Parasite Bannon
Parasite Bannon
Fifth in my American Monster series about convicted US criminals accelerating global fascism
***Originally published on August 14, 2023, republishing today as news breaks about prosecutors identifying Bannon as part of a massive criminal conspiracy and racketeering case. As I have previously noted, Bannon is not a criminal mastermind, as we learned in the Build a Wall indictment. Thank you for supporting independent investigative journalism.***
“Steve Bannon is the ultimate cockroach… a parasite in search of a host to attach himself onto in order to achieve more visibility, more fame, more access, more power.”—Kurt Bardella
American Monster — Steve Bannon
In 2019, I called Kurt Bardella — a former Breitbart employee turned democratic strategist and media personality — to thank him for gifting me the inspiration for the ‘Parasite Bannon’ phrase I deployed frequently in the early days of the Resistance. I also asked what had happened to people I had once known who had gone from trad fiscal conservatives to out of their damn minds.
He said, “They’ve been radicalized.”
By then, I had investigated the fallout from Cambridge Analytica for two years. And not unlike nuclear fallout, people were still so sick, left untreated to wander further down rabbit holes and away from their former selves. And like in Russia where the government psyoped its own citizens first — moving them away from liberal democracy and toward totalitarianism by state-run internet infiltration before attacking citizens globally — conservatives were ground zero targets. And Stephen Bannon’s tentacles were everywhere people were being infected and radicalized away from trust in democracy — as executive chairman of Breitbart, vice president of the data mining election operation Cambridge Analytica, and as Trump’s campaign CEO and chief strategist.
It’s important to note Bannon’s global endeavors. Funded by dark money, Bannon’s been attempting to unite Putin friendly political parties throughout Europe, accelerating global fascism — a key component of this series. He’s called Putin a “fellow nationalist and crusader against cosmopolitanism.” My readers will recognize that as straight Duginism. Not surprising, he met Russian political strategist Alexander Dugin in 2018 and considers himself a fan of Dugin’s extremist ravings.
Stephen Bannon is a convicted criminal who should be in prison where he can’t hurt people. But like the previous American Monsters I profiled, the inability in the US to incarcerate high-level criminals quickly and in a meaningful way is having deadly impacts on the West and the world.
‘The Failures of the Fourth Estate’
I grew up believing in the Fourth Estate — I knew it would be my destiny to report. I was a natural born writer, and it was the only practical vocation for a girl like I.
When I was getting ready to graduate J School at UC Berkeley, where I had been accepted into the Graduate School of Journalism as an undergrad, I was grateful for three educators — a New Yorker profile writer (who doubled as my tennis partner); my thesis advisor — a Shakespearean scholar; and a crusty newsman, who had spent thirty years at a San Francisco broadsheet.
The newsman took me to lunch when I was ready to graduate and told me that multinational corporations were buying all the mom and pop newspapers and media outlets, and we were in Big Trouble.
It was a long ugly slide, and here we are — nine years into the Great Information War, minds being digitally carpet-bombed at scale with operations deployed by Parasite Bannon and Co.
I knew we had crossed the rubicon in 2016, when the first post-election headline in the Hollywood Reporter was this dreck:
Omarosa Reveals What Went Down in the Freight Elevator That Brought Trump to His Victory Party (Exclusive) 🤢
I included it as Exhibit A in an epic thread I wrote in 2019 on media malfeasance. No. 6 in that thread was my observation that it took seven reporters at the Washington Post to write a report on Stephen Bannon that never mentioned his role in Cambridge Analytica.
Bannon thinks he’s special — he thinks he can thumb his nose at Congress, and rip off MAGA devotees by allegedly helping himself to their wall money.
It’s curious to me why media wants to portray him as some sort of Svengali because he can use big words and has read some books — they clearly didn’t read The Build a Wall indictment, where he proved to be really bad at criming.
That he allegedly conned Trump fans out of a million dollars pocketed for himself — according to court documents — should bother them. It bothered prosecutors in New York, who have charged him with fraud. And in 2020, we finally got a Bannon perp walk when he was arrested for wire fraud and money laundering.
In addition, a year ago, Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress. He had been indicted over his refusal to co-operate with the J6 Committee. He received a four-month prison sentence. He also received a full pardon from Trump on his way out the door — which impacted federal charges related to the border wall fundraiser.
It’s important to note presidential pardons don’t clear state charges, and if Bannon is convicted for defrauding Trump supporters and trying to hide the fraud with phony invoices, he could face up to 15 years in prison on just one charge.
If convicted, Bannon faces two counts of money laundering, which carry a maximum sentence of five to 15 years in prison, as well as additional felony counts of conspiracy and scheme to defraud along with one misdemeanor count of conspiracy to defraud.
A judge set his trial date for May 2024.
As a result of the original federal charges, one Bannon colleague was sentenced in April to four years behind bars for embezzling $350,000 from the campaign. In April, another was sentenced to three years in prison. And in June, the scheme’s founder received a 63-month prison sentence.
‘Bannon the Barbarian’
His relationship with Trump is Rasputin-like, and corrupt leaders need corrupt people around them — it’s their leverage and security blanket. After his stint as Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon vowed to wage war on Trump’s opponents, referring to himself as ‘Bannon the Barbarian.’
Breitbart founder, Andrew Breitbart — who if he had lived would have been anti-Trump, in my opinion — had a different name for him. He referred to Bannon as the ‘Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.’
It’s important to note that the Tea Party movement wasn’t an organic movement — it was an operation funded by the same dark money billionaires who are continuing to attack democracy — host bodies for Parasite Bannon, who took over running Breitbart when Andrew died of a heart attack in 2012.
A former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro called Bannon a ‘bully' who 'sold out Andrew's mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.’
But prior to joining Trump, he had attached like a tick to Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson — receiving funding by Robert Mercer, a creepy billionaire with myriad ties to Russia who invested in both Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica, and financed Bannon’s information warfare media projects targeting Hillary Clinton.
As Mercer threw his financial weight behind Trump, Bannon invited Trump on Breitbart’s propaganda show. With Mercer’s backing, Bannon became the CEO of the Trump campaign in August of 2016, then later managed an invented position with the Trump administration. He broke with Trump after some mouthy comments in Michael Wolff’s ‘Fire and Fury’ book, and Trump took to calling him ‘Sloppy Steve’.
Bannon returned to Breitbart in August of 2017, only to step down a few months later. The Mercers — father and daughter — had become allegedly disenchanted with their parasite.
So he went in search of another billionaire host body — the latest, a Chinese billionaire who was arrested in March by Federal authorities for conspiracy to defraud his online followers out of more than $1 billion. That billionaire had Bannon on his payroll as a seven-figure consultant.
But even before that latest scandal, Bannon had already committed significant harms.
Born in Virginia in 1953, he spent four years in the Navy before receiving an MBA at Harvard. His resume includes stints at Goldman Sachs, and in the entertainment industry, where he famously helped get Seinfeld produced, before going full RWNJ — producing propaganda documentaries on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party. One of his three wives accused him of domestic abuse — and he was charged with domestic violence and battery — but the case ended when she didn’t show up in court.
‘Monster Power’
Through his background in entertainment and media, Bannon had become interested in the online gaming community, once describing its members as "rootless white males” who “had monster power." Through Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos — who had been recruited by Bannon and who was fired for pro-pedophilia comments — he saw a potential sociopathic army in the gaming community — many self-proclaimed ‘incels’, some who got off on misogyny. Bannon aimed to harness that so-called monster power toward politics and Trump.
RadPod interviewed game developer Brianna Wu, who was a victim of targeted gamer gang hate, receiving death and rape threats, in what became known as Gamergate. Please listen carefully to what she had to say:
Not only does she describe Gamergate as ‘being hunted as a person’ but as ‘total war’ — and how Gamergate becomes 8chan becomes QAnon. So what happened to those who perpetrated and fanned the flames of this misogynistic war? They were given jobs in the Trump White House.
All of the above already qualifies Stephen Bannon as an American Monster, but it’s important to not just view his harms in the US but also abroad. For that, we are going to head to Italy — which is currently experimenting in soft fascism.
Bannon’s Italian Experiment
I reached out to geopolitical analyst Monique Camarra — who produces EuroFile and co-hosts Kremlin File — to offer insights into Bannon’s movement in Europe, and what follows is her response in pull-quotes:
Meloni and Bannon
In a phone call to an English friend some time in 2017, obtained by the Guardian, Steve Bannon reminded him of a “famous theorem”, which has been used widely in Europe and the US ever since:
“You put a reasonable face to right-wing populism,” he said, “you get elected.”
This is nothing new: Paul Manafort — Russia’s favourite Western political operative — had used the same strategy to rebrand Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in his electoral bids between 2004 and 2014.
After leaving Trump’s presidency as advisor in 2017, Bannon instituted “The Movement”, an umbrella organisation in Europe that aimed at setting up a network of like-minded sovereigntists, right-wing, and ultra-right wing political parties and personalities. He also had grand plans of opening a school of political ‘gladiators’ in the outskirts of Rome. He toured Europe to expand his networks and forge new connections: Georgia Meloni, the head of Brothers of Italy Party, was on his list.
At a Brothers of Italy rally in November 2019, Bannon promised Meloni and her party “all the help to focus on the next European elections to win.” Meloni was lagging in the polls at the time, stuck at 4%.
“We can give you and create polls, big data analysis, political management, everything you need to win the election,” he was quoted as saying, hinting at his recent past as co-founder of the defunct and discredited Cambridge Analytica.
Meloni denied having a close relationship with Bannon, stating publicly in a press conference that she had only met with Bannon three times. The mercurial rise of Meloni and her party in the past four years tells a different story. It points to a well-organised campaign fought on social media and in the press to increase her visibility and reach within the right-wing electorate.
Ever the opportunist, Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine set the stage for her to rebrand her image and boost her party’s polling.
She took Bannon’s teachings to heart: she dropped the “Italy First” slogan, and put aside the party’s anti-EU/US isolationist stance, and embraced Trans-Atlanticism instead. She kept the party’s ultra-traditionalist domestic policy, best compared with the radical arm of the GOP in the US, and Vox Party in Spain.
For the 2020 elections in Italy, the right-wing legacy media abandoned Matteo Salvini, who was uncomfortably tied to Vladimir Putin and Russia’s imperialist war, and decided instead to throw their support to Meloni by whitewashing her neo-fascist past. Magically, she was presented to the world as Italy’s darling new “moderate conservative” face, which she played up by donning pastel pinks, pearls and a hint of white eyeshadow. To the Anglo world, she was now respectable and ‘reasonable’.
Steve Bannon’s ‘gladiator’ school in the outskirts of Rome may have failed, but he must be celebrating his pupil’s victory. Bannon’s Italian experiment was successful, and the same strategy may be used across Europe in the upcoming elections in Poland, the Netherlands other EU member states. Recent polling by Politico indicates that we’re in for a wave of far-right and right-wing populist victories—a slate of wolves in sheep’s clothing.—reported by Monique Camarra
So this is what happens when we do not incarcerate American criminals — they infect Europe with their fash brand, accelerating global authoritarianism.
To offer a summary of Bannon’s impacts, I turn to my podcast partner Joshua Fidel, aka High Fidelity, who was once a Something Awful troll and then grew up to become a Silicon Valley technologist, who trouble shoots network systems. He’s been applying his troubleshooting skills to democracy’s vulnerabilities, and he sees blinking red lights all around Bannon.
“Bannon didn’t just radicalize people through Breitbart, he took radicalization and delivered it through social media at industrial scale,” he said. “Through Cambridge Analytica, he was able to break people’s brains across the globe—he opped people to vote for Brexit, Trump, and twisted people’s neuroses to use it against them.”
Do recall the now-bankrupt Cambridge Analytica had in its possession data scraped from millions of Facebook accounts — 187 million is one estimate — and Russians coming in out of its London offices, according to former employee Christopher Wylie.
In a thread I wrote about Wylie’s book “MINDF*CK: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America”, I cited him saying the following:
I was acclimating to their corruption and moral disregard…I stupidly fell for the hubristic allure of Facebook’s call to ‘move fast and break things’… I never fully appreciated what we were breaking until it was too late.—Christopher Wylie
Wylie described Bannon’s response as he relayed a female voter profile in granular detail — how they had data about her mortgage applications, how much money she made, whether she owned a gun, even information about her airline mileage program, and a satellite photo of her house. Her life had been recreated in their computer, without her consent.
Wylie said he looked over at Bannon who had a big smile on his face. They had reconstructed tens of millions of Americans inside a computer, with hundreds of millions more to come.
I will never forget this quote:
“The firm became a revolving door of foreign politicians, fixers, and businessmen with their scantily clad private secretaries… many were associates of Russian oligarchs, who wanted to influence a foreign government and seek to stash money somewhere discreet.”
So Cambridge Analytica, which was just a shell for the British military contractor SCL Group — formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories — was being used to detonate mindwar on unsuspecting citizens. Robert Mercer’s money was working to sway elections without any campaign finance restrictions that govern US elections because it was a private company.
And Stephen Bannon was there — smiling as democracy burned. It was Bannon who talked about ‘flooding the zone with shit’ and ‘destroying the administrative state’.
When people show you who they are, believe them.—Maya Angelou
In the film “The Great Hack” Wylie called Cambridge Analytica a grossly unethical experiment.
“You’re playing with the psychology of an entire country without their consent or awareness,” he said.
Steve Bannon continues to be a liability to humanity — he is still free to radicalize people on his propaganda show where he floats right-wing narratives that then become popularized such as describing Putin’s war of annihilation in Ukraine as a ‘border dispute’ — his show ranking highest in disinformation among 79 political podcasts studied — and thanks to a many years’ long campaign to reputation wash him, the world as a whole has underestimated just how dangerous he is.
“He’s like the Goblin King from Lord of the Rings — the only thing that gives him power is the mob money that continues to flow into his coffers,” said Fidel. “We are facing a cesspool of evil — funded by Russia, China, UAE, Saudi, cartel money — everything evil is rising up in the world and Steve Bannon is leading the charge.”
By spotlighting the monsters accelerating global authoritarianism, it’s my aim to demystify them — show the techniques, expose the networks and where they connect, expose their criminality.
Round up the usual suspects — hold them accountable — show the totality of their harms against humanity.
It took seven Washington Post reporters to write a Steve Bannon puff piece — ignoring his roll in detonating Cambridge Analytica to break people’s brains.
It takes one independent mother networked with global pro-democracy activists to gather up the facts so you have tools to fight monsters.
They’re not under our beds — they’re in people’s heads, uninvited, without consent — malignant whispers by criminals targeting our minds
Gamergate, to 8chan, to QAnon, now being mainstreamed — championed by monsters who took CA/SCL money, who know how to psyop.
Steve Bannon is a weapon of mass destruction — the blast radius includes minds globally.
If New York is successful in prosecuting him, he will be defused by handcuffs, held behind bars, given plenty of time to think about what he could have done differently — while our multiracial democracy continues its ascent.
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To read the first thirteen reports in the American Monster series, please go here:
To read the first four reports in the 2016 Election Attack series, please go here:
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