In 2020, Google demonetized Steve Bannon, removing him from YouTube and blocking ads on his War Room website after he fomented the Jan. 6 insurrection and called for Dr. Anthony Fauci to be beheaded. However, ProPublica revealed a year later that Bannon was still using Google's ad network, including on a then-recently-demonetised site called Populist Press, which had been revealed in 2020 to be part of a Facebook disinfo scam.
We've kept an eye on Populist Press over the past couple years, as it provided an example of what non-Big-Oil-controlled right-wing disinformation looks like, as it tried to replicate the Drudge approach of aggregating a bunch of propaganda in one place and calling it news.
And we say "provided” in past tense, because as of last week, the new text on the website reads, "Big Tech Has Shut Down Populist Press for Good! WE COULD NO LONGER RUN A FREE AND FAIR PRESS."
Indeed, after years of trying and failing to evade Google's demonetization, it appears Bannon admitted defeat… and immediately started doing the exact same thing at a new URL.
With all the subtlety you'd expect from Stevey Three-Shirts Bannon, AKA The HotTub Crime Machine, AKA Mr. Nazis Wrote My Website's Style Guide, the message on Populist Press turns from black and title-to-all-caps to red and random (MAGA-style) capitalization: “PLEASE go to www.PoliticalSignal.com They are the BEST aggregator alternative and run by patriots.”
In case readers didn't get it, the next line is an all-caps instruction to bookmark the link, and then, for good measure, the website lists "www.PoliticalSignal.com" four times in a column. The Internet Archive shows Populist Press up and running on 2/27, but a new splash with the shutdown message loads on March 2nd's save.
We begrudgingly clicked over to Political Signal, and the unsecure HTTP site is basically indistinguishable from the old Populist Press in terms of layout and content: three columns of headlines, each linking to a page that summarizes/plagiarizes the original reporting that's linked out from that page.
On the "About" page, though, the website claims its "mission is to bring together news from both the left and the right that we feel represents Americans in the middle." This, of course, is a lie, as there were zero "left" links, only a few innocuous mainstream news links, and a ton of links to right-wing disinformation and propaganda outlets including Breitbart—just like Populist Press!
Is Political Signal just Bannon's latest attempt to get Google ad revenue? Because it does carry Google-placed ads! The way the Populist Press statement is written, it sounds as though the entities are separate and independent though.
But on Twitter, @PressPopulist is now going by "Political Signal," having switched seamlessly from posting links to Populist Press on Feb 28th, to linking to Political Signal on March 1st. It’s basically the same story at the Populist Press/Political Signal account on GETTR, and for the BannonWarRoom account on Gab.
It's technically possible (though improbable) that Political Signal was set up independently of Bannon's efforts, and maybe the Populist Press shutdown has a simple explanation (like that Bannon needed money to pay his lawyers the nearly half-million dollars he owes for representing him in that whole 'refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena about how he tried to overthrow democracy' thing, as well as the whole 'scamming racists who donated to build a wall' issue).
But if Populist Press didn't just rename itself in an attempt to bypass Google's ban, and the two entities are entirely separate, why are the Populist Press's social accounts now openly and exclusively linking to Political Signal?