The Puzzle of Steve Bannon

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host

Steve Bannon has been Trump's right-hand man, and ever since that elevation the former head of Breitbart has been under constant attack.  According to the liberal left Democrats, Bannon is a Nazi, a bigot, and an extreme right-wing crazy.

The reality is, he's a staunch conservative; therefore, the liberal left is completely out of their mind over the guy.  Their reaction tells me that Bannon's likely nothing like what they scream he is.

I have a saying when it comes to my dealings with the liberal left.  "If I am not pissing them off, I am doing something wrong."

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day.  John Sullivan is active in the conservative side of Hollywood, and has known Bannon for a long time.  He verbalized many praises regarding the guy.  Bannon is a true conservative, according to Sullivan.

Bannon's anything but a Nazi, bigot or extreme right-wing crazy.  He's as conservative as I am, and a believer in the free market as much as I am.  Yet, the liberal left has proven with their smear campaign that an old saying is true.  If you tell a lie often enough and long enough, it becomes the truth.

In my conversations with a number of folks, even those who are not liberal left nutcases, Bannon is a complete and total villain.

In a 2014 speech Bannon discussed the importance of capitalism and the need for our world to be perched upon a biblical foundation.  A free market, he claimed, prior to the madness of the World Wars, spread "benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the Jewish faith, they were active participants in the Christians’ faith, and they took their beliefs, and the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored. I can see this on Wall Street today — I can see this with the securitization of everything is that, everything is looked at as a securitization opportunity. People are looked at as commodities. I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief."

Bannon has spent time criticizing crony capitalism, and corruption in politics, as well.

My conclusion?  He stands against everything the hard left Democrat establishment stands for, so he quickly became a target for destruction.  No evidence needed.  The left decided if they called him names enough, and long enough, he'd eventually be eliminated, and cease to be a danger to their Marxist agenda.

I was talking to a millennial a couple days ago, and he assured me that there was nothing to like about Bannon.  "He is in cahoots with dictators," the young man said.  "And, he's a white supremacist."

Really?

A parallel reality has been created by the Democrats, and people believe it.  Bannon is not who they make him out to be, but he is in the minds of those who believe the fantasy created by the Democrats in the hopes of undermining the Donald Trump presidency.  The snowflakes and the antifa believe it.  They believe that Trump, Bannon, and the rest of the Trump administration minions are white nationalists, bigots, racists, and Nazis. . . because the Democrats and their allies say so.

Has Bannon had some nasty affiliations with not-so-great characters?  Sure.  We all do, and often we don't realize at the time who or what we are associating with.  But, the tilt towards outright racism the left say he's taken is hardly true, and they know it.  But, to them, he's something worse than a Nazi, nationalist, white supremacist, bigot and racist.  The Democrats hate Bannon because he is something that they fear and loathe even more than any tyrant in history.  He's a Christian Conservative, and in their opinion, that is the greatest thing to fear because people like that might be able to upend their Marxist narrative.

Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party National agrees that the false narrative put out there by the liberal left about Bannon is a load of bull.  She wrote regarding him, "I’ve known Steve Bannon since the early days of the tea party movement, and I know what they are saying about him is not true.

The administrative monster that Washington has become is in danger of being dismantled, and Bannon is right there with Trump when it comes to the desire to take it all apart. “Susan Rice operationalized the NSC during the last administration,” Mr. Bannon said in one of his statements regarding the need to defang Washington. “I was put on to ensure that it was de-operationalized.”

A challenge to the political machine that we call The Establishment is high on the list of fears of the elitists who run it.

So, they call him a whole slew of names, including anti-Semite.

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro of the Washington Times asks that if Bannon is guilty of anti-Semitism and racism, how is it that Shapiro was able to work with Mr. Bannon for several months after his close friend Andrew Breitbart died?

Shapiro writes, "I believe I am in an unusual position to opine on Mr. Bannon’s feelings toward Jews and other minorities.  Mr. Bannon took over Breitbart News after Mr. Breitbart died of a heart attack in 2012, and helped transform the company atmosphere, direction and staff into something different than what many of the original journalists and editors were used to. Mr. Bannon had a very different personality than the joyful and optimistic Andrew Breitbart, who valiantly fought the far left with clever humor and amusing investigative antics.  Contrarily, Mr. Bannon had the personality of a tough, no-nonsense conservative hardliner who preferred highly educated journalists to bloggers, and professional corporatism to the creative, independent-minded atmosphere Mr. Breitbart affectionately fostered.  To many people who had spent years working for Mr. Breitbart, it was a shift, and created some controversy. Among the journalists who separated from the company, I was the first.  But this was not because of any conflict I had with Mr. Bannon.  On the contrary, Mr. Bannon made sure I left the company with dignity in a fashion that was equitable and fair, and often told me he appreciated my abilities as a journalist and a lawyer.  If Mr. Bannon were anti-Semitic, I cannot imagine he would have interacted with me in the complimentary and diplomatic fashion that he did, being a person of Jewish faith and heritage.  It also flies in the face of reason to suggest Mr. Bannon is anti-Semitic since many of the editors and lawyers working at Breitbart News were Jewish, including its founder, Andrew Breitbart."

In short, the idea that Steve Bannon is some kind of anti-American Nazi who has more in common with White Supremacists than mainstream American Society is a fabrication, a story concocted by the liberal left.  Little minds have fallen for the left's narrative about Bannon, as has big minds.  The liberal left has created the destructive narrative against Bannon because they fear him, because, like Donald J. Trump, Bannon poses as a great threat to their monstrosity that we have come to know as the establishment.  Or, as he said lately with a sentence that sent fiery chills down the backs of the political machine in Washington, the Trump "administration is in an unending battle for 'deconstruction of the administrative state.'"

To the liberal left, those are fighting words that must be silenced by any means, even if it means destroying Bannon with lies and fabrications that anyone who knows Bannon recognize to be obviously false.

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary