The Bulwark Podcast - Jennifer Senior: Steve Bannon Is an Asymmetric Threat

Episode Date: December 28, 2022

Steve Bannon is a card-carrying member of the coastal elite, but he's trying to light a bonfire under American democracy. An intelligent, well-read man in the same category as Tucker Carlson, Bannon's genius is in polarizing people. The Atlantic's Jennifer Senior joined Charlie Sykes in this encore episode from June.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. Back in June, I had a great discussion with the Atlantic's Jennifer Senior, who had just profiled Steve Bannon. She hung out with him. He texted her a gazillion times. He made political predictions that were totally wrong, and he got mad when she called his show a podcast. This is one of the funniest ways to talk about one of the most infuriating and loathsome people in America. Just listen to the show, and you'll see why we included this episode on our best of 2022 list. In case you have not seen it, Jennifer Senior's piece on Steve Bannon, American Rasputin, online, you can read it, is an absolute must read. Steve Bannon's still scheming. He is still a threat to democracy. So first of all, I ought to introduce our guest, Jennifer Senior, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the

winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. So welcome to the podcast and wow, congratulations on that. Thank you very much. Yeah, I heard about it while I was writing about Steve Bannon. And if you want to know how to cancel your elation over winning a Pulitzer, try being in the midst of a long profile of Steve Bannon. They more or less balance each other out, right? Like the stress versus the glee. Anyway, thank you. Well, I mean, were you also thinking like, okay, so a little bit of pressure here? I mean-

No. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, the pressure was just like, I was writing about Steve Bannon. It sort of existed whether, you know, I could have been a schlub or I could have gotten the prize. It sort of didn't matter.

He is independently a stressful, regardless. Well, just stressful and dystopian. Oh, yeah. If you want to talk about him being a bummer, we can go there. But, you know, if you want to talk about the existential dread and all that. But yes, go on. Sorry. Kind of having like a front row seat to the bonfire of American democracy.

Well, and that he's so cavalier about it. You know, he's sitting there treating it like it's a game almost, you know, there's a certain amount of sport when he takes up these matters, but the content is hair raising, right? So yes, absolutely. He is living his best life. And I'm, I want to read something, but I mean, here's a guy who not that long ago was arrested and indicted for fraud. And you would think that, okay, you know, that's the comeuppance for Steve Bannon. He gets pardoned by Donald Trump. And of course, you know, he's facing criminal charges from refusing to testify before the House. But this

guy is feeling it right now, isn't he? I mean, this is what Steve Bannon was born for, right? Well, yes, because he's fundamentally a media guy, and he was never meant to be anyone's employee. He didn't stick with most of the organizations he worked for for very long. He would always kind of go off on his own, and he lasted, what, seven months in the Trump administration? He's happiest, I think, alone howling into a microphone. I think there's a lot of truth to that, and it is his moment for reasons that are not entirely of his own doing. In fact, I don't think they have so much to do with him. I mean, he's able to howl and rant about inflation. And that's a product of many

birds coming home to roost. He's howling about prices at the pump. And that's Ukraine plus, right? That's other things. Drag queen story hour. Right. Drag queen story hour. What does one even say about that? I mean, I thought we were. He says quite a bit about. Okay.

So you mentioned something and it triggered a memory when you said that he never wanted to work for anybody else. Because I remember the moment during the 26 campaign when Donald Trump named him like the co-campaign manager. And weirdly enough, I was on a panel with Hugh Hewitt on MSNBC or something. And Hugh was, of course, saying what a brilliant move it was. And I remember saying, you know, I just don't think this is going to end well. I got the election wrong, right? You know, I mean, so I guess it ended. And given where Steve Bannon is right now, Steve Bannon living the dream.

You can argue he's living his best life. You can also argue that he isn't, that he's kind of a sad figure. And I do leave that open as a possibility at the end of the piece. And I would point out that I don't know, are you living your best life when the sword of Damocles is sort of hanging over your neck wherever you go? There are a lot of potential lawsuits that could happen here, right? There are many states that could get very testy about We Build the Wall and come after him for wire fraud and all sorts of other things. And it is conceivable that his vision about his townhouse next door becoming the kind of center for the worldwide populist movement won't ever really happen in the way that it never really happened in Europe.

And maybe his timing was just bad in Europe. And maybe the Europeans just didn't quite like him or get him and vice versa. But I could argue that one flat around. I'm just going to say. Okay. We'll come back to that because I sort of have this image of Steve Bannon on the mountaintop thinking, you know, if I can't burn it all down, I will just go in this blaze of glory. So he knows he's on the edge. But actually, you know, the self-immolation, utter destruction, martyrdom, the guy's strained. So my producer is named Katie Cooper, and she sent me a note about this article, about our interview today.

