The Daily Signal - 'Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws': Meet the Characters Behind Bannon's 'WarRoom'

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Dan Fleuette, author of "Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws: A Pictorial History of WarRoom," gives an exclusive look into the origins of Stephen K. Bannon's "WarRoom" and its evolution as a hit show. From an impromptu Sunday afternoon call from Bannon that launched the show to becoming a movement with millions of daily viewers, Fleuette shares intimate details about working with Bannon, photographing guests like Tucker Carlson and Rudy Giuliani, and collaborating with the "WarRoom" posse. Get a rare glimpse into Bannon's current communication from prison and what to expect upon his release Oct. 29. Fleuette's new book captures five years of the personalities who shaped this influential platform. Order your copy of "Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws" now! Amazon: https://amzn.to/40kFBvk Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/rebels-rogues-and-outlaws-a-pictorial-history-of-warroom-dan-fleuette/21080621?ean=9781648210624 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They've lost their jobs, sometimes their marriages. They've been debanked. They've been canceled. Like, you know, the whole gamut of things. And they've willingly stood up against that and said, I'm not doing this. This is not right. I need to take a stand. And if it's not me, who's it going to be?

How am I going to face my kids when they ask me questions when they get older? This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, October 25th. I'm your host, Rob Blewey. And you just heard from Dan Flewett, the author and photographer. of a new book called Rebels, Rokes, and Outlaws. Over the past few years, Fluett photographed guests who appeared on Steve Bannon's war room. The new book tells their stories and the fights they've waged against the powerful Washington establishment and cultural elites in America.

The book's official publication date is Tuesday, the very same day that Steve Bannon will be released from prison. You won't want to miss our interview, but first, let me tell you about another way to keep tabs on the Daily Signals Journalism. If you want to stay ahead of the curve on conservative news and analysis, you'll want to subscribe to our free Daily Signal email newsletters. You'll get the latest headlines, detailed policy coverage, and exclusive interviews delivered straight to your inbox. Whether you're interested in our morning update, breaking news alerts, or weekly roundups, we've got you covered. Don't let the liberal media control the narrative and avoid the big tech sensors who control social media.

sign up now at dailysignal.com slash email and start seeing what's really happening. You'll be joining more than 1 million subscribers who rely on the Daily Signal to cut through the noise and get the truth. And now here's my interview with Dan Fluett. Thank you for tuning into The Daily Signal. I'm Rob Luey and I'm joined today by Dan Fluett,

the author and photographer behind this new book, Rebels, rogues, and Outlaws. Dan, you've had an important role on War Room, and I'm excited to have you tell us about this new book. Thanks for joining us. Hey, Rob, thanks for having me. I know we've gone back for many, many years, and we've worked at kind of parallel tracks for a long time,

but it's really nice to converge with you here. It's really great to be here. Well, we are big fans of the work that you do, and obviously have kept Steve Bannon in our prayers as he's obviously endured this period of time, unfortunately, in prison, and unjustly, I should add from our point of view, but you have put together a really outstanding compilation that goes back about five years of the various personalities who've made a big role

in some way or another on War Room. Walk us through the history of this book and tell us more about it. Okay, great. So it didn't start off as a book. It started off as just a really was a way for me to blow off steam in between all the work that I was doing for the War Room. I was the original producer helped put the whole thing together and it's become quite a pirate ship over the years. But it was just a way to relax really and all these VIPs would be coming through to studio all the time. And I thought it would be great just to take portraits of them as they came through and maybe hang them up kind of salon style in the studio and just like leave it to that. Just over time, it just kind of progressed into, it just got bigger and bigger and bigger.

And then just turned into this book that we see here, which I'm incredibly proud of. And I think it's a fantastic testament to the war room and what is the war room. And really what it is is it's an exploration of, because it's not just, you know, pictures of people that come through, right? I wanted it to ultimately be a like a testament or a celebration of the pirate rebel spirit of the people that come through. You know, in the book, you've got a lot of professionals. You got like, you know, Tucker Carlson and Rudy Giuliani and of course Steve Bannon, right, people who have made this their career. But you also have a lot of people who were brought into this movement or into their passion, into their voice, because they saw things that were happening outside. You know, you've got the election reform or the election corruption and just all these different things that were sort of thrust into this because they just couldn't stand by and let this thing happen.

And to me, that takes an incredible amount of courage to do something like that, too. You know, they've lost their jobs, sometimes their marriages. They've been debanked. They've been canceled, like, you know, the whole gamut of things. And they've willingly stood up against that and said, I'm not doing this. This is not right. I need to take a stand. And if it's not me, who's it going to be?

