Bannon in 2024
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon
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Senior Counselor to the President[1]
In office : January 20, 2017 – August 18, 2017
Serving with Kellyanne Conway
President : Donald Trump
Preceded by : John Podesta (as Counselor, 2015)
Succeeded by : Kellyanne Conway
In office : January 20, 2017 – August 18, 2017
President : Donald Trump
Preceded by : Office established
Succeeded by : Office abolished
Personal details :
Born : Stephen Kevin Bannon / November 27, 1953 (age 71) / Norfolk, Virginia, U.S.
Political party : Republican
Spouses
Cathleen Houff Jordan (div. 1988)
Mary Piccard (m. 1995; div. 1997)
Diane Clohesy (m. 2006; div. 2009)
Children : 3
Education :
Military service
Branch/service : United States Navy
Years of service : 1976–1983
Rank : Lieutenant[5]
Criminal information
Criminal status : Released
July 2022: Contempt of Congress (2 counts)
Criminal charge
September 2022:
Penalty
Contempt of Congress: 4 months in prison[3]
Imprisoned at : Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury, 2024[4]
Stephen Kevin Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive, political strategist, and former investment banker. He served as the White House's chief strategist for the first seven months of U.S. president Donald Trump's first administration,[6][7] before Trump discharged him.[8] He is a former executive chairman of Breitbart News and previously served on the board of the now-defunct data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica.[9]
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy from 1977 to 1983, after which he worked for two years at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. In 1993, he became acting director of the research project Biosphere 2. He was an executive producer on 18 Hollywood films from 1991 to 2016. In 2007, he co-founded Breitbart News, a website which he described in 2016 as "the platform for the alt-right".[a]
In 2016, Bannon became the chief executive officer of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign[18][19] and was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the president following Trump's election. He left the position eight months later and rejoined Breitbart. In January 2018, after his criticism of Trump's children was reported in Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury, he was disavowed by Trump and subsequently left Breitbart.[20][21]
After leaving the White House, Bannon opposed the Republican Party establishment and supported insurgent candidates in Republican primary elections. Bannon's reputation as a political strategist was questioned when former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore, despite Bannon's support, lost the 2017 United States Senate election in Alabama to Democrat Doug Jones.[22][23][24] Bannon had declared his intention to become "the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement".[25] Accordingly, he has supported many national populist conservative political movements around the world, including creating a network of far-right groups in Europe.
In August 2020, Bannon and three others were arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign. According to the grand jury indictment, Bannon and the defendants promised that all contributions would go to building a U.S.–Mexico border wall, but instead enriched themselves. Bannon pleaded not guilty.[26] On January 20, 2021, on his last day in office, Trump pardoned Bannon, sparing him from a federal trial, but did not pardon his codefendants.[27][28][29] Federal pardons do not cover state offenses, and in September 2022, Bannon was charged in New York state court on counts of fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy in connection with the campaign.[2][30]
Bannon refused to comply with a subpoena issued by the Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, the U.S. House of Representatives committee investigating the 2021 United States Capitol attack. He was subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury on two criminal charges of contempt of Congress. In July 2022, he was convicted on both counts in a jury trial. He was sentenced in October 2022 to four months in prison and a $6,500 fine.[31][3][32][33] After losing his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Bannon surrendered to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, where he was imprisoned July 1 – October 29, 2024.[34][35]
Stephen Kevin Bannon was born November 27, 1953,[36][37][38] in Norfolk, Virginia, to Doris (née Herr), a homemaker, and Martin J. Bannon Jr.,[39] who worked as an AT&T telephone lineman and as a middle manager.[40][41] He grew up in a working-class family that was pro-Kennedy and pro-union Democrat.[42] He is of Irish and German descent. Much of his mother's side of the family settled in the Baltimore area.[43] Bannon graduated from Benedictine College Preparatory, a private, Catholic, military high school in Richmond, Virginia, in 1971, and then attended Virginia Tech,[44] where he served as the president of the student government association.[45] During the summers he worked at a local junkyard.[46]
In 1976, he graduated from Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies with a bachelor's degree in urban planning. While serving in the navy, he earned a master's degree in national security studies in 1983 from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.[47] In 1985,[49] Bannon earned a Master of Business Administration degree with honors from Harvard Business School.[50][51]
U.S. Navy
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy from 1977 to 1983;[52][44] he served on the destroyer USS Paul F. Foster as a surface warfare officer in the Pacific Fleet, and afterwards as a special assistant to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon.[53] Bannon's job at the Pentagon was, among other things, handling messages between senior officers and writing reports about the state of the Navy fleet worldwide.[54] While at the Pentagon, Bannon attended Georgetown University at night and obtained his master's degree[44] in national security studies.[46]
In 1980, Bannon was deployed to the Persian Gulf to assist with Operation Eagle Claw during the Iran hostage crisis. In a 2015 interview, Bannon said that the mission's failure marked a turning point in his political worldview from largely apolitical to strongly Reaganite, which was further reinforced by the September 11 attacks.[5][55] He recounted,
"I wasn't political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter fucked things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer.[44] Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that [George W.] Bush had fucked up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster."[50]
Investment banking
After his military service, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department.[56] In 1987, he relocated from New York to Los Angeles, to assist Goldman in expanding their presence in the entertainment industry.[44] He stayed at this position with Goldman in Los Angeles for two years, and left with the title of vice president.[57][b]
Media and investing
In 1990, Bannon and several colleagues from Goldman Sachs launched their own company Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. In one of Bannon & Co.'s transactions, the firm represented Westinghouse Electric, which wanted to sell Castle Rock Entertainment.[50] Bannon negotiated a sale of Castle Rock to Turner Broadcasting System, which was owned by Ted Turner at the time.[44] Instead of a full adviser's fee, Bannon & Co. accepted a financial stake in five television shows, including Seinfeld,[44] which was in its third season. Bannon still receives cash residuals each time Seinfeld is aired.[44][59] In 1998, Société Générale purchased Bannon & Co.[44][50]
Earth science
In 1993, while still managing Bannon & Co., Bannon became acting director of the earth science research project Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Under Bannon, the closed-system experiment project shifted emphasis from researching human space exploration and colonization toward the scientific study of earth's environment, pollution, and climate change.[44] He left the project in 1995.[60][61]
Entertainment and media
In the 1990s, Bannon ventured into entertainment and media and became a Hollywood film and media executive producer. Bannon produced 18 films,[41] including Sean Penn's drama The Indian Runner (1991), and Julie Taymor's film Titus (1999).[44][62] Bannon became a partner with entertainment industry executive Jeff Kwatinetz at film and television management company The Firm, Inc., where he served in 2002 and 2003.[50][63]
In 2004, Bannon made a documentary about Ronald Reagan, In the Face of Evil.[64][44] While making and screening the film, Bannon met Reagan's War author Peter Schweizer and publisher Andrew Breitbart,[44] who described him as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.[50] Other films Bannon financed and produced include Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman (2010), The Undefeated (2011), and Occupy Unmasked (2012).[65]
In 2006, Bannon persuaded Goldman Sachs to invest in a company known as Internet Gaming Entertainment.[66] Following a lawsuit, the company rebranded as Affinity Media, and Bannon took over as CEO. From 2007 through 2011, Bannon was the chair and CEO of Affinity Media.[67][68]
In 2007, Bannon wrote an eight-page treatment for another documentary, Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Facism (sic) in America. The outline states, "although driven by the 'best intentions,' institutions such as the media, the Jewish community and government agencies were appeasing jihadists aiming to create an Islamic republic."[69] In 2011, Bannon spoke at the Liberty Restoration Foundation in Orlando, Florida, about the economic crisis of 2008, the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and their impact in the origins of the Tea Party movement, and his films Generation Zero (2010) and The Undefeated.[70]
Breitbart News
Further information: Breitbart News
In 2007, Bannon was a founding board member of Breitbart News,[71][72] a far-right news, opinion and commentary website. Philip Elliott and Zeke J. Miller of Time have said that the site has "pushed racist, sexist, xenophobic and antisemitic material into the vein of the alternative right".[10] Bannon said that Breitbart's ideological mix included libertarians, Zionists, the conservative gay community, same-sex marriage opponents, economic nationalists, populists, as well as the alt-right, with the alt-right comprising a very small proportion overall. Conceding the alt-right holds views with "racial and anti-Semitic overtones", Bannon said he has zero tolerance for such views.[73][74]
In March 2012, following the death of Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, Bannon became executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the parent company of Breitbart News.[75][76][77] Under his leadership, Breitbart's editorial tone became more nationalistic, and also became increasingly friendly to the alt-right.[78] In 2016, Bannon declared the website "the platform for the alt-right".[11] Speaking about his role at Breitbart, Bannon said, "We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly 'anti-' the permanent political class."[79] Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart editor and colleague of Bannon, called Bannon a "'bully' who 'sold out [Breitbart founder] Andrew's mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.'"[80]
On August 18, 2017, Breitbart announced that Bannon would return as executive chairman following his period of employment at the White House.[81] Because of the break with Trump, Bannon's position as head of Breitbart News was called into question by Breitbart's owners.[24][82] On January 9, 2018, five months after his appointment, he stepped down as executive chairman.[83] The billionaire funders of Breitbart, Robert and Rebekah Mercer,[82] reportedly decided to push Bannon out from Breitbart, in part because of his break with Trump and in part because they had become weary of Bannon's "impulsive and attention-seeking antics" and Bannon's expenditures on "travel and private security".[84]
Bannon hosted a radio show, Breitbart News Daily, on the SiriusXM Patriot satellite radio channel.[85]
Other media activities
In 2005, Bannon secured $60 million in funding from Goldman Sachs and other investors for Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE), a company based in Hong Kong that employed "low-wage Chinese workers" to play World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, to earn gold in-game that could be traded for virtual items, which could then be sold to players of the video game for real money.[86]
While some gamers liked IGE's offers of World of Warcraft money that would typically take hours to farm, other gamers called it cheating. Many gamers responded by posting anti-Chinese vitriol. Blizzard Entertainment, the video game's owners, eventually shut down accounts used by gold farmers. IGE was also the target of a class action lawsuit by a player who said IGE's practices were "substantially impairing" people's enjoyment of the game.[86]
While IGE's business model failed, Bannon became interested in the game's online community, describing its members as "rootless white males, [who] had monster power". Through Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos, whom Bannon recruited, Bannon realized that he could "activate that army" of gamers and Internet trolls, adding, "They c[a]me in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump."[86]
Since 2019, Bannon has hosted Bannon's War Room on Robert J. Sigg's Real America's Voice television network, podcast platforms, and radio.[87][88]
Government Accountability Institute
Further information: Government Accountability Institute
Bannon was executive chair and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization where he helped orchestrate the publication of Breitbart News senior Editor-at-large[89] Peter Schweizer's book Clinton Cash,[50][90] from its founding in 2012 until his departure in August 2016.[91] The organization creates fact-based indictments against politicians using the deep web, tax filings, flight logs, and foreign government documents and then forwards their findings to the media.[92][50] The organization is registered as nonpartisan but it mainly investigates alleged corruption, crony capitalism, and misuse of taxpayer money within the Democratic Party. The group has spread conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.[93][92] For the years 2012 through 2015, he received between $81,000 and $100,000 each year; the organization reported that he worked an average of 30 hours per week for the organization.[91]
Cambridge Analytica
Bannon served as vice president of the board of Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm owned largely by the Mercer family,[9] who also co-owns Breitbart News; the firm allegedly used illegal tactics to target American voters in the 2016 election.[94] According to former Analytica employee Christopher Wylie, Bannon oversaw the collection of Facebook data which was used to target American voters.[95] Wylie who helped with creation of the company referred to the company as a "psychological warfare tool".[96] Bannon was paid more than $125,000 for his work at Cambridge Analytica.[97][98] Bannon's stake in Cambridge Analytica was estimated at $1–5 million, but he sold his stake in the company once he joined the Trump administration in April 2017.[99][100][101]
The Movement
In 2017, Bannon founded the Movement, a populist organization which frequently promotes right wing populist groups in Europe which are against the EU government and political system in Europe. The group is also known for its opposition to George Soros's Open Society Foundations, Bannon has referred to Soros as "evil but brilliant".[102] The organization employes 10 full time staff members. Mischaël Modrikamen, the leader of the Belgian People's Party, serves as executive director. The organization has received praise from figures like Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italian Eurosceptic party M5S leader Luigi Di Maio.[103]
Political career
Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign
On August 17, 2016, with 88 days until the 2016 presidential election, Bannon was appointed chief executive of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.[104] Bannon left Breitbart, the Government Accountability Institute[91] and Cambridge Analytica,[105] to take the job. Shortly after he had assumed the chief executive role, the chairman of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, was dismissed.[75][76][106][107]
On November 13, following Donald Trump's election to the presidency, Bannon was appointed chief strategist and senior counselor to the president-elect.[108] His appointment drew opposition from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Council on American–Islamic Relations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, and some Republican strategists because of statements in Breitbart News that were alleged to be racist or antisemitic.[109][110][19][111] However, a number of prominent Jews of the (politically) conservative persuasion defended Bannon against the allegations of anti-Semitism, including Ben Shapiro,[109][112][113] David Horowitz,[114] Pamela Geller,[115] Bernard Marcus of the Republican Jewish Coalition,[116] Morton Klein,[117] the Zionist Organization of America,[116] and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.[118] Alan Dershowitz at first defended Bannon, saying there was no evidence he was antisemitic,[119][120] but then in a later piece stated that Bannon had made bigoted statements against Muslims, women, and others.[121] The ADL stated "We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon."[122] Bannon had referred to French National Front (now National Rally) politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen as "the new rising star".[123]
On November 15, 2016, U.S. representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island released a letter to Trump signed by 169 Democratic House representatives urging the president-elect to rescind his appointment of Bannon. The letter stated that appointing Bannon "sends a disturbing message about what kind of president Donald Trump wants to be",[124][125][126] because his "ties to the White Nationalist movement have been well documented"; it went on to present several examples of Breitbart News's alleged xenophobia.[127][126][128] Bannon denied being a white nationalist and said, rather, that he was an "economic nationalist".[129]
On November 18, during his first interview not conducted by Breitbart Media since the 2016 presidential election, Bannon remarked on some criticisms made about him, saying, "Darkness is good: Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."[130] The quote was published widely in the media.[131][132][133][134]
In an interview with The New York Times in late November, Trump responded to the controversy over Bannon's appointment, saying, "I've known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist, or alt-right, or any of the things that we can, you know, the terms we can use, I wouldn't even think about hiring him."[135]
In an interview with BBC Newsnight, Bannon said that his role was to "recalibrate" the campaign, which had at that point lost its message. He "stepped in and got the campaign refocused", but he rebuffed the idea that he was the reason Trump won the presidency, saying "Trump is unique in American political history, he's his own closer." Bannon said his role was to make sure that Hillary Clinton was held up as a "guardian of a corrupt and incompetent establishment" and this was key to winning votes in states that Trump needed to win.[136]
Reuters reported on October 31, 2018, that the Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting a "wide-ranging" investigation of Bannon's activities during the campaign, including knowledge he may have had about any contacts between Russia and two campaign advisors, George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, as well as his role with Cambridge Analytica.[137]
Trump administration
Transition to the presidency
In 2018, Michael Lewis published a quote ascribed to Bannon, made while the transition team for Trump was supposed to be preparing for the next administration, and The Guardian used it twice in the title of an excerpt from the 2018 Lewis book The Fifth Risk.[138] The book examined the difference between the transition preparations provided by the administration that was exiting and what did or did not occur, and it revealed a profound lack of preparedness and concern, as expressed in the quote.
