s vision of America, notably Scott Pruitt’s tenure in the Environmental Protection Agency and Ryan Zinke at the Interior.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Pretty Hate Machine In 2013, between her internship at the British international consultancy SCL Group and her first year at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Sophie Schmidt introduced her SCL bosses to Palantir. The daughter of Google executive and longtime Valley hand Eric Schmidt, Sophie had the good idea to connect the Brits with Thiel’s firm. Soon after, a right-wing media impresario named Steve Bannon approached SCL with an idea for a U.S. spin-off. SCL was used to manage election propaganda campaigns for the ruling cliques in England’s former colonies, but the United States was a whole new market. When Bannon suggested that his Breitbart News Network funders Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were interested in financing the effort, anything seemed possible.