Steve Bannon: Militant of the Western Church

Hello listener,

How's it been? Great, right?
Right?..

This episode follows Naomi Klein's recent book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, and Errol Morris' 2018 documentary around Steve Bannon, called American Dharma (2018). In both, we get a rare glimpse into the mind of this highly effective manipulator, or enemy, of (social) media; who treats it like a political actor that understands only (algorithmic) violence...
It's like being stared in the face by the hard pragmatism of a delusion.

But this delusion is the American delusion. It's just the violence they don't see, that they talk (and walk) around, what had to be paved over to reach that shining destiny, manifest by God Himself (look they don't even have agriculture, lazy savages).

Bannon is a toxin parasite that teaches us where we hide ours, if we care to look. The American "dream" means many underground veins of denial, suppressing historical crimes that undermine the principles 'America' claims to hold.
And while the left is busy ridiculing the right for being religiously intolerant, racist, greedy, or belligerent and insensitive towards the other, they ignore this contradiction of their own complicities with exactly such things.
Those that cannot ignore it -- because they had to enact the religious and racist hatred against the brown Muslim at play when they enlist in the army (to give just one example of Bannon's target audience) -- are left, by the left, for dead.

Hence, these deep veins of denial produce deep veins of resentment rage  that Bannon knows not only how to weaponize, but how to conjoin disparate rages in a metonymous coherence of "(we may hate each other for all we know, but) we all hate X!". It is true, this is an old tactic, but Bannon adapted it to an algorithmic framework of recruitment and propaganda. At the same time, he will exasperate the left's abandonments by fomenting more and more fake controversy like a button to release a tired, long-leaking valve of Christian denial.

This is just one point.
We had many others, but I'm putting it here like a warning label, a basic blueprint, for the Bannon propaganda machine.

Stars tossed in this one: Beast & Sovereign; Marx Grudge; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD.