…from the Washinton Post
[ Editor’s Note: So what’s going on with Bannon? He knows Trump hates anyone and everyone getting more airtime than he. But then Trump also needs to show he has the Republican party in his pocket.
You could say they need each other, but if Trump croaked, Bannon would not need Trump anymore and could present himself as the new and improved version that does not use run on sentences and can speak without two teleprompters.
So here we have Bannon, using his Insurrection litigation as free publicity, and polishing up his ‘bad boy’ credentials to be first in line if Trump croaks, as Bannon could possibly run circles around all the other pretenders-in-chief.
Bannon’s current prosecution could put sand in the gears of his plans, or make him more of a MAGA hero whom they would support more intensely and financially, the latter being the part Bannon likes the most. Meanwhile, the damage to the country domestically, and its reputation internationally will continue, while the world watches America devour itself.
Politically, the Trumpster era could end up being viewed as a political tornado that struck everywhere in the country. That certainly will be a lasting legacy. Thus ends my cheery missive for today… Jim W. Dean ]
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First published December 07, 2021
Yet Trump is facing dissent on this from, of all people, his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who is raging that even Trump’s choice is too much of a squish to wage the long war from the right that Bannon is trying to summon into being.
Which signals the direction that the far right in this country, in the hands of the likes of Bannon, is likely to take: toward full-blown insurgency.
Speaking on his “War Room” podcast, Bannon ripped into Perdue as a “disaster.” Bannon seethed that Perdue is “the last person in the world” who should challenge Kemp, insisting that Perdue was “dead silent” about Trump’s 2020 loss, and “did not support” Trump’s effort to overturn it.
“There’s no difference between Kemp and Perdue,” Bannon fumed, in a striking rebuke of Trump’s anointed candidate.
This is a remarkable claim. Unlike Kemp, who rebuffed Trump’s corrupt appeals, Perdue did lend his support to Trump’s designs. In the run-up to his loss in the January runoff, Perdue supported that notorious Texas lawsuit that tried to get courts to invalidate millions of votes for Joe Biden in four states based on lies.
At the time, Perdue also took the extraordinary step of calling for the resignation of the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, who rejected Trump’s demand that he “find” the votes to subvert the legitimate outcome.
But none of this will satisfy Bannon. The former Trump adviser’s podcast has become a kind of command center for a much more explicitly anti-democratic far-right politics, a kind of openly and unabashedly declared far-right insurgency.
Bannon’s podcast features an endless barrage of ludicrous and lurid lies about Trump’s loss, as Daniel Dale details, and Bannon himself expressly declares that his goal is to reduce public faith in the “legitimacy” of President Biden’s “regime.”
Bannon reportedly helped plot Trump’s effort to overturn the election, and now that this failed, he hails the Jan. 6 rioters as “political prisoners.” He is transforming himself into a hero over his indictment for refusing a lawful subpoena from the select committee investigating the effort to overthrow U.S. democracy through corrupt legal manipulation and mob violence.
All of which says a good deal about the future direction of this sort of right-wing politics.
Nicole Hemmer, a scholar who specializes in conservative media, notes that in attacking Trump’s chosen candidate, Bannon is occupying a space different from other right-wing media figures, such as those on Fox News whose propaganda remains faithful to Trump.
Bannon has long seen Trump as more of a “vessel” for his “insurgency,” said Hemmer, the author of “Messengers of the Right.”
“Bannon sees Trump as one of many tools to achieve this broader vision that he has of nationalist politics, both in the United States and abroad,” Hemmer continued, describing his vision as “anti-democratic,” “anti-liberal,” and “authoritarian.”
Interestingly, Bannon’s self-martyrdom around Jan. 6 has echoes in figures such as Oliver North, who parlayed his own legal sentencing related to the Iran-contra scandal into a media presence organized around an explicitly insurgent message.
“North was celebrated for his lawlessness,” Hemmer told me. “Bannon is tapping into that same idea,” by signaling a “willingness to break the law” to realize his radical right vision.
Given all this, it’s a no-brainer that Bannon sees Perdue as too much of a squish to wage the war to overturn U.S. democracy that Bannon envisions. But Bannon appears to have a lot of followers, and all this signals where this movement is really headed.
“Bannon has a bigger-picture view,” Hemmer concluded, which is that the Jan. 6 insurrection “just brings us one step closer to his end goal of having this authoritarian nationalism put in place independent of the electoral process.”
Jim W. Dean is VT Editor Emeritus. He was an active editor on VT from 2010-2022. He was involved in operations, development, and writing, plus an active schedule of TV and radio interviews. He now writes and posts periodically for VT.
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