The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby MacCruiskeen » Tue Jan 31, 2017 6:09 pm

Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jan 31, 2017 12:21 pm wrote:
Did Lenin ever believe in anything but power?



If power had been all he believed in, a man of his background and talents could have acquired it much more easily than by opposing the Tsar, suffering imprisonment and years of exile, and eventually risking his life and health at the age of 47 in a struggle to influence the course of a socialist revolution in Russia during and immediately after WWI. I mean, there are safer and more straightforward career-paths for a bright middle-class boy with a law degree.
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:21 pm

‘He is running a cabal’: White House leaker says Steve Bannon runs ‘shadow NSC’ with no paper trail
David Edwards
31 Jan 2017 at 09:28 ET

Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief political strategist, has taken control of domestic and national security policy, according to a Trump administration source.

An intelligence official who spoke to Foreign Policy magazine painted a picture of a White House that was in disarray and being run without checks and balances or even a complete paper trail.

Even before he was given a formal seat on the National Security Council’s “principals committee” this weekend by President Donald Trump, Bannon was calling the shots and doing so with little to no input from the National Security Council staff, according to an intelligence official who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution.

“He is running a cabal, almost like a shadow NSC,” the official said. He described a work environment where there is little appetite for dissenting opinions, shockingly no paper trail of what’s being discussed and agreed upon at meetings, and no guidance or encouragement so far from above about how the National Security Council staff should be organized.


The official said that the National Security Council staff had been cut off from reviewing White House executive orders, which has been the practice in previous administrations.

Additionally, Bannon is insisting that the National Security Council make its recommendations without producing a traditional paper trail, known as a “summary of conclusions” (SOC).

“Under [President George W. Bush], the National Security Council was quite strict about recording SOCs,” Matthew Waxman, a former member of Bush’s National Security Council, told Foreign Policy. “There was often a high level of generality, and there may have been some exceptions, but they were carefully crafted.”

According to the intelligence official, the Trump White House generated no SOCs during its first chaotic week. The lack of a paper trail is also helping Bannon concentrate power, the official said.

“He who has the pen has the authority to shape outcomes.”

The source revealed that Bannon is conducting a “witch hunt” to find out who is leaking proposed executive orders to the press.

“There is zero room for dissenting opinion,” the official explained.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby brekin » Tue Jan 31, 2017 7:49 pm

Not good. Bannon may be a worse Dungeon Master in the White House than Cheney.
The country rolled a snake eyes: Lawful Evil (Bannon) and Neutral Evil (Trump).

“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”: Steve Bannon


http://www.easydamus.com/lawfulevil.html

Lawful Evil

A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He is comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He condemns others not according to their actions but according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank. He is loath to break laws or promises.

This reluctance comes partly from his nature and partly because he depends on order to protect himself from those who oppose him on moral grounds. Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to harm (if it can be helped). They imagine that these compunctions put them above unprincipled villains.

Some lawful evil people and creatures commit themselves to evil with a zeal like that of a crusader committed to good. Beyond being willing to hurt others for their own ends, they take pleasure in spreading evil as an end unto itself. They may also see doing evil as part of a duty to an evil deity or master.

Lawful evil is sometimes called "diabolical," because devils are the epitome of lawful evil.
Lawful evil creatures consider their alignment to be the best because it combines honor with a dedicated self-interest.
Lawful evil is the most dangerous alignment because it represents methodical, intentional, and frequently successful evil.

...


Image
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Jan 31, 2017 8:06 pm

brekin » Tue Jan 31, 2017 6:49 pm wrote:Not good. Bannon may be a worse Dungeon Master in the White House than Cheney.
The country rolled a snake eyes: Lawful Evil (Bannon) and Neutral Evil (Trump).

“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power”: Steve Bannon


http://www.easydamus.com/lawfulevil.html

Lawful Evil

A lawful evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty, and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but without mercy or compassion. He is comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to rule, but is willing to serve. He condemns others not according to their actions but according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank. He is loath to break laws or promises.

This reluctance comes partly from his nature and partly because he depends on order to protect himself from those who oppose him on moral grounds. Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to harm (if it can be helped). They imagine that these compunctions put them above unprincipled villains.

Some lawful evil people and creatures commit themselves to evil with a zeal like that of a crusader committed to good. Beyond being willing to hurt others for their own ends, they take pleasure in spreading evil as an end unto itself. They may also see doing evil as part of a duty to an evil deity or master.

