OG Trump ally and promoter, Steve Bannon, thinks Elon Musk is not an asset to MAGA. This podcast paladin has made his feelings clear on his propaganda for paranoids site, The War Room. He has also taken his show on the international road — most recently to Italy. A country now led by a Bannon-approved Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, head of the operatically-named, far-right party Fratelli d'Itali, ‘The Brothers of Italy”
Bannon shared his thinking on the state of Republican politics in an interview with Corriere della Sera, titled Steve Bannon: «Elon Musk vuole solo i soldi, farò di tutto per tenerlo fuori dalla Casa Bianca» Which translates as, Steve Bannon: «Elon Musk only wants money, I will do anything to keep him out of the White House»
Just in case the reader missed the point, the sub-title is “Former Trump Strategist: 'Workers Will Reject Elon Musk's Global Techno-Feudalism’.”
This Italian hit-job would have made no waves in the US, except Breitbart (Bannon’s original internet home), chose to report snippets of the interview to its American MAGA readers. Let’s have a look
The piece starts:
ROME — Former Breitbart News executive chairman Steve Bannon has declared war on Elon Musk, vowing to have the tech billionaire kicked out of the White House by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated.
As Trump’s inauguration is in eight days, that seems like an ambitious goal. And if I were a quibbler, I would point out that Musk is not yet in the White House.
The piece then quotes Bannon expressing himself with his typical wild-eyed and spit-flecked immoderation:
“I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” Bannon told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera this week. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House, he will be like any other person.”
I think Bannon may have overestimated his sway. This is not surprising. He is not a man guided by reality. Steve goes on to explain his antipathy to his godhead’s new playmate:
“He [Musk] is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it; I’m not prepared to tolerate it anymore.”
As people up-to-date in Trumpworld’s shit-slinging wars know, the point of friction between Steve and Elon is H-1B visas. Musk wants to further enrich himself off the efforts of lower-priced and pliable Southeast Asian tech engineers. Whereas Bannon pursues an incompatible crusade, namely MAWA — Make America White Again.
Bannon further explains:
“This thing of the H-1B visas, it’s about the entire immigration system is gamed by the tech overlords, they use it to their advantage, the people are furious.”
“76 percent of engineers working in Silicon Valley are non-Americans.”
Bannon goes on, like a scorpion denying its true nature, to present himself as a friend to minorities.
“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs.”
Before the reader has an opportunity to check if this empathetic soul is the real Steve Bannon, the unhappy warrior warms to his newfound desire to protect American minorities from the depredations of foreign bigots.
“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans. He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”
Steve then celebrates his decade-long jihad against the plutocrat-financed, venal deep state.
“We have been fighting this fight for ten years. We are going to expose the entire corruption of the American system, of how money controls everything and hopefully we’ll inspire you in Italy to wake up.”
I’m not following him. Italy has a leader he seems to like. So what is he asking Italians to wake up for? I don’t know. He doesn’t say.
Bannon goes on to celebrate Musk’s “huge defeat here in America.” This raises the question, ‘Has Musk been defeated?’ I do not have a MAGA scorecard, so I can’t speak authoritatively on right-wing losers and winners. However, history suggests that under Trump, winners and losers can switch places at the drop of a tweet. Besides, when you have $416.1 billion in the bank, you never really lose. You just write a check to get America’s most corruptible sexual abuser back onside.
Not that Bannon is connecting those dots. Instead, he continues telling a fairy tale in which he is self-cast as a dragon-slaying, modern-day knight with a movement. (No bowel jokes, please.)
“He went out of his way to mock our movement as racist and retards, and he lost. We blew him out of the water. He won’t fight. He’s got the maturity of a little boy.”
That feels like an inaccurate analogy. Don’t little boys love to fight? Also, whatever Musk’s emotional age, all the pugnacious pissant does is tilt at windmills. Musk will never be a conscientious objector in the war to destroy the US.
Bannon, however, is a man who believes reality is what he wants it to be. Thus he blithely states that Musk has had “tremendous loss of credibility here in the United States, and quite frankly, the people around Trump are tired of it.”
That isn’t to say a broken clock is always wrong. He went on to accurately accuse Musk of being self-serving, insisting that his “sole objective is to become a trillionaire.” The grammar purist in me needs to point out that calling a conservative “self-serving” is redundant. But nit-picking aside, Bannon nails it when he says:
“He will do anything to make sure that any one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or he makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then — through wealth — power: that’s what he’s focused on.”
Bannon then tries to have his cake and eat it by throwing the object of his venom an ‘attaboy’. He acknowledges that Musk’s financial support of Trump has been such a positive, Elon should do likewise for the mushrooming European populist movements.
But his praise is ephemeral. He soon returns to his normal belligerence with enthusiasm.
“What’s not positive is when all of a sudden he tries to put his half-baked ideas which are really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale. I don’t support that and we’ll fight it.”
The best spin on this is that Bannon does not understand consumer psychology. Most people shopping for themselves purchase things for their own benefit. Musk is buying Trump, not to make the MAGAs and their mouthpieces happy, but to feather his own nest.
You would think a guy who begged MAGAs for money to build a wall — and is now charged with stealing it — would understand self-dealing. I guess consistency and self-awareness are not respected qualities in the reactionary sewer.
Whatever. Let’s remember and relish Lincoln’s observation. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” My message to Bannon is, “You go, girl.”
Note: The adage has it that, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ I think that if the enemy of your enemy is also your enemy, the sentiment is better expressed as “If the enemy of my enemy defeats my enemy, I will have one less enemy.”