National Security Council
At the end of January 2017, in a departure from the previous format of the National Security Council (NSC), the holder of Bannon's position, along with that of the chief of staff, were designated by presidential memorandum as regular attendees to the NSC's Principals Committee, a Cabinet-level senior inter-agency forum for considering national security issues.[139][140] The enacted arrangement was criticized by several members of previous administrations and was called "stone cold crazy" by Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama's last national security adviser.[141] In response, White House press secretary Sean Spicer pointed to Bannon's seven years experience as a Navy officer in justifying his presence on the committee.[142]
Presidency of Donald Trump
Upon his inauguration, Trump appointed Bannon to be his chief strategist, a newly created position. The title made him a counselor to the president, nearly equivalent in authority to the chief of staff.[108] As a staff member in the Executive Office of the President, the position did not require Senate confirmation.[143] Breitbart News editor Julia Hahn followed Bannon to the White House, where she was appointed as Bannon's aide, as well as special assistant to President Trump.[144]
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Bannon analogized his influence with Trump to that of "Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors".[145][146][147]
Several days after Trump's inauguration, on January 26, Bannon told The New York Times, "The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while. I want you to quote this: the media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States."[148]
Bannon and Stephen Miller were involved in the creation of Executive Order 13769, which resulted in restricted U.S. travel and immigration by individuals from seven countries, suspension of the United States Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days, and indefinite suspension of the entry of Syrians to the United States.[149][150] According to The Economist, a British news magazine, Bannon and Miller "see Mr [Vladimir] Putin as a fellow nationalist and crusader against cosmopolitanism".[151]
"Bannon Says Corporatist Global Media Opposed to Economic Nationalist Agenda" video from Voice of America recorded at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2017
In February 2017, Bannon appeared on the cover of Time, on which he was labeled "the Great Manipulator".[152] The headline used for the associated article was "Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?", alluding to Bannon's perceived influence in the White House.[153]
In a March 14, 2019, hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Commerce Department secretary Wilbur Ross was questioned about his conversations regarding the adding of a citizenship question to the 2020 census surveys, which he had with Bannon, who in turn had referred him to immigration hardliners Kris Kobach and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Missouri Democratic representative Lacy Clay accused Ross of being "complicit" regarding his efforts to weaken minority group voting rights, additionally accusing him of committing perjury with respect to those contacts. Clay called for Ross to tender his resignation, saying, "You lied to Congress. You misled the American people and you are complicit in the Trump administration's intent to suppress the growing political power of the non-white population." Ross said the change was in response to a request by the Justice Department for statistics to protect voting rights.[154] On April 23, 2019, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments regarding appeals of rejections by three circuit courts of the proposed inclusion of the survey question.[155][156]
It was reported that Bannon intentionally published stories to undermine H. R. McMaster. Bannon allegedly did this by leaking information to the alternative media, including alt-right writer Mike Cernovich.[157][158] It was also reported that the Trump administration retroactively granted Bannon a blanket exemption from federal ethics rules that allowed him to communicate with editors at Breitbart News,[159] which according to former Breitbart consultant Kurt Bardella would be proof of the administration's intent to allow him to continue being "the de facto editorial director of Breitbart" (italics added).[160] In the final hours of Donald Trump's administration, Steve Bannon was issued a presidential pardon. The accompanying announcement said he was "an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen".[161]
Bannon was removed from his NSC role in early April 2017 in a reorganization by U.S. national security advisor H. R. McMaster, whom Bannon had helped select.[162] Some White House officials said Bannon's main purpose in serving on the committee was as a check against former national security advisor Michael T. Flynn, who had resigned in February 2017 for misleading the vice president about a conversation with the Russian ambassador to the United States.[163][164] Hence, with Flynn gone, Bannon was no longer needed.[162] Bannon reportedly opposed his removal from the council and threatened to quit if President Trump went forward with it, although Republican megadonor Rebekah Mercer urged him to stay.[9] The White House said Bannon had not attempted to leave, and Bannon said any indication that he threatened resignation was "total nonsense".[9][165] Bannon only attended one NSC meeting.[166]
Russia investigation
Bannon was interviewed multiple times by Robert Mueller as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election. Bannon was reportedly interviewed about Roger Stone's contact with WikiLeaks.[167] In November 2019, Bannon gave evidence in the federal criminal trial of Roger Stone. Bannon did not voluntarily testify; rather, he was compelled to give evidence under subpoena.[168] Bannon testified that Stone was WikiLeaks' access point for the Trump campaign; the testimony helped establish that Stone lied to Congress. Stone was subsequently convicted on all charges (lying to Congress and witness tampering),[169][170] but on July 10, 2020, his federal prison sentence was commuted by President Trump.[171] Asked for a comment after Bannon himself was arrested on August 20, 2020, Stone replied, "Karma is a bitch. But I am praying for him."[172]
In August 2020, members of the Senate intelligence committee told the Department of Justice (DOJ) that they believed that Bannon, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump Jr. may have misled them with their testimony about Russia investigation.[173][174]
Quotes in Michael Wolff books
In January 2018, upon the publication of Michael Wolff's book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which attributed many controversial and inflammatory statements to Bannon, Bannon and Trump became estranged and were widely seen as enemies.[175][176] The book quoted Bannon as saying that Ivanka Trump was "as dumb as a brick";[21] that the meeting among Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and agents of Russia was "treasonous";[177] and that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller would cause Donald Trump Jr. to "crack like an egg on live television".[178] Bannon also warned that investigators would likely uncover money laundering involving Jared Kushner and his family business loans from Deutsche Bank.[179]
In his 2019 book Siege, Wolff wrote, "Trump was vulnerable because for 40 years he had run what increasingly seemed to resemble a semi-criminal enterprise," then quoted Bannon as saying, "I think we can drop the 'semi' part." Wolff wrote that Bannon predicted investigations into Trump's finances would be his political downfall, quoting Bannon as saying, "This is where it isn't a witch hunt – even for the hard core, this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth $50 million instead of $10 billion. Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag."[180]
Relationship with Donald Trump
In January 2018, after excerpts from Fire and Fury were published, Trump promptly disavowed Bannon, saying that Bannon "lost his mind" when he left the White House, and attacking him in multiple angry statements.[181][182] Trump asserted in a tweet that Bannon had "cried when he got fired and begged for his job"[183][184] and publicly referred to Bannon with an unflattering nickname ("Sloppy Steve") in reference to Bannon's usually disheveled appearance.[185][186] On January 7, 2018, Bannon expressed regret over his delayed response, declared his "unwavering" support for Trump and his agenda, and praised Donald Trump Jr.[187] Bannon said his remarks about the campaign meeting were aimed at Manafort instead of Trump Jr., a detail which Wolff contested.[188]
Despite Trump's disparagement of him, Bannon retained ties with Trump.[185][183] In an appearance in August 2019 on CNBC, Bannon praised Trump as a "great leader as president" and "amazing campaigner"; in response, Trump called Bannon "one of my best pupils" and "still a giant Trump fan" and said he "loved working with" Bannon.[183] In 2018, Bannon released a pro-Trump documentary, Trump @War through his production company, Victory Films; the film aimed to galvanize Trump supporters ahead of the 2018 elections in a bid to keep a Republican majority in the House.[189][190] In October 2019, Bannon began co-hosting War Room: Impeachment, a daily radio show and podcast in which he offered advice to the Trump administration and its allies on how to counter the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.[191] In 2020, Bannon began a podcast War Room: Pandemic, broadcast from his Capitol Hill townhouse; Bannon told friends that Trump had "told others that he watches the program and that the president was familiar enough with it to cite specific interviews he had seen when the two men spoke this summer".[185] A February 2023 Brookings Institution study found Bannon's podcast contained the highest proportion of false, misleading and unsubstantiated statements among 36,603 episodes produced by 79 prominent political podcasters.[192]
Departure from the White House
Bannon's employment in the White House ended on August 18, 2017, less than a week after the August 11–12, 2017, Charlottesville Unite the Right rally which degenerated into violence and acrimony. Whereas members of both political parties condemned the hatred and violence of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and alt-right activists, The New York Times noted that Trump "was the only national political figure to spread blame for the 'hatred, bigotry and violence' that resulted in the death of one person to 'many sides'."[193] The decision to blame "many sides" was reported to have come from Bannon.[194] The NAACP released a statement saying that while they "acknowledge and appreciate President Trump's disavowment of the hatred which has resulted in a loss of life today", they called on Trump "to take the tangible step to remove Steve Bannon – a well-known white supremacist leader – from his team of advisers". The statement further described Bannon as a "symbol of white nationalism" who "energized that sentiment" through his current position within the White House.[195][196]
Some sources stated that White House chief of staff John F. Kelly asked Bannon on August 18, 2017, to submit his immediate resignation in lieu of being fired.[197] Bannon, however, stated he was not fired but rather submitted his two-week resignation notice on August 4, 2017.[198] He reminded The Weekly Standard that he had joined then-presidential candidate Trump's campaign on August 14, 2016, and said he'd "always planned on spending one year", but that he stayed a few more days due to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.[199]
In an official statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said: "John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve's last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best."[200][201][202]
The same day, Breitbart News announced that Bannon would return to the site as executive chairman.[81] Several weeks after his departure it was reported that Trump still called Bannon using his personal cell phone and was only calling when chief of staff Kelly was not around.[203] The Washington Post reported in October 2017 that Trump and Bannon remained in regular contact.[204]
Republican Senate primaries
Bannon has made efforts to unseat incumbent Republican members of Congress he deemed to be insufficiently supportive of Trump's agenda.[205][206][207] In October 2017, Bannon said he planned to sponsor primary challenges against six of the seven incumbent Republican senators in the 2018 elections. He said he had two requirements for a candidate to earn his support: they must pledge to vote against Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader and to end the Senate filibuster.[208] Bannon used his group Citizens of the American Republic to aide him in his efforts to help keep Republican control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 election.[209] The group is a dark money organization;[210] Bannon declined to "describe his donors or how much money the group has raised".[209]
Bannon received credit for helping Roy Moore defeat incumbent senator Luther Strange in the September Republican primary for the 2017 special Alabama Senate election, despite Trump's having endorsed Strange.[211] After nine women alleged sexual misconduct, Bannon doubled down on his support for the candidate, raising doubt about the veracity of the accusations.[212] When Ivanka Trump condemned Moore's campaign in Alabama, saying "there's a special place in hell for people who prey on children", Bannon responded, "What about the allegations about her dad and that 13-year-old?", in reference to a woman who accused Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein of raping her at that age.
In what had been considered a safe Republican seat, Moore lost the election on December 12, 2017. Bannon's reputation as a political strategist was subsequently questioned by Republican commentators.[22][23]
Post–White House career
Work abroad
After leaving the White House in August 2017, Bannon declared his intention to become "the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement".[25] He toured Europe to speak at events with various far-right political parties there, in a bid to build a network of right-wing populist-nationalist parties aspiring to government.[213] Bannon visited the Dutch Party for Freedom,[214] the Freedom Party of Austria in October 2017,[215] the UK Conservative Party in December 2017,[216][217][218][219][220][221] the Swiss People's Party in March 2018,[222] the UK Independence Party,[223] the Flemish Vlaams Belang,[102] the Belgian People's Party,[102] Alternative for Germany in March 2018,[224] France's National Front (now the National Rally) in March 2018,[225] the Italian League, the Brothers of Italy in September 2018,[103] Hungary's Fidesz in March 2018,[226] the Sweden Democrats in March 2018,[227] the Polish Law and Justice in September 2018,[228] Spain's Vox in July 2018,[229] the Finns Party in July 2018,[102] the pan-European identitarian movement in March 2018,[230] Republika Srpska's Alliance of Independent Social Democrats in August 2018,[231] the Five Star Movement in May 2019,[232][233] and the Israeli Likud.[234] Bannon believes that these movements – along with Japan's Shinzo Abe, India's Narendra Modi, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Saudi Arabia's Mohammad bin Salman, China's Xi Jinping, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan,[235] and Trump, as well as similar leaders in Egypt, the Philippines, Poland, and South Korea – are part of a global shift towards nationalism.[236][237][238] Bannon's attempt to build a network of far-right parties in Europe had only limited success;[239] while he appeared at events with the French National Rally's Marine Le Pen and the Italian League's Matteo Salvini, the Sweden Democrats said that it had "no interest" in Bannon's initiative, the Flemish Vlaams Belang called it "poorly organized", and the Alternative for Germany cited divergent views among the parties.[240] Right-wing populist parties did not achieve a surge in support in the 2019 European Parliament elections.[240] The Atlantic cited a number of factors inhibiting Bannon's project, including differing national and ideological views among the European far right and U.S.-skeptical views held by some parties of the European extreme right.[240]
Bannon supports the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, a right-wing Catholic organization in Italy formerly based in what was previously Trisulti Charterhouse; Bannon drafted a leadership course curriculum for the group to train conservative Catholic political activists.[241] In 2018, Bannon announced that he planned to establish a right-wing academy on the site,[242][243] with the support of Benjamin Harnwell, a British associate of Bannon's who underwrote the project and aimed to create a "gladiator school for culture warriors".[244][245] However, in 2019, the group's rights to use the former monastery were revoked by the Italian government because it determined that the lessee Dignitatis Humanae Institute failed to meet several criteria to operate the monastery and failed in its obligation to pay a "concession fee" as well as maintenance and security expenses.[246][243]
In August 2018, Bannon met with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, and served as informal advisor to the Bolsonaro campaign in the Brazilian presidential elections that year.[247] In February 2019, the younger Bolsonaro joined Bannon's organization the Movement as its representative in South America.[248][249] In March 2019, Bannon met with both Bolsonaros in Washington, D.C.[250]
In October 2017, after leaving the White House, Bannon met exiled Chinese billionaire businessman Guo Wengui (also known as Miles Kwok), and the pair cultivated a friendship, frequently meeting in Dallas, at Guo's apartment at the Sherry-Netherland in New York, and on Guo's yacht.[251] In 2017, Guo reportedly gave a $150,000 loan to Bannon shortly after he left the White House, and a Guo-linked company entered into a $1 million consulting contract with Bannon, beginning in August 2018.[210] In early 2020, Bannon and Guo raised hundreds of millions of dollars in a private offering for a company called GTV Media Group. In August 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the fundraising for the company was under investigation of federal and state authorities.[252]
Guo has allowed Bannon to use one of his two private jets, and during the 2018 election campaign, Bannon flew on Guo's Bombardier Global Express to events in support of Republican congressional candidates in New Mexico and Arizona.[210] The flights were revealed in February 2020 by ProPublica.[210] Bannon made the flights under the auspices of his dark money group, Citizens of the American Republic.[210] Several campaign finance experts who spoke with ProPublica said the trips could violate federal campaign finance law, which prohibits foreign nationals from making contributions to candidates in U.S. political campaigns (including in-kind contributions such as payment for campaign-related travel).[210] Guo and Bannon denied that the travel was for campaign activity; an attorney for Bannon's group stated that the trips on the private jet were to promote Bannon's film, Trump@War.[210]
On June 3, 2020, Bannon and Guo participated in declaring a "New Federal State of China" (also called "Federal State of New China"). It was said that they would overthrow the Chinese government. In New York City, planes were seen carrying banners which said, "Congratulations to Federal State of New China!".[253]
On August 20, 2020, federal prosecutors in New York unsealed criminal charges against Stephen K. Bannon and three other men they alleged defrauded donors to a massive crowdfunding campaign that said it was raising money for construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. After Bannon's arrest, Guo Wengui hurriedly cut ties with him, stressed that he was not involved in Bannon's affairs outside their shared efforts "fighting for democracy in China", and would no longer allow Bannon to continue to serve as a member of Guo Media's board of directors.[254]
In November 2020, The New York Times reported that Bannon along with Guo Wengui had been promoting Li-Meng Yan's account of COVID-19. The pair had bought Yan a plane ticket to the United States, provided her accommodation, coached her in media appearances and helped secure interviews with conservative television hosts including Tucker Carlson. Yan later said that the COVID-19 virus was artificially made, however her interview was rejected on social media as misinformation and her research rejected by scientists who said it was "based on conjecture" though filled with jargon.[255][256]
Treatment of colleagues
In an interview with Frontline, former writer for Breitbart News Ben Shapiro said that he tried to avoid interacting with Bannon due to a fear of being on his bad side. Shapiro also recalled Bannon yelling and cursing at people at Breitbart News.[257][258] Those who worked with Bannon have described him as "egomaniacal" and "purely Machiavellian".[259] Other former staffers at Breitbart who spoke to Politico said that Bannon would degrade employees by mocking their intelligence and would imply they were "expendable, low-life creatures". Several employees who left Breitbart alleged that when they attempted to find employment outside of Breitbart, Bannon attempted to sabotage them. However, other employees praised Bannon's leadership describing him as a generous, loyal, caring, and supportive. Many described Bannon as someone who would pay out of his own pocket for personal expenses.[260]
In his memoir, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner recalled having an abrasive relationship with Bannon and two occasions in which Bannon threatened him, including one in which he threatened to 'break Kushner in half' after he accused Bannon of leaking to the press.[261][262] Also in his memoir Kushner writes "Bannon single-handedly caused more problems for me than anyone else in my time in Washington. He probably leaked and lied about me more than everyone else combined. He played dirty and dragged me into the mud of the Russia investigation".[263]
He only paid part of the $850,000 legal bill charged by Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron LLP, who represented him in the case for contempt of Congress for his defiance of the January 6 committee subpoena and in the case for the "We Build the Wall" fraud scheme. The law firm sued Bannon, and in July 2023, he was ordered to pay the remaining balance.[264]
Connection to Jeffrey Epstein
According to Michael Wolff, Bannon was introduced to Jeffrey Epstein in 2017 and Epstein introduced Bannon to some of his friends.[265] Bannon also worked with Ehud Barak and attorney Reid Weingarten to attempt to reform Epstein's public image.[266][265] Later reports showed Bannon reportedly prepped Epstein for an interview with 60 Minutes that ultimately never occurred. Bannon confirmed that he did tape 15 hours of interviews with Epstein but denied that he was coaching him for further interviews and that the footage was for an unannounced documentary on Epstein.[267][268][269]
Criminal prosecutions
Dismissed 1996 domestic violence charges
Bannon was charged with misdemeanor domestic violence, battery, and dissuading a witness in early January 1996 after his then-wife, Mary Piccard, accused Bannon of domestic abuse. The Santa Monica Police Department crime report states that after Piccard called 911, an officer arrived at their home and observed red marks on Piccard's wrist and neck.[270][271] The charges were later dropped when Piccard did not appear in court.[272] In her divorce filing, Piccard stated her absence was due to threats made against her by Bannon and his lawyer: Bannon, she said, told her, "if I went to court, he and his attorney would make sure that I would be the one who was guilty." She said that Bannon's lawyer also threatened her, telling her that if Mr. Bannon went to jail, she "would have no money and no way to support the children". Bannon's lawyer denied pressuring Piccard not to testify.[272]
Charges related to We Build the Wall campaign
Further information: We Build the Wall
2020 federal fraud and money laundering indictment
On August 20, 2020, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed against Bannon and three others, charging them with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. Each charge has a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison upon conviction.[273][274][275] Federal prosecutors of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York allege that Bannon, United States Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage and the two other defendants used funds received from the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign, marketed to support the building of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, in a way which was "inconsistent" with how they were advertised for use to the public.[276][277][278] According to the indictment, donations were collected through a GoFundMe campaign that was launched in December 2018.[279][280] Bannon promoted the project until the day before the indictment, saying "You've been the leader of this, assisting President Trump in building this wall in these tough areas" in his War Room: Pandemic podcast.[281]
Federal prosecutors allege that Bannon and the three other men conspired to use a non-profit group run by Bannon, and a shell company controlled by one of the other defendants, to make payments to themselves, despite promises to donors that their contributions would go to build a wall. Prosecutors also alleged that Bannon received more than $1 million in connection with the plan, some of which was paid to Kolfage in secret[279][274][275] and some of which Bannon and two other defendants allegedly used for personal expenses ranging from paying off credit cards to personal travel.[282] Prosecutors stated that they plan to seize the assets of Bannon's non-profit Citizens of the American Republic, as well as other organizations "politically aligned with [Donald] Trump".[283]
Bannon was arrested by U.S. postal inspectors on Long Island Sound, off the coast of Connecticut,[284] on board People's Republic of China expatriate Guo Wengui's luxury yacht. Later that day, Bannon pleaded not guilty to the charges.[274][285] Bannon was released pending trial on a $5 million bond, of which Bannon was required to put up $1.7 million.[278] He was required to surrender his passport and his domestic travel was restricted.[286] Following the indictment, Donald Trump[287] and his son, Donald Trump Jr. distanced themselves from Bannon. Trump Jr. had originally been supportive of Bannon's fundraising efforts for the Trump wall.[288][289][290][280]
At a preliminary hearing on August 31, U.S. district judge Analisa Torres set a trial date for May 24, 2021.[26] Prosecutors revealed that they had collected a large number of emails found on various devices and online storage accounts after search warrants were executed—some earlier in the year.[291]
Pardon by Trump
Shortly before midnight on Tuesday, January 19, the final full day of Trump's presidency, Trump issued a series of pardons[292] to 144 individuals, including Bannon.[293] The White House released the list of pardoned individuals at 12:50am on January 20, Trump's final day in office.[28]
In May 2021, Judge Torres, following the precedent of criminal cases being dismissed following presidential pardons, dismissed the fraud case against Bannon. Torres said that because the pardon was valid, dismissal of the indictment was "the proper course".[294] In her ruling, Torres stated that despite Bannon not pleading guilty, "the issuance of a pardon may carry an imputation of guilt; acceptance a confession of it."[295] She further quoted: "If there be no guilt, there is no ground for forgiveness."[294]
2022 New York state indictment
