Steve Bannon, Populist Carpetbagger, Takes His Solo Act to Europe
Having expended his goodwill in America, the unkempt Svengali of the far right seeks redemption, and new business, abroad.
Exiled by his patrons in the United States, Steve Bannon has taken his grand populist vision abroad, traipsing across Europe in a furious bid to insert himself into the powder keg of continental politics. Europe, after all, has been ground zero for the sort of anti-establishment movement that Bannon helped to cultivate at home, before his untimely excommunication from the White House and Breitbart News. It is also something of a return to form for the rumpled political guru, who launched a Breitbart outpost in London in 2014, and later forged a tender alliance with Nigel Farage, Britain’s resident Brexit Bad Boy and host of the imaginatively titled podcast Farage Against the Machine. Now, as Italy grapples with the rise of an insurgent far right, Bannon seems to have found a newfound relevancy, or at least a new mission, in the fertile agar of the post-crisis Eurozone.
The scope of the project, mysteriously, has not humbled him. Speaking with The New York Times in Milan’s resplendent hotel Principe di Savoia, he laid out his blueprint for what sounds like a darkly inverted version of the E.U., in which an interlocking network of populist uprisings across Europe would collectively demolish the political establishment. “All I’m trying to be,” he says, a variety of jams arrayed before him, “is the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.”
Back in America, Bannon is building a think tank aimed at “weaponizing” populist ideas. He aims to spread these across Europe via a network of scoop-driven Web sites, which would undercut Europe’s legacy papers with digestible kernels of populism. These ideas would not be distributed solely in cyberspace, but circulated by an army of Breitbartian foot soldiers trained in the language and tools of social media. “Like Axios,” he explains, sipping sparkling water—but for the working man.
Having debriefed the Times, the former Goldman Sachs banker headed north. After meeting a succession of political operatives in grand hotels in Rome and Milan, he checked out and headed to Zurich, where he proceeded to attack “limousine liberals” and “the Party of Davos” in a sold-out speech organized by conservative Swiss magazine, Die Weltwoche. Opening with a flashback to Brexit, (which, he claimed, would never have happened without Breitbart London), he moved on to explain that liberation could be found in a combination of nationalist populism and blockchain-powered cryptocurrencies. “Control of data, citizenship, and currency will be true freedom,” he said. Asked about his brittle relationship with Donald Trump, Bannon said he still “loved the guy.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/steve-bannon-takes-his-solo-act-to-europe/amp
Mueller is making it too hot for him here.
Putin feels he'd be more effective wrecking democracy elsewhere.
= new reply since forum marked as read
