This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World

Donald Trump’s newly named chief strategist and senior counselor Steve Bannon laid out his global nationalist vision in unusually in-depth remarks delivered by Skype to a conference held inside the Vatican in the summer of 2014.

Well before victories for Brexit and Trump seemed possible, Bannon declared there was a “global tea party movement” and praised European far-right parties like Great Britain’s UKIP and France’s National Front. Bannon also suggested that a racist element in far-right parties “all gets kind of washed out,” and that the West was facing a “crisis of capitalism” after losing its “Judeo-Christian foundation,” and he blasted “crony capitalists” in Washington for failing to prosecute bank executives over the financial crisis.

The remarks — beamed into a small conference room in a 15th-century marble palace in a secluded corner of the Vatican — were part of a 50-minute Q&A during a conference focused on poverty hosted by the Human Dignity Institute that BuzzFeed News attended as part of its coverage of the rise of Europe’s religious right. The group was founded by Benjamin Harnwell, a longtime aide to Conservative member of the European Parliament Nirj Deva, to promote a “Christian voice” in European politics. The group has ties to some of the most conservative factions inside the Catholic Church; Cardinal Raymond Burke, one of the most vocal critics of Pope Francis, who was ousted from a senior Vatican position in 2014, is chair of the group’s advisory board.

BuzzFeed News originally posted a transcript beginning 90 seconds into the then–Breitbart News chairman’s remarks because microphone placement made the opening mostly unintelligible, but we have completed the transcript from a video of the talk on YouTube. You can hear the whole recording at the bottom of the post.

Here is what he said, unedited:

Steve Bannon: Thank you very much Benjamin, and I appreciate you guys including us in this. We’re speaking from Los Angeles today, right across the street from our headquarters in Los Angeles. Um. I want to talk about wealth creation and what wealth creation really can achieve and maybe take it in a slightly different direction, because I believe the world, and particularly the Judeo-Christian West, is in a crisis. And it’s really the organizing principle of how we built Breitbart News to really be a platform to bring news and information to people throughout the world. Principally in the West, but we’re expanding internationally to let people understand the depths of this crisis, and it is a crisis both of capitalism but really of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West in our beliefs...

https://www.buzzfeed.com/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world

Steve Bannon's Weird, Winding Road to the White House

Wiki: Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller is an American political operative, best known for working for Republican Senator Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump. He is now a Senior Advisor to the President.

Miller grew up in a liberal-leaning Jewish family in Santa Monica, California.[2] Though his parents were Democrats, Miller became a conservative after reading National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre's Guns, Crime, and Freedom.[3] While attending Santa Monica High School, Miller began appearing on conservative talk radio.[3] In 2002, at the age of sixteen, Miller wrote a letter to the editor of The Santa Monica Evening Outlook, in which he stated that "Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School."[4].

In 2007,[5] Miller received his bachelor's degree from Duke University, majoring in political science.[3] Miller served as president of the Duke chapter of Students for Academic Freedom and wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper. Miller gained national attention for his defense of the wrongly accused students in the Duke lacrosse case.[3][6] While attending Duke University, Miller accused the poet Maya Angelou of "racial paranoia" and described student organization MEChA as a "radical national Hispanic group that believes in racial superiority."[7]...

“Stephen is a highly competent and tough individual,” Richard Spencer, 38, the White Nationalist who coined the term “Alt-Right,” according to Mother Jones. “So I have no doubt that he will do a great job.” Stephen and Richard became buds while attending Duke University, as they both were members of the Duke Conservative Union....

After graduating from college, Miller worked as a press secretary for Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Congressman John Shadegg, both members of the Republican Party.[8] Miller started working for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions in 2009,[8] rising to the position of communications director.[3] In the 113th Congress, Miller played a major role in defeating the Gang of Eight's proposed immigration reform bill...

Miller, along with Steve Bannon, has been credited with writing much of Trump's inaugural address.[12] In the early days of the Trump administration, Miller continues to work with Jeff Sessions, the not-yet-confirmed candidate for Attorney General, and Steve Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, to enact policies restricting immigration and a rebuke on sanctuary cities.[13]

Miller was a major force in the creation of the Executive Order "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States", which temporarily restricted people from seven countries and Syrian refugees from coming to the United States, with exceptions on a case-by-case basis.[14][15]...

Miller had always existed at the political margins, but Trump’s rise has allowed him to advance to the vanguard, and he clearly enjoys it. He grins at the podium, he savors the crowd’s reactions, even if they periodically boo him for not turning the stage over to Trump fast enough. “All the anger right underneath the surface just waiting to come through, about what I don’t know,” says a former staffer with the Republican leadership on the Hill. “I’ve seen the videos of him getting the crowd fired up. People that knew him when he was on the Hill, I don’t know how to describe the reactions people had to the videos of him. Maybe creeped out a little bit? Like, what’s going to happen when this guy gets the power?” He pauses as a thought dawns on him. “Oh my God,” he says. “He’s going to find out that I spoke with you and I’m going to end up in a camp somewhere.”...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Miller_(political_operative)

http://hollywoodlife.com/2017/01/30/who-is-stephen-miller-donald-trump-adviser-muslim-ban/amp/

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/stephen-miller-donald-trump-2016-policy-adviser-jeff-sessions-213992

Trial Balloon for a Coup?

The theme of this morning’s news updates from Washington is additional clarity emerging, rather than meaningful changes in the field. But this clarity is enough to give us a sense of what we just saw happen, and why it happened the way it did.

I’ll separate what’s below into the raw news reports and analysis; you may also find these two pieces from yesterday (heavily referenced below) to be useful.

News Reports

(1) Priebus made two public statements today. One is that the ban on Muslims will no longer be applied to green card holders. Notably absent from his statement was anything about people with other types of visa (including long-term ones), or anything about the DHS’ power to unilaterally revoke green cards in bulk.

The other was that the omission of Jews from the statement for Holocaust Remembrance Day was deliberate and is not regretted.

A point of note here is that Priebus is the one making these statements, which is not normally the Chief of Staff’s job. I’ll come back to that below.

(2) Rudy Giuliani told Fox News that the intent of yesterday’s order was very much a ban on Muslims, described in those words, and he was among the people Trump asked how they could find a way to do this legally.

(3) CNN has a detailed story (heavily sourced) about the process by which this ban was created and announced. Notable in this is that the DHS’ lawyers objected to the order, specifically its exclusion of green card holders, as illegal, and also pressed for there to be a grace period so that people currently out of the country wouldn’t be stranded — and they were personally overruled by Bannon and Stephen Miller. Also notable is that career DHS staff, up to and including the head of Customs & Border Patrol, were kept entirely out of the loop until the order was signed.

(4) The Guardian is reporting (heavily sourced) that the “mass resignations”of nearly all senior staff at the State Department on Thursday were not, in fact, resignations, but a purge ordered by the White House. As the diagram below (by Emily Roslin v Praze) shows, this leaves almost nobody in the entire senior staff of the State Department at this point....

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5

Trump gives National Security Council seat to ex-Breitbart chief Steve Bannon

President Donald Trump granted controversial adviser Steve Bannon a regular seat at meetings of the National Security Council on Saturday, in a presidential memorandum that brought the former Breitbart publisher into some of the most sensitive meetings at the highest levels of government.

The president named Bannon to the council in a reorganization of the NSC. He also said his chief-of-staff Reince Priebus would have a seat in the meetings.

Trump also said the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the director of national intelligence, two of the most senior defense chiefs, will attend meetings only when discussions are related to their “responsibilities and expertise”. Barack Obama and George W Bush both gave the men in those roles regular seats on the council.

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Bannon called the press “the opposition party” and said it should “keep its mouth shut”. He has previously described himself as “a Leninist” and an “economic nationalist”.

Before he caught the ear of Trump while the businessman was a candidate, Bannon oversaw Breitbart news, a website that has featured racist and sexist articles. Like Trump, he entered government with no experience in public service...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jan/28/lobbying-ban-trump-executive-order-isis-strategy

Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’

WASHINGTON — Just days after President Trump spoke of a “running war’’ with the media, his chief White House strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, ratcheted up the attacks, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by the election outcome and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

The scathing assessment — delivered by one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted and influential advisers, in the first days of his presidency — comes at a moment of high tension between the news media and the administration, with skirmishes over the size of Mr. Trump’s inaugural crowd and the president’s false claims that millions of illegal votes by undocumented immigrants swayed the popular vote against him

Mr. Bannon, who rarely grants interviews to journalists outside of Breitbart News, the provocative right-wing website he ran until August, was echoing comments by Mr. Trump last weekend, when the president said he was in “a running war” with the media and called journalists “among the most dishonest people on earth.” Mr. Bannon’s remarks added to the growing acrimony between the press and a president who made attacks on the media a rallying point of his election campaign...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/business/media/stephen-bannon-trump-news-media.html