So I wanted to read this to you. She says, you can see the evidence of how she won that Pulitzer in her lead. And she sent it to me. I sometimes look at the long ribbons of texts I've gotten from Steve Bannon and wonder whether they couldn't tell the whole story on their own. There are certainly enough of them. He says he has five phones, two encrypted, and he's forever pecking away, issuing pronunciamentos with incontinent abandon after midnight during commercial breaks for his show, War Room, sometimes while the broadcast is still live. You can discern much of Bannon's mad character and contradictions in these exchanges, The chaos and the focus, the pugnacity and the enthusiasm,

the transparency and the industrial-grade bullshit. Also, the mania, logomania, arithmomania, monomania. He likely copped to all of these, especially that last one. He's the first to say that one of the features of his show is wash, rinse, repeat, garden variety hypermania with a generous assist from espressos, and last of all, perhaps above all else, straight-up megalomania, which even those who profess affection for the man can see, though it appears to be a problem only for those who believe, as I do, that he's attempting to insert a lit bomb into the mouth of American democracy. That's a hell of a paragraph. Thank you. So you spent time with him.

He decided that he was going to work with you and that he was going to text his thoughts to you, which is always an interesting choice. Yeah, well, and I'm not the only one. He's an avid texter. I think he texts his thoughts to a lot of reporters, and I think I might have been just the first to go, God, you know, this would make a really interesting lead. In fact, they should kind of be woven throughout the piece, because his texts are peculiar. There's a lot of crowing in them. He can be very pugnacious and very conceited in those

texts his sense of humor which he does have is almost never in evidence in those texts unless you're ribbing him and then he writes an lol he knows when you're kind of japing or whatever but i think i wrote at one point that they felt almost like a turing test i wasn't quite sure i was talking to a human sometimes there was something slightly bot-ish about him. I was going to ask you that. I mean, that's the test to determine whether computer artificial intelligence can effectively imitate human behavior.

Right, an owning the libs bot. If there was an owning the libs bot, you can imagine it generating a lot of the text that I got, like maybe 80% of them. But then he would text things to me like about missing his father. And that's not an owning the lips, but texts, that's a real text. That's real. But at the same time, so you get a little like glimpse of human being, but then he's calling Ann Applebaum a fucking clown spelled with a K.

Yeah. I mean, honestly, there's something really distasteful about that. That was kind of waking up and getting a fondue fork poked in your eye. I was like, what is this? And I tried to just sort of gently respond by saying, I mean, I didn't take the bait. I just said, interesting. You've always really liked her and expressed nothing but admiration and respect for her intellect. What's going on here? And it just turned out he linked something she said about Hunter's laptop that he disapproved of

because she just didn't think that Hunter's laptop was all that interesting. I remember that. She just found it neither here nor there, and that pissed him off. But yeah, he could be quite abrasive in those texts. So one of the surest ways to get under his skin, though, it's always interesting what his points of sensitivity are. Apparently, if you call his show The War Room, if you call it a podcast, he gets very upset. No, he doesn't. And it's, I mean, he's used to it and he knows that's how it's referred to. I mean, I defy you to kind of Google it and see it referred to as anything other than that,

but he takes it very seriously as a TV show. And so seriously that it's true that parts of it are mystifying and incomprehensible as a podcast. He never IDs the voices, right? Somebody like Navarro will hold up a pie chart and no one can see it. But I mean, it's on like channel 240 of Pluto TV, which I write as sort of its own weird metaphor. You called it its sad metaphor. Yeah, it is. Well, because it's like in the Kuiper belt of the universe. Where is it? Right? I mean, it's like, it's so far away it's not readily accessible in many markets you can watch it on rumble if you want to go online no i mean pluto tv is not like you're putting it not high end it's like at this user an amusing shoestring

quality i mean it's it's like it's like wayne's world for insurrectionists i mean what yes exactly and i think i said it's like father coglan stumbled into wayne and garth space yeah it has a very low budget kind of feel about it which i think he actually takes some pride in it's very homespun i once said to him you know steve i can hear your two of your cell phones buzzing throughout the show like when it's between my ears and i, which is mainly how I took it in, I would listen to it because Spotify doesn't carry it, but I guess Apple does. And I said to him, it just bzzzt, bzzzt, bzzzt. I mean, it sounds like mosquitoes. There are just these mass casualties of mosquitoes as you're listening. And I said to him, it's a little weird.

