Once again, Steve Bannon has bypassed the mainstream media in an attempt to talk directly to his people. Its funny that someone who has made a living railing against the Libruls has decided to give an exclusive to The Hollywood Reporter. But irony is not something that Bannon does, apparently.
"I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon tells THR media columnist Michael Wolff as the controversial Breitbart News chief turned White House advisor unleashes on Hillary Clinton, Fox News and his critics.
Got that? Definitively not a racist. move along. Nothing to see here. But that’s not the least of it. Bannon has embraced darkness. Media darkness, electoral darkness, anything but skin darkness apparently. But I digress.
Bannon openly discusses, and is proud of, the fact that the Trump campaign took the world by surprise. And by the world, I mean those that didn’t think the US still had a long streak of racism and misogyny hiding just under the surface.
“Darkness is good,” says Bannon, who amid the suits surrounding him at Trump Tower, looks like a graduate student in his T-shirt, open button-down and tatty blue blazer — albeit a 62-year-old graduate student.
“Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they—“ I believe by “they” he means liberals and the media, already promoting calls for his ouster “—get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
And here’s the thing about that. We don’t need to go back to Germany in the 1930s, we can use an example from right here. Hint, check your $20 bill. That’s right, Andrew Jackson. The Native American killer himself.
“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he says. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.
With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks.
It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”
Just a reminder:
The Great Depression (1929-39) was the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression began soon after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.
So, you know, don’t worry. Be happy. They’ve got this.