How am I going to face my kids when they ask me questions when they get older? And to me, if you read through the entire book, you see that it really becomes a story of that. Like, you understand that it's not just that these people are on the show and they happen to, you know, happen to just be there wandering through the studio. That there really is a bigger narrative as you go through the whole thing. So, yeah, it just kind of morphed into that over time somehow. But I think it turned out really well. I'm super proud of it. Well, I do want to hear about some of the specific stories in the book, but you mentioned that

you didn't really intend for this to be the end product. Take us back to the beginning of the War Room. Tell us how it originated. You mentioned your role on the program. What was that original idea that Dan had? Okay. I'm going to give you a little insight into how this pirate ship works. I had actually been, you know, recommending to Steve over a period of years to do a podcast.

I said, you don't understand how big it would be. I thought it would be just incredible. I said, look at all these other people blowing up. You'll kill them. Because, you know, just because your breadth of understanding and knowledge and the way that you can tie historical events to, like, burgeoning movements and all these things. I was like, it's just unsurpassed, really. Not to mention how you were able to help ushered Donald Trump into the White House in 2016. I mean, absent you, I don't think that that would have happened.

So it's really incredible. And I think you've got something really powerful to do. Anyway, we left it on the back burner for a number of years. And I get a call on a Sunday afternoon. and he tells me that we're doing a podcast starting tomorrow. Oh, I say. Okay. Let's roll, you know.

And that was October 21st of 2019 was our first one. And it started off literally as a podcast. It actually started off as a radio show on John Frederick's radio network. And then we, of course, turned it into a podcast. In short order after that, I think it was about six weeks or so after. we teamed up with Real America's voice and they brought in all their expertise with the video and all that. We actually ended up growing really quickly.

But that was back in the salad days when we still had Facebook and YouTube and Spotify right before we got canceled. And it just really blew up, you know, to the tune of we were getting literally millions of viewers every single day, which I think they felt a little threatened by. So, you know, in short order, then, you know, now we're not on there. But that's how it started. And then it just kept growing and growing from there, yeah. And then your vision, as you talked about, because there's obviously so many different potential stories that you could feature any given day.

But Steve has this magical, a special gift where he is able to shape a narrative, as you said, with Trump being probably the most notable example that the American people can identify him with. What is it like to put together a show and how do you go about choosing the guests that you have on in the future? Well, putting the show together is, look, it's very similar to when I learned that we're going to do this podcast, right? It is a fire hose of information. So it's in a sense trying to just ride that wave, right? The whole time and you're managing like all these different people and then the check. changes and all this stuff. It's fast and furious. And if you watch the warm room, you'll see it is

just jam-packed with information, almost too much information, it seems like. It's hard to keep up. And that's why I give all the credit to the, we call them the posse, the war, but I've never seen a group of individuals, an audience that's been so activist before. And I think that's part of the genius of Steve is that he's able to not just convey information and like I said before put all these pieces together to create a narrative and so to give people a broader understanding of how these things work. But he also is able to empower the audience, right? He gives them things to do. He allows them to say, hey, I know you guys are frustrated. Here's tangible things. Here's real information that you can take and do something with. And it just makes, he likes to call it a force

multiplier, right? And it really is that the individual doesn't feel so much alone, that they're part of a bigger community and that their voice matters, the things they do matter, and how they integrate their information and talk about it with their family friends, social media, have events, have parties and screening parties. So it's crazy. But it's really amazing to watch that happen. And it's something that I don't often see. And this community that you speak of, I mean, largely just came together organically.

Organically. Well, you know, it's interesting because one of the, okay, I had an opportunity to watch Errol Morris's documentary on Steve. It's called American Darm. It was a beautiful movie. I think it's his best movie. And if you remember, Errol Morris, he did. fog of war, known unknowns with Rumsfeld. And he's got a huge body of work. And his,

his work is amazing. He's probably my favorite documentary filmmaker. And this, I think, is his best piece. And in that film, Steve talks about when we were at Breitbart and how the, he intentionally created this community in the comments section, that the stories and those things were essentially, vehicles to build this community, and that's where all the action was. And yes, it got spicy sometimes, but that happens, you know. It's it's, it's let the market decide, right? You know, let people, it will tell you when you go too far. It's just, it's just called free speech, right? It used to be what America was based on. And so, yeah, so, so building that community, I think, was something that was instinctual based on the, you know, the, the experience of the, the, the, the

art comments section and it just blew up. And he's always been that way, quite frankly. Always wanted to, you know, just not just talk about the news of the day in politics, but also history. He's a big history guy, right? So, you know, we've done things like the Gettysburg 150th anniversary. We're just for fun. We went out there for three days and just interviewed a ton of people. And it was amazing, right? So, you know, really connecting with people on that level is just, I think, a very for him and just something that comes naturally and something he spends a lot of time trying to develop. So now let's talk more about the book. So you are a photographer in addition to your other talents.

And so you would have guests come to the show and pull them aside and ask them to pose for a photo. Tell us just about how all of this collection of tremendous content all came together. So like I said, it wasn't intentional necessarily for it to happen. But it started, okay, so before we were doing the War Room, we had our C4 Corps. And we would go literally around the world. And we're talking about, you know, populism and conservatism and really trying to build a movement and connect different groups together and help grow that. And in doing that, we did a lot of media.

And one time we were in Paris and we had a fantastic photographer who was there shooting a spread of Steve for a news article or for an article for a magazine. And I took a look at the images. I said, these are really nice, right? I really liked these. And I told Steve after that, I said, you know, I could do this. And he, but he had never known me as a photographer, of course, right? It was always, my background with him has always been in either writing or doing our documentaries. We've done, you know, probably a couple dozen documentaries over the years.

So I took it as a bit of a challenge. I was like, oh, well, let me show you. And so, you know, it became like after the guests would come through the studio, it was more or less like kind of a meditative process for me. It was a way for me to, you know, sort of blow off steam. and kind of relaxed from the intensity of doing the program and allowed me just to, you know, experiment a little bit. And, you know, over time, I just kind of locked into a certain style. And, you know, just kept that very consistent throughout. But yeah, it started with just, you know, the, like Matt Gates and the mayor, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, and of course, Steve, right?

they were there. And I said, hey, let's, you know, let's take some images. And they, they were, to their credit, for me, they, they were very gracious and given me their time and allowed me to do it. And then, yeah, as it became a bigger, bigger project, then, you know, sometimes I would go to events and, you know, draft people in and that kind of thing. But, yeah. At some point, you said, I have enough here for a book.

It just, it just grew. By the way, I got to say, like, as, as happy as I am, that it's finally coming out and as proud as I am of it, I'm a little bit sad because it means that I'm finished with it. And it's, and it was something that brought me really so much joy to do that, you know, I miss doing it. You know, I miss writing the stories. I miss getting to know these people, right? And, and thinking of what is, what is it about this person that's interesting to me, right? And is it, part of a bigger movement? Is it some event that happened? Is it something? You know, I try to, I try to really understand something, at least, about each of these people and really write about that and blossom

about it inside the writing. And so you'll see all kinds of things. We talk about, you know, God and demons and angels and just all kinds of, you know, metaphysical things as well as news of the day kind of things. But it's really all over the place. And even as you read the book, you will quite literally at one point be blessed in the book. And I'll leave that for the audience to find that, but literally. And that was my attention was to really have the audience be able to engage and see these people maybe in a different light and that kind of thing. So it really was a labor of love, this whole thing.

Well, I think based on what I've seen, you've managed to accomplish that. Is there a favorite subject that you photographed? whose story you feature in the book? It's such a great question. And I don't want to slight anyone because they really, quite frankly, I enjoyed all of them. And I'm not kidding about that. But there are some that stand out for me. There's like a Libby Emmons, right, who's, you know, her background was, you know,

you talk about they were thrust into this. is, is, her background is, is, you know, what I call a, um, conservatives like nightmare, right? She, she grew up and, uh, went to Sarah Lawrence and Columbia. I think it was, um, was a playwright in New York. And she happened to write an article about how, uh, you know, trannies are not, um, you know, men are not women. And her community that her friends, uh, the people she had worked. with for so many years, like turned on her. And she was left with a voice in the wilderness,

right? She's like, what do I do now? Her entire world collapsed. And from those ashes, right, from that, like, what do you do? She was able to, you know, really build herself back up. And then she found a real community that allows her to express herself on her own terms. And then she's now blossomed into the sun. She's on Tim Poole all the time and that. But it's those kinds of things, you know, those types of people in, and there's, there's several in there that have that trajectory. And to me, it's incredibly inspirational, you know, just to, and, and I thought as I was doing it, I was like, yeah, I don't know if I'll ever finish this, but, but in a sense, I wanted to take their passion, their, their, their rebel spirit, and, and say, if they can do it,

You know, it inspired me to finally finish it to like, I can do this, right? I should do this. And we'll, you know, we'll see what happens with it, right? It'll be what it'll be. But I've done something now. And so, you know, I quite literally take inspiration from them. Yeah. Well, absolutely.

And so many of them are inspiring figures for the courage that they have. We also meet the war room posse as you call them. So for those who are fans of the show, obviously you have an opportunity to, to, to, to, to, to, learn more about them and who they are and see their photos. You know, one of the things that I remember Steve saying before he went to Danbury was that kind of next person up, next man up, next woman up, and certainly, well, he's been away from the show. That's been the case.

Bring us up to speed on how things have been without him and what it's meant to the team to continue the show. Well, look, it's a sort of, like you said, all hands on deck. now, right? And there's an old Bill Belichick saying the former coach of the New England Patriots, you know, next man up. And that's what it is. It's your responsibility now to fill these shoes, to take that message out now and put it out. You know, it's now your responsibility, right? And I think instead of being a daunting task, like how am I going to do this, it goes back again to like the the audience and the and the guest hosts and everything now, I really feel that they're,

they're actually very much empowered and inspired by him and his messages and just all the things that they've learned and the power of the, of the war room to really take that mantle up and bring it out. And, you know, it's been hard. It's been tough. But, you know, they haven't taken away all his things. He still emails every day. Okay. So we get, you know, unfortunately he can't, you know, quote unquote, work from prison or run a business, but he can give his opinions and he still has First Amendment rights as far as that goes. So, you know, he's well versed in what's going on in the day to day. And, you know, we're definitely looking forward to him being out on or around the 29th.

So it's coming up quick now. Yes. Yes. So am I? So are a lot of our, our, our, our subscribers. our audience, I know that they're eager to see Steve back behind the camera. He'll hit the ground running. You can bet.

Okay. Do you know, do you have a sense of, you know, what his mood is? I mean, it'll be, what, a week before the election? I mean, there's a lot to pack in in those seven days. Yeah, well, from what I know of him and from our correspondence, he's chomping at the bit. You know, he cannot wait to get out. And you can believe we're going to see some hellfire come October 30th when he comes out. But no, he's, you know, he, look, they took away his voice, right?

And that was intentional. That was the whole idea for him to go away when he went away, by the way. He never did get his real appeal, right? It never actually went through the whole process. They couldn't wait to get him in during election season and take away one of the most powerful. voices in the movement to help promote the agenda, give context to the agenda, and show people really what's going on. So it's not by accident. So yes, he'll have a week left, but I think that, you know, we've done a really good job in the meantime and that he's going to coalesce all that

information and it is going to be, it's going to be some fireworks for the days after, you know, about a week. It's about a week after that. And then by the way, you know, we're not going to know. on November 5th or November 6th or November 7th, you know, what's actually going on. So there's going to be a lot of confusion, a lot of angst, a lot of misinformation, and it's going to go on for a little while. So we saw it in 2020 and, you know, we're certainly going to see it again. Oh, I suspect that you are correct. And that's why it's so important to have outlets like yours helping to provide that context.

By the way, I can't think of perhaps better timing for the book to come out. I mean, obviously, a week before the election on the 29th. Tell our listeners how they can go ahead and order a copy, get a copy delivered to their homes so that they can enjoy what you've created. Great. Well, if they order today, they'll have it for sure before the election. And I wanted to time it, not just really for the election. And certainly I didn't plan for it to come out on a day that Steve gets out of prison.

talk about getting big-footed. But also it's, you know, it really is a coffee table book. It's something that, you know, I think in five, ten years that it will still be relevant and it'll be something to look back on and hopefully that people would still have it. And, you know, it's perfect for the holidays to give it to your warm room or conservative friends and family. But the best way to get it right now is either Amazon or there's a nice little. independent site that I like to promote, bookshop.org. If you want to avoid Amazon, bookshop.org, they'll have it there.

It's called Rebels, Roads, and Outlaws. You can pick it up. Yeah, and you order Today ships on the 29th. You'll have it for the election. And, yeah. Dan, thank you so much for doing it. And by the way, maybe five years from now, you can do part two or the sequel. There will be more.

There will be more. Yeah. Don't stop taking those photos and telling those stories because there's certainly many to share. Again, the book is called Rebels, Rokes, and Outlaws by Dan Fluett. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. We'll be back again soon. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thank you for listening to The Daily Signal podcast.

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