Tim Miller made the ultimate sacrifice and listened to Steve Bannon’s podcast for a whole week. I’m surprised his brain is still functioning enough to write about it:
For three hours every day, the Republican coup plotters who inspired the domestic terror attack at the U.S. Capitol last year gather to discuss their next move. On their January 6th anniversary program, the Dead Cops Society beseeched their great patriotic listeners to “Seize The Day. We’re ashamed of nothing. We’re proud of the work we did on January 6th.”
Their scheming does not take place in caves in the Hindu Kush mountains. Nor in a vacated Florida flophouse with an acid-filled bathtub. In fact, it doesn’t happen in secret at all.
You can find these enemies of democracy livestreaming across multiple platforms for your convenience. Dish channel 219. Samsung TV Plus Channel 1029. Roku. Apple TV. Pluto TV. Amazon Fire! You can livestream the proceedings on the web at AmericasVoice.com or catch clips on Rumble. Or listen through IHeartRadio.
If you are a regular working American who wants to overthrow the regime but can’t sneak away from your day job, not to worry, Apple Podcasts is platforming daily mutiny discourse for your convenience 24/7. And as it turns out, Insurrection Radio does big numbers. Last I checked it was the #9 News Podcast in America on Apple. According to the hosts—and these guys would never lie, obvi—the show has gotten an eye-popping 125 million downloads.
Insurrection never paid so good.
The host of Forever One Six radio is the former Trump administration chief strategist and twice-indicted “Sloppy” Steve Bannon. His show is called WAR ROOM PANDEMIC. In the week leading up to the first anniversary of Jan. 6th, I dove into the War Room to see how the OG “Stop the Stealers” were processing the fallout from their botched putsch.
What I found was that their effort to overthrow the government has been undeterred by the initial setback of Joe Biden being inaugurated. While Republican elites try to minimize the events of Jan. 6th, the War Room and their minions have continued to take the coup both literally and seriously. In their view the Biden “regime” is illegitimate and the regime’s medical establishment has covered up nearly a half a million deaths from the COVID “vaccines.”
In 2022 they aim to put so many of their people in positions of power throughout state and local governments that next time there will be nothing anyone can do to stop their quest for power. And this crusade is infused with an unmistakable religious fervor and appeal to a quasi-Christian nationalism that calls it devotees into action.
As crazy as their show may sound on its face—and let me tell you it seems very crazy—anyone who cares about American democracy should take that prospect very seriously indeed.
There’s plenty to criticize about Steve Bannon. He’s sloppy—looking like a regular at the local Pizza Hut who wears the same stained multilayered black shirts every day—narcissistic in the extreme, and a habitual liar. He’s a necrotizing confidence man who allegedly robbed the very people he claims to fight for in order to enrich himself. He was partially responsible for engineering a riot that resulted in the death and imprisonment of some of his loyal listeners. Deadly sins, he has a few. Greed, gluttony, vainglory, wrath. Check. Check. Check. Check.
But one thing you cannot say about Bannon is that he’s slothful. The dude is absolutely prodigious. In an interview with Michael Lewis during the Trump years, Bannon described his approach to dealing with a hostile media as “flood the zone with shit.” And he’s still doing exactly that: The brown river emanating from the War Room overfloweth.
Over the course of the last week there have been appearances by: a doctor who has diagnosed 30 percent of the country with a mass psychosis (not the people you might think!); a lobotomized Mr. Kruger-looking fellow who upped the percentage to 70 percent; a European correspondent with a flavor savor and a bucket hat; a man who wore Oakleys on air and fashions himself a John McAfee expert; Rudy Giuliani slurring before noon; Peter Navarro in a very tight t-shirt; several Republican elected officials and aspiring electeds; and a superfan calling in from what appeared to be a Bannon shrine in Wisconsin.
You have to see this thing to believe it.
In the outro to every single commercial break Bannon plays bumper music about . . . well . . . taking down the CCP. It’s like a downmarket Nickelback and it haunts my dreams. And again, you have to see it to believe it.
