Offline with Jon Favreau - Steve Bannon’s Very Online Insurrection

Episode Date: June 19, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Dave from Accounting was a 250-pound man who one day drops dead. And in real life, Dave from Accounting has barely gone to church, has a few friends. They have to rent a preacher who barely knows him, speaks 10 minutes. They if Ajax dies, it's a huge deal. Thousands of people show up for Ajax's funeral. The rival tribe comes out to fight. Men and women actually stay home from their day jobs to attend Ajax's funeral. And as I was watching this, I thought, oh my God, this is what happened on January 6th. This is exactly what happened on January 6th.

People showed up as their avatars. They showed up in face paint and fur skirts with their own weird weapons. They missed a day of work. They stormed the Capitol and fought a rival army. They had no longer made the distinction between online life and real life. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Senior. Last week, Jennifer published a profile of Steve Bannon in The Atlantic.

He granted her a ton of access that included texting her in the middle of the night, even inviting her to his father's funeral. And after months in his shadow, the piece she wrote was appropriately unsparing. In Jennifer's words, Bannon is, quote, attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy. I've been thinking a lot about that sentence as I've watched the January 6th hearings over the last week. It's highly likely that Bannon played an important role in Donald Trump's attempted coup, and he'll stand trial in July for refusing to comply with the committee's subpoena.

But as Jennifer noted, Bannon also helped fuel the energy, the conspiracies, and ultimately the rage that led to January 6th. Through his podcast, his stint in the White House, and in many years before. So why is this an offline conversation? Because, in many ways, Steve Bannon is the original internet troll, or at least certainly one of the most influential. He's talked to Jennifer and others about how, when he was running Breitbart, he intentionally built out the comment section in order to build a community of the outraged. As he's put it, quote, this could be weaponized at some point in time. The angry voices properly directed have latent political power. That's exactly what he did to help elect Donald Trump and fuel the January 6th insurrection.

And it's exactly what he's still doing today. Which is why I wanted to talk to Jennifer, to understand Bannon's role and the Internet's in creating our current political crisis. Would the MAGA movement exist without the internet? Would democracy be safe? What's Bannon's endgame? And what can be done to make sure he doesn't succeed? As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, please do email offline at crooked.com. And please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Jennifer Senior.

Jennifer Senior, welcome to Offline. Hey, thanks for having me. So I've always thought of Steve Bannon as an internet troll who helped fuel an insurrection. So I figured your Atlantic piece would be a great fit for this show, which is about how the internet is breaking our brains. But I wanted to start with why you wrote the piece in the first place. Because you could make an argument, and I'm sure you've heard this argument, that Steve Bannon seeks and receives more attention than he might actually deserve,

especially for someone who's standing in MAGA world isn't what it once was. Why do you think Bannon matters right now? Because I think he's the one who's stretching the discourse at the sort of treacherous, perilous end. That's one reason. I mean, more broadly, I'd been only writing non-political stories for The Atlantic. And my editor finally said, okay, you know, democracy is sort of on the line. And it's kind of a jump stories for the Atlantic. And my editor finally said, okay, you know, democracy is sort of on the line and it's kind of a jump ball for the next, God knows how long, decade, rest of our known natural lives. Pick someone, anyone. And I think the really profound questions are surrounding epistemological warfare. And he is sowing all of these crazy conspiracies, right? He's got a very energized base.

Not base, listenership. I think he is an asymmetrical threat. I think, as we saw on January 6th, you don't need that many people to be really angry and to breach a barrier at a capital and to do serious damage um and i think he really inflames his audience and i think if you want to know where the discourse is kind of heading in in crazy land and in you know disinformation land i think bannon is the place i think you have to hear what he has to say. And by the way, I kind of hate that argument. I mean, the idea that like, I mean, exposure doesn't equal an endorsement, right? I mean, it's journalism. And I think we're a little bit past that, because we've learned what happens. I mean, people are going to do what they're going to do, whether we cover it or not. And I don't want to be caught on my back foot. I mean, there are things that he's saying right now that I think are important for us to listen to,

really important. And I don't think we want to be caught flat-footed. I always wrestle with this. I mean, we wrestle with this on Pod Save America all the time, especially post-Trump. He's obsessed with you guys, by the way. Steve Bannon is? Yeah.

I didn't even know he knew us. Well, this is the way that he's obsessed with you. I thought we'd flown under the radar. You're just that little engine that could. It's really nice that you're succeeding. No, I don't mean to cut you off. I just think it's interesting. No, please.