Federal pardons only cover federal offenses, so Trump's pardon of Bannon did not preclude state charges against him. By February 2021, the Manhattan district attorney had issued subpoenas to Wells Fargo Bank and GoFundMe, which had provided accounts for the venture.[296][297] In August 2022, Bannon was indicted on New York state charges of money laundering, conspiracy and fraud related to the $25 million "We Build the Wall" scheme.[298] Bannon said the charges were politically motivated, and—invoking a common right-wing conspiracy theory—linked somehow to financier George Soros.[299] Bannon said that he and Trump would not "stop fighting" and "they will have to kill me first".[299]
He surrendered to authorities on September 8, 2022.[298] The trial was originally expected to start May 27, 2024, however it was postponed to September 23, 2024 because the judge in that case, Juan Merchan, was also overseeing the Trump "hush-money" case and was unavailable at that time.[300][301] Due to an ongoing conflict, Bannon's case was reassigned to Judge April Newbauer who later rescheduled it for December 9, 2024.[302][303] At Bannon's request, Newbauer again rescheduled it for February 25, 2025.[304]
2022 contempt of Congress conviction and prison stay
On September 23, 2021, the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack subpoenaed Bannon, ordering him to appear on October 14. His lawyers gave the committee advance notice that he would not comply. After he did not appear, the House of Representatives voted to hold him in criminal contempt of Congress and to refer him to the Justice Department. This was initiated by the nine-member committee's unanimous vote on October 19,[305] followed by the full House of Representatives which voted 229–202, with all 220 Democrats and 9 Republicans in favor of the resolution, on October 21.[306] He was indicted by a federal grand jury on November 12, 2021, on two criminal contempt charges: one count of not providing documents, and one count of not testifying.[307][308] Three days later, Bannon surrendered to the FBI.[309] He was represented by criminal defense attorney David Schoen.[309] He pleaded not guilty.[310]
Bannon was released pending trial, without bail, but on conditions, including keeping authorities informed of his whereabouts, and not leaving the country.[311] An appeals court in April 2022 rejected his appeal regarding his failure to testify before the committee.[312]
In the days leading up to his trial, Bannon offered to testify before the January 6 committee after all; U.S. district judge Carl J. Nichols, a Trump appointee, rejected Bannon's offer as a "last-ditch attempt to avoid accountability." Bannon sought to delay his trial to October, citing negative publicity from the concurrent televised committee hearings; the court denied the motions.[313] Bannon incorrectly asserted Trump had claimed executive privilege over his testimony and documents,[314] and said he would call prominent Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi to testify at his trial, asserting on his podcast, "we're going medieval on these people."[315] Nichols denied the defense motions, finding that Bannon was not entitled to raise an "advice of counsel" defense or an executive privilege defense.[316] After the judge's ruling, Bannon's attorney Schoen asked the court, "what's the point of going to trial if there are no defenses?", to which Nichols replied, "agreed", hinting that Bannon should seek a plea deal.[313]
The trial began on July 18, 2022, with the jury being finalized the next day.[317][318][319] Bannon declined to call witnesses or testify in his own defense.[316]
On July 22, 2022, the jury found Bannon guilty on both charges.[320][321] Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, the chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the January 6 Committee, called Bannon's conviction "a victory for the rule of law and an important affirmation of the Select Committee's work".[322] The DOJ prosecutor said that Bannon "chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law" and "No one is above the law";[322] prosecutors also said that Bannon had "thumbed his nose" at American democracy and law.[31]
On October 21, 2022, Judge Nichols sentenced Bannon to serve four months in prison and pay a $6,500 fine.[323][324] Nichols stated in issuing the sentence, "Others must be deterred from committing similar crimes." The DOJ had requested the maximum penalty (six months in jail), plus a $200,000 fine.[31]
On November 4, 2022, Bannon appealed his conviction and sentence; he remained free pending appeal, with his sentence put on hold.[31][325] In January 2023, his lawyers argued that the DOJ had improperly searched his private communications.[326] Due to the unexpected death of a government lawyer's son, Bannon's appeal hearing was delayed from October 12[327] to November 9 at the request of the DOJ.[328][329] Bannon did not attend the hearing; his attorney David Schoen did.[330] On May 10, 2024, the appellate court unanimously upheld the conviction and on May 14, the DOJ filed a motion to lift Bannon's stay of sentence and have him report to prison.[331][32]
On June 6, 2024, Judge Carl Nichols granted the motion and ordered Bannon to report to prison by July 1 unless the full appeals court were to take the case and pause enforcement of the sentence.[333] Because of the pending case against him in New York, he was not eligible for a minimum-security prison, and it was decided that he would instead go to Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury, a low-security prison in Connecticut.[334] On June 26, House speaker Mike Johnson said that House Republicans would intercede on behalf of Bannon with the federal court considering his appeal, though they did not file any briefs doing so.[335]
On June 21, Bannon made an emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court,[336] which denied it in a one-sentence order on June 28.[337] He reported to the low-level security Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury in Danbury, Connecticut on July 1, 2024, where he lived in a special veterans housing unit according to his federal prison consultant Sam Mangel.[4][338][339][340][341] He was released on October 29.[35] He is the second Trump era official to be jailed for contempt related to defying a subpoena from the January 6 Committee, after Peter Navarro.[338]
Social media bans
During the November 5, 2020, edition of his webcast, Bannon called for the beheadings of Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious diseases expert, and FBI director Christopher Wray. Bannon said that if it were up to him, after beheading Fauci and Wray, "I'd put the heads on pikes" and display them outside the White House "as a warning to bureaucrats" who dared oppose Trump. By the end of the day, Facebook and YouTube had deleted the video from their platforms, and Twitter had permanently banned his account for glorifying violence. Mailchimp also disabled Bannon's email newsletter.[342] The next day, Bannon was dropped by a lawyer who had been defending him against federal charges of fraud.[343]
On January 9, 2021, Rudy Giuliani appeared on War Room, accusing Democrats of stealing the recent presidential election and blaming them for the storming of the Capitol. Hours later, YouTube removed both the podcast channel and another one called "Trump at War – A Film by Stephen K. Bannon", citing a "violation of YouTube's Terms of Service".[344][345]
Political ideology
Bannon is a Reaganite[5][44] and has described himself as a populist.[346][347]
Lebanese-American author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin and conservative intellectual Michael Anton have been pointed out as three of the main influences in Steve Bannon's political thinking.[348][236] Political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke has also been described as a major influence on Bannon's ideological outlook.[349] According to The Guardian in January 2018, Bannon's ideology is similar to that of Stephen Miller, Tucker Carlson, Benny Johnson, Raheem Kassam and Matthew Boyle, the latter two having been protégés of Bannon at Breitbart.[350]
Despite being arrested on federal charges of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and money laundering in connection with the We Build the Wall fundraising campaign in August 2020, in an interview, Bannon told journalist Michael Lewis in February 2018, "We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls." He added, "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."[351]
Individual issues
A self-described economic nationalist, Bannon advocates for reductions in immigration[352] and restrictions on free trade with China and Mexico.[353][354] He has referred to himself as a "proud Christian Zionist" in reference to his support of Israel. He has been described as a white nationalist but rejects the description.[355] He generally believes in reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy, declaring at the Conservative Political Action Conference he favored the "deconstruction of the administrative state".[356]
Paris climate agreement
Bannon was a strong opponent of the Paris climate agreement. During his time in the Trump administration, he successfully persuaded Donald Trump to withdraw from it.[357]
Immigration
Bannon favors reducing immigration, both legal and illegal immigration, to the U.S. and asserts that immigration threatens national sovereignty.[358] Bannon has suggested that too many Silicon Valley chief executives are Asian or South Asian,[358][359] and that this undermines "civic society".[359] In a 2015 radio appearance, Bannon expressed opposition to resettling any refugees of the Syrian Civil War in the U.S.[358] In a 2016 radio appearance, Bannon asserted that illegal immigration was "horrific" but that legal immigration was "the beating heart of this problem"; that levels of legal immigration to the U.S. were "scary"; and that legal immigrants had "kinda overwhelmed the country".[360]
Bannon was the chairman of We Build the Wall, an organization involved in the construction of the proposed expansion of Mexico–United States barrier.[361]
Economics
Bannon often describes himself as an economic nationalist, criticizing crony capitalism, Austrian economics, and the objectivist capitalism of Ayn Rand.[355][362][363][364] He also generally considers himself a free-market capitalist.[365] Bannon favors raising federal income taxes to 44 percent for those earning incomes over $5 million a year as a way to pay for middle class tax cuts.[366] He also supports significantly increasing spending on infrastructure, describing himself as "the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan".[130]
In 2014, during a conference at the Vatican, Bannon criticized Wall Street for its role in the 2008 financial crisis. He has also criticized bail outs for big banks and is angered by the fact that Wall Street banks have not been held accountable for the financial crisis, which he says fueled populist fury and groups such as the Tea Party.[367]
Gun control
Amid ongoing national debates on gun violence and gun control, Bannon has been vocal in advocating for broader access to firearms, emphasizing the importance of the Second Amendment. He has been vocal in warning Trump against any shifts towards gun control, emphasizing the potential for intense backlash from the president's base. A notable instance of this was his reaction to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, where Bannon insisted that any move by Trump towards gun control would be the "end of everything," suggesting that it would be received even more negatively than an immigration amnesty bill by Trump's political base.[368][369] Expanding on his pro-gun stance, Bannon sparked controversy by advocating for the arming and training of children in the use of firearms. Speaking at Turning Point USA's America Fest in December 2023, he proposed that gun classes should be integrated into school curriculums as a means for children to defend themselves against bullies.[370][371]
Foreign policy
He is generally skeptical of military intervention abroad, opposing proposals for the expansion of U.S. involvement in the War in Afghanistan,[372] the Syrian Civil War,[373] and the crisis in Venezuela.[374]
In Afghanistan, he supported a proposal by Erik Prince for the deployment of private military contractors instead of the U.S. military.[375] He believes "there is no military solution" to the 2017 North Korea crisis.[353]
Bannon has described U.S. allies in Europe, the Persian Gulf, the South China Sea, the Strait of Malacca, as well as South Korea and Japan, as having become "protectorates of the United States" that do not "make an effort to defend [themselves]", and believes NATO members should pay a minimum of 2% of GDP on defense.[376]
Bannon opposes upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal.[377][378] Bannon strongly favors U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal,[379] and was supportive of the approach taken by Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman during the 2017 Qatar diplomatic crisis.[380]
During his tenure as White House chief strategist, Bannon opposed the 2017 Shayrat missile strike, but lost the internal debate on the matter to Kushner.[381] He also expressed skepticism about the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, questioning whether it was "necessary to kill this guy and to kill him now and to exacerbate the military issues", and warned that an escalation with Iran could undermine Trump's support with "working-class, middle-class people, particularly people whose sons and daughters actually fight in these wars".[382]
He has referred to himself as a "proud Christian Zionist" in reference to his support of Israel.[383][384][385] Bannon reportedly spoke often with Trump donor Sheldon Adelson, and was alarmed at a push for a renewed Middle East peace process.[386] He has described Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas as a "terrorist".[387] He has advocated giving the land in the West Bank to Jordan and in Gaza to Egypt.[388]
China
Bannon believes the U.S. is not merely in a Cold War but already in a "hot war" with China, especially in the domains of information and economics. Bannon expressed concerns about China's growing influence in Asia, viewing the nation as expansionist and anticipating a global culture clash.[389] He holds the view that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be confronted and suggests that the ongoing informational and economic confrontations will escalate into a "kinetic war". Bannon believes a military confrontation between the US and China in the South China Sea will occur within the next decade. He highlighted China's construction of artificial islands, equating them to stationary aircraft carriers with missiles, as a primary concern.[390][391]
United Kingdom
Although "those who met him say" Bannon initially favored the British National Party (BNP) and the English Defence League (EDL) in the United Kingdom, he later backed the UK Independence Party (UKIP).[392][223]
Bannon urged Boris Johnson, who Bannon said in July 2018 that he had known "over the last year" and was "very impressed" with, to challenge Prime Minister Theresa May.[393][394] According to a BuzzFeed News report, Bannon was in private contact with Johnson during his visit to Britain that month, and the two men were previously in text communication during their respective tenures as White House chief strategist and British foreign secretary.[395]
Europe
Bannon has defended Trump's ties to and praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin.[378][396] He expressed a belief that traditionalists see Russia as an ally. Bannon said they "believe that at least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he's trying to do it in a form of nationalism—and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country. They want to see nationalism for their country" rather than a "pan-European Union".[396] According to the book War for Eternity, Bannon met notorious Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugin in Rome in 2018 to advocate closer relations between the United States and Russia, as well as Traditionalist philosophy.[397][398]
In 2018, Bannon announced plans to launch a new political operation beginning with an attempt to unite populist parties across Europe before the 2019 European Parliament election. With the project to be based in Brussels, he indicated he would spend 50 percent of his time in Europe from the following November working at locations throughout the continent.[102] Later that year, Bannon formed a foundation called The Movement to connect far-right groups throughout Europe.[399]
Bannon is supportive of European right-wing populist national conservative movements such as the Hungarian Fidesz, the French National Front (now National Rally), the Spanish Vox, the Dutch Party for Freedom, Alternative for Germany, the Italian Northern League, the Freedom Party of Austria, the Sweden Democrats, the Danish People's Party, the Flemish Vlaams Belang and the New Flemish Alliance, the Polish Law and Justice, and the Swiss People's Party.[103][227][400][401][402]
Islam
In 2007, Bannon proposed and developed a script for a documentary titled Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Fascism in America. The film's plot was that there was an effort by Muslims to take over America.[403][404]
In 2010, Bannon said "Islam is not a religion of peace. Islam is a religion of submission". He also criticized George W. Bush for calling Islam a religion of peace.[405] Bannon has said that Islam today is "something much darker" than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.[406] He has also stated, "If you're Sharia-compliant ... we don't want you here," and has accused U.S. newspapers of being "Sharia-compliant".[406] He has also stated, "The elites in Europe ... are allowing an Islamic invasion to take place."[406] and that the war with Islamic fascism is "metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it."[407]
In his talk delivered to a small conference in the Vatican during 2014, Bannon said: "If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places...it bequeathed to us the great institution that is the church of the West".[408] He is reputed to believe Putin's Russia and Trump's America are Christian allies against the Islamic State and "radical Islamic terrorism".[409][410][411] During Bannon's time in the Trump administration Bannon and Stephen Miller helped orchestrate Executive Order 13769 which banned entrance into United States from seven majority Muslim countries.[412][413][414] Bannon has been linked to the counter-jihad movement.[415][416][417]
Transhumanism and new technologies
Bannon sees transhumanism as a dangerous and radical religion of "the technocratic elite". He accuses tech entrepreneurs of using "transhumanistic science" to control humanity and eradicate religion through advanced gene editing, robotics, and forced microscopic implants. He has accused transhumanists of wanting eternal life at the expense of disregarding people's religious beliefs. Bannon's recent preoccupation with transhumanism aligns with his anti-vaccine rhetoric, and he has adopted similar positions as Alex Jones on this topic.[418][419] In discussions with his frequent podcast contributor Joe Allen, he also promotes viewpoints against AI and other new technologies inspired by "The Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski.[420] On his podcast, Bannon said he was proud to be a Luddite and expressed concern that Homo sapiens could be replaced in the near future.[421]
Overview and influences
Bannon's ideology was the subject of the book War for Eternity by Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, where his thinking is described as combining elements of a radical version of the Traditionalist school with paleoconservatism and other more standard American conservative beliefs.[398] Bannon's political and economic views have been described by others as nationalist,[422] and right-wing populist.[423] He self-identifies as a conservative.[106][424][425] He rejects allegations that he is a white nationalist.[426]
At a party congress in March 2018, Bannon gave members of the French right-wing populist National Front (NF) what has been described as a "populist pep talk".[225] He advised party members to "Let them call you racist, let them call you xenophobes, let them call you nativists. Wear it like a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger and they get weaker...History is on our side and will bring us victory." Bannon's remarks brought the members to their feet.[427][428][429][430] Critics expressed concern that Bannon was "normalizing racism".[431]
Bannon was influenced by Fourth Turning theory, outlined in Neil Howe's and William Strauss's The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,[432] one of Bannon's favorite books.[348] The theory proposes, "populism, nationalism and state-run authoritarianism would soon be on the rise, not just in America but around the world. [...Once one strips] away the extraneous accidents and technology, you are left with only a limited number of social moods, which tend to recur in a fixed order" and cyclically. The book was major influence on Bannon's film Generation Zero.[432][348][433][434]
Bannon's political beliefs have been influenced by René Guénon's traditionalism, a form of anti-modernist thought that views "certain ancient religions, including the Hindu Vedanta, Sufism, and medieval Catholicism" as being repositories of spiritual truth under attack by Western secularism; he synthesizes traditionalist beliefs with Catholic social doctrine, particularly the idea of subsidiarity, as expressed in the 1931 papal encyclical, Quadragesimo anno, defending that political matters ought to be handled by the lowest, least centralized competent authority.[236] According to Bannon's former friends, he was particularly influenced by the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita and the ancient Chinese military treatise The Art of War.[435][436] Bannon has also cited the Russian neo-fascist Alexander Dugin,[437] who promotes a Russian nationalist variant of traditionalism called Eurasianism,[437][236] and described himself as a fan of Dugin's book, The Fourth Political Theory.[397] However, Bannon has urged Dugin to abandon his anti-American and Sinophile views.[438] Bannon has also described Brazilian traditionalist thinker Olavo de Carvalho as "one of the great conservative intellectuals in the world".[439]
Bannon is an admirer of paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan.[440] Bannon's favorite columnist is academic Walter Russell Mead.[441] In a 2014 speech to a Vatican conference, Bannon made a passing reference to Julius Evola, a twentieth-century, Nazi-linked Italian writer who influenced Benito Mussolini's Italian Fascism and promoted the Traditionalist School, described by a New York Times writer as "a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions." Bannon's interest in the ideas of the Traditionalist School was driven by Evola's book Revolt Against the Modern World, and Guénon's books Man and His Becoming According to the Vedanta and The Crisis of the Modern World.[442] In March 2016, Bannon stated he appreciates "any piece that mentions Evola".[443] In referring to the associated views of Vladimir Putin, who is influenced by Evola follower Dugin, Bannon stated "We, the Judeo-Christian West, really have to look at what he's talking about as far as Traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism."[444] He has likewise quoted French anti-Enlightenment writer Charles Maurras approvingly to a French diplomat.[445][446] Bannon has also repeatedly referenced the controversial French novel The Camp of the Saints (1973) by Jean Raspail, which depicts Third World immigration destroying Western civilization.[447] He has embraced what BBC News describes as Savitri Devi's "account of history as a cyclical battle between good and evil".[448] Bannon told an interviewer in 2018 that he is "fascinated by Mussolini", noting: "He was clearly loved by women. He was a guy's guy. He has all that virility. He also had amazing fashion sense, right, that whole thing with the uniforms."[449] A former Breitbart writer wrote that Bannon said in 2015 that alt-right publication American Renaissance was "fighting the same fight" as him.[450] Bannon has expressed admiration for German Conservative Revolutionary philosopher Martin Heidegger, praising his "ideas on the subject of being".[451]
German film director Leni Riefenstahl, who produced propaganda films for the regime in Nazi Germany, is said to have influenced Bannon's film-making techniques, with Bannon once describing himself to writing colleague Julia Jones as the "Riefenstahl of George Bush", modifying the ending as "the GOP" when Jones was horrified.[452] The opening of Bannon's documentary film The Hope & The Change (2012)[453] consciously imitated Riefenstahl's film The Triumph of the Will (1935), which depicted the Nuremberg Rally held in 1934.[454]
He has expressed interest in Henri Bergson's concept of élan vital and Joseph Schumpeter's creative destruction. Additionally, he said that his initial inspiration to get into traditionalist philosophy was his reading of George Gurdjieff, when Dugin asked him to explain this during a meeting they had together in Rome.[455
Bannon has been married and divorced three times. He has three adult daughters. His first marriage was to Cathleen Suzanne Houff. Bannon and Houff had a daughter, Maureen, in 1988 and subsequently divorced.[456][40][457]
Bannon's second marriage was to Mary Louise Piccard, a former investment banker, in April 1995. Their twin daughters were born three days after the wedding. Piccard filed for dissolution of their marriage in 1997.[458][459]
During their divorce proceedings, Piccard alleged that Bannon had made antisemitic remarks about her choice of schools, saying he did not want to send his children to the Archer School for Girls because there were too many Jews at the school, and Jews raise their children to be "whiny brats". Bannon's spokesperson denied the accusation, noting that he had chosen to send both his children to the Archer School.[272][271][460][461]
Bannon's third marriage was to model Diane Clohesy; they married in 2006 and divorced in 2009.[462][463]
His brother, Chris Bannon, is a TV producer.[464][465]
Bannon has been a producer, writer, director or actor on the following films and documentaries:
Year / Title / Credited as / Notes
1991 / The Indian Runner[466] / executive producer
1999 / Titus / co-executive producer
2004 / In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed / director, co-producer, writer / based on the 2003 book Reagan's War by Peter Schweizer
2005 / Cochise County USA: Cries from the Border[467] / executive producer
2006 / Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration[467] / executive producer
2007 / Tradition Never Graduates: A Season Inside Notre Dame Football / executive producer
2010 / Generation Zero / director, producer, writer / based on the 1997 book The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe
2010 / Battle for America[468][469] / director, producer, writer
2010 / Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman[469] / director, producer, writer
2011 / Still Point in a Turning World: Ronald Reagan and His Ranch[470] / director, writer
2011 / The Undefeated[468][471][469] / director, producer, writer / documentary on Sarah Palin
2012 / Occupy Unmasked / director, writer
2012 / The Hope & The Change / director, producer, writer / documentary on former Barack Obama supporters
2012 / District of Corruption[467] / director, producer
2013 / Sweetwater[472] / executive producer
2016 / Clinton Cash[473] / producer, writer / based on the same-titled Peter Schweizer book Clinton Cash
2016 / Torchbearer / director, producer, writer / features Duck Dynasty patriarch Phil Robertson[467]
2018 / Trump @War[189] / director, writer / Starring Corey Lewandowski, Pete Hegseth, Sebastian Gorka, Raheem Kassam, Sonnie Johnson, Raynard Jackson, Alfredo Ortiz, Sasha Gong, Erik Prince, Joe Concha, Lian Chao Han, Bill Gertz, Michael Caputo, Rob Wasinger, John Zmirak
2019 / American Dharma[474][475] / actor
2019 / Claws of the Red Dragon[476] / executive producer
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
In addition to the Management team, Genius Products also boasts an impressive Board of Directors. We have brought together a diverse set of talent, experience and credentials that enable and guide our growth.