The music video for the song features a montage of Miles Guo, Bannon’s foppish late-middle-aged Chinese billionaire sugar daddy, shadowboxing in a sweatsuit, smoking a cigar on a yacht near the Statue of Liberty, and walking down an ornate hallway in a white suit whilst carrying a small fluffy Pomeranian (the second-highest-ranked “adorable little fluff ball,” according to Woman’s Day). Imagine if your WWG1WGA-loving uncle saw “I’m On a Boat” and didn’t realize it was a joke.
After the war with China bops, Bannon moves to ads, which are largely limited to niche products for MAGA fanatics and preppers. Among the merch being moved: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA Bible (Only $59.99), Gettr (which Bannon must have some kind of stake in, given how relentlessly he pushes it), gold and other precious metals, and of course the world’s only fraud-busting pillow which may very well come stuffed with palladium.
Like every good radio man, Bannon has a sidekick, the most recent of whom is a balding, poor-man’s Bobby Baccalieri named Boris Epshteyn. Boris was previously a Sinclair news “reporter” who was too biased even for them. Sinclair dropped him so that he could be a Trump staffer full-time. In the interest of candor, I must say that Boris is not a particularly dynamic or insightful figure. He’s got the sense of humor of a prep-school C-student, peppering in bons mots about how Pete Buttigieg is “still trying to breastfeed his kids.” This limited skill set made me wonder whether his role in the War Room is related to the content, or to other business with the head man.
For example, Boris and Bannon have teamed up on a new FJB (get it?) crypto that aspires to be the “currency for the MAGA movement.” According to an appearance on last Wednesday’s program, Boris believes that FJBcoin “represents a primal political scream and a growing absolutely powerful movement” and he encourages listeners to “let your feelings, your primal disapproval, your primal disgust with Biden be heard” by shoveling more money across the table to the same guy who allegedly took their money to build a pretend wall a couple years ago.
If it weren’t for the domestic terrorism and the threat to democracy, the whole thing would be an over-the-top laugh riot. They literally featured a correspondent in an America First t-shirt on an oxygen tank reporting live from his hospital bed about Antifa and BLM!
If Adam McKay put scenes from this podcast in Don’t Look Up, mainstream conservatives would use it to dismiss the film as smug, out-of-touch twaddle. But beneath the absurdist theater is a beating refrain about how the audience is made up of brave warriors who are doing battle against incipient authoritarianism, with terrifying implications.
Bannon understands the maxim that constant repetition carries conviction. Like a NXIVM life coach he reminds viewers over and over about his watchwords for the year: Commitment. Engagement. Empowerment. He tells them that they are victims, but also are feared by the most formidable forces in the world if only they will exercise their power. And he has several catch-phrases that he reiterates throughout the show.
–“Elections have consequences. Stolen elections have catastrophic consequences.”
–“100 seats for 100 years” meaning how a 2022 election landslide could strip Democrats from power for good.
–“There are no conspiracies but there are also no coincidences”—a motto which is helpfully framed and placed over Bannon’s shoulder, next to icons of the Holy Trinity: a picture of Jesus, a picture of Our Lady of the Assumption, and a red Gettr hat.
Put it all together and what you have is a show that offers Trump supporters a fascistic MAGA cosplay where they are the main characters, and the aggrieved victims, and also the all-powerful heroes. In this story reality is inverted to suit their purpose. Anyone who punctures the narrative must have an ulterior motive and be in league with the powerful (((shadowy))) forces who are conspiring to take them down.
From this vantage, the uprising that led to the Jan. 6th riot is not a thing of the past but an exercise to be learned from in their ongoing effort to ensure that they gain enough power so that next time the Democrats, and the establishment Republicans, and the Never Trumpers won’t be able to deny them total victory. And it’s part and parcel with their broader effort to tear down not just the government but any American institution that might threaten their ability to control the levers of power.
To truly understand how radical, threatening, and comically unhinged the content is, here are some highlights from the Jan. 6th anniversary week.
You can click over to see those highlights. They are doozies.
He also makes the point hatt his radical incitement is carried on all the podcast services where millions and millions of people are listening. It’s taken up where Limbaugh left off. It’s not just Facebook and Twitter, people.
Steve bannon is a freak but don’t underestimate him. He’s proved himself to be a survivor and he has some very big ideas he’s spewing to millions of people.