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Steve Bannon

On Politico The Crackpot Theories of Stephen Bannon’s Favorite Authors
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The problem isn’t that Bannon will want to launch a nuclear war; even someone who takes a clash-of-civilizations view of radical Islamism isn’t necessarily jonesing for mass destruction, and, besides, Bannon doesn’t have the power to initiate that if he did. The problem is that admiration for these kinds of crackpot theories reveal, or confirm, the dangerous amateurism about in the White House.

Autodidacts like Strauss and Howe—or Bannon—tend to fall in love uncritically with the seductive insights they stumble upon. They tend to disdain the reasons that more expert students of their subjects may offer for rejecting their overly simplistic claims. The penchant for grand explanatory theories frequently reflects an inflexibility of thought, a resistance to contrary evidence, an eagerness to fit everything into an all-encompassing system. But successful policy making depends on intellectual nimbleness and pragmatism, on being able to revise your ideas based on new events and information, on understanding history as a set of contingent choices. The type of person enchanted by The Fourth Turning’s overly neat diagrams and mechanistic arguments, who isn’t compelled to pick apart its glib generalizations, is not someone whose intellectual instincts encourage confidence.

But then I would argue something practical like that. I’m a Generation X Nomad.
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Another airport bookshop tome. For a product of elite education Bannon has a peculiarly well developed taste for middlebrow meanderings.
 
CrabbedOne said:
On Politico The Crackpot Theories of Stephen Bannon’s Favorite Authors
Another airport bookshop tome. For a product of elite education Bannon has a peculiarly well developed taste for middlebrow meanderings.
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I have no problem with people being critical of Bannon's views, they deserve criticism, but it does tar all autodidacts with the same brush as obsessives who latch on to a simple theory that then explains everything. Yes some autodidacts are guilty of this but then so are some well known people with a university education, Richard Dawkins with his theory of memetics, computer scientists/engineers who see everything in computational and mechanistic terms and the numerous economists with their free market dogma. In my view the issue here is that these people operate in a social and educational environment whereby their views are continually reinforced by their peers, who will tend to think along similar lines and thus lack an exposure to different points of view which then prevents them from assessing their own views in a critical manner.

I also can't help but think that there is some degree of educational snobbery here on the part of the author.
 
mather said:
I have no problem with people being critical of Bannon's views, they deserve criticism, but it does tar all autodidacts with the same brush as obsessives who latch on to a simple theory that then explains everything. Yes some autodidacts are guilty of this but then so are some well known people with a university education, Richard Dawkins with his theory of memetics, computer scientists/engineers who see everything in computational and mechanistic terms and the numerous economists with their free market dogma. In my view the issue here is that these people operate in a social and educational environment whereby their views are continually reinforced by their peers, who will tend to think along similar lines and thus lack an exposure to different points of view which then prevents them from assessing their own views in a critical manner.

I also can't help but think that there is some degree of educational snobbery here on the part of the author.
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Err, Bannon's not exactly a CSE bearing Secondary Modern kid like myself. We are talking about a critter who has a BSC from Virginia Tech a Masters from Georgetown and a MBA from Harvard Business School. A Navy Officer who was lettered and well connected enough to try for Partner at Goldman.

Yet he does reference a lot of dodgy old tat in his output and (probably more disturbingly) still get regarded as well read by his adoring circle.
 
phillm said:
A Hitler / Churchill "art watercolour off competition" would be a close run thing but both of course would beat Bush raised arm down.

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Winston-Churchill-Villa-on-the-Nivelle-%C2%A3200-300k-%C2%A35052501.jpeg
churchill-paints-chartwell2.jpg
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Perfect excuse for Hannah Gordon to dust off her time machine

eif-mahagonny-2.jpg
 
DaveCinzano said:
Perfect excuse for Hannah Gordon to dust off her time machine

eif-mahagonny-2.jpg
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I'd forgotten about her. She inhabits the universe of Felicity Kendall / Joan Bakewell - if only I had had some etchings to show her. Bannon has got through three wives so far. He's obviously a good catch for the ladies who will no doubt swoon to wake up next to that. He's single now. Classy guy. Late to the party .....