Trevor Drinkwater, Chief Executive Officer
Mr. Drinkwater joined Genius Products in 2004 as Executive Vice President of DVD Sales after more than 15 years of senior management experience in the home entertainment and consumer products industries. Previously, he served as Chief Operating Officer of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. and as Senior Vice President of sales for Warner Home Video. He began his career at Nestle Waters, formerly known as The Perrier Group of America, as an entry-level sales person and progressed to general manager during his 10-year tenure. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing from the University of Colorado.
Stephen K. Bannon, Chairman of the Board
Mr. Bannon is Chairman of the Board of Genius Products board. His professional career has focused on financing and strategic advisory assignments related to emerging growth, media and entertainment companies. Previously Mr. Bannon sold Bannon & Co., an investment banking boutique formed in 1990, to Société Générale in 1998 after a successful two-year joint venture called Société Générale Bannon.
Michael Koss
[...]
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1994 (May07)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/166261759/
Texas billionaiure Ed Bass ... ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bass )
https://www.newspapers.com/image/166262403/?match=1&terms=%22Bannon%20%26%20Co.%22
Nov. 16, 1996 12 AM PT
France’s Societe Generale USA and Bannon & Co., a boutique investment banking firm, are forming Societe Generale Bannon, aimed at media, entertainment and communications investment banking. Bannon is headed by former Goldman Sachs executives Stephen K. Bannon and Scot K. Vorse. Societe Generale is one of the world’s largest banks.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-11-16-fi-65379-story.html
https://www.newspapers.com/image/158187045/?match=1&terms=%22Bannon%20%26%20Co.%22
SG Cowan Securities Corp., the Wall Street arm of French bank Societe Generale, acquired Beverly Hills media investment bank Bannon & Co. for an undisclosed sum, Cowan announced Friday.
The acquisition highlights SocGen’s push to beef up Cowan’s investment banking effort in several major industries, including media and entertainment, since the French bank bought Cowan last year.
SocGen and Bannon formed a joint venture in late 1996, but this deal brings Bannon into the bank completely. Bannon’s two principals, Steve Bannon and Scot Vorse, will join SG Cowan as co-heads of the firm’s investment banking media and entertainment group, Cowan said.
Cowan’s head of investment banking, Kim Fennebresque, said Friday that after 18 months of the joint venture, both sides had to “either get married or get divorced, and everybody wanted to get married.”
He declined to comment on the terms of the acquisition other than to say “obviously it was something that made everybody economically happy. We have compensated (Vorse and Bannon) generously.”
Bannon will relocate to Cowan’s Gotham headquarters, while Vorse will continue to hold down the fort at the firm’s Beverly Hills office.
Additionally, Cowan media investment banker Stephanie Young moved into the firm’s equity capital markets group to focus on media and entertainment capital-raisings.
SG Cowan also confirmed the hiring of research analyst Ed Hatch from Warburg Dillon Read to head up the firm’s media research effort (Daily Variety, 10/2). Hatch, who replaces Harold Vogel, will work alongside Cowan’s location-based entertainment analyst Paul Marsh and cable analyst Gary Farber.
Bannon & Co. have built a franchise since its founding in 1990, representing such clients as Polygram, Westinghouse and MGM. The firm advised Polygram Holdings during the negotiations on its sale to Seagram Co. earlier this year and has been representing Polygram Filmed Entertainment during the auction of PFE over the past few months.
“Adding the successful and highly focused advisory practice of Bannon & Co. to SG’s significant financial resources and global reach … will make us an even stronger provider of integrated financial solutions to the entertainment and media industries,” said SG Cowan CEO Curtis Welling.
Vorse said in a statement that “SG’s global platform … will give our team of bankers a unique opportunity to assist both emerging growth and large capitalization companies in the entertainment and media industries.”
July 27 2005
https://web.archive.org/web/20051219115020/http://geniusproducts.com/PressRelease.aspx?releaseid=90
NOTE -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Rivkin
Charles Rivkin is now CEO of MPA (Movie picture associationof america)
Rivkin served as Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 2014 to 2017. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate on February 12, 2014, Rivkin assumed office the following day, and was sworn in publicly by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on April 15, 2014.[2] Rivkin's confirmation marked the first time a U.S. ambassador and former CEO ever led the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs at the U.S. State Department.
Rivkin is one of four children of Enid Hammerman and William R. Rivkin, who was the United States Ambassador to Luxembourg under President John F. Kennedy and United States Ambassador to Senegal and Gambia under President Lyndon B. Johnson.[3][4] His mother's grandfather founded J K Industries, a large children's clothing manufacturer, greatly expanded by Rivkin's grandfather. In 1967, Rivkin's father died when he was just 5 years old. His widowed mother remarried Chicago obstetrician Dr. John S. Long in 1971.[4][5][6]
His brother Robert S. Rivkin served as Deputy Mayor of the City of Chicago between July 20, 2017, and March 1, 2019, and also served as the 21st General Counsel of the United States Department of Transportation (DOT) under President Barack Obama;[52][53] his brother's wife, Cindy S. Moelis, was appointed director of the Presidential Commission on White House Fellows.[53] His aunt, Joanne H. Alter, was the first woman to be elected to a countywide office in the metropolitan Chicago area.[54] His cousin, Jonathan Alter, is an author and NBC correspondent; and his cousin Jamie Alter Lynton, the wife of former Sony Executive Michael Lynton, is one of California's biggest political fundraisers.
His family has presented the "Rivkin Award" at the United States Department of State since 1968 as a way to honor intellectual courage and constructive dissent in the American Foreign Service.[11] The award was created in part with the help of Charles Rivkin's godfather, Hubert H. Humphrey, after the elder Rivkin's death at 47, in 1967.[7]
WOW
--COMPANY’S CEO TREVOR DRINKWATER NAMED TO BOARD OF DIRECTORS--
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Solana Beach, California – July 27, 2005 – Genius Products, Inc. (OTCBB:GNPI), a producer and distributor of branded entertainment products sold in retail outlets nationwide, today announced a reorganization of its management team, including the election of Trevor Drinkwater, chief executive officer, to the board of directors.
Drinkwater, 38, has been chief executive officer of Genius Products since February 2005, having joined the company as executive vice president in 2004. Previously, he was senior vice president of sales for Warner Home Video, where he led one of the nation’s largest home entertainment sales forces.
Commenting on the addition of Drinkwater to the board of directors, Charles Rivkin, co-chairman, said, “During his tenure with the company, Trevor has demonstrated excellent leadership, strategic and operational skills. We welcome his voice on the board of directors and look forward to working with him during this exciting time for the company.”
As part of the management reorganization, Drinkwater said that effective immediately, Michael Meader will step down as the company’s president, Mark J. Miller will step down as the company’s chief operating officer, and Klaus Moeller, founder and former chief executive officer, remains on the board of directors and will serve as a consultant to the company.
Meader joined the company in 1998 as executive vice president of distribution and was promoted to president in 2002. He was instrumental in transforming the company from its origin as International Trading and Manufacturing to Genius Products, in developing the initial Baby Genius concept and in laying the groundwork for the company’s music business.
These changes follow the promotion of Rodney Satterwhite to executive vice president, operations, and the recent addition of Shawn Howie as the company’s chief financial officer and Michel Urich as general counsel. “The management reorganization is in keeping with the growth and development of Genius Products and its transition to a broader-based entertainment company,” Drinkwater said.
The company also reported that Bruce Pompan, managing director of the investment banking firm Cappello Capital Corp., has resigned from the board, and that Genius Products and Cappello Capital have agreed that Cappello Capital will continue to advise the company on a non-exclusive basis.
Stephen K. Bannon, co-chairman of Genius Products, said, “The management reorganization enables the company to effectively pursue opportunities across a wider spectrum of entertainment products. At the same time, it facilitates achieving the objective of streamlining overhead expenses.”
About Genius Products, Inc.
Genius Products produces and distributes affordable entertainment products including DVDs and CDs. Its products are sold in retail outlets nationwide under well-known brands including AMC®, TV Guide®, Wellspring, IFILM®, Sundance Channel Home Entertainment™, Bazooka®, Jay Jay The Jet Plane®, National Lampoon®, The Twilight Zone™, Baby Genius®, Tonka®, My Little Pony®, Curious George® and Paddington Bear™. Genius Products also licenses the Baby Genius brand to third-party companies for a variety of products including books, apparel and infant care products. Promotional partners include the world famous San Diego Zoo®, Gerber®, Fazoli’s® and Child® Magazine.
Safe Harbor Statement
Except for historical matters contained herein, certain matters discussed in this news release are forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements, include, but are not limited to, further growth and development of the company, its ability to pursue opportunities across a wider spectrum of products and to streamline overhead expenses. The outcome of these statements may affect Genius Products’ business, forecasts, projections and prospects, which may vary for many reasons, also including but not limited to, the timely development and acceptance of new products, the market demand for independent films and general market conditions. Other such risks and uncertainties include Genius Products’ ability to grow its business, to obtain additional licenses, to meet anticipated release schedules and other matters, which are described in its filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/836799835/?match=1&terms=%22stephen%20bannon%22
with "Jefferies and Companny"
https://www.newspapers.com/image/539460559/?match=1&terms=%22genius%20products%22
https://baby-genius.fandom.com/wiki/The_Four_Seasons
not to be conufsed with the movie "babygeniuses"
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NDfDOZMPMN9MxGtvA2Ex9Sx_0yXEmHKz/view?usp=drive_link
2002 (Sep 11) announcemnet (in Sep 12 2002 paper)
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2002-10-03-the-province-vancouver-bc-pg-b2-clip-snoop-rivkin.jpg
Information Resources Inc. in Chicago is considering the sale of part or all of the company, a decision that comes two months after the loss of the largest client of the market research firm, Procter & Gamble .
Information Resources, known as IRI, said last week that it had hired William Blair & Company in Chicago to review "strategic options," which could include a sale as well as steps like joint ventures or a reorganization. The move had been expected because IRI stockholders have been pressuring the company to put itself up for sale after the loss of the assignment from Procter, which is shifting its business to a competitor, the ACNielsen division of VNU. IRI collects data from store scanners and also operates consumer panels.
The Firm, the artist-management agency in Beverly Hills, Calif., and Global Brand Marketing, a company in Santa Barbara, Calif., that holds licenses for footwear brands like Diesel and Nautica, are forming a company, Pony International L.L.C., to produce and market the Pony brand of athletic shoes and apparel. The Firm acquired the rights to Pony in 2001 and has been selling the brand with colorful, attention-getting campaigns created internally, that now feature actresses from the pornographic films produced by the Vivid Entertainment Group. Global Brand will own a majority of Pony International and oversee operations like design, production, distribution, marketing and public relations. The Firm, which will receive cash from Global Brand and own what was described as a significant stake in Pony International, will provide marketing services like brand-image ideas, strategy and promotions.
The "big push" for the Pony brand by Pony International will come for the spring 2004 line, said Steve Bannon, a managing partner at The Firm who will be a member of the Pony executive committee.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/575757628/?match=1&terms=%22genius%20products%22
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2009-02-22-the-news-press-fort-myers-fl-pg-b7.jpg
2009-02-22-the-news-press-fort-myers-fl-pg-b7-clip-sinofresh.jpg
https://littlesis.org/org/257374-American_Vantage_Media_Corp.
Steve Bannon Executive chairman, Breitbart News LLC (2012-2018)
https://www.newspapers.com/image/599933681/?match=1&terms=%22steve%20bannon%22
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109761959320543484?mod=Searchresults_pos4&page=1
2004-10-13-wsj-reagan-vs-soviets.pdf
By Mary Anastasia O'Grady / Oct. 13, 2004 at 12:01 am ET
America is at war. In every corner of the globe the threat to freedom is on the march. The U.S. president terms it "evil," rejects advice from allies to avoid provoking conflict and makes victory his mission. America is accused of arrogance.
The year is 1983 and the battle has been joined: Ronald Reagan is squaring off against Soviet domination.
Thanks to the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the coloring of American life by orange alerts, 20th-century totalitarianism can seem like ancient history. Yet with America under assault from a new freedom-loathing force, we can ill afford to forget the commitment and courage it took to defeat the Soviet Union.
"In the Face of Evil," director Stephen K. Bannon's documentary based on Peter Schweizer's book "Reagan's War," bids us to remember not only the courage and insight of Ronald Reagan but, as important, the cost of appeasement. Reagan ended Soviet repression, but not before the "beast" -- as the film terms it -- claimed millions of lives and enslaved millions more. Détente never freed anyone. Reagan freed a billion people.
From the grainy footage of Bolshevism, Stalinism and Nazism right up to the late 1980s, when hard-line Soviet generals were pressing for a "first strike," the film reminds us that evil is part of the human condition. Reagan pursued his mission believing at his core that "Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid."
Were it not for Lenin's view that "Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important" and Reagan's startling good looks, communism might never have had to tangle with the unyielding president. During a 1946 labor strike heavily infiltrated by communists Reagan felt Marxism's heavy boot, an experience that would permanently set him against tyranny. This was among the earliest displays of the plain-spoken Reagan's unwavering public manner. Others cowered, but he never did.
From this Hollywood experience Reagan understood that the Soviets were strongest when they smelled fear. Later history, the film reminds us, bears this out. When Kennedy "sought dialogue," Khrushchev "saw weakness." Castro and the Soviets chased Kennedy out of the Bay of Pigs and, during the Cuban missile crisis, extracted a U.S. pledge never to try to help free Cuba again. To Reagan, accommodation of Soviet domination was dealmaking with slave masters. In 1964, he warned that a showdown was inevitable. "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth..." Yet two decades more would pass before he would get his chance to stand up to Soviet tyranny.
"Détente," Reagan famously quipped, "is what a farmer has with his turkey until Thanksgiving Day." And no leader better personified the West's policy of appeasement than Jimmy Carter. He sought to "bring down tensions" and reduce the "arrogance" of American power. The Soviets walked all over him -- in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Africa, Afghanistan and Poland.
Two months after he took office, Reagan survived an assassination attempt. He became convinced that God had spared him for a divine mission: to put an end to the Soviet Union. Again, the film graphically fills in what pop culture easily forgets: "The gloves came off" and a small dedicated inner circle of trusted Reaganites put in play a four-part strategy of intelligence, materiel, ideas and money designed to bring the Soviets to their knees.
Among the milestones along Reagan's path to victory: a spiritual bond with Polish Pope John Paul II, also badly wounded by a would-be assassin. Solidarity was a promising crack in Soviet power and Reagan was "determined to see it succeed."
Derision of the 40th president was a pastime of the American elite. But the Russians weren't laughing. Then came the closer: the strategic defense initiative. A clip of Carl Sagan mocking the president makes the point about Reagan's status in establishment circles. But when the cameras switch to former Soviets, we hear a far different view. Reagan's resolve and SDI set off a crisis in the Kremlin. When Reagan met Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, the Soviet leader read off a litany of concessions he would offer in exchange for the termination of Star Wars. Reagan refused, Mr. Gorbachev threatened and Reagan famously stood up and ended the meeting.
The film frames that final showdown with the perfect biblical analogy: The devil had taken Reagan to the mountaintop and offered a world of spoils, from peace prizes to popular acclaim and a glamorous place in history. To reject it took more than guts. It took a man who put freedom ahead of his own glory.
This is not a biography but the story of a man who faced off against the 20th century's "heart of darkness" and won. As former KGB officer Oleg Kalugin explains, "He overcame the culture of fear because he refused to live by it."
By Bridget Johnson / Nov. 24, 2004 at 11:59 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122702657473437637?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=1
2004-11-24-wsj-look-who-isnt-talking.pdf
Since Nov. 2, I've had an icky feeling in the pit of my stomach. As an ardent Bush backer, my queasiness has nothing to do with the glorious election results, but is prompted by a murder that occurred the same day in Amsterdam.
Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh's short film "Submission," about the treatment of women in Islam, written by female Dutch parliamentarian and former Muslim Aayan Hirsi Ali, had aired in August on Dutch TV. Van Gogh was riding his bike near his home when a Muslim terrorist shot him, slashed his throat, and pinned to his body a note threatening Ms. Ali. This appears to be an organized effort, not the act of a lone nut; Dutch authorities are holding 13 suspects in the case.
After the slaying, I watched "Submission" and my mind is still boggled that 11 minutes decrying violence against women incites such violence. There've been many films over the years that have taken potshots at Catholics, but I don't remember any of us slaughtering filmmakers over the offense. You didn't see the National Rifle Association order a hit on Michael Moore over "Bowling for Columbine."
One would think that in the name of artistic freedom, the creative community would take a stand against filmmakers being sent into hiding à la Salman Rushdie, or left bleeding in the street. Yet we've heard nary a peep from Hollywood about the van Gogh slaying. Indeed Hollywood has long walked on eggshells regarding the topic of Islamic fundamentalism. The film version of Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" changed Palestinian terrorists to neo-Nazis out of a desire to avoid offending Arabs or Muslims. The war on terror is a Tinsel Town taboo, even though a Hollywood Reporter poll showed that roughly two-thirds of filmgoers surveyed would pay to see a film on the topic.
In a recent conversation with a struggling liberal screenwriter, I brought up the Clancy film as an example of Hollywood shying away from what really affects filmgoers--namely, the al Qaeda threat vs. the neo-Nazi threat. He vehemently defended the script switch. "It's an easy target," he said of Arab terrorism, repeating this like a parrot, then adding, "It's a cheap shot." How many American moviegoers would think that scripting Arab terrorists as the enemy in a fiction film is a "cheap shot"? In fact, it's realism; it's what touches lives world-wide. It's this disconnect with filmgoers that has left the Hollywood box office bleeding by the side of the road.
President Bush wasn't the only one to receive a mandate on Election Day. Voters showed that they don't give a hoot about celebrity endorsements. The dollar democracy of the box office has shown for years that those same Americans are tired of the old shtick. Hollywood hasn't paid attention to its chronic illness, and now even once-powerhouse Miramax, under the tutelage of uber-liberal Harvey Weinstein, has been handing out pink slips. Purse strings are pulling even tighter across town as studios can't continue to stomach the same flops.