Lawful evil is sometimes called "diabolical," because devils are the epitome of lawful evil.
Lawful evil creatures consider their alignment to be the best because it combines honor with a dedicated self-interest.
Lawful evil is the most dangerous alignment because it represents methodical, intentional, and frequently successful evil.

...


Image


Great analysis, brekin, and I loved the chart too. The only thing I have to add is that while Bannon may be a Lawful Evil, he fantasizes about doing Chaotic Evil. Or loves to give that impression.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby Elvis » Tue Jan 31, 2017 11:14 pm

brekin » Tue Jan 31, 2017 12:24 pm wrote:I don't know what that is supposed to accomplish.
We should email him and his friends to let him know we don't agree with his policies and we even have thread about him going? Do a candle light vigil outside one of his residencies?
I think there is even a rule against doxxing.


If he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to worry about.

Cryptome has a series of these "dox" for the Trump Gang. I sometimes check Cryptome when I run out of adjacent thread titles.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 31, 2017 11:47 pm

‘Why let ’em in?’ Understanding Bannon’s worldview and the policies that follow.
By Frances Stead Sellers and David A. Fahrenthold January 31 at 8:05 PM

Stephen K. Bannon walks in before a listening session with cybersecurity experts in the Roosevelt Room in the White House on Tuesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In November 2015, Stephen K. Bannon — then the executive chairman of Breitbart News — was hosting a satellite radio show. His guest was Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), who opposed President Obama’s plan to resettle some Syrian refugees in the United States.

“We need to put a stop on refugees until we can vet,” Zinke said.

Bannon cut him off.

“Why even let ’em in?” he asked.

Bannon said that vetting refugees from Muslim-majority countries would cost money and time. “Can’t that money be used in the United States?” he said. “Should we just take a pause and a hiatus for a number of years on any influx from that area of the world?”

In the years before Bannon grabbed the world’s attention as President Trump’s chief White House strategist, he was developing and articulating a fiery populist vision for remaking the United States and its role in the world.


Bannon’s past statements, aired primarily on Breitbart and other conservative platforms, serve as a road map for the controversial agenda that has roiled Washington and shaken the global order during Trump’s first two weeks in office.

Now, at the center of power in the White House, Bannon is moving quickly to turn his ideas into policy, helping direct the biggest decisions of Trump’s administration. The withdrawal from a major trade pact. A ban on all visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries. And — in an echo of that conversation with Zinke, who is now Trump’s nominee for interior secretary — there was a temporary ban on all new refugees.

The result has been intense fury from Democrats, discomfort among many Republicans, and a growing sense of unease in the world that Trump intends to undermine an America-centered world that has lasted 70 years. This sense of turmoil, welcomed by many Trump supporters as proof that the new president is following through on his vow to jolt Washington, reflects the sort of transformation that Bannon has long called for.

That worldview, which Bannon laid out in interviews and speeches over the past several years, hinges largely on Bannon’s belief in American “sovereignty.” Bannon said that countries should protect their citizens and their essence by reducing immigration, legal and illegal, and pulling back from multinational agreements.

At the same time, Bannon was concerned that the United States and the “Judeo-Christian West” were in a war against an expansionist Islamic ideology — but that they were losing the war by not recognizing what it was. Bannon said this fight was so important, it was worth overlooking differences and rivalries with countries like Russia.

It is not yet clear how far Bannon will be able to go to enact his agenda. His early policy moves have been marred by administrative chaos. But his worldview calls for bigger changes than those already made.

In the past, Bannon had wondered aloud whether the country was ready to follow his lead. Now, he will find out.

“Is that grit still there, that tenacity, that we’ve seen on the battlefields . . . fighting for something greater than themselves?” Bannon said in another radio interview last May, before he joined the Trump campaign.

That, said Bannon, is “one of the biggest open questions in this country.”

Bannon, 62, is a former Navy officer and Goldman Sachs banker who made a fortune after he acquired a share of the royalties from a fledgling TV show called “Seinfeld.” In the past 15 years, he shifted into entertainment and conservative media, making films about Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin and then taking a lead role at Breitbart News.

At Breitbart, Bannon cemented his role as a champion of the alt-right, the anti-globalism movement that has attracted support from white supremacists and found a home on the far-right website.

Bannon also forged a rapport with Trump, interviewing the businessman-candidate on his show and then, in August 2016, joining the campaign as chief executive.

Now, Bannon has become one of the most powerful men in America. And he’s not afraid to say so.

Stephen Bannon's White House role expands amid immigration turmoil Play Video2:53
As nationwide protests against President Trump’s immigration mandate rage on, he reshuffled the National Security Council and put chief strategist and former Breitbart News chair Stephen Bannon in an unprecedented national security role. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
In interviews with reporters since Trump’s election, Bannon has eschewed the traditional it’s-all-about-the-boss humility of presidential staffers.

“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in November, embracing the comparisons of him to those figures.

In the same interview, Bannon compared himself to a powerful aide to England’s Henry VIII — an aide who helped engineer a world-shaking move of his era, the split of the Church of England from the Catholic Church.

“I am Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter.

To explore Bannon’s worldview, The Washington Post reviewed hours of radio interviews that Bannon conducted while hosting a Breitbart radio talk show, as well as speeches and interviews he has given since 2014.

Bannon did not respond to a request for comment made on Tuesday afternoon.

In his public statements, Bannon espoused a basic idea that Trump would later seize as the centerpiece of his campaign.

While others saw the world rebounding from the financial crisis of 2008, Bannon just saw it becoming more divided by class.

The elites that had caused the crisis — or, at least, failed to stop it — were now rising higher. Everyone else was being left behind.

“The middle class, the working men and women in the world . . . are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos,” Bannon said in a 2014 speech to a conference at the Vatican in a recording obtained by BuzzFeed. Davos is a Swiss ski resort that hosts an annual conclave of wealthy and powerful people.

Bannon blamed both major political parties for this system and set out to force his ideas on an unwilling Republican leadership.

What he wanted, he said again and again, was “sovereignty.” Both in the United States and in its traditional allies in Western Europe.

On one of the first Breitbart Radio shows, in early November 2015, Bannon praised the growing movement in Britain to exit the European Union. He said that the British had joined the E.U. merely as a trading federation but that it had grown into a force that had stripped Britons of sovereignty “in every aspect important to their own life.”

Bannon has been supportive of similar movements in other European countries to pull out of the union. Trump has echoed those sentiments in his first few days as president. It is a remarkable shift in U.S. policy: After decades of building multinational alliances as a guarantee of peace, now the White House has indicated it may undermine them.

Bannon, in his 2014 speech at the Vatican, cast this as a return to a better past.

“I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors,” Bannon said. “And that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.”

In the case of the United States, Bannon was skeptical of multinational trade pacts, saying that they ceded control. In a radio interview in November 2015, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) agreed with Bannon.

“We shouldn’t be tying ourselves down like Gulliver in the land of Lilliputians with so many strings a guy can’t move,” said Sessions, who is now Trump’s nominee to become attorney general. He was referring to a scene from the novel “Gulliver’s Travels” in which the hero is tied down by a race of tiny men. “That is where we are heading, and it’s not necessary.”

One solution put forward by Bannon: the United States should pursue bilateral trade agreements — one country at a time — rather than multi-country agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership supported by Obama.

He suggested as much to Trump himself, when the candidate appeared on his show in November 2015.

“Trump brings [a deal] back to the Senate and gets his bilateral trade deal with Taiwan or with Japan approved by two-thirds of the Senate,” Bannon said. “And you have to go argue, ‘Hey, this is why it’s a good deal.’ And that’s the way the Founders wanted it.”


On a March 2016 episode, Bannon said that restoring sovereignty meant reducing immigration. In his radio shows, he criticized the federal H-1B visa programs that permit U.S. companies to fill technical positions with workers from overseas.

The “progressive plutocrats in Silicon Valley,” Bannon said, want unlimited ability to go around the world and bring people back to the United States. “Engineering schools,” Bannon said, “are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. . . . They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” Meanwhile, Bannon said, American students “can’t get engineering degrees; they can’t get into these graduate schools because they are all foreign students. When they come out, they can’t get a job.”

“Don’t we have a problem with legal immigration?” asked Bannon repeatedly.

“Twenty percent of this country is immigrants. Is that not the beating heart of this problem?” he said, meaning the problem of native-born Americans being unable to find jobs and rising wages.

In another show, Bannon had complained to Trump that so many Silicon Valley chief executives were South Asian or Asian. This was a rare time when Trump — normally receptive to Bannon’s ideas on-air — pushed back. “I still want people to come in,” Trump said. “But I want them to go through the process.”

So far, Trump has made no changes to the high-skilled visa program. This week, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that the Trump administration may reexamine the program.

Even as Bannon was calling for a general retreat from multinational alliances, however, he was warning of the need for a new alliance — involving only a subset of the world’s countries.

The “Judeo-Christian West” was at war, he said, but didn’t seem to understand it yet.