Didn't do a thing about it. Just leaves them right in front of the mic. I mean, he's too engaged with them. He wants the feedback. He wants to know what's blowing up. He wants to know which guests listeners are responding to, you know, what things people are saying that are sticky. So he's kind of tied to the low budget, low rent quality. People are sitting in like these kind of white corners with kind of shades. And I mean, nobody seems to have had any TV training. I mean, there's a lot of sad brown backdrops. And yet everyone goes there, right? I mean, it's become like the go-to place for the deplorables. Every candidate, every elected official, you know, they come in and they kiss the ring. And I guess I was surprised to read that they do pre-interviews too. Yeah. And Bannon does them. I mean,

here's what I will also say for what he does. He's pretty good at it. If you know what I mean, I mean, if you want to make your meat and potatoes like trafficking and conspiracies and repeating the big lie and occasionally getting super wonky in a very conservative framework with economic data and polling data. You know, the facts are sketchy. You will often get poll data wrong if you want to spread a lot of COVID misinformation. I mean, he's your guy. And it's a variety show. There are A, B, C, and D blocks.

He mixes up the pacing. fringe candidates who are running for local offices and you know activist moms and throws in his own peter navarro's and steve cortez's people who will analyze the data the way he likes to you know there's kind of a bro quality going on with him and his correspondence they talk for a while then he'll throw in something else i mean it's not the dick van dyke show but there's more variety in this hour than there are in a lot of other podcasts i would say and he does four hours right so you know, four hours. It's exhausting just watching. So you mentioned that the show became, over time, a guided tour through Bannon's gallery of obsessions, the stolen election, Biden family syndicate, Hunter, of course, the invaders at the

southern border, the evil Chinese Communist Party, the stolen election, the COVID mandates, the folly of modern monetary theory, the stolen election, that strikes me as kind of a rundown of what has become the id of the right. And so I guess this is the question, I'm sure you've got to ask this, why pay attention to Steve Bannon? Don't we just give too much oxygen to the fringes by paying attention to him? Yeah, I have been asked that. But my feeling about this is that, first of all, exposure is not an endorsement, right? It's journalism. But my other thought is, actually, I think it's important to know what the actual content is, what they're saying. I mean, I think we have to know what their talking points are.

I don't think we do ourselves any favors by not knowing kind of what shit they're flinging against a wall. I think we have to know. It's important to get a beat on what the misinformation is and disinformation is. And also to grasp how very much of it there is, you know, what Obama said about flooding the public square with raw sewage. I mean, I just think that not knowing these things never helps because he's doing it whether we're paying attention or not. I think one of the big mistakes that people made was not paying attention before 2016. And if it weren't for the fact that Donald Trump is waiting out in the wings and might be the next

president of the United States, and the fact that Steve Bannon is actually pretty influential, maybe not in gross numbers, but in terms of where the right wing is going. We don't have the luxury of ignoring this. I mean, you mentioned, for example, you know, Bannon's the country's biggest exponent of this precinct strategy, which encourages people to sign up for the grunt work of elections and the Democratic Party's nightmare scenario. And there's a lot of evidence that it may sound crazy, it may sound off the wall, it may sound like Iago ranting, but that's what's happening in the country. Thank you for saying that. Because I think that Democrats would be smart to pay very close attention to the

precinct strategy and try and match it, do it on their own, right? There are things we can learn from what they're doing. They're trying to take over every level of state government so that Trumpists and MAGA people are in control of the infrastructure so that whatever barely held together in 2020 will completely come unstrung or undone in 2024. So I think it's important to know that. It's also important to understand the way guys like him are really mainstreaming completely zany ideas. So, for instance, I mean, he was banging his spoon on his high chair for forever about impeaching Joe Biden for the quote-unquote southern invasion, right? The idea that there are unprecedented numbers of undocumented immigrants coming over the border.

And he considers this an impeachable offense. It's failure to protect and defend, right? And to me, this just seemed nuts. And if you're dissatisfied with this, you address it through policy, you vote Biden out, you do whatever normal Democratic things are. He just wants to impeach him for it. And I thought, well, this is bananas and it's never going to go anywhere. 70% of all Republicans now believe that in 2022, if Republicans take over the House, they should impeach Joe Biden. I mean, that's nuts. And I don't think that Democrats should get caught. But it's going to happen. And Democrats should not be caught on their back foot. They can't be caught on their back foot about this. I mean, does anyone have a strategy for what happens if this happens? I don't know when you came of age politically, but I was like a cub reporter when Newt Gingrich took the reins of, you know, in 1994, 95. Oh, 95. And everybody thought that he was just right.

Okay. So everybody just thought he would, he almost had a roosterly hairdo. He had that big high hair. He would puff out, you know, and sort of strut around and tell everyone that he was going to take over the house and no one took him seriously. And you know what? He took over the house and he sort of understood what the grand realities looked like. Steve Bannon could be jumping on bandwagons rather than actually kind of sitting on the saddle leading, you know, kind of driving the horse.

But I do think we should be paying attention to what he says. I do. I totally agree. And also because in many ways he is a leading indicator of where the party is going to go. And we've seen this over and over again where you have some bizarre thing thing that's sort of a, you know, a tiny cloud on the horizon that everybody else is ignoring. And then before you know it, it is on you. Stuff that was, you know, considered quite extreme now has become mainstream. So when he makes comments about Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, you may think, okay, well, obviously he's a complete outlier. There

are only two to 3% of Republicans, you know, agree with his take. Well, just wait a while. Just wait. Watch how it grows and it spreads when he talks about the impeachment. This is going to happen. He obviously was sharing with you his glee at what he thinks is going to happen during the midterm. The left and the media, they're all about democracy. He ranted to me one day, you wrote, then he broke into a smile. On November 8th, the war room and the war room posse and all the little people at the school boards and things, we're going to give you democracy shoved up your ass, okay? We're going to give you a democracy suppository. Ever-classing. And of course, I laughed at the time. I know, I know. One of the reasons I think I could afford to laugh was that he actually didn't say it particularly scarily.

I mean, he sort of was grinning and making sport of the whole thing, but it's terrifying because there's some truth to it. I mean, if people do infiltrate the sort of state infrastructure, right, and they become the people who eventually oversee elections and become secretaries of state, that's it, right? I mean, then they can nullify and invalidate legitimate election results if they don't like them. And it's very upsetting. I'm sure you've had the same reaction. I mean, I was concerned too alarmed after the election before January 6th about what was going on. But on a daily basis, we're finding out that we weren't necessarily alarmed enough. These people were very, very serious. And the question is, once they figure out which doors are unlocked, which buttons they can push, which personnel they need in certain places, they're serious about all this. And Steve Bannon, he doesn't pretend.

I mean, what you have is that raw id telling you who we're going to punish, how we're going to use the power, how far we're willing to go. And I think it's incredibly naive not to think that he is going to be incredibly influential and that Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell may not think the same way. But those are the voices they're going to be hearing at their back come next January. Oh, yeah. I mean, when they're trying to contain their right flank and cater to them, I mean, when they're talking to Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene, absolutely. Those were the regulars, you know, at Steve Bannon's Star Wars bar, you know. And if I can also just point one thing out, it is true that, for instance, somebody like Ben Shapiro or somebody like Don Bongino or somebody like Joe Rogan, all of these people have significantly larger audiences. The question is how many people you need, because I think

Bannon is sort of an asymmetrical threat. All you need to do is inflame. You don't need hundreds of thousands of people to wreak havoc at the Capitol, right? You just need the right number to overpower the cops, to kill cops, to wreak utter havoc, to come within a hair's breadth of harming actual members of Congress. I mean, Steve Bannon's audience is more than large enough to inflame those folks. And that's really all you need. This is a key point. And I think this is also something that Steve Bannon understands. He's described himself in the past as a Leninist. I think that this is interesting because, of course, you know, as a right winger, he, though, has internalized many of those revolutionary attitudes and the kind of thing that you need a small vanguard and what you can accomplish with that. Did you talk to him about that at all?

You know, I should have, particularly because I think he tried to make common cause at one point with the editor-in-chief of the American Prospector. So there are moments when I would actually stop him and say, I agree with you. I also think that, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are getting away with murder and that they ought to be nationalized. Sure. I mean, it makes a certain sense. I mean, my grandpas were both union guys, right? My grandparents, they saved money and became part of the prosperous middle class in the United States. They were foundational to America, you know, and Steve Bannon on some level fancies himself the champion of guys like my grandpa and guys like his own father. If he can find his talk to all the Leninist stuff, it'd be great. But you can do that without spreading the big lie.

You can do that without fermenting really horrendous culture wars and telling people not to get vaccinated. You can do it. I mean, I don't really know where to go with this. I mean, you can follow Bernie Sanders if that's what you like. It's interesting the different different opinions. You got Stephanie Grisham, White House alumni told you that she thinks of him as a con man. Anthony Scaramucci said he's a very sick megalomaniac compared to Hitler. Another White House colleague

called him a cancer in the administration with too many conversations ended with, we burn it all down, just burn it down. But you write, this is interesting, that there's a dirty secret about Bannon that many liberals who've met him are disarmed by how charming he is. White House reporters actually liked him because he was a huge leaker and can easily code switch into the patter of the coastal elite, probably because he's a card-carrying member, whether he likes it or not. So, I mean, here's a guy who's known for having an extraordinarily high level of bullshit, and yet as dramatically not believing any of it. So that's what I want to get your take. At the end of the day, does he believe the bullshit?

