Nobody Matches The Lies Of Bannon, Though Many Keep Trying
Of all the monsters spawned by trump, none is more pernicious, amoral and prosperous than Steven Bannon and none of the trumpian nightmares have had and continue to have more of a negative impact on America than the unshaven, bedraggled Bannon.
The flagship purveyor of far right wing propaganda is Bannon’s podcast, “The War Room,” where he and his vile guests spew out lies by the ton. And tens of millions of naive, angry viewers shape their world views based on Bannon’s lies, from believing that the COVID-19 vaccine kills people, to believing that Democrats are pedophile cannibals to believing that trump and Kari Lake obviously were robbed of elections to president and governor of Colorado, respectively.
It should come as no surprise that Bannon, 68, a twice convicted felon and one-time top trump advisor, came out as the number one podcast merchant of on-line misinformation. The War Room began in October 2019 and publishes up to four episodes per day, five to six days a week.
A study released on Thursday by the Brookings Institution analyzed 36,603 episodes from 79 different podcast series. The report noted that nearly 41 percent of Americans listen to podcasts monthly, and almost one in four Americans look to podcasts for their news.
It found that Bannon’s podcast, which claimed to have been downloaded more than 135 million times, accounted for nearly three-quarters of all conspiratorial content on political podcasts and more than one quarter of all COVID-related claims. After the election, the study found that claims of election fraud on political podcasting rose by 600 percent.
A day before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by trump supporters, Bannon told listeners, “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow.”
The study found that unsubstantiated or false claims tied to COVID-19 were featured in one out of every eight COVID-focused episodes and that the claims primarily focused on unproven, alternative treatments and preventions.
Media Bias/Fact Check determined that Bannon’s War Room “is a vehicle to promote far-right disinformation propaganda as a means to sow division and create chaos.”
Bannon speaks and millions listen, like lemmings. In an episode of Bannon’s War Room that aired on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Bannon told his listeners that their efforts would result in a 2020 election victory for trump.
“The play has been called…Mike Pence, run the play,” said Bannon. “We’re coming in right over target . . . This is the point of attack we always wanted . . . today is the day we can affirm the massive landslide on November 3.”
A viewer to one episode of War Room would learn about efforts to reveal “the truth about the coronavirus being made and re-engineered by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and intentionally released to the whole world as part of their evil plan.”
A War Room guest, Peter Navarro, who served in a number of positions in the Trump administration, said, “I was looking at the classified information, and all hell was going to break loose, and I’m thinking is this a bioweapon that they’re gonna take President Trump down with?”
In a 2021 podcast, Bannon’s host was Clay Clark, an evangelist and debunked, anti-vaccine activist. Among Clark’s absurdly untrue statements were that COVID-19 is “100 percent treatable” with hydroxychloroquine and other drugs. Covid vaccines are filled with fetal tissue. Concentration camps are coming. And Bill Gates owns a demonic patent for a cryptocurrency that is injected into your body.
The definitive source of the coronavirus has not been tracked to Chinese research but was most likely spread by infected bats or pangolins sold in Chinese markets. The vaccine doesn’t contain fetal tissue, concentration camps are not in the plans and there is no cryptocurrency injected.
Bannon’s show was the worst but by far not the only podcast spreader of misinformation. A guest on Sarah Gonzales’s show, “The News and Why It Matters,” criticized scientists’ shifting assessment of hydroxychloroquine, saying “So the science changed. I thought science doesn’t change.” In an episode of the Charle Kirk Show, guest Vladimir Zelenko compared the vaccine to a “bomb inside you.”
“What we really have is a poison death shot — it’s not a vaccine,” Zelenko said.
Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria but its efficacy in treating COVID-19 has been found ineffective in clinical trials with a possible risk of dangerous side effects.
Fauci’s emails were released on June 2, 2021, following a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails included exchanges with domestic and foreign government and public health officials and journalists. He also emailed civilian Americans regarding daily briefings and, speculation during the early stages of the pandemic that the virus was human-made or manufactured and accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Bannon used the emails to buttress his theories that Fauci knew early on that COVID-19 was a “genetically engineered bioweapon,” that Fauci decided “not to tell the president” amid speculation that Fauci and others “stood to profit if this (spread of COVID-19) turned into a pandemic.”