“There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global,” Bannon said at the Vatican in 2014, at a time when the Islamic State was gaining territory. “Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is — and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it — will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.”

Bannon has given few details about the mechanics of the war he thinks the West should fight. But he has been clear that it is urgent enough to take priority over other rivalries and worries.

In his talk at the Vatican, Bannon was asked about Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. Bannon’s answer was two-sided.

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“I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand,” he said. But, Bannon said, there were bigger concerns than Russia — and there was something to admire in Putin’s call for more traditional values.

“However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I’m not saying we can put [Russia] on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first,” Bannon said.

If Bannon succeeds, Bannon’s own comparison, to England’s Thomas Cromwell, might be apt — to a point.

“The analogy — if it’s going to work — is that Bannon has his own agenda, which he will try to use Trump for, and will try to exploit the power that Trump has given him, without his master always noticing,” said Diarmaid MacCulloch, a professor of history at England’s Oxford University.

But Cromwell was later executed, after Henry VIII turned against him. For a man like that, MacCulloch said, power is always tenuous: “It’s very much dependent on the favor of the king.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... 3e3d245029
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:32 am

PALACE COUP: SHUFFLE OF NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL PLAYERS LAMBASTED
BY JEFF STEIN ON 1/29/17 AT 8:27 PM

President Donald Trump’s executive order to swap out his top military and intelligence chiefs from meetings of the National Security Council in favor of his controversial political adviser Steve Bannon drew furious reactions ranging from shock to disquiet over the weekend.
http://www.newsweek.com/shuffle-nationa ... ted-549892
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:49 am

Steve Bannon had a big weekend in the White House. Get to know him

Topics: The Trump Era
Categories: Dig

By Amy Julia Harris / January 30, 2017

i
As chaos and confusion erupted after Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, one thing became abundantly clear: Stephen Bannon is the man pulling the strings in the Trump White House.

Since the inauguration, Bannon, Trump’s fiery chief strategist and the former chairman of Breitbart News, has had an outsized role in shaping policy in the new administration, particularly when it comes to immigration.

It was Bannon who wrote Trump’s sweeping executive order on Friday that stopped all Syrian refugees from entering the United States and temporarily banned immigration from seven mostly Muslim countries. The hastily enacted order caused chaos at airports as immigrants were pulled off planes and protests erupted around the country. CNN reported that Bannon and another White House adviser overruled Department of Homeland Security officials who recommended that green card holders be exempt from the order. The White House later softened that position.

Amid the fallout of the executive order, Trump elevated Bannon to a full seat on the National Security Council, an unprecedented move that gives him “a status alongside the secretaries of state and defense, and over the president’s top military and intelligence advisers,” according to The New York Times. On Twitter, Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, called the arrangement “stone cold crazy.”

We reported on Bannon’s rise to power and his stark views on immigration and globalism on our radio show last month.




Here are four things we learned:

1. Under Bannon, Breitbart became the platform of the “alt-right.”

Bannon became executive chairman of the conservative website Breitbart in 2012, and under his leadership, the website began embracing racist, anti-immigrant and white nationalist ideas that form the alt-right movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Breitbart published an article in 2015 defending anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller for hosting a “Draw Mohammed Cartoon Contest” in Texas, which was viewed as many as an overt attempt to anger Muslims. Two armed men with links to ISIS targeted the event and were killed by police.

Two weeks after the white supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine black parishioners at a prayer service in South Carolina, Breitbart ran a story titled, Hoist it Loud and Proud: The Confederate Flag Proclaims a Glorious Heritage.

Last year, Breitbart ran a story titled, Young Muslims in the West are a ticking time bomb.

At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Bannon proudly told a reporter from Mother Jones that “we’re the platform for the alt-right.” In the same interview, he denied that the alt-right embraced racism or anti-Semitism.

However, his message has resonated with white nationalists and neo-Nazis, who’ve celebrated his rise to power in the White House.

2. Bannon worried that too many immigrants would undermine our “civic society.”

In an interview between Bannon and Donald Trump in 2015 on Bannon’s Breitbart News radio show, Bannon suggested that highly skilled foreign students should return to their home countries after finishing college in the U.S., rather than staying in the U.S. to create startups and work in the tech industry.

Trump seemed concerned by that proposal, saying, “We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our talented people in this country.”

Bannon didn’t back down. “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think …” he said, trailing off. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

3. He views Islam as an existential threat to Western values.

In a speech to a conservative conference in Europe, Bannon said that the Judeo-Christian West was in an all-out war against “jihadist Islamic fascism.” Calling his views “militant,” he said the U.S. and other Western nations had to take a “very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam.”

4. He is an expert at playing the media and manipulating the masses for his political goals.

Bannon is a master communicator who knows how to work the media, according to a profile of Steve Bannon in 2015 by Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. Bannon understood the limits of running a conservative news site like Breitbart, and wanted even more influence to push his conservative political agenda on the public.

So around the same time that Bannon took over Breitbart News, he founded a nonprofit group called the Government Accountability Institute to “investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other corruption and malfeasance.” The group hired investigative reporters to dig up serious stories and “dirt” about Bannon’s political enemies, like Hillary Clinton.

Government Accountability Institute would then feed that research to mainstream media outlets, like The New York Times, who would publish a damaging story about Clinton. Here’s Green talking about how the set-up worked:

“He could go over to Breitbart and they could run these rolling narratives saying, look, it’s not just us saying that Hillary is nefarious and evil and corrupt. Here’s The New York Times saying it over here and here’s a story from The Washington Post and here ‘60 Minutes.’ And he could both excite the right-wing populist base while at the same time disillusioning Hillary Clinton’s core of support.”

Last week, he had a more straightforward message, telling The Times the media needed to “keep its mouth shut.”
https://www.revealnews.org/blog/steve-b ... -know-him/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Feb 01, 2017 7:59 am

brekin » Tue Jan 31, 2017 2:39 pm wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » Tue Jan 31, 2017 2:26 pm wrote:
brekin » Tue Jan 31, 2017 2:24 pm wrote:I think there is even a rule against doxxing.


Only applies if one of you cops to being Bannon.


Alas, my festering darkness isn't quite to Green Man level.

Image
Image

Nor Yellow King.



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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby RocketMan » Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:28 am

I just started laughing uncontrollably at work at the thread title (deliciously hyperbolic) and the True Detective connection.

Thanks guys & gals, it's a time of festering darkness, but there is... well, us. And laughter.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby 8bitagent » Wed Feb 01, 2017 9:32 am

Surprised all the focus is on Stephen Bannon, when it's another Stephen....Stephen Miller who has been largely behind thinking up and writing all these executive orders and originally was the sole writer for Trumps campaign teleprompter
speeches.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-other ... 02120.html

Image

Miller is seen as almost more right wing than Bannon. From what I've read, a young 31 year old Milo-esque provocateur who is mostly known for penning racially antagonistic pieces toward black and latino college students
when he was in school and graduating to working as communications director for Michelle Bachman and Jeff Sessions. Now Miller seems to be the most powerful man in Washington next to Bannon.

But something more curious...despite being raised Jewish....

According to Richard Spencer, the white nationalist alt-right founder, he and Miller met each other and clicked as members of the Duke Conservative Union (DCU). In October, Spencer told Mother Jones that “Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an on-campus debate on immigration policy that Spencer organized in 2007 featuring influential white nationalist Peter Brimelow.” Another former member of the DCU confirmed to Mother Jones that Miller and Spencer worked together on the event. At meetings of the Conservative Union, Miller “denounced multiculturalism and expressed concerns that immigrants from non-European countries were not assimilating,” a former DCU president told the magazine.

“It’s funny no one’s picked up on the Stephen Miller connection,” Spencer said. “I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this because I don’t want to harm Trump.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-other ... 02120.html

But to think a snot nosed 31 year old kid is running the Trump show and has a seat at the inner sanctum of the NSC...
Now that Bannon and Miller are ensconced in the West Wing — Trump lovingly refers to them as “my two Steves” — their influence seems limitless. For instance, Bannon and Miller not only devised Trump’s controversial travel ban; Miller in particular spent Saturday directing how it would be implemented, overruling Homeland Security officials and insisting, according to reports, that green card holders would also be barred from entering the country unless granted waivers on a case-by-case basis. On the same day, Miller “effectively ran the National Security Council principals meeting” — an unprecedented move. In terms of policy, Miller — who knows his way around Capitol Hill and remains close to Sessions, Trump’s attorney general nominee — is probably even better positioned than Bannon to steer Trump in his desired direction, even though he’s a less familiar boogeyman among liberals.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby semper occultus » Wed Feb 01, 2017 10:03 am

...more Lenin stuff...

Want to understand what Trump and Bannon are up to? Look to the Russian Revolution of 1917

https://qz.com/898053/want-to-understand-what-trump-and-bannon-are-up-to-look-to-the-russian-revolution-of-1917/

The key to a successful insurrection, Vladimir Lenin wrote three days before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, was the seizure of the telephone and telegraph. Every Soviet child, including myself, learned this dictum in the fourth grade.