But there is an exciting undercurrent flowing through Hollywood, buoyed not only by the election but the campaign that highlighted divisions so oft pointed to by the left. It's something the general public can't see yet, but will when the talents of the conservative filmmaking movement in Hollywood--writers, producers, directors and actors--begin to make it past the distribution hurdle and to the cineplex.
We saw a sneak peek during the campaign: a funny commercial for the Club for Growth, denoting Kerry's flip-flops with a groom who keeps changing his mind at the altar and a bomb-squad specialist who can't pick which wire to cut. The producer was David Zucker, a self-described "Sept. 12 Republican," who made such classics as "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun." Meanwhile, loudmouthed liberal celebrities were crucified in the Trey Parker/Matt Stone comedy "Team America: World Police."
A liberal friend asked me what conservative filmmaking was, envisioning staid, G-rated pictures. The movement is better described as rebellion from the Hollywood status quo, the dream of being able to make a feature film whose political content won't be altered to make the Republicans evil, in which politically incorrect yet pertinent material won't end up on the cutting-room floor. It's about having faith in filmgoers that they'll eagerly support pictures to which they can relate. It's about creating content for movie houses in the red states as well as the blue.
A month before the election, the Liberty Film Festival in West Hollywood generated a palpable excitement among conservatives in the industry and those lining up to catch a glimpse of the flicks. The diverse and hip crowd joined producers Stephen K. Bannon ("In the Face of Evil"), Lionel Chetwynd ("Celsius 41.11"), Doug Urbanski ("The Contender"), Mr. Zucker and others.
One film, by Brain-Terminal.com's Evan Maloney, "Brainwashing 101," highlighted attempts to stifle free speech on college campuses. After the film, an immigrant in the audience who identified himself as Boris angrily proclaimed, "This is just like Soviet Union!"
Another film, "Relentless," exposed Yasser Arafat's doublespeak in favor of the destruction of Israel and chillingly showed children on a Palestinian TV show expressing their desire to be suicide bombers, urged on by the host--who blew herself up in Jerusalem a week before the screening.
[..cont...]
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1143728219/?match=1&terms=%22genius%20products%22
Saved as PDF : [HP00EX][GDrive] / Mentioned : Harvey Weinstein (born 1952) /
[Housatonic Research Note .... May 20, 2005,09:57am EDT (Note : Updated Jun 6, 2013, 01:18pm EDT [but not clear what changed] ) ]
[Harvey Weinstein (born 1952)] and Bob Weinstein, the founders of Miramax, opted out of their contract with The Walt Disney Co. at the end of March and are to leave the company in late 2005. But you can presage further success for the Weinstein confreres: They announced from the Cannes film festival yesterday that Weinstein Co., their newly formed multimedia firm, has received an investment and financing commitment from Goldman Sachs , although specific terms of the investment and debt financing package weren't disclosed. "We are thrilled with this important relationship that provides us with the resources to produce and market the exciting slate of films we have planned," the Weinsteins said in a statement. Goldman Sachs reciprocated this enthusiasm: "We are delighted to be teaming up with the Weinsteins in connection with this venture. We look forward to a long and successful relationship together," a spokesman said. The new Weinstein company will be launched in October 2005.
LOS ANGELES - THE film producer Stephen K. Bannon isn't just on a crusade. He's on a roll.
"Look at Feb. 25, 2004 -- a watershed week for the Hollywood right," he said in his Santa Monica office while scribbling a circle around the word "Lord" on his whiteboard. "On Ash Wednesday, 'The Passion of the Christ' is released theatrically, and on Sunday, 'Lord of the Rings' -- a great Christian allegory -- wins 11 Academy Awards. So here you have Sodom and Gomorrah bowing to the great Christian God, and did you guys notice? No, because 99 per cent of the content in the media's sewage pipes is the culture of death, not life."
He next circled the word "Evil," part of the title of a 2004 political documentary for which he was director, co-author and co-producer. "If the last election showed one thing, it's that culture drives politics. I want to take the form that is now owned by the left -- the documentary -- and use it to help drive an overall political agenda that supports the culture of life."
Though heavier than most on messianic zeal, Mr. Bannon -- Roman Catholic filmmaker, conservative-film financier, Washington networker and Hollywood deal-chaser -- is emblematic of a new wave in Hollywood, a group that intends to clean those media pipes with pictures that promote godliness, Pax Americana and its own view of family values. Some of these filmmakers, armed with camcorders and Web sites, are pushing overtly political projects in the blogosphere and at conservative festivals, including last year's Liberty Film Festival in West Hollywood, at which Mr. Bannon's "In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed" won an award.
Others have enlisted major studios as their collaborators. In December, for instance, Walt Disney Studios and Walden Media, owned by the evangelical financier Philip Anschutz, are to release their $150 million "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first in a projected movie franchise based on C.S. Lewis's Christianity-inspired Narnia novels. Walden is also developing its political thriller, "Amazing Grace," about the British evangelical abolitionist William Wilberforce, and Sony Pictures is hoping that the next installment of the apocalyptic "Left Behind" series, "Left Behind: World War III," will usher in its own religiously inspired franchise.
What joins these independent and studio filmmakers, says the conservative author James Hirsen, is a shared sense of being political outsiders in a town in which the term "Hollywood conservative" can sometimes seem an oxymoron. "A lot of them," Mr. Hirsen says, "are feeling left out on the Left Coast."
That sense also binds conservatives who have had long careers in mainstream Hollywood and, like the newer activists, cut a broad political and religious swath, from "right-to-life" Christians and foreign-policy hawks to more middle-of-the-road "family-values" advocates. They include strongly identified Catholics like Mel Gibson and the manager-producer Doug Urbanski ("The Contender"), and evangelicals like Ralph Winter, who produced "X-Men" and "Fantastic Four." One of their leading voices has long been Lionel Chetwynd, a Jewish neo-conservative whose credits include the 1987 pro-Vietnam War feature "The Hanoi Hilton." A collection of what might loosely be styled conservative libertarians includes the actors Clint Eastwood, Drew Carey and Gary Oldman, along with the producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Gavin Polone.
The old guard has been joined by the so-called Sept. 12th Republicans. These include former liberals and centrists like the actors David Zucker, Dennis Miller, James Woods and Ron Silver -- who all, in Mr. Bannon's words, "had a Road to Damascus experience" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
More recently, these familiar faces have been bolstered by new players from both inside and outside the system, many intent on using the documentary form to promote their conservative message. One, Stephen McEveety, 50, who struck gold as a producer of "The Passion of the Christ," recently left Mr. Gibson's Icon Productions to start his own film company. According to two people who have worked with him and who spoke anonymously to protect their industry relationships, Mr. McEveety, who declined to be interviewed, controls a $100 million fund devoted to making and promoting family-oriented movies. (Mr. McEveety did note in an e-mail message that his criterion for making films is whether "my kids would be able to see them," not politics.) He is collaborating with Mr. Bannon, 51, on two new Catholic-themed documentaries, one on cloning, and another on Pope Benedict XVI, which is budgeted at about $1 million.
The two men have also participated in discreet, religiously based outreach and financing initiatives, including gatherings arranged by the Wilberforce Forum, the Virginia-based evangelical public policy group whose chairman is the former Watergate figure Chuck Colson and which has a mission to "shape culture from a biblical perspective," according to its Web site, wilberforce.org. Last September, Mr. McEveety and Mr. Bannon flew to Maryland to meet with top Christian powerbrokers on Capitol Hill in a forum co-sponsored by Wilberforce.
"The idea was to start tying money from Washington's right-to-life movement to key Hollywood players," said a participant who asked not to be named to protect his relationship with Wilberforce. A spokeswoman for Wilberforce confirmed that the organization, along with the Washington nonprofit group Faith and Law, were the hosts.
That was followed by a gathering three months later in Santa Monica in which a half-dozen Christians from the world of politics met with Mr. Gibson, Mr. McEveety, Mr. Bannon and others. "The idea was just to meet conservatives in Hollywood and find out what they're working on," said Mark Rodgers, staff director of the Senate Republican Conference, who attended the events along with Bill Wichterman, policy adviser to Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader.
A co-host for the Santa Monica gathering was Act One, a nonpolitical group of Christian screenwriters based in Los Angeles and led by Barbara Nicolosi, a Catholic activist and former nun. Ms. Nicolosi said one of the goals of the meeting was "for Wilberforce to find some intersection of policy and story ideas" for future Hollywood content.
Ms. Nicolosi added that while religiously motivated filmmakers can "obviously find it difficult enough" working in Hollywood, "some of us think we should stop calling ourselves Christians, it's become such a political liability here." Building political connections hasn't been easy, either. "The Christians in Washington just don't trust us, because we're part of the Great Satan called Hollywood," she said.
And some show business conservatives say they fear that overt political connections will turn off audiences. "It never works when politicians come to Hollywood to try to influence content," said Govindini Murty, a Hindu actress and right-wing advocate who appears frequently on conservative talk shows. "Democrat or Republican, they should just stay away."
Ms. Murty and her husband, Jason Apuzzo, while leery of political control, aren't shy about promoting their own political message. These two budding filmmakers founded the Liberty Film Festival, which supplies ammunition for what Mr. Bannon calls "the right's propaganda war with the left."
Last year's festival -- the first, which used the slogan "Liberating Hollywood One Film at a Time" -- offered more than a dozen documentary features and shorts by activists forging a feisty brand of ideological filmmaking. Popular entries included Evan Maloney's "Brainwashing 101," an indictment of what he calls "the left-wing indoctrination on college campuses"; Roger Aranoff's "Confronting Iraq"; Michael Wilson's "Michael Moore Hates America"; and the eponymous comic short "Greg Wolfe: Republican Jew." The next festival is in October.
Many films on the Liberty program were also shown in Dallas last September at the American Film Renaissance Festival, whose motto is "Doing Film the Right Way."Its founders, Jim Hubbard, a businessman, and his wife, Ellen, are scouting oil-industry investors and have announced that they will expand their festival to Los Angeles. Ms. Murty and Mr. Apuzzo said they would not welcome the competition.
"A lot of red-state conservatives don't even know what a film festival is," Mr. Hubbard said. "It's seen as a liberal thing, but we think there's a ton of money to help change that."
In addition to meeting at Liberty and on its blog, "Libertas" (libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/), Hollywood conservatives gather at the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, a grass-roots political and social group that, its Web site, hollywoodrepublicans.com, says is seeking to "transform the political landscape of the entertainment industry," and the author David Horowitz's Wednesday Morning Club, whose political guests in the past have included George W. Bush when he was still governor of Texas. There is also the Sunday Evening Club, a semi-regular get-together organized by the screenwriter Craig Tipley and the actor Robert Davi; Ms. Murty called this group "the secret underground," and Mr. Bannon dubbed it "some of our 'friends of Dorothy,"' meaning working professionals who prefer to be discreet about their political affiliations in Hollywood.
Mr. Apuzzo said that many young conservative activists were "inspired to take up their cameras and find their voice" in response to Mr. Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." "So we're indebted to Mr. Moore in that respect," he said. As a one-time Hollywood outsider who ushered political documentaries into the realm of mass appeal, Mr. Moore is, paradoxically, a role model for these young conservatives.
"Five years from now, all I hope is that filmmakers to the right have the same access to distribution that Michael Moore has," said Mr. Maloney, the maker of "Brainwashing 101."
If established Hollywood conservatives welcome the energy of this new group, some nonetheless fear that it is heading down the wrong path. "This is the cult of victimization, which says, 'The left has ganged up on us in the media, so we're going to fight back with film festivals for conservatives and screenwriting courses for Christians,"' said Mr. Chetwynd, who directed the agitprop documentary "Celsius 41.11." "I don't support that approach at all, because what you'll end up with is ideologues with laptops."
Even the outspoken Mr. Bannon thinks that little will be gained if conservative ideology moves too far in front of conservative art. "We have the money, we have the ideas," he said. "What we don't have -- and what the left has in spades -- are great filmmakers."
Those filmmakers may yet materialize, Mr. Apuzzo said. "When we finally move away from the literalness of documentaries and into narrative movies," he said, "we'll find the real power of our stories."
But Mr. Chetwynd worries that after three decades of conservatives' struggling for a bigger stake in Hollywood, "some of our own battles from within may ultimately defeat us" -- meaning, he said, battles over political turf and over the notion of a "blacklist" of Hollywood conservatives. Mr. Malone said that the veteran professionals would have to "become better allies" of the young filmmakers, who envy the veterans' success "but feel ignored by them -- the very ones we can learn from the most."
And yet the industry may already be changing. "Conservatives don't even need a movement to take over Hollywood," said Alan L. Gansberg, a historian and screenwriter on the left, because, in his view, most of the young professionals entering the film and television business today are in line with conservative values.
Mr. Chetwynd agreed that newcomers to the entertainment business did not all share the liberal beliefs that were once so common. "These new conservatives are working in desk jobs in the agencies and studios," he said. "They're busy building careers and may change Hollywood politically."
If there's truth to that assessment, Mr. Bannon will be there to urge them on. "In the future, why wouldn't we want to take over the levers of Hollywood?" he said with a rakish grin. "We're the peasants with the pitchforks storming the lord's manor."
Oct. 24, 2005, 5:48 PM EDT / Source: Reuters
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9807439
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Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the brothers who founded venerable art house movie maker Miramax Films, said Monday they have raised $490 million in private equity to fund the start-up of a new media company.
The Weinstein Co. has been operating for several months but kicked into a higher gear Oct. 1 after the brothers left Miramax and its corporate parent, Walt Disney Co., on Sept. 30.
In the 12 years Disney owned Miramax, the company backed Oscar winners like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Chicago” and enjoyed hits like “Spy Kids” at its Dimension Films label.
The Weinsteins hope to raise about $1 billion in equity and debt funding to finance their new film, television and Internet company, sources close to the pair have said.
The $490 million reported in private placement was higher than earlier expectations. The Weinstein Co. said it already had raised $230.5 million in equity and hoped to raise as much as $420 million in total, in a federal filing late last month.
The funding announced Monday includes the sum from the earlier filing, and the Weinsteins continue to negotiate with bankers for debt funding, one source said.
The Weinstein Co. declined to comment beyond Monday’s news announcement. Investment bankers Goldman Sachs & Co. and Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison advised the company on the equity offering.
The company is filling its ranks with seasoned executives, many of whom worked with the brothers at Miramax. It is near signing a deal with Barbara Schneeweiss to develop TV shows, including one based on best-selling book series “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.” Schneeweiss had worked at Miramax as a TV executive.
The Weinstein TV slate also includes fashion model reality series “Project Runway” and a U.K. spinoff called “Project Catwalk.”
On the film front, the brothers’ first new release will be "Derailed,” a thriller starring Jennifer Aniston, which hits U.S. theaters Nov. 11.
In addition, they have Oscar hopes for Johnny Depp in “The Libertine,” Pierce Brosnan in “The Matador” and Felicity Huffman in “Transamerica,” which all reach theaters later this year.
The brothers formed Miramax 26 years ago and sold it to Disney in 1993. But in recent years, Harvey Weinstein and former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner clashed over issues that eventually led the Weinsteins to depart.
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Mentioned : Warren Lieberfarb / Stephen Bannon (Steve Bannon) / Trevor Drinkwater /
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also - june 27, 2006
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PDF (printed from web, hard to read..) : [HW00DG][GDrive] / PDF (made from images, easier to copy from) : [HW00DI][GDrive]
By Aaron Lovell. / PEI Staff - 2 September 2006
Orson Welles once famously said moviemaking was the "greatest electric train set a boy could have". When Miramax founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein bolted from Disney last year to establish a new studio, they turned to the private equity market and ended up with $1 billion in equity and debt - enough to buy one hell of a train set.
For more than two decades, the Weinstein brothers made a name for their Miramax Films studio with successful art-house fare like Sex, Lies and Videotape, Reservoir Dogs and Bob Roberts. The streak continued after Disney purchased the studio in 1993, producing some of the most popular films of the 1990s, including Pulp Fiction, Clerks and The English Patient.
When the Weinsteins took their new stand-alone studio out on a private fundraising tour, they found a number of hedge funds and institutional investors keenly interested in the new venture.
"I won't say it was the most challenging equity raise I've been involved with," says Larry Madden, chief financial officer of the brothers' new venture, The Weinstein Company (TWC).
Having two of the most familiar - and occasionally feared - names in showbusiness at the helm of a new company with a full slate of projects in the pipeline piqued the interest of a group of 22 international investors, including hedge funds GLG Partners and Perry Capital; movie producer Tarak Ben Ammar's Quinta Communications; Japan's SOFTBANK; French media conglomerate TFl; Mark Cuban's WPP Group; and Israeli investor Vivi Nevo. TWC ended up raising $490 million in equity from these institutional investors, as well as a matching credit line from advisor Goldman Sachs - allowing the Weinsteins to set off with more than $1 billion in capital.
Following an abandoned partnership with private equity firm The Blackstone Group [NOTE : this is the previous name of the entity which is knwon as Balckstone ...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone_Inc. ] , the Weinsteins had begun looking at how much capital they could raise in the second quarter of 2005.
"Once we determined how much we wanted to raise, we started conversing with investors," says Madden. "There was a tremendous appetite for this type of offering."
SPONSORS ON THE SET
Below is a selection of recent film productions that involved financial investors. Private equity and hedge funds have increasingly taken front-row seats as they surmise value in owning entertainment content.
2006 GENIUS SEC filing notes :
Mr. Bannon was appointed as a director of our company in connection with our acquisition of American Vantage Media Corporation (AVMC). He also has served as an outside consultant to the Company since July 20, 2006. Mr. Bannon served as the Chief Executive Officer of AVMC from May 2004 until our acquisition of AVMC in March 2005. From January 2004 to April 2004, he provided executive and management services to AVMC as a consultant. From April 2002 to December 2003, Mr. Bannon served as Head, Strategic Advisory Services for The Firm, a leading talent management company in the entertainment and media industries. Mr. Bannon served as a managing director and head of media and entertainment investment banking at Jefferies & Company, Inc., an institutional brokerage and investment bank for middle market growth companies, from July 2000 to April 2002. He served as the Chief Executive Officer of Bannon & Co., Inc., an investment banking firm specializing in the entertainment, media and communications industries, from April 1990 to July 1998. Mr. Bannon served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the Executive Committee of First Look Media, Inc. from October 1996 to June 2000 and a director and a member of the Executive Committee of First Look Media, Inc. from December 1993 to February 2004. First Look Media, Inc. specializes in the acquisition and direct distribution of, and worldwide license and sale of distribution rights to, independently produced feature films in a wide variety of genres.
Genius Products, whose main business is the home video distribution of The Weinstein Company, is stirring considerable commotion with plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange as soon as next month, Fortune reports.
Some industry watchers are speculating that Genius, whose thinly traded over-the-counter stock closed Friday at $1.63, could help brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein get their eponymous company past the somewhat rocky situation it currently finds itself in.
Depending on which rumor you hear, Fortune says, Genius is either a potential source of needed cash for the Weinstein’s ambitious efforts, or a vehicle through which the Weinstein Company will one day soon take itself public, either by buying out the 30 percent of Genius’s parent it doesn’t own, or through a reverse listing via Genius.
David Bank, an analyst who follows entertainment companies for RBC Capital Markets, told Fortune he doubts that the Weinsteins will use Genius to take themselves public, but he does think they will find a way to rework the convoluted structure through which they hold control of Genius.