Is it a role that he's playing? And I guess that's the same question we ask about Trump, you know, lie, delusional. Is he really Iago, or is Iago a character that he's assumed? What do you think? Okay. I mean, I wouldn't want to lay too much money on this, but we are seeing this in the January 6th hearings right now, right? Smart people didn't believe this. No one believed this. No one with their wits about them believed anything. And Sam Nunberg, on the record, said to me that Steve doesn't believe this. What he needed was a pardon. So to curry favor with Trump, he embraced this. Now, is Sam right? I mean, Sam has better visibility into Steve Bannon's head probably than I do. He worked with him side by side for

quite some time. Sam was one of the first employees, if not the first employee on the Trump campaign. So I take what Sam says seriously. I think anybody who keeps two sets of books after a while has to figure out some way to merge them. And because the cognitive dissonance is just too great, there's a gulf running between what you say and what you privately believe. So eventually you start to internalize your own pattern, right? And I could watch Bannon at times. I'll tell you two stories because I would sometimes see him take up a position where he was doing it almost for sport, but by the end he had wound himself up so completely, it was almost, he started to believe the things he said.

There was a moment when we were talking about Katonji Brown Jackson, and he was really stuck on one particular case. It was the Hawkins case. She gave him, I think, only three months of jail. And I think two years were recommended. And that wasn't even the sentencing guideline. It was a child porn case. And it was the only one where she really radically departed from what was recommended. And he was fixated on it. And I said to him, yes, but did you read the Washington Post piece about this kid? Because if you read it, and he was like, no, but I did.

And he's a recidivist. And I said, he's not a recidivist. If you read that piece, what was very clear to me is that it was a story about being a young black gay man in a community where it was hard to be young black and gay and came of age, obviously online, both inured to porn and kind of overstimulated by porn and also was probably, you know, closeted. And to me, there were just so many complicated pathways that I think she was using her individual discretion and saw something cultural and looked at this adolescent and saw something else and made a different decision. And we don't know the full story here. And at first, he was just dismissing it. I was then trying to steer him back to talking about Marjorie Taylor

Greene and why on earth he kept having her on his show when she was a demonstrable nutball and anti-Semite. And he said, you're just trying to change the subject because you're losing the argument about Katonji Brown Jackson. And I said, I'm not losing this argument. We just don't agree. And he paused and he said, okay, wait, let me just get this straight. You're saying that you think this was about masculinity in the black community, and this was about a kid who was uncomfortable and in the closet. He repeated back to me with utmost compassion what I had said to him. And I stared at him and said, so you can do that?

Why don't you ever do that if you can do that? He can do that. But he can't weaponize that exactly brilliant exactly exactly it doesn't make for good radio or podcast or low rent low budget cable access level tv that's right it's not a. And his genius is in polarizing people. Can I tell you another quick story? Sure. Yeah, please. This killed me. This killed me. Okay.

So he was lecturing me about how, you know who really hates illegal immigrants? Legal immigrants, Jennifer. They really hate. And I cut him off saying, you know what, Steve? I actually know this. And I don't need you telling me this, because I learned it as a really, really young woman when I saw a John Sayles film called Lone Star. And John Sayles is super lefty and a pioneer in indie film and multiracial casting. And I learned it from John Sayles.

I don't need you telling me that. And I described the scene in Lone Star. And then he cut me off and said, God, don't you love John Sayles? I love John Sayles. I mean, that film about that coal mining, I mean, that was so good. And he started going on about a John Sayles film. He speaks our language. This is why I put him in a completely different category than the Sean Hannity's or the Don Bongino's because he knows this stuff. He's at a different level. His intellect can go in different directions, but he's chosen this. It's not like Sean Hannity, who's as dumb as a box of rocks. This is a guy who has taken this intellect, and I don't want to go off on a digression,

but that's why I put him in the category of Tucker Carlson. These are really intelligent, well-read individuals who have decided that this is the role they want to play. Okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that about Sean Hannity, so I'm totally intrigued by that. I mean, it's Gans, but I don't watch his show. I just see clips. You're shocked that Sean Hannity is dumb? Yeah, I just assumed that anybody who achieves a certain level of something can't be entirely dumb but trump obviously wasn't particularly bright forget it that's stupid scrap that that was dumb sure sean hannity is dumb

steve bannon is not dumb he's most emphatically not dumb and he's perfectly clubbable i mean the thing that i found also that needs to be said is that he's great company. I mean, he was perfectly respectful to me. He was perfectly charming to me. And this is why I think he's successful. He's charismatic, right? I mean, this accounts partially for his success and the reason that he's popular with reporters. I mean, I think it's really interesting. He has stopped texting me. So he clearly, he felt on some level hurt by what i wrote i think otherwise he would have kept texting me there are plenty of reporters that he's in constant touch with you know and i'm not among them so something yeah he didn't like it i think in the end no he claimed on the first day that he did and that it was badass and i think he texted

me on the second day too and then it just stopped it just stopped i think he texted me on the second day too. And then it just stopped. It just stopped. I think he reconsidered. Well, his intelligence and the charm and the other things are also why he is consequential and why he is dangerous. And he engages in talk, which I also think that people should pay attention to and not brush off, you know, about the destruction of institutions. You know, it's one thing to say the media to be destroyed. There's an undertone of just, you know, burning everything down, the possibility, toys, the possibility of civil war, taking over various institutions. I mean, and again, that's the kind of dangerous stuff that might be off most people's radar screen, but he's sowing the seeds of something. I mean, just talk to me about that,

because when you talk about taking a lit grenade and putting it in the mouth of American democracy, where does this go? What does it morph into? What does it take us? If I had a dime for every time I asked him that question, I would be rotting on a beach somewhere with an umbrella drink in my hand. I mean, I honestly would. I'd hang up my pens. I mean, I asked him over and over again, how do you envision this ending? And he doesn't have much of a vision beyond being in the crane with the wrecking ball. You know, there is, and this is what's alarming about a certain kind of fascism, you know, that it's kind of content-free, right? There is no

message. There is no content here. It's just about power. But like, if you ask him, he will say things like, some of us are meant to clear the land and others are meant to settle it. I cut a lot of things out of this piece, including my story about John Sayles, including that quote. I mean, he sees himself as the person who clears the land, but that's a delicate euphemism. That's quaint and suggests that, I mean, this is destroying things. Yeah. The point is the fire. You mentioned to me the goal is power. Well, there's a kind of fascism where it's just the fire and the flames and tearing everything down. And that seems to be what excites Steve Bannon, not building anything, certainly not running anything. Right. And there's a certain nihilism, I think, under that. He, I think,

would say there's a certain nihilism that he's taking advantage of in his listeners. I think he just has this kind of, there's almost a spiritual dimension to it where he just thinks history moves in 80 or 100 year cycles, and this is the cycle of destruction. And soon there will be a rebirth and new things will grow in its place. But he can't give and this is the cycle of destruction. And soon there will be a rebirth, and new things will grow in its place. But he can't give you, for the life of him, the contours of what kind of shape there'll be. Will there be anything like, I mean, in the meantime, let's be, like, let's just speak very bluntly. We need, like, people to pick up our garbage and pave our roads. You know, we still need an extant government. We need structures to, we need a functioning

department of energy, like, and commerce, just to do all the things that we don't even know exist. I mean, there are all kinds of things that, like, he's cavalierly proposing that we just tear it all down. But our lives are made possible by infrastructure that we don't really even know is there.

You can't see past the horizon of destruction, what he's got in mind. It's like, we tear everything down and then, well, I'll leave that to somebody else. Well, that's not reassuring. So in terms of the tearing down, one of the things that really has always been, I think, a major theme of Steve Bannon's career going back to the Breitbart days when he very openly said that he thought that Breitbart was an alt-right platform. And you talk about the threads of anti-Semitism that run through the war room. They have chat rooms filled with anti-Semitism. And you asked him about that. Bannon describes the commentary as a little spicy. So talk about

this because you found that there's something about his world where anti-Semitism is the most abundant form of ugliness among his stans. What is that about? I was surprised until I wasn't because I was expecting to see much more anti-Muslim sentiment or much more anti-immigrant sentiment. But it wasn't like a close call, at least the times that I watched him on Rumble. The anti-Semitism drowned it all out, all from different handles. And I think it's actually straightforward. And it's this.

When Steve broadcasts, he's got sitting above his, is it his right shoulder? Or I guess it's his left shoulder, but on the viewer's right. What you see is this sign. It's his own quote that he has sitting on the mantle, saying, there are no conspiracies, but there are no coincidences, which is itself an ingenious form of doublespeak. It's saying, there are no conspiracies, but there actually are.

It gives you the ability to say, this isn't a lie. Please believe this lie, you know, and he really does traffic and loads of conspiracy theories. They aren't just about the election. They're about all kinds of things. Like including, gosh, was that really Omicron in China during the Olympics or was it an outbreak of something like hemorrhagic fever and ebola i don't know just saying could be we don't know just asking questions just asking questions you know right uh we stipulate you decide you know so there's a lot of that and

if conspiracies are sort of what you peddle if they're your bread and butter anti-semitism is really the biggest conspiracy of them all because it's the mother of all conspiracies. It says that Jews are behind everything. I mean, you point out, I mean, he tells you that, you know, he has lots of Jewish friends. He loves his Jewish doctors in Los Angeles, I guess, but you're right. There's no question that Bannon and his guests are always invoking George Soros. They're always talking about the Rothschilds, a frequent guest, Marjorie Taylor Greene, known for her Jewish space laser references. Uh-huh.

A Rothschild controls those. Exactly. I mean, one of his regular guests is Jack Posobiak, you know, of the three sets of parentheses meme, one of the Pizzagate guys. And so it's not a coincidence that all of these folks have gravitated to him. No. He's another one of the warning flags that people ought not to sleep on. Right. And if he wants to claim that he has never said an anti-Semitic word, you know, or, you know, and that no Jew can actually find any

anti-Semitic moment, number one, he's using code words, right? Soros, Soros, Soros. He said, when he was dissing Macron, he said the former Rothschild's banker, and then caught himself and had to say on the air, that's not code. I mean, he had already had a conversation about this. I mean, so he knows, he is aware that of course it's a code. And he's anti-Semite adjacent with Posobiec, who, by the way, on Ben and Show, actually was on some tear about Ron Klain, and kept saying Ron Klain. And there's no one in Washington who has any confusion about how you say Ron Klain. It looks like rain and Spain and plain and main and vain, and it rhymes with all those things. And then Posobiec stopped himself one day while I was listening and called him Ronald Klein. Just wanted everybody to know what kind of fellow he was. Just in case you're

curious how that name got morphed over time. So what was Steve Bannon doing on January 6th? The January 6th committee played one of the more extraordinary soundbites from Steve Bannon's War Room the night before when he basically said, you know, it's going to be extraordinary. I mean, it was as if he knew what was going to happen. So whatever happened on January 6th, Steve Bannon is part of that story, isn't he? So here's what I can't say. I mean, the whole clip from the night before, it's going to be extraordinary. That's a lot of war room macho talk, you know, and he could, to my mind, having listened to many, many, many, many hours of war room, that sounded sort of consistent with the kind of, you know, extra habanero talk that he has all the time when he's talking on the show,

like, oh, it's going to be epic. It's going to field strip these clowns we're going to you know like to me i heard that as like this is going to be a legislative insurrection the life the likes of which you've never seen i did not necessarily think that he knew although i felt like he had been stirring up his audience and flaming them for weeks, telling them, you know, to protest, to, you know, man the phones, to write. He was certainly selling the big lie awfully hard and giving lots of coverage to the rally on the mall, all the things that were happening the night before. What we knew from the day of is that he was working the phones. He won't say who he was calling. He at first wouldn't even admit that much. But his daughter had spoken to me about what had gone on that day.

She was on the mall. She was listening to Trump speak. And then she got a call from Mark Fincham, who's running for Secretary of State in Arizona, who was closer to the Capitol than she was. And he said, don't come near here. It's chaos. Walk away. So she went back to the Breitbart embassy. He broadcasts nearby. And she went back and she told me that she didn't really see much of her dad.

She just briefly went upstairs, which I believe is only accessible through the outside of the house. Saw him, told him she was safe, and then went downstairs into the war room studio and watched on their giant tv and he was upstairs working the phones and she didn't really see him until you know it was time for his next broadcast at five o'clock when i first asked him about this he said well i was just watching it the entire time in the war

room downstairs and i said but you weren't because your daughter told me you weren't down there. You know, and then, you know, the second you kind of catch him in a contradiction, he just glides away backwards on his ice skates and changes the story slightly. Oh, well, you know, I eventually got down there. You know, I'm sure he did. I mean, he had to broadcast at some point. It seems that one of the things that he does a great deal is to threaten retaliation against people who he feels have betrayed the cause. He obviously despises Mike Pence, you know, bitterly blames you, Bill Barr. In your story, you talk about how he's going to defeat Lisa Murkowski because she voted for KBJ to confirm her for the Supreme Court. So this is, again, you know, he's feeling powerful in a vindictive, vengeful way, which, you know, obviously, you know, places him at the heart of Trump world. One thought when I was watching one of the brief

clips, I can't stand watching it long form because I can take so much that as I was watching him recently, his cockiness, it did occur to me that he thinks that Trump is coming back into the White House and that all the rules will change, that that will be the culmination, that here's a man who looked like he was faced with complete destruction when he was indicted, he was pardoned, he understands the power of the president, the power of the president to rewrite the rule of law, and he thinks this is going to happen. And it's one of the, I don't know, it just seems like the wind at his back. Do you that sense at all or yes i think he's highly energized by this moment i i do agree you know it's super upsetting to behold by the way he had no measurable effects lisa murkowski

did not listen to him you know yeah i mean there are people who are lashing themselves to the mast and deciding they are going to resist the temptation to capitulate to, you know, voices like this. You know, if I had to guess, she's not listening to his show. But I agree with you that I think he is enjoying himself. But, you know, it's also agitating to him. He can taste it, right? And there's something agitating about being almost there for him. And I do think there are questions just about what his future will look

like. I mean, he's 68, but I mean, I don't know how many pivots he has left in him. And he's got an impressive list of people who don't like him and who wouldn't want to work with him. I think he's best positioned where he is, you know. And he doesn't care. He doesn't care about those people. He doesn't care. I mean, he's got that revolutionary spirit which again one of the great ironies of our time is the conservative republican party now being taken over by a guy who is a revolutionary and he sees the revolution at hand and i think it's that revolutionary mentality that i don't think that democrats understand because i think don't think the Democrats understand because I think they still think that politics has some vague resemblance to the way it is.