In the 21st century, I never thought I’d have reason to reflect on Lenin’s advice again. The Soviet Union is long gone; I now live in the US. Then, in the first month of the centennial anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Americans inaugurated Donald Trump as their 45th president. This is a man who, in alliance with most radical elements of the Republican Party, has flooded the country’s media channels with fake news and conspiracy theories. If Trump hasn’t yet seized the modern-day equivalents of the telephone and the telegraph, he has certainly managed to scramble their signals.

Does Trump’s victory and his cabinet appointments genuinely amount to a government takeover akin to the one staged by the Bolshevik Party in 1917? If we view Trump’s “movement” as a radical faction within the Republican Party that has swept him to power despite opposition from within the party, the comparison is not as far-fetched as it may seem.
The disturbing parallels between Lenin and Trump include the role that foreign interference appears to have played in their rise to power. Although never definitively proven, Lenin’s rapid assent to power has long been credited to the complicity of Germany, which had a vital interest in destabilizing Russia, their key adversary in World War I. An exile in Switzerland up until April 1917, Lenin and his comrades had been allowed to pass through German lands in a special “sealed train” and eventually reach Petrograd. There, he joined other Bolsheviks to plot the second—proletarian—revolution. According to many prominent historians, Germans also provided significant funding for Pravda, the newspaper that spread the Bolsheviks’ propaganda.

One hundred years later in the US, American intelligence agencies and bipartisan members of Congress have come to a consensus that the revanchist and anti-democratic government of Russia meddled in the 2016 US election, using cyber warfare to tip the scales toward the pro-Putin candidate. What seemed unimaginable just a few months ago—lifting Western sanctions imposed on Russia for its annexation of Crimea—is now possible. In the post-industrial world, totalitarianism, too, can become global.

Now, despite losing the popular vote by nearly three million people, the new US president is forcing a radical agenda upon his country that is contrary to the beliefs of at least half of the 2016 electorate. If his victory is viewed as a kind of government takeover, aided by a hostile foreign power, the shock and unprecedented grief experienced by the 62 million Americans who voted for Clinton is not the loser’s inability to move on, and no “bubble.” It is something akin to what the Russians experienced 100 years ago when they woke up to the news that the legitimate provisional government had been disbanded by the Bolsheviks, whose stated agenda was the destruction of the Russian state and building a completely different—Soviet—entity in its stead. Indeed, the president’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has himself cited Lenin as an influence. Writer and historian Ronald Radosh wrote in the Daily Beast that Bannon approvingly told him in 2013, “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

But if Bannon can model his strategy after Lenin’s, so too can Trump’s opponents heed the lessons of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks succeeded by activating fringe groups, including radicalized proletariats and soldiers deserting the war, and by demagoguery summed up in the slogans “Peace to the Peoples,” “Land to the Peasants,” and “All Power to the Soviets.” In the months leading up to the October coup, they spread false rumors about the provisional government colluding with the Germans, the personal life of the government’s leader, Alexander Kerensky, and generally equated the government with “exploiters,” “war profiteers,” and “traitors to the people.”

In 2016, Trump’s campaign adopted a similar strategy by mobilizing the economically disadvantaged—as well as racist, nativist, and other right-wing groups—against the so-called “coastal elites.” The difference is that while pre-revolutionary Russia had been truly devastated by World War I, Trump and company perpetuated the myth of American decline in an expanding economy (which also happens to be the largest and one of the richest in the world). This is not to deny the real economic struggles faced by many Americans—only to note that, in the reality shaped by mainstream and social media, Trump’s virtual “American Carnage” proved as persuasive as a real war.
Trump’s decision to appoint billionaires, bankers, and oil tycoons to his cabinet signifies that his administration does not plan to even pay lip service to a democratic government. The fact that many of the new cabinet members lack relevant expertise doesn’t matter; Lenin famously maintained that “any cook can run the state.”
Trump is no revolutionary, at least not in the Lenin’s sense of the word. He doesn’t seem to care about ideology, and he’s no ascetic. But fundamentally, their goals are not that different.

Lenin viewed the world as a space in which he could build the dictatorship of the proletariat with himself at the helm. To Trump, the world is a collection of structures upon which he can stamp his own name. Both gave little credence to the expertise or knowledge of others; both had no problem pandering to the basest instincts of the human race.