As The New York Times reported in April [NOTE: The URL was https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/weinsteins-films-may-falter-but-not-their-focus/ , and as of Jan 2 2025, this is no longer available from other the NYTimes, nor is it archived on Wayback.] the firm founded by the Weinstein brothers as they acrimoniously left Miramax and the Walt Disney Company two years ago has suffered humiliations to its highly visible movie operation that might have sunk a less tenacious start-up.
Marquee filmmakers like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, with “Grindhouse,” and Anthony Minghella, with “Breaking and Entering,” have tanked.
Genius, meanwhile, has grown rapidly in the last year – and has predicted as much as $800 million in revenue this year – as producers like ESPN and Robert Halmi signed on, in part because high-profile Weinstein films had opened the doors to major retailers like Wal-Mart and Target. The operation provides the kind of stable income that larger film companies get from their film libraries, while providing a pipeline for the release of older films that have been acquired by the Weinsteins.
Still, The Times said in the report that there was also widespread talk in the industry that new money would be needed to maintain a release schedule that is still reckoned at 15 to 20 theatrical films a year.
At the time, Mr. Weinstein told the newspaper that his company, which has amassed $1.2 billion in financing from various sources, has sufficient financing and does not expect to recapitalize itself soon.
But a reverse I.P.O. through Genius would be one way the movie company could shore up its finances.
Whatever happens next, says Fortune, Genius is already at something of a cross-roads between Wall Street and Sunset Boulevard. Steve Bannon, Genius’s chairman and a one-time Goldman Sachs media banker, along with a partner, Trevor Drinkwater, bought Genius, then a small film library, in 2004. Mr. Bannon apparently then caught wind that the Wall Street powerhouse was raising $1.2 billion for the Weinstein startup in 2005. He and Mr. Drinkwater pitched his old firm and the Weinsteins to enlist Genius as their home video distributor rather than one of the majors.
Go to Article from Fortune via CNN Money [ NOTE : The url is https://money.cnn.com/2007/11/21/magazines/fortune/siklos_Weinstein1121.fortune/index.htm?dlbk ... which is offline as of this date (Jan 2 2025), but is on the wayback machine .... which we also captured below ... ]
Richard Siklos Fortune editor at large / November 26 2007: 9:22 AM EST / Saved PDF : [HM00DH][GDrive]
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Normally, we don't trouble ourselves much with companies sporting mere $110-million market capitalizations, but then again neither do most of the people involved with the modestly named Genius Products Inc.
Genius is a curious little venture whose main business is the home video distribution of The Weinstein Company, the closely watched multimedia endeavor started by eponymous brothers Bob and Harvey of Miramax fame after they divorced from Walt Disney Co. (Charts, Fortune 500) two years ago.
Compared to their former Oscar-laden company, the Weinsteins have had a bumpy time creating major box office hits in their first year as an independent media company, which among other things has branched into video games, fashion and social networking. Now, however, there is considerable rumbling that the little-noticed Genius could help the brothers move their business into its next act.
Depending on which rumor you hear, Genius is either a potential source of needed cash for the Weinstein's ambitious efforts, or a vehicle through which the Weinstein Company will one day soon take itself public, either by buying out the 30% of Genius's parent it doesn't own, or through a reverse listing via Genius.
Part of the commotion around Genius is that the thinly traded over-the-counter stock is expected to list on the Nasdaq exchange as soon as next month. Shares of Genius (Charts) closed Friday at $1.63.
David Bank, an analyst who follows entertainment companies for RBC Capital Markets, said he doubts that the Weinsteins will use Genius to take themselves public, but he does think they will find a way to rework the convoluted structure through which they hold control of Genius. Despite the public company's pipsqueak size, he said: "I'm covering it because this company's going to be a much bigger company in some way, shape or form."
Indeed, Steve Bannon, Genius's chairman, said in an interview that the company is getting attention because its overall business has grown from a mere $32 million in revenues last year to sales of around $800 million this year that will top $1 billion by next year.
Whatever happens next, Genius is already a somewhat mind-bending meld of high finance and Hollywood chutzpah. The company has a checkered past in the pink sheets and was essentially a shell when Bannon took it over in 2004 with Trevor Drinkwater, a former Warner Brothers home video executive who serves as its CEO.
Their idea was that there was money to be made as independent distributors of home video and that their industry expertise would give them a leg up on the in-house distribution capabilities of the big studios.
Although the DVD business has flattened out, Bannon and Drinkwater believe there's still plenty of money to be made as consumers buy more flat screens and HD players and the gap between theater and home video release dates shrinks.
The hitch behind the Genius idea was a lack of product to distribute.
Bannon, a one-time Goldman Sachs media banker, bought a small film library and then caught wind that the Wall Street powerhouse was raising $1.2 billion for the Weinstein startup in 2005. He and Drinkwater pitched his old firm and the Weinsteins to enlist Genius as their home video distributor rather than one of the majors.
Bannon cut them the industry's best deal -- a 5% royalty paid to Genius versus a typical rate of more than double that. Perhaps best of all, the Weinsteins were given a 70% stake in Genius as part of the bargain. For tax-saving reasons, the venture was structured such that the publicly traded Genius Products Inc. actually only represents the 30% of parent Genius Products LLC that the Weinstein Company does not own.
Bannon is now telling minority shareholders he wants to simplify the structure and improve liquidity and make the company more alluring to Wall Street. Investors are betting that he'd also like to renegotiate his sweetheart distribution deal with the Weinsteins.
Bannon declined to comment on specifics, but here's how it could work:
If the Weinstein Company were to convert its stake in the LLC for common stock in the publicly traded entity, it would instantly have a market value of closer to $350 million, and the Weinsteins' would own $250 million of that. By paying a higher royalty to Genius for distribution, the Weinstein Company would theoretically fuel the public company's earnings and stock price from which the Weinsteins -- as largest shareholder -- would most benefit. Indeed, in May, the stock was nearly double where it stands today, meaning that on paper that imputed value of the Weinstein stake was worth close to $500 million.
Part of the recent falloff in Genius stock is just the reality of being a microcap stock that trades only a couple of hundred thousand shares trade a day. That, plus the mixed track record of Weinstein releases so far this year, general Hollywood jitters, and, according to Bank, questions about whether Genius can grow as quickly as previously thought.
The company has pursued its strategy of using its anchor tenant to build relationships with the big box retailers and Blockbuster that account for the lion's share of home video sales, while attracting new distribution partners including Sesame Street, ESPN, and World Wrestling Entertainment. To supplement its thin margins as a distributor, it is taking part-ownership in some of the straight-to-DVD films it is putting on shelves.
Larry Madden, the Weinstein Company's chief financial officer and one of its appointees on the Genius board, told me last week that Genius has performed "beyond our wildest hopes" given that the Weinsteins took a chance on an unproven entity while getting their own venture off the ground. "First and foremost we are absolutely thrilled with the relationship; we're thrilled with their performance."
As far as the rumors -- which he called persistent and "annoying"-- Madden said he wouldn't comment on them specifically. But he also indicated that changing any aspect of the Genius relationship was not something in the works.
"This is a long term play for us. The structure is definitely complicated. We'll always consider restructuring or making it better for everyone if that makes sense. Do I feel I need to restructure it? No, I think it works fine."
That said, Madden went on to say the Weinstein Company would consider anything that works best for both the parent and its subsidiary, and would keep its options open. Needless too say, it's nice -- if complicated -- having a Genius in the family.
Like the so-called witches that plagued early New England, the bank Goldman Sachs makes a handy scapegoat for people who have screwed up. They’re an indisputable force of evil — a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity! — that preys on poor innocent civilians for sport and profit. Their latest victim? Poor Harvey Weinstein, who borrowed $1 billion from the bank to make movies, then proceeded to spend it like a drunken sailor on ill-fated forays into the Internet and fashion and cable industries. Whose fault is this? Not Harvey’s, obviously. He was possessed by Goldman, one investor in his company tells the Times.
Blame, this investor says, falls to Goldman Sachs as much as the Weinsteins. The imprimatur of the bank carried a lot of weight, and there was an assumption that Mr. Ravitch and others had done their homework. But there was at least one glaring oversight in their homework: nobody asked Michael Eisner what it’s like to work with the Weinsteins, according to two people who have discussed the subject with him.
Yes, clearly this is a case of a big evil bank once again not doing their due diligence! If only they had done some legwork, observed the nuances of Harvey’s personality, maybe administered the Myers-Briggs test, then they would have found out … what? That Weinstein was a mercurial megalomaniac, like every other talented person in Hollywood, and for that matter, everyone at Goldman Sachs?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCxHwyj6Hw0
Jason Moreira
33,013 views Jan 27, 2017
Generation Zero 2010 Documentary - Atlas Documentary Films May you find this video informative and be thrilled to subscribe for more. Thanks for watching!
Generation Zero 2010 full Documentary DOCUMENTARY HISTORY CHANNEL DOCUMENTARY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY BBC .
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704629804575325270578772024
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By Lauren A.E. Schuker And Serena Ng / Updated June 24, 2010 at 12:01 am ET
Independent film studio The Weinstein Co. has agreed to a major debt restructuring that gives Goldman Sachs Group and an insurance company possession of more than 200 films in its library, including "The Road" and "Halloween II."
The restructuring, finalized by the companies Wednesday, is designed to allow Weinstein Co. to continue as a going concern and resolve the financial struggles that beset the studio shortly after it opened in 2005.
Brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein established the company after leaving Miramax, their previous independent film studio which they had sold to the Walt Disney Co. in 1993. The brothers raised roughly $1.2 billion with the help of Goldman Sachs to launch the venture. About $500 million of that total was securitized debt and much of the remainder was equity.
Instead, the brothers produced a string of movies that flopped at the box office and made investments in several businesses including social media and clothing that struggled. About five years later, the company spent most of the $1.2 billion that was raised and had little to show for it other than the film library and success of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds."
If successful, the restructuring should help the Weinstein Co. get back on its feet and become debt-free. Goldman Sachs and Assured Guaranty Ltd., which insured some of the company's debt, will now own as many as 250 Weinstein films as well as a small portion of the Weinstein Co.'s future projects, including the upcoming summer horror movie, "Piranha 3-D."
Under the terms of the deal, control of movies such as "Scary Movie 4" would revert back to Weinstein Co. once the debtholders are paid off, mainly using cash generated by the films in the library. Any interest payments owed by Weinstein Co. on the debt were eliminated in the agreement. The studio will continue to distribute the library, but the revenues from those films will go toward paying back the outstanding sum.
In 2009, that library produced roughly $49 million in cash flow, but industry experts estimate that amount would decline by about 15% a year in the future. The films that Weinstein Co. transferred to Goldman are expected under existing deals to bring in about $233 million over the next four and one-half years.
The films in the library were used as collateral for the original loan. Another collection of about 150 films, including "Inglourious Basterds," will remain in the Weinstein Co.'s possession.
The restructuring comes the same day as a state court hearing that involved bond insurer Ambac Assurance. Corp., which had insured the $500 million loan to the Weinstein Co. Ambac has run into its own financial problems.
In the Wednesday hearing, a Wisconsin county court approved a settlement proposal from Ambac, which is undergoing it own restructuring. The proposed settlement would release Ambac from insuring the studio's debt in exchange for paying debtholders a total of $115 million in cash and notes.
As part of the restructuring deal, Goldman Sachs has agreed to subtract that $115 million from the Weinstein Co.'s total outstanding debt of $450 million. That reduces the Weinstein Co.'s debt to $335 million.
"This deal works brilliantly for all parties involved," says Harvey Weinstein. "It makes [the company] debt-free, library rich, working capital insured, no interest payments on an ongoing basis and gives it the ability to take its rightful place as one of the strongest independent [studios] in the industry."
When the Weinstein brothers first launched their new company, their plan was to repeat their success at the Miramax company, where they successfully turned highbrow literary dramas such as "Shakespeare in Love" into mass-market films. The Weinstein Co. also hoped to build their latest film venture into a bigger corporate empire with investments in social media and even clothing.
More recently, the brothers—as part of an investment group that included billionaire Ron Burkle—entered into negotiations with Disney about using Weinstein Co. as a vehicle to promote, distribute and manage Miramax's between 600 and 700 film titles, including "Cold Mountain" and "The Aviator." Those talks ended last month without an agreement.
The court filing from Ambac indicates that Weinstein Co. had run into significant financing problems. The filing asserts that based on "audited financial statements," the Weinstein Co. had burned through nearly all of the initial capital it raised and had "exhausted its liquidity."
The Weinstein Co. "has lost money and had negative operating cash flow in every year since its inception," the filing states. It says that Weinstein Co. management repeatedly advised Ambac "of its dire financial situation."
Last summer, the studio hired New York-based investment bank Miller Buckfire. The bank helped convince Ambac to waive some bond covenants, which gave the Weinstein Co. some breathing room.
Since 2006, according to the Ambac filing, the Weinstein Co. failed to meet its financial commitments several times. Over the past year, the two firms attempted to hammer out a new arrangement. Talks broke down and ended in March 2010.
The new plan, put together with the help of Wall Street lawyer H. Rodgin Cohen, stands to give the studio a fresh start. If it can pay off the $335 million through film library revenue, it will emerge debt-free and be able to reclaim ownership of those 250 movies.
"This restructuring will not only help the Weinstein Company become hugely solvent," says veteran Hollywood attorney Bertram Fields, who is representing the Weinstein Co., "but it also puts the company in a good position to achieve its goals."
by Duff McDonald, contributorJune 25, 2010: 11:19 AM ET / Saved as PDF : [HM00DJ][GDrive]
FORTUNE -- Did you hear the great news about The Weinstein Company? The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the cash-strapped indie studio had reached an agreement with its lenders that positions it for greatness. Again.
Or at least that's the way Harvey Weinstein and his cohort are explaining it. "This restructuring...puts the company in a good position to achieve its goals," said ever-present Hollywood lawyer Bert Fields. Weinstein himself went further. "This deal works brilliantly for all parties involved," he told the Journal. "It makes [the company] debt-free, library rich, working capital insured, no interest payments on an ongoing basis and gives it the ability to take its rightful place as one of the strongest independent [studios] in the industry."
We wouldn't go that far. In fact, we might even venture the opposite opinion for many of the "parties involved." But that's just us. First, though, a little history and a synopsis of Wednesday's deal.
When The Weinstein Company was formed in 2005, it was capitalized with $500 million in debt and $700 million in equity. Apparently, Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob have burned through all of that cash with little to show for it save the success of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. And now they're restructuring. Which means that the original equity is worthless.
Point of issue #1: The equity investors probably don't see this deal as working out "brilliantly." You see, they're done. Wiped out.
And what about that $500 million loan? After some cost-saving moves of late, it had apparently been reduced to $450 million. But they still can't pay it. And neither can the people who said they had The Weinstein Company's back, bond insurer Ambac (ABK).
In a decision akin to insuring subprime loans in Detroit, Ambac figured the Weinsteins were good for their money. That kind of judgment will end up making you bankrupt. Oops! It did! Ambac is nearly bankrupt, and a court allowed it to buy its way out of the deal for $115 million on Wednesday.
The Weinstein Company's lenders, led by Goldman Sachs (GS, Fortune 500), will take that money, thereby reducing the outstanding debt to $335 million. And to give the studio even more breathing room, they have agreed to eliminate all interest payments on that debt.
Point of issue #2: No lender considers the elimination of interest payments a "brilliant" development.
What do the lenders get in exchange? More than 200 of the company's films -- including The Road and Halloween II -- which are projected to generate $233 million over the next 4 1/2 years, as well as a "small portion" of the company's future films
Point of issue #3: Collateral that will generate $233 million in exchange for a bad loan of $335 million -- no brilliance there, at least from the lender's perspective. And only a "small' portion of future films? This joint is in foreclosure, folks. Why not most of those future films?
Remarkably, it seems as if the wizards at Goldman have met their match in the Weinstein brothers, who basically bent the investment bank and their other lenders over the proverbial barrel. It's one of those deals, you see: lighten the debt load and hope upon hope for another Pulp Fiction, or watch the brothers turn and walk away from the debt in its entirety.
Point of issue #4: Getting schooled by film industry sharps probably doesn't feel too brilliant to Goldman Sachs.
"Give these guys enough at-bats and they'll get it right," Goldman banker Joe Ravitch said of the Weinsteins to Fortune in 2007. "No one works harder than these guys.
He may be right. But working at what? It would certainly seem that Weinstein had his eye off the ball while he was engaged in ultimately failed negotiations with Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) to use The Weinstein Company to distribute and market Miramax's 700-film library.
Harvey Weinstein can go on as long as he wants about how good this deal is -- calls to The Weinstein Company were not returned -- but Deadline Hollywood founder (and Tinseltown scourge) Nikki Finke isn't having any of it. "People do business with The Weinstein Co at their peril," she wrote. "Almost everybody who trusts The Weinstein Co lives to regret it."
Except, clearly, Harvey Weinstein. He thinks it's been brilliant doing business with himself.
Liberals in the media seem puzzled about why so many women are showing up at Tea Party rallies, not to mention the existence of Tea Party-backed candidates such as South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Nevada's Sharron Angle. Lesley Stahl of CBS News gave voice to this confusion on MSBNC's "Morning Joe" program this week: "I wanted to ask all the gurus here why so many of the Tea Partiers are women. I find that just intriguing and don't quite understand why that has happened."
At a recent Tea Party rally in Richmond, Virginia, I also noticed a large number of women present. A Quinnipiac Poll found that 55% of Tea Party members are women; the pollster Scott Rasmussen says women up make up about 40% of voters who say they support the Tea Party. At the organization level, women are clearly very important in the Tea Party. Although it prides itself on not having a central leadership, to the extent the movement does, it's often female. Six of the eight national coordinators of the Tea Party Patriots, which organizes the efforts of hundreds of individual local groups, are women.
Deputy Editorial Page Editor Daniel Henninger analyzes the political impact of the former president's return to the stage. Columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady describes the flaws in the U.S. agenda at this weekend's G20 meeting, and discusses 20-year-old Marisol Valles Garcia's decision to take on the drug gangs.
Even liberals such as Peggy Drexler, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell Medical School, grudgingly acknowledge that Sarah Palin has a point when she says the "Momma Grizzlies" of the Tea Party are the real feminists. "These are women rising up to confront a world they feel threatens their families. They are loud, determined, unafraid and - politically speaking -- have very big teeth," she wrote in the Huffington Post last month.
The Tea Party provides women who have often been given short shrift by party establishments a natural home. "For a long time people have seen the parties as good-ole'-boy, male-run institutions. In the Tea Party, women have finally found their voice," says Rebecca Wales of Tea Party Patriots.
A new film "Fire From the Heartland," done for the conservative group Citizens United by filmmaker Steve Bannon, interviews only women in exploring the Tea Party movement. The sole male voice comes from a clip of the February 2009 on-air rant of CNBC's Rick Santelli, whose criticism of home mortgage bailouts touched off the formation of the Tea Parties.
The women interviewed in the film believe their children will be the losers as government pushes a "dependency" agenda and the country loses its competitive edge. "The current administration is promoting T-ball nation," says Doreen Borelli. "With T-ball, you hit the ball, everyone gets on base, everyone supposedly wins and everyone goes for ice cream after the game. But life isn't like that."
"I was born to a crackhead and grew up in the projects," says Sonnie Johnson of the Frederick Douglass Foundation. She now supports the Tea Party because she wants local governments to have more autonomy. "How can you make a change locally if your community is run by the federal government?" she asks.
Ms. Johnson told me she is irritated by liberal attempts to paint the Tea Party as racist. She notes that such charges are essentially a political strategy and points out that Mary Frances Berry, the former Democratic chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Bill Clinton, acknowledged as much when she said: "Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. . . . Having one's opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness."
Liberal attempts to smear the Tea Party take many forms. One prominent black professional from Virginia received a phone call warning against attending the Richmond event by falsely saying the crowd would be all white and displaying Confederate flags.
But the Tea Party seems to grow regardless of attempts to pigeonhole or marginalize it. A new Washington Post poll reports that 43% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans are intensely interested in voting this November. Among Tea Party supporters, the number is 74%. Given that a Rasmussen poll this month finds that three out of ten Americans consider themselves Tea Party members or have close friends or family members who are, it has the potential to reshape the political landscape.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1063118129/?match=1&terms=breitbart%20bannon
https://www.newspapers.com/image/193475857/?match=1&terms=breitbart%20bannon
The Sarah Palin documentary "The Undefeated"—which opens in 10 cities this Friday--couldn't have opened at a better time. With a Newsweek cover story about the former Republican Vice Presidential candidate, wherein she declares, "I can win a national election," Palin is once again in the media spotlight. Maybe she never left, but filmmaker Stephen Bannon wants his new documentary film to set the record straight on Palin, destroying the notion of the "Caribou Barbie" and replacing it with the image of a strong, smart-thinking individualist unafraid to take on the establishment.
Bannon, a self-described "conservative documentarian" whose credits include "In the Face of Evil: Reagan's War in Word and Deed" (2004) and "Fire from the Heartland" (2010), began his professional career at Goldman Sachs, then formed his own investment firm and finally found his way to documentary filmmaking. He talked to Speakeasy about his goals for the film about the former Alaska governor and responded to criticisms about the film's alleged omissions and manipulations.
[Q] How did you make the leap from investment banking to documentary filmmaking?
Bannon : I didn't go to film school. We had built our firm on doing bankruptcy business in the early '90s in independent film, like MGM and Credit Lyonnaise. And I saw the wreckage, and from that wreckage, the big lesson was that you have to think through the marketing before you make the film, and how to make films that are different and can really grab people by the throat. And I realized no one is going to give me $5 million to make a feature film, so I have to start in docs. And I got to start in something that I can do inexpensively and build an audience, and keep costs down like the Palin film and grab them like a movie should.
Michael Moore also talks about making documentaries that are like movies and that can grab people. Do you feel akin to him?
Bannon : I don't agree with anything about Michael Moore's politics. But he's a master craftsman. He's won an Oscar. I tell people: John Ford, Stanley Kramer, Michael Moore, they're not propagandists; they come up at it from a strong point of view. Michael Moore comes at a film with an angle of attack. So do I. It's not propaganda. But it is a frame of reference of how you're going to see it. Every filmmaker does that. I think people on the right think his films are propaganda. But I'm a free market capitalist. And Michael Moore's films work tremendously.
The montage with pop culture figure attacking Palin that opens "The Undefeated" seems to recall Moore.
Bannon : People have said I'm like Leni Riefenstahl. [See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leni_Riefenstahl ; Note that Quentin Tarantino also studied her : https://www.openculture.com/2019/11/quentin-tarantinos-world-war-ii-reading-list.html ] I've studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style. I'm a student of Michael Moore's films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.
The film has already been criticized for certain omissions, such as the fact that there's no mention of so-called "Troopergate," the controversy about whether the then-governor fired her public safety commissioner for not firing an Alaska state trooper.
Bannon : Let's address that. The film is two hours long. The second act alone is over 45 minutes; it's very dense. It's a Harvard business case study of restructuring in a turnaround. Look at what I left out. I left out the fact that she had a baby; I left out the fact that she went against the Christian Right to sign a same-sex civil rights law. If you look at the big thematic stuff, Troopergate wouldn't have made the top 25. It's a media thing. I went after a big story and tried to tell it in a big way and didn't chase rabbits. Even people on the Left have come out from the film, and they don't like her politics and don't like her personally, but you have a grudging admiration of someone who is an outsider and continues to hammer away at the establishment.
It may come as surprise to some viewers that there's little mention of any problems or conflicts with the McCain camp.
Bannon : McCain is a total non-event. I admire his Naval service, but he's a non-event. He's eight points down on the day she gets the call, to 5 points up. It's only three weeks later with the bankruptcy of Lehman Bros and the Republican Party got fired, rightfully, by the American people. And they go into a freefall. So I tried to show that John McCain was a tangential player, and as history will show, it was really the beginning of the rise of Sarah Palin.
There was something in that section in the film, where you go back to the vicious attacks against her right after the Lehman Bros failure, and you suggest that the Obama team was behind them. But you have no evidence in the film to prove that claim?
Bannon : I think that's Meg Stapleton. She says these attacks came from the highest levels. I think she may actually be talking about the post-governorship in Alaska. Meg's point is that her belief is that it was coordinated by the highest levels of the Democratic Party. One of the reasons she had no air cover is that in Alaska she put together this coalition that was heavily dependent on Democrats, but when she became the Vice Presidential candidate, the Republican establishment didn't want to giver her any air cover, and the Democratic party didn't give her any air cover, either. I think Meg's belief is that these attacks came from Barack Obama.
But there's no evidence, except this one person saying this.
Bannon : I think that's a great point. One of controversies of the film is that it's clearly a sore subject with the Palin camp.
I realize you need to make choices as a documentary filmmaker. But I also wanted to ask you about the MatMaid dairy privatization, which is used in the film to show how she turned around the state. But there's some crucial information left out. Like she initially wanted it to stay open, and gave it $600,000 to keep it open. That seemed a little misleading.
Bannon : We use MatMaid as an example of one of the state-funded entries that went to the private sector. Initially, she made an initial attempt to make a go of it, because there were people that depended on it for the jobs. But she determined that she needed to have a private equity solution. I'm not trying to make the point that she's perfect. There's a lot of argument today about ACES, and the marginal tax rates, and AGEA, her radical plan to bifurcate producers from transmission companies. Was that the right way to go? I'm not trying to make the point that she's super-woman…
But the film does. You don't present debate. You don't present the question as to whether these were the right things to do. You present these as triumphs and success, without qualification.
Bannon : But at the time it took place. Remember, I'm putting you in the moment that it happened. That's why I do it with live footage.
I guess that also explains why there's no mention that the Alaska Pipeline Project is now an ExxonMobil project, not just TransCanada.
Bannon : Yes, circumstances change. And I was trying to show with ACES and Point Thomson that in the meme that's out there that she's some Caribou Barbie. But she's actually gotten tremendously applied intelligence. These aren't school uniform issues. These are the biggest intractable issues of the State. But I'm not trying to make a detailed policy thing. I'm not trying to make a PBS document on the Alaska Pipeline.
How do you think the film will do?
Bannon : We'll have to see. But let's be brutally frank: There's not that much great product for conservatives. I'm a capitalist. We have to prove that there's a market out there for this product. Look, Al Gore had $15 million in P&A from Paramount; Michael Moore had $15-20 from the Weinsteins [on "Fahrenheit 9/11"]. But social media has changed things. We have a couple of million dollars in P&A, and we'll see how it does over time. [...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3aa9D1Ar2Q
VictorySessions
244,422 views Nov 27, 2011
FOX News' Sean Hannity interviews Director Stephen K. Bannon on his new film 'The Undefeated' about the stewardship of Governor Sarah Palin
He says he is working with Breitbart here ....
2012 (March 01) - Death of Andrew Breitbart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8h3JwTon50
Rep. Louie Gohmert Pays Tribute to Andrew Breitbart
Mar 1, 2012
Rep. Louie Gohmert (TX-01) spoke on the House floor about the life and legacy of his friend, conservative writer and American patriot, Andrew Breitbart.
"Thank you, dear God, for sharing this extraordinary gift that was Andrew Breitbart with us. We did not get to keep our gift nearly as long as we wanted, but we are so grateful for such a marvelous gift."
Text is available (of full article) here : Saved as PDF : [HN02HM][GDrive]
A friend of arch-conservative U.S. Andrew Breitbart say he will make good on Breitbart’s promise to release tapes that he said reveal Barack Obama as a radical bent on “racial division and class warfare.”
“We are going through a series of tapes of President Obama at Harvard,” filmmaker Steve Bannon said on the Sean Hannity Show on Thursday night. “We will show them in a week to 10 days.”
Breitbart, whose six websites are worth an estimated $4 million, had promised to release the tapes March 1, but dropped dead while walking home early Thursday in Brentwood, Los Angeles, at the age of 43.
“Andrew had heart issues,” said Bannon, whose most recent film is a documentary about failed U.S. Republican presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Last year, he said, Breitbart had been in the hospital and since then “he was on medication, he’d dropped weight, he was on a diet and had a personal trainer.”
Breitbart last Friday told the Conservative Political Action Conference about the alleged Obama tapes:
“We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008. [...] The videos are going to come out, the narrative is going to come out, that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver ponytails in the 1980s, like Bill (Ayers) and Bernardine (Dohrn), who said one day we would have the presidency, and the rest of us slept as they plotted, and they plotted, and they plotted. [...] Barack Obama is a radical, we should not be afraid to say that! Okay? And Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine’s salon. I’ve been there.”
In fact, Breitbart had been there as recently as December when he was a dinner guest of Ayers and Dohrn. Ayers turned out to be “a fantastic host, a fantastic conversationalist and a great chef,” Breitbart admitted. Still, he said, Ayers “is a sociopath” even if he did serve apple pie for dessert.
Ayers and Dohrn were founders of the Weather Underground, a violent radical leftist group formed in 1969 who went on to become university professors in Chicago, where they met Obama.
2012 (mar 02)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyhgJUsc9qg
The Horrible Legacy of Andrew Breitbart
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
From the Majority Report, live M-F 11:30am EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM:
Cliff Schecter joins Sam Seder on the show to discuss the legacy Andrew Breitbart leaves behind.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/breitbarts-obama-tape-thats-all-you-got-75818/
Breitbart’s Obama Tape: That’s All You Got?
By Julian Brookes
Andrew Breitbart's Friends Sell Him Out
The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
7,281 views Mar 5, 2012
From the Majority Report, live M-F 11:30am EST and via daily podcast at http://Majority.FM:
Breitbart dot com has posted the last post Andrew Breitbart was working on before he died. Sam Seder discusses the post, The Vetting, Part I: Barack's Love Song To Alinsky.
March 5 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfRbJfSMDVg
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! Andrew Breitbart's Final Encounter. TV News 3.5.12
thetvnews
455 subscribers
492 views Mar 4, 2012
Just before conservative blogger and TV pundit, Andrew Breitbart met his final fate he had a lengthy encounter with a top PR executive. Arthur Sando tells you about Andrew Breitbart's final conversation - and you'll see this interview no where else but The TV News. Plus, Part 2 of "Your OWN Pitch" - as Jimmy Kimmel pitches Oprah on a funny new show for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Visit The TV News at http://thetvnews.tv
2012 (Mar 08)
Mar 8 2012
Breitbart Obama Video 'Controversy'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnY3sVimtKo
The Young Turks
80,616 views Mar 8, 2012
Via Mediaite: "The video the late Andrew Breitbart promised of President Obama was delivered in snippets this morning-- first by Buzzfeed, then by Breitbart's Big sites-- but on tonight's Hannity, editor-in-chief of Breitbart.com Joel Pollak and contributor Ben Shapiro released the full tape-- one held by Professor Charles Ogletree but released in a presentation after the 2008 election, where the professor is clearly heard saying he hid it during the election...Pollak and Shapiro then began to explain the context of the clip itself, and who Bell is and why it matters. Describing him as the "Jeremiah Wright of academia," Pollak explained he had radical and controversial beliefs that eventually cost him his job...".* The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5-gqkzyey0
Goldman Sachs Sells Back Movies to Weinstein
Bloomberg Originals
188 views Jul 20, 2012
July 19 (Bloomberg) -- Adam Johnson reports that Goldman Sachs is selling back a portfolio of movies to Harvey Weinstein. He speaks on Bloomberg Television's "Street Smart." (Source: Bloomberg)
2012 (Aug 5) - breitbart bannon
https://www.newspapers.com/image/838256772/?match=1&terms=breitbart%20bannon
(aug 1 2012 version in la times) - https://www.newspapers.com/image/203874393/?match=1&terms=breitbart%20bannon https://www.newspapers.com/image/203874399/?match=1&terms=breitbart%20bannon
. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljZew68XUNM
15,198 views Aug 28, 2012
Fox News' Sean Hannity interviewed Citizens United President and Executive Producer of the film "The Hope and The Change" David Bossie, Writer/Director Stephen K. Bannon, former Democrat pollster Pat Caddell and cast members of "The Hope and The Change" in a one hour special.
Visit CitizensUnitedMovies.com to watch the film!
tapes ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK1kbqlmZ1M
Schweizer and Bannon join Hannity Oct. 8, 2012
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1084064772/?match=1&terms=%22stephen%20bannon%22
In August, Donald J. Trump shook up his presidential campaign for the second time in two months, hiring Stephen K. Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, as the Republican campaign’s chief executive.
By Michael Barbaro and Michael M. Grynbaum
Aug. 17, 2016
As the American financial system collapsed in the fall of 2008, Stephen K. Bannon began to fantasize about destroying something else: the elite economic and political establishment that he believed had created the crisis.
Mr. Bannon, who was named Donald J. Trump’s campaign chief on Wednesday, was at the time a highly improbable revolutionary, a wealthy former Goldman Sachs banker and a budding filmmaker. But his blue-collar Southern roots tugged at him: panicked by the swooning market, his father, a telephone company lineman with no college degree, had sold much of the stock in his retirement account.
“Steve felt it was outrageous,” said Scot Vorse, his former business partner and a longtime friend.
It was the start of a remarkable reinvention that turned a polished corporate dealmaker who once devised $10 billion mergers on Wall Street into a purveyor of scorched-earth right-wing media who dwells in the darker corners of American politics.
The website he runs, Breitbart News, recently accused President Obama of “importing more hating Muslims”; compared Planned Parenthood’s work to the Holocaust; called Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator, a “renegade Jew”; and advised female victims of online harassment to “just log off” and stop “screwing up the internet for men,” illustrating that point with a picture of a crying child.
With its provocative content, bare-knuckle style and populist message, Breitbart is, in many ways, a mirror of Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign — which explains why the Republican nominee was so drawn to Mr. Bannon, Breitbart’s chairman.
“Steve is a fighter. He loves the fight. He loves the scrum,” said Andrew Marcus, who met Mr. Bannon, a Navy veteran, while making a documentary about Breitbart’s founding editor, Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012.
Mr. Bannon, 62, who grew up in a Democratic family in Virginia that fled the party in favor of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order Republicanism, has quietly advised Mr. Trump throughout his campaign, according to friends and colleagues. But as Mr. Trump’s candidacy has started to sputter and flail, Mr. Bannon’s role has intensified, so much so that Mr. Trump asked to meet with him over the weekend and offered him the position of chief executive.
That vaunted post, which makes Mr. Bannon the single most influential figure in the Trump campaign, is a leap of faith by a candidate who has long eschewed political professionals: Mr. Bannon has never before worked on a national campaign, let alone overseen one. But his résumé is thick with the kind of experience Mr. Trump covets: a deep understanding of how the news media works and how public perceptions are molded.
Over the past decade, Mr. Bannon has built a small but potent media empire designed to directly challenge the country’s cultural and political elite, whom he sees as incorrigibly detached from working-class America and responsible for dismantling its backbone — an industrial economy that employed its families and the secure borders that protected them.
He made movies that lionized Sarah Palin and vilified the Occupy Wall Street movement as fraudulent rebels backed by well-off liberals.
A trailer for that film, called “Occupy Unmasked,” is a fevered compilation of rioting, profanity, a burning American flag and a man appearing to brush his bare behind against a police car.
“We are finally telling you the true story of the radicals behind the Occupy movement,” Mr. Breitbart, the film’s star, says grimly into the camera.
Mr. Bannon, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has made little secret of his desire to frighten Americans out of complacency, fusing relentless provocation and a hodgepodge of conservative ideas to make the case for rebellion against the political order.
“Fear is a good thing,” he said in a 2010 interview. “Fear is going to lead you to take action.”
His timing was serendipitous: Mr. Bannon’s ventures in right-wing film and news were perfectly timed to capture the emerging fury of the Tea Party movement, which was still smarting from the federal bailout of Wall Street banks like his former employer, Goldman Sachs, and the growing sense that the nation’s top tier had sold out the working and middle classes.
By 2014, Mr. Bannon had jumped from the political sidelines into the arena. When a little-known Republican candidate named David Brat challenged Eric Cantor, the House majority leader known for his close ties to Wall Street, Breitbart News put its thumb on the scale, publishing dozens of positive articles about the underdog’s bid. Mr. Bannon was childhood friends with a top adviser to Mr. Brat, whose victory stunned Republican elders. It was a foretaste of the white-hot movement Mr. Trump would soon lead.
“He is somebody who puts his activism on par with his intellectual work,” said David Bossie, president of the conservative group Citizens United, who has collaborated on film projects with Mr. Bannon.
“A lot of intellectuals sit back and write columns and let other people do the work,” Mr. Bossie said. “Steve is a believer in doing both.”
The credential that has earned Mr. Bannon a spot in the Trump campaign — his stewardship of Breitbart News — was something of an accident. The death of Mr. Breitbart, at age 43 of heart failure, was a shock to his reporters and fans.
Mr. Bannon threw himself into the day-to-day management of the site, opening branches in Los Angeles and London and leading twice-daily conference calls during which he issued directives on what stories to pursue.
His business acumen has paid off: Breitbart received 18.3 million unique visitors in July, according to data from comScore, up about 40 percent from the year prior. The site has outpaced conservative rivals like The Daily Caller, and Breitbart executives say that monthly traffic has increased by 16 times since the year Mr. Bannon took over.
But some inside Breitbart chafed at Mr. Bannon’s outspoken style of management, complaining that he upbraided staff members and seemed to embrace outright advocacy over journalistic principles.
In March, several top reporters and executives resigned, saying that Mr. Bannon’s insistence on articles favorable to Mr. Trump had compromised Mr. Breitbart’s ethos that nothing was sacred.
“He is someone who is prone to profanity-laced tirades at all hours of the night,” said Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart, who quit after complaining that the site had transformed into “Trump’s de facto ‘super PAC.’”
Ben Shapiro, a former editor at Breitbart, said Mr. Bannon’s language could be startling. “There are very few people who have dealt with Steve Bannon who have not been cursed at,” he said.
Tensions spiked after Michelle Fields, a Breitbart reporter, accused Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of shoving her at a rally. (Battery charges against Mr. Lewandowski were later dropped.) To the surprise of many on staff, Breitbart published an article that questioned portions of Ms. Fields’s account, a rare case of a publication publicly challenging its own reporter. She later quit.
Allies of Mr. Bannon say that he is simply a hard-charging manager with high expectations — a description echoed on Wednesday by Breitbart’s chief executive, Larry Solov, who in a memo to the staff described Mr. Bannon as “a huge piece of manpower.”
Mr. Marcus, the documentary filmmaker, said that it frequently fell to Mr. Bannon to rein in the excessive instincts of Breitbart News and its staff in meetings. “He was a voice of reason,” Mr. Marcus said of the time he spent inside the company, following Mr. Breitbart around. “Steve was the one saying, hey, maybe you want to dial that back a bit.”
Like Mr. Trump, who remains closely involved with his real estate business despite his candidacy, Mr. Bannon is not walking away from his pastimes.
A new documentary he directed, “Torchbearer,” which follows the “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson to the Parthenon and other famed locations, is scheduled to be released this fall.