And I don't know whether you had a sense of that you spend time with it and realize that this is a completely different moral cultural universe in many ways. Well, yeah, certainly the Democrats in many instances are playing chess, whereas he's playing checkers. And checkers is like, you know, the cruder thing sort of tends to prevail and tends to win. I do have that sense. I want to push your analogy. They think they're playing chess and he's bringing a knife to the chess match. I mean, he's playing every game.

They're doing the King to Rooks Four type thing, you know, Rook to Kings four type thing. And he basically just has this big, you know, cudgel and he's smashing the board and they, whoa. Hey. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I, there's that scene in Indiana Jones where, you know, those guys are sort of moving really amazing knife play and Harrison Ford just like gives him a contentious look and shoots him with his gun. I mean, if that's what you're thinking,ious look and shoots him with his gun.

I mean, if that's what you're thinking, yeah, I can coast with that metaphor. I totally get it. Although, you know, Harrison Ford looks much cooler in that. I mean, yeah. And you sort of wish the Democrats would be the ones who look cool. Yeah. I mean, of course, I'm totally nervous about all of this. And I think it's been true for a while where, but look, Democrats still believe in government, right? So they're still trying to get the government to do stuff. And so paradoxically, a number of them are still the incrementalists. Like you said, you know, the number of conservatives who are, you know, embracing conservative principles and opting for incremental change

are becoming vanishingly rare. And it's now bizarrely the Democrats who are trying to kind of be incrementalists, but they too have a left flank. And look, I'm going to say something about Steve Bannon. I mean, he was noisier about inflation earlier. I watched MSNBC and everyone else sort of buy the Biden administration line that this is just a blip. This ain't going to be nothing. This is nothing. And Bannon was skeptical, and he was very dubious very early on. He was making noise about that laptop for 18 months,

and only recently did the New York Times and Washington Post concede that it was real. And there was a time when you couldn't even post about it on Facebook, right? He has a reason to be pissed at the mainstream media. He has reason to be pissed at people like me. I am really conscious of that. I mean, if he weren't so busy trafficking and lies, if he wanted to point out our excesses, I would welcome it. You know, it is not without merit to say that, like, the Democrats looking at all of the, you know, Black Lives Matter riots and sort of disregarding, you know, the looting

may have been very problematic, right, for the Democratic Party. But there are things that he was focusing on where I think we were vulnerable. And he was right. What he is doing in response is so catastrophic. It's just so 100x bad. Well, that is right. And that's, of course, part of the problem when you start to see the world in the binary term is you close your eyes to where the other side might actually be, right? So I'm sitting here in Wisconsin and last night I don't watch a lot of television at all. And I was watching some of the news broadcasts because I wanted to see the coverage of the committee and the political ads here are wall to wall. And they're almost all Republican and they're all pounding away on law and order and the Kenosha riots.

Now, for much of the legacy media, including MSNBC, where I'm a contributor, I should acknowledge that, they look back on that and say, well, that didn't work for Republicans. Let's move past that. Well, don't be so sure. Guys like Bannon understood that those scenes of burning storefronts were going to be great wedge issues, and they are just pounding and pounding away on all of that. And I'm not sure that a lot of the folks on the coast understand what's happening here with issues like that. But I have to concede with your point is that Bannon knows. Well, that's just it. And I think that you can get suburban moms on your side with that and a couple other things if you're shrewd. He's not. I mean, he's got all the subtlety of a crocodile, but I mean, we just don't know how much that matters. I think that Bannon was more, he was early to think about the pandemic like he was early on the the possibility that it might have been a lab leak and that's because you know he hates china and that's like his you know relentless talking point so you know that might have been just an instance of a

stopped clock happening to be right but nonetheless i think democrats are vulnerable on this and i think that like legacy media is vulnerable on this and was vulnerable on this. You can see how he could have appeal and why people might just despise us. He did make me see that. I will say he did. He did. Well,

the story is American Rasputin. It is online and in the July, August issue of the Atlantic magazine, Jennifer senior. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time talking about somebody who is both loathsome and immensely consequential at the same time.

Thank you. Can you imagine that as like a business card? Loathsome and immensely consequential. That's good. My ambition is to have that on my card someday. Yeah, you and me both, baby. Oh, my God. But this has been just an absolute delight and pleasure. You're the best. You're the bee's knees. You're as good as they get. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Bulwark Podcast. Okay, so we talked about

Bannon today. And next up, we're going talk about old-school Trump with one of America's most famous reporters who happens to be from his hometown. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.