We should remember, however, that revolutions are only able to take hold when the majority remains complacent. Right now, Trump’s voting base is likely maxed out at the roughly 63 million people who voted for him. (Given the intensity of feelings he ignites in both supporters and opponents, let’s assume that most people who wanted to vote for him did so.) Roughly 66 million people voted for Hillary Clinton. And about 42% of eligible voters—that is, an estimated 95 million—stayed home, choosing to vote for no one at all.

This “silent majority” is not necessarily in the Trump camp. They did not vote to end Affordable Care, Medicaid, and Social Security. They do not necessarily believe that the best government is one that’s designed by billionaires, for billionaires, or that climate change is a hoax. It is these voters who need to be mobilized to protect our democracy.
If there is any lesson from the Russian Revolution, it is that active engagement with the base is critical. That doesn’t mean that Democrats should focus on fundraising emails and better slogans: It means they need to work to understand why a substantial chunk of eligible voters did not view November 2016 as a referendum on the American way of life. They then need to mold the progressive coalition to accommodate voters’ concerns and struggles, so that the fight against conservative takeover becomes their fight.

The Democrats cannot afford to mull this over. The effort needs to happen quickly. What’s at stake—democracy in the US and around the world—is too important to “wait and see.” We all know who came after Lenin.
Anastasia Edel is the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground (2016). Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 12:58 pm

Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Wed Feb 01, 2017 6:49 pm

8bitagent » Wed Feb 01, 2017 8:32 am wrote:Surprised all the focus is on Stephen Bannon, when it's another Stephen....Stephen Miller who has been largely behind thinking up and writing all these executive orders and originally was the sole writer for Trumps campaign teleprompter
speeches.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-other ... 02120.html

Image

Miller is seen as almost more right wing than Bannon. From what I've read, a young 31 year old Milo-esque provocateur who is mostly known for penning racially antagonistic pieces toward black and latino college students
when he was in school and graduating to working as communications director for Michelle Bachman and Jeff Sessions. Now Miller seems to be the most powerful man in Washington next to Bannon.

But something more curious...despite being raised Jewish....

According to Richard Spencer, the white nationalist alt-right founder, he and Miller met each other and clicked as members of the Duke Conservative Union (DCU). In October, Spencer told Mother Jones that “Miller helped him with fundraising and promotion for an on-campus debate on immigration policy that Spencer organized in 2007 featuring influential white nationalist Peter Brimelow.” Another former member of the DCU confirmed to Mother Jones that Miller and Spencer worked together on the event. At meetings of the Conservative Union, Miller “denounced multiculturalism and expressed concerns that immigrants from non-European countries were not assimilating,” a former DCU president told the magazine.

“It’s funny no one’s picked up on the Stephen Miller connection,” Spencer said. “I knew him very well when I was at Duke. But I am kind of glad no one’s talked about this because I don’t want to harm Trump.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-other ... 02120.html

But to think a snot nosed 31 year old kid is running the Trump show and has a seat at the inner sanctum of the NSC...
Now that Bannon and Miller are ensconced in the West Wing — Trump lovingly refers to them as “my two Steves” — their influence seems limitless. For instance, Bannon and Miller not only devised Trump’s controversial travel ban; Miller in particular spent Saturday directing how it would be implemented, overruling Homeland Security officials and insisting, according to reports, that green card holders would also be barred from entering the country unless granted waivers on a case-by-case basis. On the same day, Miller “effectively ran the National Security Council principals meeting” — an unprecedented move. In terms of policy, Miller — who knows his way around Capitol Hill and remains close to Sessions, Trump’s attorney general nominee — is probably even better positioned than Bannon to steer Trump in his desired direction, even though he’s a less familiar boogeyman among liberals.


Thank you so much for this, 8bitagent. I think it's good to keep tabs on both of them - Miller is definitely part of the cabal that has taken control of domestic and national security policy. The fact that Richard Spencer vouches for him should be enough to sicken any rational human.
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Festering Darkness That is Steve Bannon

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 01, 2017 10:54 pm

Another Right-Wing Power Player Emerges From the Shadows

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Stephen Miller is a 31-year-old who appears to have fit seamlessly into the inner circle at President Donald Trump's White House. If you look closely during Trump's executive order signing ceremonies, you'll likely find the pre-maturely balding Miller lurking in the background, sometimes standing next to Steve Bannon or Reince Priebus. He's one of a cadre of previously unknown ultra-conservative nativist provocateurs whose history includes mentoring by the alt-right's Richard Spencer, connections to the Breitbart media operation, being communications director for Senator Jeff Sessions, and who, during the presidential campaign was a consistent rev-up-the-crowd guy at Trump rallies. Now, he is the senior adviser to the president for policy, a high-powered position, as evidenced by his significant contribution – along with Steve Bannon -- to the executive order on immigration that resulted in a firestorm of criticism and huge demonstrations at airports across the country.

In what seems like eons ago, in a June 2016 profile of Miller, Politico's Julia Ioffe maintained that he was "a deeply unsettling figure, even to many in his own party." "His nine-year career working for some of the most politically fringe figures on the Hill — he also worked for Michele Bachmann and helped David Brat in his primary defeat of Eric Cantor — was preceded by a trail of writings and provocations that go all the way back to high school, one that has raised the eyebrows of even conservative Republicans."

According to a more recent piece by The Daily Beast's Tim Mak, Miller "is as versatile as he is polarizing. A consistent theme in his life is knowing how to poke his political opponents in the eye, and he has seemed to revel in the feeling—from his childhood, to his college years, to the presidential-campaign trail."

On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Monday, January 30, co-host Joe Scarborough maintained that Miller was on a "power trip": "Why did Stephen Miller fight so hard to put out this order [the president's Muslim ban] on Friday without talking to any of the other agencies?"

"It was Stephen Miller sitting in the White House saying, 'We're not going to go to the other agencies. We're not going to talk to the lawyers. We're going to do this all alone,' " Scarborough continued.

"You've got a very young person in the White House on a power trip thinking that you can just write executive orders and tell all of your Cabinet agencies to go to hell."

Scarborough also tweeted out that "Richard Spencer, a leading white nationalist, said he was a "mentor" to Stephen Miller while at Duke."

"I spent a lot of time with him at Duke… I hope I expanded his thinking… but I think he probably would be where he is today without me as well," Spencer has said, noting that Miller was a "highly competent person, and a brave person."

Miller had his own explanation for the massive demonstrations that took place over the weekend after Trump signed an executive order banning Muslims from seven countries: "I think anytime you do anything hugely successful that challenges a failed orthodoxy, you're going to see protest," Miller said on "CBS This Morning." "In fact, if nobody's disagreeing with what you're doing, then you're probably not doing anything that really matters in the scheme of things."

"By any measure, I would describe that as efficient, orderly, enormously successful," Miller said of the order's implementation over the weekend. "When you have to screen hundreds of thousands of people, day after day, for entry into the United States, it only makes sense that when you're establishing new vetting procedures, that you try to minimize the burden by reducing migration from the most dangerous areas identified by the administration until a better screening system is put into place."

At a Texas rally, Politico's Julia Ioffe reported in June, Miller warmed up the crowd by predictably taking off after Hillary Clinton. "In recent days, I'm sure you've seen Hillary Clinton step up her attacks on Donald Trump," he said. "And you've seen all the usual special interests, all the special interests step up their attacks on Donald Trump, too. And the one thing, the one thing that aaalllll these groups have in common is that they run the show now, and they want to make sure they run the show forever."

"Everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who have been running the country into the ground, who have been controlling the levers of power. They're the people who are responsible for our open borders, for our shrinking middle class, for our terrible trade deals. Everything that is wrong with this country today, the people who are opposed to Donald Trump are responsible for!"

Ioffe pointed out that the crowd started chanting "Build the wall," Miller responded: "We're going to build that wall high and we're going to build it tall. We're going to build that wall, and we're going to build it out of love. We're going to build it out of love for every family who wants to raise their kids in safety and peace … We're building it out of love for America and Americans of all backgrounds."

"When it comes to issues and messaging and policy, there isn't anybody else that I've known that would be as valuable to a presidential campaign as he," Senator Sessions told Ioffe. "Maybe other than Karl Rove."

Miller, who was raised in a liberal-leaning Jewish family in Santa Monica, California, seemed to make his far-right turn after reading National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre's Guns, Crime, and Freedom, according to Ioffe. In a 2002 letter to the editor of The Santa Monica Evening Outlook, Miller, then a high school student, declared that "Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School."

While a student at Duke, Evan Osnos reported for The New Yorker magazine, 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."

Despite his youth, Miller has been involved with some of the fringiest characters on the right. Now he has ascended to the White House where he appears to be Steve Bannon's tag-team partner orchestrating chaos and disruption. Unless the bottom falls out, we will be hearing lots more from, and about, Stephen Miller in the hours, days and months ahead.
http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/comm ... he-shadows
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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