Now I, of course, want to hear this. I was just going to say, I figure, right. This is the way that it comes up. He's fixated on the fact that on Apple podcasts, there's a politics category. And if you ever suggest to him that he dips below the number two, it makes him crazy. And you guys are almost always number one and he's number two.

So he's very aware of you because if he's, you know, edged past you, something amazing has happened. What this sort of obscures is that you guys are much better listened to by 10 X or a hundred. I mean, there's a real difference in audience volume between you two and the Apple politics category is not very precise in showing how many people listen to what. But anyway, he has almost an ominous awareness of you guys, is the point. Fantastic.

Love that. Sure. No, I figured that out because, you know, Tommy Vitor, my co-host, who you know of, has started listening to Steve Bannon's podcast like a couple months ago. And I started listening to it a little bit just in preparation for this interview. And I realized, I'm like, why does he have three episodes per day? But I realized he does a three-hour show, and then he cuts it up into three one-hour episodes every day that go on Apple,

which is probably one reason why it juices the ranking a little bit. But that is so much podcasting. I can't believe he's doing three-hour shows. Well, what you really should be amazed at is that he does four hour shows. He added a fourth. Oh, cause he does the battleground thing, right? He was like one that's focused on politics. Yeah.

So from 10 to 12, he does what, like you say, it's a two hour show. And then he does another one from five to seven now. And it's a little bit like the podcast equivalent of Logeria. You know, he just he can't stop podcasting. He can't stop talking. He does seem to like the sound of his own voice. Well, I mean, oh, yeah, what I was saying earlier is like, we struggle with this once in a while, even when we talk about Trump on Pod Save America, we get some people saying like, he's gone, he's off Twitter, why are you still talking about him and their argument is you know like you're giving him the attention that he wants and you're giving more attention to him and his

ideas like how did you think about that when you were covering bandit did you wrestle with that at all or is your thought like no this is this is important to talk about because it just is and if people read about it that's fine that's what you what you want. Yeah, I mean, no, again, we can stick our fingers in our ears and cover our eyes. But I think that it's actually useful. It's critical that we know what he's talking about. I mean, just as an example, he has been banging his spoon on his high chair for months about this idea that Biden should be impeached for the volume of undocumented immigrants who are coming over the southern border. They're now at record highs. He thinks that this is failure to protect and defend, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think that's nuts. You fix this through policy. If you don't like it, you don't think Biden's doing the job that you want, you boot him out. He thinks this is an impeachable offense, which I think is a promiscuous use of impeachment, obviously. And I thought this was bananas. I thought this was completely bonkers. Maybe a

month ago, but maybe less, there was a poll that just came out that media picked up on. 70% of all Republicans now think that when the House flips in 2022, which we all assume it will, the first thing they should do is impeach Biden. I mean, these things gain traction. I wouldn't have known this. And I think Democrats should know this. They're acting like, oh, what? I mean, you know, all the fringe people, McCarthy is going to have to cater to them in order to keep his coalition together. And you have to know what the fringe is saying. They are actually stretching, they are mainstreaming dangerous ideas.

More than half the caucus right now thinks that like Mayorkas is impeachable, right? They just sent this letter saying, laying the predicate for this. I will say that I would have guessed that they would impeach Biden from basically the day that Biden took office if Republicans take the House. I mean, look, partly because they would get this pressure from their media ecosystem.

And I do think within that media ecosystem, clearly, Bannon is driving much of the message, particularly after reading your piece about this. So I'm sure he gets a lot of requests for interviews like this. I know he probably loves the publicity. But why do you think he let you in and gave you so much access? I was interested in that. I have absolutely no idea. I mean, it is a bafflement to me. I don't know. He's fundamentally a media guy. I think the people who spent time in his orbit were mainly men um maybe he just thought that's let's mix it up a bit you know yeah you wrote that a lot of liberals um who've met bannon are disarmed by how charming he is i would never have thought to put the word charming in the same sentence as steve bannon but can you elaborate on that what is what's the yeah what's the charm i have not met him i have not had

the pleasure um i mean i think it's one of the reasons he's successful, actually. I mean, you've got to be charismatic and you've got to have something. I'll tell you a story, okay? I mean, just he can code switch, right? I mean, he knows how to speak the way you and I speak because he's part of the East Coast elite, whether he wants to admit it or not. He's a card-carrying member. I mean, he went to Harvard Business School. He went to the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. He was at Goldman.

You know, he worked in Hong Kong. He worked in Hollywood. I mean, he started going off on a mad tear at one point, saying to me, you know, you realize that the people who despise illegal immigrants the most are legal immigrants. He was about to go off on a mad tear about this, you know, his own filibuster, which he's always doing. And I said to him, Steve, you want to know what? I learned this as a kid watching a movie by the super lefty independent filmmaker, John sales in lone star. He has this amazing scene that shows just this tension.

And I started to describe this scene and he cut me off and he said, John sales, don't you love him? He is amazing. Made one that coal mining movie, I absolutely love that movie, starts going off rapturously about Matewan. He's funny. He's sunny. I can't tell you how many people I know who are like you and me, who have described the horror of meeting him, wanting to despise him, and finding themselves incapable. And he cultivated relationships with all kinds of, you know, tons of my colleagues in the press corps. Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, it is clear that the Bannon spin on things was very well represented in the media in those days of the Trump campaign in the early days of the White

House for sure even more than some of his colleagues in the in the Trump campaign in White House right and by the way I'm not saying I knew just what he was doing and I think he knew what I was doing it was like that scene in the wire when Stringer Bell and um what's his name Avon Barksdale They both know that the other knows and they're about to betray each other. And I wasn't trying to betray Steve Benn. And I said to him, I walked through the front door and said, I think what you're doing is dangerous. And he knew.

I was a columnist for a year at the Times. I wrote a million columns about this. You know. So the moment in your piece that I knew this would make a great offline conversation was the story Bannon tells about his days working for Internet Gaming Entertainment, where he first learns about the size and intensity of the online gaming community. Can you talk about that? Yeah. It was really arresting, and I can't take credit for it. He told this story to Errol Morris in American Dharma, by the way, and that was at a kind of the moment of peak deep platforming of Steve Bannon. And so very few people saw that

and they should see it. I mean, this is the argument again for you know actually paying attention i will just say by the way people should see it i watched it the other night again in preparation for this and i know there was a lot of controversy after it came out i do not think it was a favorable depiction of steve bannon in any way and i thought it was actually people should watch it to know why to the extent he is successful, he is successful with his message, I think. Correct, exactly.

And I'm hoping that my piece did some of the same. I mean, Errol is, you know, wouldn't want to compare myself to him. He's uniquely suited to that kind of project. And here's what happened. He knew just where this conversation was going to go. So he teed it up. He said, tell me about your time at Internet Gaming Entertainment, Steve.

And Steve said, sure. And I almost felt like he'd told the story before because he told it perfectly and in perfect syntax, almost in perfect paragraphs. He said that when he was in Hong Kong, that was when he, and so this is in the mid 2000s, let's say, starting in the early 2000s. He was surprised to discover how many people played these multiplayer online games. I guess they were the World of Warcrafts and all the others, and how intensely they played them, how many hours they played them, and that people would miss work to play them, and that they were very identified with their online avatars. And that was when he realized that people's online personas were more real to them than their

regular, than their, you know, in-person personas. And that they preferred their idealized selves. And that a lot of the people who were doing this were angry, isolated men. And that if you could harness that energy that they had, it could be weaponized. That was his word. It could be properly channeled and weaponized politically. And the example he gave was Dave from Accounting. Dave from Accounting was a 250-pound man who one day drops dead. And in real life, Dave from accounting has barely gone to church, has a few friends. They have to rent a preacher who barely knows him, speaks 10 minutes. They drop him in an urn in a perpetual cemetery.

And that's Dave. But if online Dave dies, online Dave is Ajax. And if Ajax dies, it's a huge deal. Thousands of people show up for Ajax's funeral. The rival tribe comes out to fight. Men and women actually stay home from their day jobs to attend Ajax's funeral. And as I was watching this, I thought, oh my God, this is what happened on January 6th., this is what happened on January 6th. This is exactly what happened on January 6th. People showed up as their avatars.

They showed up in face paint and fur skirts with their own weird weapons. They missed a day of work. They stormed the Capitol and fought a rival army. They had no longer made the distinction between online life and real life. I thought that nothing I've read describes that the temptations and the dangers of online life better than that analogy between Dave and Ajax that he was given. And can you talk about how Bannon's Ajax theory informed his years at Breitbart? Yeah.

