American Rasputin

[Nevilledog]

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Jay Rosen
@jayrosen_nyu
"There is no plan. The plan is to leave a smoldering crater where our institutions once were."

Those are the best sentences from @TheAtlantic's feaure on what Steve Bannon is up to these days.

theatlantic.com
American Rasputin
Steve Bannon is still scheming. And he’s still a threat to democracy.
10:52 AM · Jun 6, 2022

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/steve-bannon-war-room-democracy-threat/638443/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/seFjy

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 all 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’d likely cop 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.

March 28, 9:49 a.m.

I’m taking out Murkowski today and forcing her to vote NO on judge Jackson

He’s talking about the Senate confirmation vote on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination, and uncertainty about whether Lisa Murkowski, the senior Republican senator from Alaska, will vote yes. I tell him I’ll be interested to see if Murkowski responds.

*snip*

[vlyons]

1. I don't get it. Could someone please explain to me

This is a serious question that hopefully will get a serious answer.

Why Does Steve Bannon want to destroy all our American institutions?

[Midnight Writer]

2. It's not just America. He has been traveling to other countries to try to gut their democracies.

Last year, he was living on a yacht owned by a Chinese billionaire. That looks like a clue to me.

He believes that a chosen (read filthy rich) few should control the world.

What puzzles me is his appeal to working class people. He plainly wants to destroy their prosperity, their individual rights, their protections under the law. And they respond not with disgust, but with fervent glee.

[vlyons]

3. yew, but WHY ???

Why does he want to do that ???

[Celerity]

5. Because he wants to destroy all the significant global countervailing forces standing in the way of

a world wide, fascist, authoritarian RW wave.

This is all a 'grand sweep of history' power play, medium to long term event horizon stuff when the project is viewed as a whole, but the US is up for grabs now, it is the 800 pound gorilla in the overarching battle. Bring it to heel under the whip hand of christofascism, and the march towards global RW authoritarianism becomes far more easy.

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

4. As the late Same Ervin said, "Any jackass can kick down a barn."

It takes a carpenter to build one.