As COVID-19 infections and deaths soared in New York City in April and May 2020, podcaster Daniel Horowitz minimized the severity of the pandemic and suggested that listeners “explore the politically right way to think about the issues.”
“If you take out New York City, which is unique, how many people is that? You’re talking about getting struck by lightning. You’re talking about risk levels that are not elevated above any other activity associated with your daily lives,” Horowitz said.
Similar skepticism was expressed on the show hosted by John Solomon, a former Fox News contributor and executive and editor-in-chief at The Washington Times. Solomon said the coronavirus “does exactly what all other respiratory disease epidemics during the flu season do: they come for two weeks, they stay at the peak, they go, and it’s over.” It was not unlike trump’s predictions in February 2020, that the U.S. would go down from 15 coronavirus cases to nearly zero. Trump was wrong, and millions died.
Bannon was the White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President from Jan. 20 through Aug. 18, 2017. Married three times and divorced two times, the Harvard University graduate and Navy veteran has three children.
He was convicted in July 2022 on two counts of contempt of congress for refusing to honor a subpoena by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection by trump supporters. Bannon was sentenced to four months in prison and fined $6,500 but the sentence was held pending a ruling on his appeal.
In August 2020, Bannon and three others were arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign. In his last day in office, trump pardoned Bannon on all charges.
Trump could not absolve the state charges and in September 2022, Bannon was charged in New York state court on counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy in connection to the “We Build The Wall” campaign.
Wealthypersons.com reported that as of February 2023, Bannon’s net worth was more than $55 million. He has written, directed, and executive produced many films like “Clinton Cash,” “Sweetaker,” “Occupy Unmasked,” “Generation Zero” and “The Chaos Experiment.”
The rise of Bannon is the subject of a book by Joshua Green, “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising.”
“The shocking elevation of Bannon to head Trump’s flagging presidential campaign on August 17, 2016, hit political Washington like a thunderclap and seemed to signal the meltdown of the Republican Party,” Green wrote. “Bannon was a bomb-throwing pugilist who’d never run a campaign and was despised by Democrats and Republicans alike. Yet Bannon’s hard-edged ethno-nationalism and his elaborate, years-long plot to destroy Hillary Clinton paved the way for Trump’s unlikely victory.”
Bannon was an officer in the Navy for seven years and then worked for two years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. In 1993, he became acting director of the research project Biosphere 2, was an executive producer in Hollywood, producing 18 films between 1991 and 2016 and in 2007, co-founded the far right website, Breitbart News.
Bannon was the chief executive officer of trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the president following trump’s election. He left the position eight months later and rejoined Breitbart.
After leaving the White House, Bannon said he hoped to create “the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.” He proceeded to support many national populist conservative political movements around the world, including creating a network of far-right groups in Europe, known as “The Movement.”
The Movement is a right-wing populist organization to promote right-wing populist and economic nationalist groups in Europe that are opposed to the European Union governments and political structures of Europe. The Movement has attracted the attention of the right wing prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil.
In November 2020, Bannon’s Twitter account was permanently suspended after he suggested that Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray should be executed.
Bannon was initially introduced to trump by Rebekah Mercer and her father, billionaire hedge fund manager, Robert Mercer. Rebekah Mercer was identified in published reports as “the most powerful woman in GOP politics” and the “First Lady of the Alt-Right.” The Washington Post called Robert Mercer one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics.
In 2013, Rebecca Mercer had helped Bannon to form “Reclaim New York,” an organization that trains citizens to watch their government closely, and uses freedom of information laws to force the New York government to disclose public spending.
In June 2016 after trump won the primary, Mercer created the “Defeat Crooked Hillary” PAC, and ran the daily operations. She also worked with Bannon to create the film “Clinton Cash.” The Mercers contributed $25 million to the 2016 presidential election.
The Mercers also were key financial benefactors for the far right, Breitbart News, where Bannon was the former executive director.
Robert Mercer was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer and is the former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies. He played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit.
Robert Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a major mistake. A 2017 lawsuit claimed that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists.
In a related matter, the outcome of a case in federal court could help decide if the government can stifle disinformation of the type put forth by Bannon and others.
A suit filed by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana claims that the White House and dozens of officials like Fauci, have forced social media platforms to stifle the voices of its political critics in violation of the constitutional guarantee of free speech. Government officials have long urged social media companies to fight illegal or harmful content online. The attorneys general accuse the Biden administration of taking the effort too far.