So when he realized that people preferred their idealized online selves, that they were their more glorious selves, but also their id selves, right? I mean, they were their angrier selves, their unfiltered selves. One of the first things he did when he got, when he took over Breitbart was he took over the comments section and he built it out thinking, this is where people are going to be their true selves, where I can harness all this energy. And also, critically, he knew it was going to be a source of community because this is all the bowling alone stuff that Robert Putnam wrote about in 2000.

All of our civic ties have been on decline for 22 years. We're no longer affiliated with churches and political groups and neighborhood organizations and the Elk Club and the Rotary Club. You know, what do we have? Online groups take the place of that for a lot of people. Twitter takes the place for, you know, that for a lot of people. You know, it's a community, you know, it's solidarity and trolldom. You link arms.

Well, that was my first thought. It's like the Breitbart comment section became a large part of Twitter. It was proto-Twitter. Right? It was proto-Twitter. It was proto-Twitter. It was proto-Twitter. And a lot of these social media platforms became the comment sections come to life, but sort of sped up and in real time. And now people are interacting with one another. I mean, I have often wondered if the internet and especially social media are what made the MAGA movement possible, you can be anonymous, you can spread lies, you can get affirmation from the online mob for stoking anger and outrage, and you can be cruel without ever really having to see

the reactions on the faces of the people that you hurt. I've been whinging about this for years. I think that that's right. There might be a sort of left analog a little bit. I think that the Gawker comment section also had some real snark and anger in it. And I think you could see some of the same, I hate to say. Well, I think the important thing for everyone to realize is none of us are immune from these technologies and algorithms and what they could potentially

do to us. We're not just because we might be right about politics doesn't mean that like the same sort of dynamic that might radicalize someone can at least change us a little bit, if not radicalize us as much as that. It's all the difference between embodied communication and not embodied communication. I think if you're hiding behind an avatar, I mean, there's just something fundamentally different if you're looking at someone. I mean, it just, or even hearing them between your ears. There's just, it's unmediated in a way that's really disturbing. I mean, you mentioned the connection to January 6th, where this sort of online fantasy becomes offline reality. It does seem that what separates Bannon from the other MAGA media stars is that he is explicitly trying to organize his online audience.

You mentioned that he says openly his show is not about entertainment and that people need to use their agency. Did you get the sense that this is effective, this is working? Well, I know it's working from the point of view of primary candidates who are raising money, you know, they go on a show and then they get cash, right? Also, he's a big proponent of the precinct strategy, which I'm sure you've heard about, right? Which is this idea that you take over like all the state political infrastructure from the ground up, the school boards, the precincts. Eventually, you get to run elections that way, right? You get to oversee them. And he's been, ProPublica did a really great piece about this showing just how many people

had signed up to be precinct captains once Steve Bannon started talking about this day in and day out on a show. Something like 8,500 people signed up for this. And by the way, this is another reason we ought to be paying attention. While we're angrily tweeting or not paying attention, they're infiltrating all of the state organizations and becoming poll inspectors. Well, I mean, it really hit me because in a way I was reading it and thought that it's a bit of a like bizarro, crooked media, pod save America, what we're trying to do. Because I think when we started our company, we thought, okay, even the progressive media that's out there, a lot of it is progressive opinion and there's not a,

okay, now here's how to go take action component to what you hear from the news, even if it's progressive news. And I think even on Fox, you have Tucker and Ingram and all them just spewing hatred and extremism every night, but there's not an explicit, okay, here's how to go get involved. Bannon seems to be taking it to that next step where he's saying, it's not just punditry that I'm offering you. This is how you need to sign up and get active. You have no idea. I mean, every single guest that he has come on, you know what it reminds me a little bit of? It's like the weight loss app Noom, okay, which everybody is now using. Yeah, a sponsor. Somewhere on one of our pods. Oh my god, wow. This was unknown to me. I don't think on offline,

I don't think on this episode, but somewhere in our world it is. Okay, sorry. Well, this was not supposed to be some kind of synergistic advertorial moment. Oh, crap. Well, I'm just going to say briefly, what does he have? He has testimonials, right? He has like, moms who have suddenly become active who come on his show and say, you want to know what Steve, it was this easy. I did this, I did this, I did this. And you can too. And here's the phone number. Here's how you can follow me. Here's that woman I spoke to who just went on a show twice and got something like 1,100 emails just asking her how they could participate in her project. I mean, there are all kinds of – he never lets a guest leave without their saying, how can people follow you? How can they reach you? How can they get in touch with you?

He's got activist guests. And also his kind of pep talk stuff. Use your agency. Put your shoulder to the wheel. Here's the phone number to call. Here's Lisa Murkowski's Senate office phone number if you want. And then blah, blah, blah, right? It's stuff like that.

I mean, he gives people actionable advice and it sinks in after a while and it creates community. Right. Which again, goes back to the online aspect of all of this. Right. And even if it's small, right? I mean, again, because how many people do you need to storm a Capitol? What, if anything, do you think Bannon understands about our online era that the Democratic Party and mainstream media might not? I don't know if it's that he understands it better. I think he is less afraid. He's more shameless about it. He understands its emotional potential, that it's a hot medium, as he said to me. He said something very chilling to me, which was, I said, why do you think that Democrats

really never mastered talk radio? He had an immediate answer for that, which is, they master the cool mediums. They master TV. We master the hot mediums, like talk radio, because I can fuck with your mind if I'm just coming in between your ears. And I think Democrats understand that just as well, but they're disinclined to do that, in part because they're not as nihilistic. I mean, they believe in actual policy. I mean, all of us are still valiantly trying to solve things through our institutions because we believe in them. We're not trying to take a wrecking ball to them. So if you're busy

laying dynamite beneath the floorboards of democracy and blowing everything up, what do you care? And so you'll talk however you want. He's very good at identifying wedge issues. Democrats don't tend to do wedge issues, again, because I think they're trying to run a functioning government and sort of, by definition, believe that you reach across the aisle to do that, or at least you work. Well, I do want to hit on that institution point on the Democratic side, but also just for the media. As a member of the media, I wonder how you think about, you know, Bannon has been very explicit that the enemy is not even the Democrats, it's the media, you know, that's like the early Trump years, they always talked about that. Yeah, yeah. How do people in the press handle the fact that you've been targeted as the enemy?

And yet, if you enter the fray, it doesn't work as well because you're trying to be the defender of your own institution and that institution is needs to have some measure of objectivity to it like you're being attacked but you can't really fight back can you i mean who i was writing the piece he wasn't right that's true i guess i mean you you have the freedom now as now you're writing profiles you're at the atlantic to be a little more, I don't want to say a little more opinionated. A lot more opinionated. I think there's a lot of sort of, there's a lot of beat reporters, you know, Times, Post, other places that are like, well, how much can we really, I don't know, right? Or a party that's, you know, whose sole project seems to be,

at this point, it seems to be content-free. It's about power. I can't tell yet what their real platform is. I mean, in some ways I can. But in my case, I mean, I was able to say that he was a conspiracist and a megalomaniac and a peddler of industrial grade bullshit all before paragraph four.

I mean, so you mentioned that great line that he's trying to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of american democracy yeah um you quoted my old boss barack obama saying that bannon understands it's not necessary for people to believe disinformation to weaken democratic institutions you just have to flood a country's public square with enough raw sewage which was a nicer way of paraphrasing what bannon said to michael lewis in 2018 which is his strategy is to just flood the zone with shit um why do you think that works? Flooding the zone with shit? Oh, gosh. Part of it has to do with this new wild world. I mean, we're easily distractible. Most people are chasing clicks, even the highbrow places are chasing clicks. So the sticky stuff, the hot stuff, the emotional stuff works, you know, and we're not in 24 hour news cycles anymore. We're not even in three hour news cycles. We're in, you know, micro cycles of like

15 seconds, right? And a lot of the shit is actually just emotional stuff. Really, it's the wedge issue stuff. And it's the heated stuff. I think that's one of the reasons it works. I mean, what's your theory? I mean, you're much more of a media guy than I am. I mean, you tell me. And also, Obama was good at figuring out how to capture several media cycles. Like he would speak to a niche press, and he would speak to, you know, he was good at figuring out what to do as the media was breaking off into its different silos. I don't think he was being cynical about it. But he was very tactical about speaking to different audiences when he realized that nobody was watching Cronkite, right? He was.