Stephen Bannon's Wives and Children (Bio, wiki)
 
Politics Is Downstream from Culture, Part 2: “Cultural Marxism,” or, from Hegel to Obama
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Breitbart’s slogan “Politics is downstream from culture” takes theoretical insights from “Marxists” and reverse-engineers them for the right. Powered by the media empire he founded, Breitbart introduced a conviction into far right circles that the Frankfurt School had been correct: “As it stands, the Frankfurt School…is fighting the political battle on both the political and the cultural battlefields. Conservatives are fighting it only on the political battlefield.” But today, conservatives have taken the fight to the cultural battlefield. Breitbart, and Bannon after him, believe that to counteract the large-scale (and very fuzzy) conspiracy, they would need to foster an anti-Marxist counterculture, one that would refashion narratives (as Breitbart did in Righteous Indignation) and repurpose media to influence hearts and minds through movies, pop music, and, crucially, the aesthetic and political tinderbox of social media, especially Twitter and messageboards like Reddit and 4Chan.

Hollywood remains stubbornly liberal, but by repurposing social media, Breitbart and his followers created an effective channel to influence and manipulate political discussion, and politics itself. That’s not so far from what the Frankfurt School suggested, and the resemblance hardly seems accidental. Walter Benjamin, for example, famously argued that the left should “politicize aesthetics” in response to a fascism that aestheticized politics. For Benjamin, the medium for that work was film. For Breitbart and his followers, a complex multimedia landscape is the means to politicize aesthetics to a very different end. By recognizing that goal and the most effective means to it, Breitbart reversed the intent of critical theory dramatically while borrowing its central insight.
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Funny really, if anything Trump is the triumph of the trivial. Odd to think of him being enable in anyway by reengineered Theory.
 
phildwyer said:
He's hardly the product of elite education. But it's true: only in America could Bannon pass as a highbrow.
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C,mon be fair, Cameron, Johnstone and a host of other British arseholes of various political,hues are considered beneficiaries of elite educational institutions!
Define "highbrow"
:p
 
coley said:
C,mon be fair, Cameron, Johnstone and a host of other British arseholes of various political,hues are considered beneficiaries of elite educational institutions!
Define "highbrow"
:p
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It's not a matter of where he went to school, but of which books he's read. He's evidently a sucker for the kind of all-encompassing, simplistic but original grand theory that hits the bestseller list. But I can't imagine him wading through Capital or the Phenomenology or the Critique of Pure Reason or any other really serious philosophy.
 
On Buzzfeed News The Hungarian Rise And Fall Of Sebastian Gorka
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Now Gorka works in the White House as an adviser on counterterrorism, but as recently as March, he had reportedly yet to receive a security clearance. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on whether Gorka had received his clearance.

“The last I heard he had not been cleared to sit in any sort of national security meetings, which leaves him without much to do all day,” one former Obama administration defense official said in early April. The official remains in contact with the professional staff at the National Security Council and asked for anonymity to openly discuss off-the-record conversations with former colleagues.

“It was never clear what his qualifications were for any sort of posting,” the official said. “But without that clearance he’s not allowed to sit in the real meetings or review intelligence. I am told he basically sits in the White House canteen drinking coffee between Fox News live hits.”

Gorka’s ability to parlay a failed career as a national security expert and local politician in Hungary into a position at the White House advising the president of the United States on national security matters amuses Horvath.

“I admit some Hungarians are asking questions about how someone who failed here could end up in the White House,” he joked. “It doesn’t look good for America.”
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Described by a very unimpressed Hungarian spook as "a peddler of snake oil". In some ways the ludicrous Gorka is a comedy script version of Bannon.
 
On TDB White House Weighs Kicking Out Sebastian Gorka
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Two senior administration officials described Gorka as completely devoid of influence on White House policy, corroborating reports that he “had not been cleared to sit in any sort of national security meetings, which leaves him without much to do all day,” as one former Obama administration official told BuzzFeed.

One source described the situation to The Daily Beast as “a pain in the ass.” Gorka, the source said, has been “biding his sweet time,” with virtually no official substantive duties and or role in White House decision-making.

Another source said Gorka owes his continued presence at the White House to President Donald Trump himself. The president views him as a strong communicator of the administration’s anti-terrorism policies.
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More of a move sideways it seems. Whitehouse unable to finagle Dr Gorka PHD a security clearance and then there's the small matter of the Hungarian Nazi thing and trying to take a gun onto a plane... you know the whole nine yards of being an obvious comic book crazy.
 

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A professional among ideologues

But the NSC is not walled off from the internal power politics of the Trump White House, and staffers reading the tea leaves see they still need to curry favor with people like Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, if they’re to have their voices heard and survive in what one source described as the White House’s “Game of Thrones for morons.”

Being allied to Bannon is what saved Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the NSC’s 30-year-old senior director for intelligence, handpicked by Flynn for the job. It also might ultimately save Sebastian Gorka, who doesn’t serve on the NSC staff but as a national security aide to the president. It was widely reported that the White House was looking to move Gorka, a former editor at Breitbart and friend of Bannon’s, to a new post — if not out of the government completely — but for now he remains in his current job.

Plenty of controversy surrounds Gorka, thanks to his Islamophobic policy prescriptions and reported association with a far-right group in Hungary, but the real issue is his security clearance, said the source familiar with White House discussions about his role. Gorka was granted an interim clearance, but it has always been suspected that the CIA would deny him a permanent one, the source said. If the clearance doesn’t come through, the White House has limited options: move him to a job where he doesn’t need clearances, leave him in his current post where he can keep being Trump’s television bulldog, or the president can intervene and get him clearance, which would allow Gorka to actually work on national security issues behind the scenes.

McFarland, Cohen-Watnick, and Gorka are all still in their jobs despite McMaster’s efforts to remove them, thanks to pushback from Bannon and even the president. But McMaster has further made enemies by refusing to fire members of his staff that certain administration officials want gone. Lake reported in his story that Derek Harvey, a Flynnstone and the top Middle East advisor on the NSC, compiled a “list of Obama holdovers at the National Security Council who were suspected of leaking to the press.” Bannon and Trump then pushed McMaster to fire them, but he said no, asserting it was ultimately his decision who worked for him.
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Bannon still apparently an influential. A sort of Idiot Whisperer in the Whitehouse.
 
In The Intercept BIRTH OF A RADICAL
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At a glance, Hahn is an outlier among outliers. She was raised in Beverly Hills, attended a private high school, and the only wisp of political activity in her adolescence was a decidedly liberal, pro-immigration gesture: She raised money for a group that brought foreign orphans to the United States. She majored in philosophy at the University of Chicago, and the sole public trace of her time there is a video of a panel discussion in which she discussed Michel Foucault’s idea that psychoanalysis stigmatizes human sexuality.

Not long after she was appointed to the White House at the age of just 25, one of her college friends reacted by writing on Facebook, “It’s weird because she was always very nice and it’s disappointing when seemingly nice people turn out to be Nazis/Nazi-adjacent.” Another friend asked, “WTF happened???”

The question of what happened offers an opportunity of sorts. There has been a lot of discussion about countering extremism and identifying extremists before they do something that harms themselves or the nation. How do young people become radicalized? The preferred means for answering these questions are not mysterious — find out the ideas that young people are exposed to, find out the social environment they are raised in, and work from there. This framework has been applied mostly to Islamic extremism, with the goal of figuring out why some Muslims become terrorists.

But the tools of “countering violent extremism,” as it’s known, work extremely well for figuring out the riddle of rich white kids who turn to the fringes of the right. How does someone who raised money for foreign orphans write, a few years later, a screed for Breitbart headlined “Muslim Immigration Puts Half a Million U.S. Girls at Risk of Genital Mutilation”? One of the first things you would seek to do, in the effort to understand the creation of this extremist, is to investigate the place where she was raised. It turned out that I didn’t need to search far, because I grew up less than a mile from Hahn’s home, and attended the same high school.
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Interesting idea posh liberal LA schools as extremist clusters. But then you have to remember neocons self described as "liberals who had been mugged by reality". Reacting to in opposition to the younger self is common maturing experience. Here there might just be a large element of opportunism latching on via social connections to Mercer backed, cash rich Breitbart as a savvy career move.

Breitbart folk then naturally go on to warp precious liberal tropes to their own ends confusing the fuck out of the liberals they have come to despise.
 
CrabbedOne said:
In The Intercept BIRTH OF A RADICAL
Interesting idea posh liberal LA schools as extremist clusters. But then you have to remember neocons self described as "liberals who had been mugged by reality". Reacting to in opposition to the younger self is common maturing experience. Here there might just be a large element of opportunism latching on via social connections to Mercer backed, cash rich Breitbart as a savvy career move.

Breitbart folk then naturally go on to warp precious liberal tropes to their own ends confusing the fuck out of the liberals they have come to despise.
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'Nazi-adjacent' is a ridiculous phrase.

I was quite familiar with someone at university who went on to become a prominent and active Breitbart writer, though frankly in their case it was not something that exactly came out of the blue. They had the sort of trajectory that I think is more common, going from 'libertarian' to alt-right via gamer and internet culture which at some point cross-pollinated with far-right racial politics. They were however quite familiar with liberal identity politics, and I think that was partly because they were to some extent exposed to them through university politics and I think at the time fascinated by them.
 
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In Vanity Fair AS TRUMP’S PROBLEMS MOUNT, BREITBART’S NUMBERS ARE CRATERING
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Early on, Solov’s prediction seemed to be coming true. “Breitbart News is the #45th most trafficked website in the United States, according to rankings from Amazon’s analytics company, Alexa.com,” they wrote on January 9, 2017. “With over two billion pageviews generated in 2016 and 45 million unique monthly visitors, Breitbart News has now surpassed Fox News (#47), Huffington Post (#50), Washington Post (#53), and Buzzfeed (#64) in traffic.” A month later, the site had even greater cause to celebrate. “Breitbart News is now the 29th most trafficked site in the United States, surpassing PornHub and ESPN,” they crowed. In the article, its staffers bragged that their bonkers traffic reflected the site’s cementing a permanent place in American politics. “The numbers speak for themselves,” said Solov. (Many outlets, including The Hive, experienced traffic peaks around Trump’s inauguration.)

Just a few months later, the numbers have a different story to tell. As of May 26, 2017, according to Alexa.com—the same web-ranking analytics company that Breitbart drew its numbers from in January—Fox News is the 64th most-trafficked site in the country. Huffington Post is at 60. Buzzfeed is at 50. The Washington Post, on the strength of a series of eye-popping scoops, is at 41.

Breitbart is in 281st place.
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Not what I'd expect. What is happening there? Contented Trump voters not feeling the need to jump aboard the outrage bus? Running cover for Trumpski just making it a bit dull? Feeling the loss of Bannon to Westwing backstabbing?
 
It's strange, i just had a poke around on there and seems they are 100% back on the Trump Train now. Maybe they lost a lot of clicks when they briefly turned against him.
 
Bannon's back

The escalating crisis surrounding the Russia investigation (with reports last night on FBI interest in Jared Kushner) looks like good news for somebody in the White House: Steve Bannon.

Nine sources in the West Wing and within Trump's close orbit said the Russia situation is Bannon's shot at redemption. He's being described as a "wartime consigliere" relishing a fight against the "deep state," media, Democrats and investigators.

Why it matters: Bannon had been on very rocky footing recently (to the extent that the President has vented to a number of people about him), but the bolstering of the White House team to respond to the outside crises is a joint effort led by Kushner, Bannon and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, two sources said. The senior staff that had been out for each other is now united by a common enemy.

"It is now very clear that there is a unified opponent and that's ultimately the swamp, both with regard to the deep state leakers, to the partisan opponents and the people who just don't want to give up their power. That includes the media," said one source close to the process. "Obviously you want it [unity] under different circumstances but it's really united this team and helped bring clarity to their focus."

The proposed war room (the planning for which Mike Allen scooped yesterday) is not currently conceived as being about replacing current staff but adding "experienced veterans from the campaign trail who recognize the gravity of the situation," the source added.

Why some Bannon allies say he's made for this crisis:

"Steve is super savvy dealing with the media and dealing with crises," says Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy, a friend of Trump's.
Bannon, who declined to comment for this story, played a key role during the tensest moments of the Trump campaign (see: "Access Hollywood" tape).
He's skilled at misdirection and deflection. Along with his street fighter ally from the campaign, David Bossie — who is now under serious consideration to join the White House communications team — Bannon deployed scorched-earth tactics against Hillary Clinton like staging the famous press conference with the women who'd accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault.

At Breitbart he ran a 24/7 war against the mainstream media — one of the two identified enemies for Trump currently (the other is the "deep state," which the team expects will keep leaking against Trump).
Side note: As Politico's Ben Schreckinger reported, Bannon teamed up with former Fox News boss Roger Ailes to discredit the work of journalist Gabe Sherman, who wrote an unflattering book about Ailes. The scene reads a lot like a war-room: "In the weeks before the release of Sherman's biography, 2014's "The Loudest Voice in the Room," Bannon huddled inside a Fox News conference room with Ailes, Ailes' personal attorney Peter Johnson Jr., pollster Pat Caddell and former Fox journalist Peter Boyer to discuss discrediting the book...True to form, Bannon advocated an all-out "go to war" approach during these sessions..."

Dissenting view: Roger Stone, who has known Trump since the late 1970s and been a political advisor, believes Bannon is the problem not the solution. "Steve doesn't do anything. I question his competence. I don't question his intelligence," Stone said. "Stephen K. Bannon talks a good game but never does anything ... the man has no political accomplishments, or as Donald Trump said to me, 'what did he do in the campaign?'"
 
On TDB Steve Bannon’s Security Council Rival Dies in Darkness
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‘Inconsequential’ Gorka

The collapse of the SIG leaves the key foreign policy-focused member of staff, Seb Gorka, now working directly for Bannon, according to three senior Trump administration officials. Gorka continues to defend President Donald Trump’s policies in the media. A fourth senior administration official said he does not generate policy for the National Security Council, but another U.S. official said he regularly attends meetings devoted to drafting Trump’s new National Security Strategy.

“He has no discernible or real impact on policy making, period,” one senior Trump aide told The Daily Beast. “Every once in awhile, he gets a pat on the head from the president.”

Asked what Gorka does, exactly, for the president, another senior administration official simply said, “He goes on TV.” When asked to describe Gorka’s work or function in Trump’s orbit, one White House official replied with one word: “Inconsequential.”
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I was watching Veep last night. This script is funnier.
 
On TSG Privatizing the War in Afghanistan
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A July 10 report in the New York Times highlights the tension between the urge to ‘do something’ and the difficult reality of achieving lasting gains. According to the report, some in the Trump administration favor a strategy that would essentially privatize the war in Afghanistan—which is already heavily supported by civilian contractors that hide the true costs and commitments of a nation at war. The proposed strategy would drastically increase the government’s reliance on private military contractors, using ‘private military units’ to replace U.S. troops. However, the arguments for such a strategy make little sense, even when viewed strictly through the narrowest of economic lenses. As seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, the contracts for private military companies are often enormous in scale, but defended on the grounds that they are short-term, and that they relieve the government of the costs of deploying uniformed personnel, such as providing lifelong medical care or benefits for U.S. troops.

While outsourcing war is often viewed as an effective cost-saving measure, it is also extremely profitable for private military companies, with the near-certainty of massive conflicts of interests by those advising the administration to let their companies fight America’s wars. Senior members of the Trump administration reportedly sought policy proposals for the war in Afghanistan directly from private contractors who would stand to benefit financially from the conflict. The suggestion that private military contractors may play an increased role in planning U.S. strategy in Afghanistan raises the prospect that concerns over financial profit might influence the military planning process, which in any democracy ought to be based solely on America’s national interests.

The lack of accountability is just one of the toxic consequences of outsourcing war. In addition, a heavy reliance on private military contractors essentially hides the true costs of war, in terms of both financial and human capital. Such a strategy enables the government to hide the fact that the nation is, and has been, in multiple continuous wars, even as it insists in law and sentiment that it is not a country ‘at’ war. The effect that privatizing war has on elected officials’ political calculations is obvious, yet powerful: the ‘boots on the ground’ aren’t officially U.S. military—the contractors executing American foreign and national security policy are very often not even American—so the conflict does not demand the same level of debate, authorization, and applicable legislation. With the true costs and impacts of war obscured from reality, both the public and the U.S. congress are less able to effectively scrutinize one of the most consequential enterprises of American foreign policy.
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That was predictable, it involved Erik Prince. Famous CEO of what was called Blackwater. A mercenary company that did very well out of Iraq and was very unpopular with Iraqis. Often seen as undermining US COIN efforts by being rather trigger happy. Finally thrown out of the country. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos Brother he's in tight with the UAE currently doing very nicely out of the war in Yemen. Here he is sniffing round another huge merc boondoggle in Afghanistan. There are already thousands of "contractors" up there. Prince was brought in by Bannon who coincidentally was really against sending more US troops to prop up Afghanistan. Now after that principled anti-interventionist stand he appears to be pimping for a wealthy libertarian mate to get even richer off the US tax payer. This really stinks to high heaven of private interests fucking with US policy. That Mattis even heard them out rather than having them frog marched out of the building suggests a degree of patience with well connected pond slime he isn't famous for.
 
you are supposed to call them private military contractors now. Because apparently that orwells away all the bad connotations of mercenary, war vulture and other such epithets
 
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