And I think he was even better at that in his second term than his first. I agree. better at that in his second term than his first. I think that he's a very uniquely talented politician, though I often wonder if he was president today instead of Biden, would he still be able to get his message through? Would we be able to adapt to this media environment where, as you said, we have these micro cycles? Look, and I think the danger that autocracy presents to the United States is a uniquely American danger. You know, Neil Postman talked about this in Amusing Ourselves to Death, which is like, it's the threat is mixed up in sort of entertainment and distraction. And the river of bullshit that we get all the time is,

it's just distracting us from the most important issues. Our attention attention spans we can't even remember who the twitter villain was yesterday anymore right because we're on to the next thing and if we just bet on a kardashian if we yes and and news about you know vladimir putin possibly using nuclear weapons is right next to you know johnny depp and amber Heard trial, right? And then some silly thing that everyone thinks is funny, right? So it's really hard to sit for a while and grab people's attentions and hold that attention, which is what you need to organize and build institutions that people have faith in. And I think what Bannon and Trump and some of the people on the right understand is all they have to do is just knock it all down, right? And they are

pushing on an open door because faith in our institutions has been declining now for decades, decades. And the Democratic Party is caught in the unenviable position of trying to be the defender of institutions when people are upset with institutions. And so there is a, as much as a lot of smart strategists on our side will say, well, we got to have populism of our own and economic populism. And I happen to agree with a lot of economic populism, but there is a limit to our populism because at the end of the day, we are now the ones defending democracy. Democracy requires institutions and institutions not only require work, but they often lead to a lot of disappointment because they're not perfect. Right. One of the great ironies here is that

we're the institutionalists. We're suddenly defending the military and the FBI and the deep state, but also that we are suddenly the slow-plotting incrementalists arguing for conservative, slow-plotting change, some of us, whereas the Republicans in the main are now just advocating. I mean, they just want to blow it all up, right? And it's content free. And I asked Bannon more than any other question, I would come back to this almost every hour with kind of tedious metronomic regularity, I would say, and what's going to come up in its place again when you're done? And he never had an answer for it. And there was one line that I had that I cut, we cut it. It was just, my piece was getting really long.

But he said, look, you know, some people are here to clear the fields and other are here to, you know, to settle. And I'm here to clear the field. And I thought that's such a quaint way of putting what you're doing, which he's not clearing any fields. I mean, there's no, he is blunt. He is frank. There's no vision. He has no plan. I don't think it's a lot of genius to it because it's very easy. Cynicism.

It's very cynical. But it's lazy and it's cynical, right? But it's like, right, like you keep asking that question, well, what do you want to build? And once you blow everything up, what do you want to build in its place? He doesn't have an idea. Right. Like you keep asking that question. Well, what do you want to build? And once you once you blow everything up, what do you want to build in its place? He doesn't have an idea. Right. He doesn't have an idea because what they're thinking about right now is just how can we harness the disappointment and anger and cynicism that is already out there that has been supercharged by an online media environment, how do we harness that rage towards our institutions, towards government, towards media, towards business, towards whatever it may be, and just burn those institutions down? Because our answer to people being upset is, you're right, and here's the people that you should blame. Right, exactly. I can't really put it better myself. a huge part of it though now that i've been listening to the war room which i'm sure you have too what what he's focuses on most is sort of elites and institutions whether it's democrats or republicans it's cultural yeah it's cultural i think and that's what's most interesting to me

i mean they're really there are very few policy prescriptions in there every once in a while you'll get a breath of his leninism, like, you know, nationalize the pharmaceutical companies. Sure. Great. You know, like, pretty hot. You know, but like, I mean, I agree with that. You know, maybe once I heard him talk about raising corporate tax rates, but did I, or was he just talking to me? I don't know. You know, like, I'm not sure, you know, if he's ever said that on the air. And, you know, certainly his time in the White House, he didn't say anything like that. But I mean, I think what he mainly talks about, he's very, very fixated. I think that the educational attainment divide is something that he's really exploiting. Institution capture, the elites are trying to turn your kids woke and queer, and they're trying to operate on your children without your consent, and they're trying to read stuff to them without

your consent. And by the way, you know, Katonji Brown Jackson is, you know, is a pedophile by association, you know, is easy on pedophiles, is soft on pedophiles. One of the most fascinating conversations I had with him, because he was relentless about this on his show. He would not stop. And he kept saying, this isn't my line of country. I hate talking about this. He is always talking about this. He loves mentioning pedophilia. I mean, like, that's ridiculous. But so this was easy for him to talk about. Anyway, but he had like five days of talking about Katonji Brown Jackson, you know, these terrible departures from the sentencing guidelines and even for the other recommendations. So the one case that he was really hung up on

was Hawkins, that 18 year old kid who only got three months. And it's true, that was a radical decision compared to the others, right? It was less than anybody had recommended. But the Washington Post found him and discovered there hadn't been any recidivism, right? He was closeted, gay, black, in a community that was not particularly forgiving of being gay. And also he was probably that weird combination of both inured to and electrified by online porn and didn't quite know what he was doing or thought, this is sick,

this is amazing. Who knows what he was thinking? He was 18. And Bannon was ranting about this to me and I was saying to him that I had a very different point of view and it was the one I just gave you. And I then started giving him grief about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and he said, you're just trying to change the subject because you're losing this particular argument that we're having, and I said, I'm not losing this argument. It's just that we can't agree. Like, we see this fundamentally differently, so he indulged me. We started talking about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then five minutes later, he looked at me, and he said, okay, wait. Let me just see if I got this right. So what you're saying about the Hawkins case is that you just think here is a kid who is gay and black, and this was all tied up in issues of masculinity in the African-American community,

and he spits it out completely compassionately, completely just as I had. he can do it. It's just that that's not great radio. That's not a wedge issue. So I was going to ask you this because you mentioned earlier about how he is this card carrying member of the eastern elite establishment do you think he is a status traitor or do you think he is just full of shit or both and it doesn't matter yeah i think i think we should say both both and i mean i mean a status traitor you know i'm sure he would want to call himself that yeah right i'm sure he would say that yeah i mean look there's a way that he comes by these um opinions honestly not the televangelism part but he's a middle-class kid from richmond virginia you know i went to his dad's funeral

with him which was that's bizarre that he invited you i thought yeah it's a bizarre part of the whole thing yeah i thought it was the ultimate gorilla move to sort of like spring on your siblings like oh and here morning my dad will be a lady from the atlantic you never know but they were by the way this lovely warm gregarious irish catholic family that was just like hey how you doing they're so used to his shenanigans. They just, it's just Steve being Steve. But what I was struck by was, I mean, look, he's born in Richmond, right? Sort of seat of the Confederacy. His dad worked for the phone company for 50 some odd years.

His 401k is blown to smithereens in 2008 and he panics and sells off most of it and loses most of his retirement. These are the kinds of politics that I would have had if I'd been born in the exact same circumstances. We always think of our politics as being deeply considered intellectual things, when in fact they might just be tribal and we were born that way. I mean, I probably didn't have a prayer. I was going to be who I was going to be based on the family I was born into in the moment of time and, you know, all these things. So how much of a traitor he is, I mean, then he went off and, you know, got himself lots of fancy initials after his BA, you know, and that was going to skew him in one direction. And he worked in Hollywood and he worked at Goldman. So that was going to continue skewing him in one direction. But of course, I think he's full of shit. I mean, how, you know, I think you,

if you touch him, a whole vat of shit would spew out. The number of times in the podcast, he just talks about the working class and the working class people of this country. And the other day he said something, he said, you know what, this audience is, is sophisticated. You may not be credentialed like some of these elite, but you're sophisticated. Which struck me as he's touching on exactly what these people want to hear, right? Which is that like we are so put upon and they think they're so smart. And just because we don't have a college degree, they talk down to us and they tell us what to do. And they think we're racist and all this bullshit. Did he use the word credentialed?

Yeah, credentialed. Well, okay, because what's interesting about that is that he's recruiting from the vocabulary of the Eastern elite by saying that. Credentialism, that's Michael Sandel's argument, right, in the book that he wrote a couple of summers ago, that we are overrun by a credentialed elite and perhaps we would do better to diversify it a bit. So it's very funny that he's taking like the Harvard professor's Harvard book and using that language in his podcast. But that said, like I said, he comes from that world.

I mean, you can have a lot of access to those feelings and a lot of sympathy to that. I mean, my grandpas were both union guys. You know, my dad speaks with like a Queens Rockaway accent that could like slather a Bialy. I mean, like I have access to all of those instincts and feelings and sympathies. I don't think those are inauthentic. The part that I think of him that's like full of shit is the big lie.

I was just going to say. No one. Yeah. I mean, no one in the Beltway who knows anything about elections. And we saw it on that Thursday night hearing, that spectacular two hours of like perfectly produced television. Barr, Ivanka, nobody believed. I don't think Trump believes that he lost. And I actually had a high level person in the Trump administration tell me that Trump didn't believe it. And I almost put it in the piece, and then I thought, without a name, it's not interesting. This person wasn't willing to go on the record. When I read that part of your piece, how he is, you know, people say that Bannon doesn't believe the big lie. But, of course, Bannon tells you, I believe it in my heart, and, you know, I absolutely believe it.

To the core of my being. I bet he justifies that in his mind, saying, this is a bigger war we're fighting here. And it's worth it to lie about this, even to whoever, because this is a bigger war we're fighting. And this is how we get people revved up. And there's a bigger goal here. What else did you find out about how he views January 6th and what he he thinks about these hearings we're talking in the middle of these hearings now you're reminding me that one of his former colleagues and not a low-ranking one said you know he's an ends justify the means kind of guy so yes to your point yeah why not say it right because if he believes that it's all with a righteous ultimate goal you can can repeat it. January 6th. He wasn't

going to come clean with me, but it was interesting that he spoke about it at all. And I think part of it is bragging rights. I think he, that morning, the Washington Post and New York Times, everybody had come out with the story that Bannon had been on the morning phone call log and the evening phone call log. And then there was this almost eight hour gap in between that was unaccounted for that happened to encompass the window of the insurrection. So when I asked him about it, at first he was, well, he lied. I mean, he said that he was downstairs watching the events unfold in the war room in his podcast studio. The problem with that is that I had spoken to his daughter for a couple of hours, and she had been on the mall and had been warned away

from the Capitol by Mark Fincham, who's running for Arizona's Secretary of State. It's a big election denier. And Mark said, it's chaos up here. Don't come near. Go back to your father's house. And so she hoofed it. And I think eventually met up with Fincham and went back to the Breitbart embassy where they broadcast. And they went to the ground floor, which is where the war room studio is. And all she did was go up the stairs, which I believe is like, you can only access it by the outside, poke her head in and say, I'm home and I'm safe.

And he was there the entire time, she told me, working the phones. Well, he told me he was working the phones. She said she didn't see him until close to broadcast time. So you've got the two Ben's giving. And he said he was working the phones. He wouldn't tell me who with. I was interested for about five minutes in knowing

whether Ginny Thomas was one of them. And he said no. At least there's that. Do you get the sense that he wants Trump to run again, or is he looking for a new Trump? And what's their relationship now? Do they talk at all? Well, so when I started this, I had been told by several people that they hadn't spoken for a year, which was interesting. But what does that actually mean? Because they speak to enough people in common that they can certainly convey, you know, it can be like sort of the middle school form of communication where you're just kind of conveying your wishes through a third party. But I think that they have recently kind of rapproched in some weird way because he was kind of live broadcasting during an event at Mar-a-Lago not that long ago. Or he was there, you know, via a screen. I think that it suits his aims best to

play to the Trump base, but to allow for the possibility that somebody else like DeSantis might eclipse him. And then the idea is to stand for Trumpism and denialism and whatever the MAGA movement is. He's not going to work at the White House. He's fundamentally a, he's not an employee. He's kind of a lone wolf. He can't work for or with anyone. Yeah. You know, that's clear.

So we've talked about, and you wrote this in the piece, how his plan is to sort of leave a smoldering crater where institutions once were. Do you think he is competent and disciplined enough to achieve that goal? Is he a unique talent on the right or is his shtick easily replicated by some of the other goobers out there? Well, here's the thing. First of all, I wouldn't call, he's not a goober. That's, I wouldn't dare call, I mean,'s smart. And we shouldn't underestimate the kind of sex appeal of being smart for some of his listeners, right? It makes them feel like they're doing something high-minded.

And all podcasts are kind of sui generis, right? Or his is. I don't think it's like a podcast out of a box. Bongino and Shapiro are very good. They have much bigger audiences. They don't do what he does. He is a different kind of variety hour with a lot of activists who show up and his own suite of correspondents. And it's just different. And like I said, I think it can be asymmetrically powerful. Its whole objective is to get people out of their chairs and doing things. And as you said, on the left, there isn't

much that does that. And even on the far right, other than shouting it back at the television or feeling yourself affirmed, his is really the one that provides a roadmap. Yeah. And that's part of the danger, I think. I think it's part of the danger. And I think, you know, and for casual listeners, it's worth picking up tips about how to organize. And it's also worth listening to just the content, what he's saying, so that we know how he's moving the Overton window, what kinds of things he's trying to mainstream into the discourse, which yes, you're right. Tucker is too. Other people are doing that too, but he's not also giving them phone numbers to call so that they can go do it at the state level or in their backyard. Right. That's the difference. Jennifer senior. Thank you so much for, um, for writing the piece,

spending that much time with Steve Bannon. And, uh, and thank you. Thank you of course, for joining offline. This has been great. Yeah, it's been really fun. Thanks for having me. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein,

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