The film may echo the bleaker themes of Mr. Trump’s campaign. “We discuss how empires rise and fall, and how they lose God in their societies,” said Mr. Bossie, of Citizens United, who is a producer.
Asked if Mr. Bannon could succeed as a campaign manager, typically the ultimate insider role, Mr. Bossie said that Mr. Bannon’s outsider status would be “a plus, not a minus.”
“This,” he added, “is the year of the outsider.”
Matt Flegenheimer, Jeremy W. Peters and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
[...] Long before [Steve Bannon] became the chief strategist of Donald Trump’s White House and the executive chairman of Breitbart News, Bannon was an investment banker. After a stint at Goldman Sachs, he launched his own firm, Bannon & Co., in 1990.
Fast forward a few years. Bannon was brought in to help Westinghouse Electric negotiate a minority stake acquisition in Castle Rock Entertainment — the producer of the iconic Jerry Seinfeld comedy — a person familiar with the deal told TheWrap.
“As often happened with Turner, when it came time to actually close the deal, Ted was short of cash,” Bannon told Bloomberg in 2015. “Westinghouse just wanted out. We told them, ‘You ought to take this deal. It’s a great deal.’ And they go, ‘If this is such a great deal, why don’t you defer some of your cash fee and keep an ownership stake in a package of TV rights?’”
And that is exactly what he did. Bannon and his team accepted a stake in the royalties of five shows under the Castle Rock banner, one of which was “Seinfeld,” which was in its third season at the time. Bannon’s involvement with Westinghouse was not disclosed to Castle Rock Parters at the time, who dealt directly with Turner in the 1992 sale.
“We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication,” Bannon said. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”
Exactly how much Bannon has earned from his stake in the show is not readily available, but consider this: the Financial Times reported in 2013 that “Seinfeld” had earned $3.1 billion in reruns. Even at one percent, that would mean Bannon & Co. would have made over $31 million since the show went off the air.
Bannon served as the CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and was recently named senior advisor and chief strategist to the Trump administration. He is a highly-regarded figure among the so-called alt-right for his views. [...]
Steve Bannon’s ex-screenwriting partner says we have Michael Moore to thank for the right-winger’s just-rolled-out-of-bed look.
Julia Jones, who worked with Bannon for nearly two decades, told TheWrap that Bannon – who has produced 18 films and directed nine – began sporting the disheveled look at the end of 2003 when he started his own film company, American Vantage Media. That’s a year after Moore made his Oscar-wnning documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” and just before the buzzy “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
The shift was noticeable, Jones said and Bannon was a vocal fan of Moore. “He used to be a spiffy dresser. Chinos, loafers without socks, it was very classic preppy,” she said. It was only after she saw pictures of him a few years after they stopped working together that she noticed a striking resemblance to Moore. “I thought, ‘What’s going on?’” Jones said. “He looked exactly like Michael Moore – down to the body type.”
But that wasn’t all Bannon may have learned from Moore, whose documentaries began veering more overtly into political territory in the early 2000s. On Friday The Washington Post published excerpts from a Bannon treatment for a documentary, “Islamic States of America,” which warns about the looming danger of Muslim extremists taking over America. The opening scene shows a flag waving above the Capitol – an Islamic flag.
Trump’s decision to appoint Bannon, a self-proclaimed nationalist with a vision of reshaping America’s policies, has raised protests from moderate Republicans and Democrats worried about his influence over a largely inexperienced president.
Jones is worried too, and described to TheWrap how she came to distance herself from her former collaborator.
“He used to say that he wanted to be the Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP,” Jones said, referring to the infamous director of Nazi propaganda films. “He was really into propaganda films.”
Bannon hasn’t been shy about his admiration for Riefenstahl, perhaps one of the world’s most notorious Nazi collaborators. In 2011, Bannon bragged to the Wall Street Journal that “people have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl.”
“I’m a student of Michael Moore’s films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl,” he added. “Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.”
Jones said she first became concerned when they began working on a 2004 Ronald Reagan documentary called, “In the Face of Evil.”
She said she grew “uncomfortable” when Bannon added a coda to the film, unbeknownst to her, warning about the threat of “the beast” over footage of Muslims praying and people jumping out of the World Trade Center on 9/11.
“He had taken the whole movie and flipped it so that basically Muslims were the new Nazis,” she said.
Jones said Bannon was “obsessed with the Holocaust as grave evil,” and often talked about the fact that “Jews weren’t the only victims,” though she insists he is not a Holocaust denier.
Last month, the Trump administration came under fire after a White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day failed to mention Jews. Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, insisted he did not regret the administration’s choice of words telling NBC’s Chuck Todd, “I mean, everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust including obviously, all of the Jewish people affected in the miserable genocide that occurred is something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad.”
Trump aide Hope Hicks responded to a CNN inquiry about the matter with a link to a Huffington Post article about “The Holocaust’s Forgotten Victims: The 5 Million Non-Jewish People Killed By The Nazis.”
Jones said the statement is constant with Bannon’s views during the time.
“He used to talk about Jews as an afterthought,” Jones said. “He would always say that there were other victims too, and not just Jews,” adding, “I doubt Trump has a clue about this. That’s all Bannon.”
Jones eventually moved to Massachusetts where she continued doing some work for Bannon remotely. The last thing they co-wrote was a 2008 screenplay adaptation of a best-selling book called “Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust.” [...]
Senior White House strategist Stephen Bannon reportedly began work in 2005 on a movie that featured Nazi aspirations for racial purity, and sought backing from Mel Gibson.
An 11-page outline for the film that was never made, titled “The Singularity: Resistance Is Futile” was obtained by The Daily Beast according to a report Thursday. The website says that an alternate title being considered was “The Harvest of the Damned.”
Although the outline was never finished and it is unclear what its intended message was, the Daily Beast describes it as a “story in which mankind’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge and scientific advancement has led to horrific, fascist atrocities and forced sterilization, drawing a direct line between those atrocities and modern bio-technology.”
One two-minute section of the movie entitled “The Commercial Eugenics Civilization” was to be about “Blood purity and the Nazis — the perfectibility of life through a human-controlled elite race that will bring about a better world.”
Before joining Trump’s campaign last summer, Bannon ran Breitbart News, a platform for the “alt-right,” a loose-knit alliance that includes within it anti-Semites as well as right-wing Jews. Prior to entering the news world Bannon worked in Hollywood, making right-wing films such as “In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed.”
His former writing partner and close friend, Julia Jones, confirmed to the Daily Beast that she had done research for a movie about eugenics. She also told the news outlet that Bannon claimed to have met with Gibson, telling her that the star known for his drunken anti-Semitic outburst would put up the money for the film.
Bannon made several right-wing documentaries in the 2000s.
Last week, the Washington Post reported on his role in a 2007 proposal for a documentary that was never made called “The Islamic States of America.” It would be comprised of interviews of people who, like Bannon, believe that the threat posed to the West is broader than Islamist extremist terrorists, embracing an array of Muslim advocacy groups.
In it, Bannon described the “American Jewish community” as among unwitting “enablers” of jihad.
The proposal also mentions “front groups and disingenuous Muslim Americans who preach reconciliation and dialogue in the open but, behind the scenes, advocate hatred and contempt for the West.”
BY PAUL BOND / MAY 8, 2017 6:00AM / Saved as PDF: [HM00DR][GDrive]
President Donald Trump’s controversial chief strategist Steve Bannonhas ties to Hollywood, as has been widely reported, including a lucrative stake in the TV sitcom Seinfeld. But few, if any, who crossed paths with Bannon during his stint in the entertainment industry have been willing to speak candidly and on the record about him.
Jeff Kwatinetz, Bannon’s former Hollywood business partner, now says he can’t take it anymore so he has decided to go on the record for the first time with The Hollywood Reporter. In a Q&A, the founder of the talent management and TV production company The Firm says some surprising things about one of the most polarizing figures in politics. Bannon was with The Firm in 2002 and 2003 when it purchased Michael Ovitz’s powerful Artist Management Group.
2017 (Aug 18)
https://time.com/4904066/steve-bannon-north-korea-military-solution/
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By Aric JenkinsAugust 16, 2017 8:46 PM EDT
W
hite House chief strategist Steve Bannon does not believe there is a military solution to North Korea in regards to its nuclear weapons program.
Bannon on Tuesday called journalist Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor of left-wing publication The American Prospect, telling him to “forget” the possibility of warfare with North Korea during a wide-ranging interview.
“There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it,” Bannon said. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
Bannon’s comments appeared to contradict President Donald Trump’s comments last week in which he warned that North Korea would “be met with fire and the fury like the world has never seen” should it continue to threaten the United States.
Bannon added that the U.S. is at “economic war with China,” though he would consider a deal with China to remove American troops from the Korean peninsula in exchange for China freezing North Korea’s nuclear program. But since Bannon feels such an agreement would be unlikely, he has been campaigning for the Trump administration to take a stricter stance on trade with China.
“To me, the economic war with China is everything,” Bannon said. “And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”
Bannon is reportedly in danger of being fired by Trump, with the a number of advisors urging the President to fire him, according to the New York Times.
But during a press conference Tuesday, Trump called Bannon a “good man” before once again leaving the door open for speculation.
“We’ll see what happens with Mr. Bannon,” the President said.
2017 (August 17)
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During Sunday night’s “60 Minutes,” former White House senior strategist Stephen K. Bannon was described by Charlie Rose as “a good Catholic.” How then, Rose wanted to know, does Bannon feel about church leaders criticizing President Trump for ending a program that allows nearly 800,000 undocumented young people to live and work in the United States?
“The Catholic Church has been terrible about this,” Bannon said. “The bishops have been terrible about this.”
Bannon, who left the White House last month and returned to run the conservative website Breitbart, charged that Catholic leaders, who have been among the most vocal critics of the Trump administration on matters of immigration, have been unable “to come to grips with the problems in the Church” and so “they need illegal aliens to fill the churches. That’s — it’s obvious on the face of it.”
Plus, he continued, the Catholic leaders “have an economic interest in unlimited immigration, unlimited illegal immigration.”
Rose interjected, “That’s a tough thing to say about your church.”
Bannon did not back down. “I totally respect the pope and I totally respect the Catholic bishops and cardinals on doctrine,” he said. “This is not about doctrine. This is about the sovereignty of a nation. And in that regard, they’re just another guy with an opinion.”
Bannon being described as “a good Catholic” may have surprised some viewers. He rarely discusses his faith life, though in 2015 he told Bloomberg News, “I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats.”
But according to Joshua Green, the Bloomberg political writer whose new book, “Devil’s Bargain,” offers a glimpse into Bannon’s life, Catholicism was a constant presence during his formative years.
He frequented Mass each Sunday with his family in Virginia, and he attended Catholic schools, graduating from Benedictine College Preparatory School, a Catholic military academy in Richmond.
When the Church stopped using Latin at during services in the 1960s, Bannon’s parents, Green writes, were not keen on the changes. A few decades later, though, the Church began allowing some churches to celebrate the old Mass and Bannon’s family found a traditionalist parish in Richmond and began going there.
Later, according to Green, Bannon embarked on a decade-long exploration of world religions, while serving in the Navy, which included a brief stint practicing Buddhism. But eventually he returned to Catholicism and it was during this time that he became enamored with the Catholic idea of subsidiarity, the notion that social issues should be addressed at the most local level possible, which continues to drive him.
“My sense is that Bannon’s politics is driven more by his religious views than I think most people understand,” Green said, noting that Bannon says he considers himself a practicing Catholic.
“He’s captivated by this idea that the world is in decline,” he said, “which seems to be partially rooted in some medieval variant of Catholicism.”
Austin Ruse, the president of the Center for Family & Human Rights, who has supported laws restricting LGBT rights, said Bannon “is greatly motivated and interested in the things of the faith,” though he is unsure if Bannon prays or attends Mass regularly.
“I refer to him as a nonpracticing orthodox Catholic,” Ruse said, conceding the phrase is a bit of an oxymoron. “Some people think that’s not a possible thing to be,” he said, but he defined it as “somebody who for whatever reason is not practicing the faith but who does not dissent from any of its teachings.” He said he wonders if Bannon’s three divorces had put distance between him and the Church, which prohibits divorce and remarriage.
Bannon at one point had accepted an invitation to attend a Catholic spiritual retreat with Breitbart editor in chief Alex Marlow, though plans were eventually scrapped due to schedule issues, Ruse said.
A regular contributor to Breitbart, Ruse convinced Bannon to broadcast his Breitbart radio show from Rome during the 2014 canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. For two days, the two men interviewed Catholic thinkers, priests and theologians.
At that point, Pope Francis was about a year into his papacy, well along in his quest to pivot the Church’s public image away from opposition abortion and same-sex marriage toward promoting issues such as immigration, economic inequality and climate change.
During that visit to Rome, Bannon met with Cardinal Raymond Burke, a conservative critic of Pope Francis who, like Bannon, has been critical of Islam.
“That was actually the point that he determined that he wanted to have a Rome bureau,” Ruse said.
To anchor Breitbart’s Rome coverage, Bannon turned to Thomas D. Williams, a former Catholic priest who has known Bannon since 2003, when the pair met through a mutual friend who was working on “The Passion of the Christ.” (Bannon previously worked as a movie producer. A 2005 article in the New York Times described him as a “Roman Catholic filmmaker, conservative-film financier, Washington networker and Hollywood deal-chaser.”)
Williams, who had been a member of a conservative religious order that was disciplined by the Vatican after revelations that its founder had sexually abused young men, described Bannon as “a believing Catholic. I don’t know what his practice is.”
But, Williams said, Bannon is an adherent of a maxim popular at Breitbart — that politics is downstream of culture — “and at the heart of culture is morality, religion, faith, convictions, what people believe, worldviews.”
A few months after Bannon traveled to the Vatican for the canonization ceremony, he gave a speech via video feed to the Institute for Human Dignity, a conservative interfaith group based in Rome. During that speech, the transcript of which was first made public by BuzzFeed News, Bannon laid out his case that society is reeling from “a crisis both of our church, a crisis of our faith, a crisis of the West, a crisis of capitalism.”
While Bannon was able to secure a meeting with Burke, the conservative cardinal critical of the pope, he has powerful critics in the Vatican. He was recently called out by two close associates of Pope Francis in an article published by an Italian Catholic journal critical of an alliance between U.S. Catholics and evangelicals. The article, which was vetted by the Vatican, described Bannon as a “supporter of an apocalyptic geopolitics.”
Like much of the content published under Bannon, Breitbart’s coverage of the Catholic Church is aimed at bolstering conservative ideas and undercutting progressive figures — including Pope Francis. (Though Williams says he usually just reports what the pope says and allows readers to read into it what they will. “I’m sure many Breitbart readers take that in a negative way, but it’s simply what the pope is saying or doing,” he said.)
Bannon’s accusations that the Catholic Church advocates for immigrants out of self-interest are not new. Breitbart has published articles in the past making similar accusations and Bannon himself said the same in 2016.
Polls show that Catholics in the United States tend to mirror the opinions of most Americans when it comes to questions of immigration, albeit with big gaps between white and Hispanic Catholics. But some of Bannon’s Catholic supporters agree with his assessment that the U.S. church is too involved with the government when it comes to politics.
“I don’t think that the [bishops are] doing immigration because of the money,” said Benjamin Harnwell, the head of the organization that hosted Bannon’s 2014 video presentation in Rome. “Though that said, it’s absolutely true that the Catholic Church in the states receives a lot of money for its refugee program — a lot of money. What Steve said is legitimate to ask in that situation, whether it’s still pure. I think he’s made a good point. I’m glad he said it.”
“It is big business,” he continued. “If the Catholic Church wants to avoid questions being asked of its motives, perhaps a period of introspection would be helpful.”
But Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York called the claims “preposterous and rather insulting.”
“The Bible is so clear, so clear, that to treat the immigrant with dignity and respect, to make sure that society is just in its treatment of the immigrant is [a] biblical mandate,” he said on the Catholic Channel last week after CBS released a clip of Bannon’s comments.
A spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops also weighed in.
“Our pro-immigration stance is based on fidelity to God’s word and honors the American dream,” James L. Rogers, chief communications officer for the organization, said in a Sept. 7 statement. “For anyone to suggest that it is out of sordid motives of statistics or financial gain is outrageous and insulting.”
One of Bannon’s longtime friends is the Rev. Jonathan Morris, a priest in New York City and a contributor to Fox News. Last November, when Trump announced that Bannon would be one of his senior advisers, some of Bannon’s critics protested, pointing to articles published on Breitbart under his watch that they said were racist and anti-Semitic. At the time, Morris tweeted, “I’ve known Steve Bannon as a close friend for nearly fifteen years. I’ve never heard or seen a racist word or action from him.”
But when it came to Bannon’s “60 Minutes” comments, Morris was more critical.
“Steve Bannon is my good friend, but he is very wrong on this,” Morris wrote on his Facebook page. “Parishes with big Hispanic first-generation immigrant congregations are not rich parishes. Just the opposite. In fact, many parishes like my own spend more money taking care of immigrant populations than we get from them.”
The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor at large at America magazine, said Bannon’s assertion that the positions Catholic bishops take on immigration is not doctrine and that they are “just another guy with an opinion” is not true.
“Welcoming the stranger is Catholic doctrine,” Martin said, noting that papal encyclicals, the highest form of Catholic teaching, have repeatedly promulgated this part of the faith. “It also comes from the lips of Jesus himself, the foundation of Catholic doctrine.”
“Bishops are not just another group of guys,” he said. “They speak with the authority that comes by the virtue of their offices, so that’s doctrine too.”
As for Bannon’s assertion that the Church is invested in immigration for the money, Martin said he finds the charge “a cross between ridiculous and appalling.”
“Did Jesus help people because he wanted them to give him money?” he asked. “We help people who are struggling because it’s what Jesus asked us to do.”
WASHINGTON — The multiplying tentacles of the Harvey Weinstein sex abuse scandal have touched a former president, a former presidential candidate and now a former presidential adviser.
Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House chief strategist and current head of Breitbart News, is the latest politico touched by the scandal. Bannon, whose website has hammered Democrats for accepting Weinstein’s political donations, himself profited from a relationship with the movie mogul, in an ill-fated joint venture more than a decade ago.
Bannon served as chairman of a small company that distributed DVDs and home videos, and went into business in 2005 with The Weinstein Co., led by Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob. The Weinsteins became 70 percent owners of the now defunct venture, Genius Products.
The connection highlights the breadth of a scandal that has tainted an array of leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who were friendly with Weinstein and accepted his campaign donations.
Clinton and Obama have both issued statements denouncing Weinstein’s actions in the wake of The New York Times’ reporting about his serial sexual assaults on women. Other leading Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have announced plans to donate his campaign contributions to charities.
Bannon was not immediately available to comment, according to a spokeswoman.
The ties to Weinstein open Bannon up to charges of hypocrisy given Breitbart’s intense focus on the scandal and its political fallout. In recent days the site has featured a blog with live updates on the story; headlines calling out Obama, Clinton and top Democrats for their ties to the producer; and stories attacking other news outlets for failing to cover the scandal with the same ferocity as Breitbart.
On Tuesday, The New Yorker reported new allegations of rape, which Weinstein has denied. Judy Woodruff talks to Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker to learn more about the revelations.
The connection between Bannon and Weinstein began more than a decade ago when Bannon, who had been a Goldman Sachs banker, was dabbling in Hollywood investments. Transcripts of investor conference calls at the time show Bannon enthusing about the business opportunities with the Weinsteins.
“We are extremely honored to be in business with the new Weinstein Company,” Bannon told investors in one such call, declaring that “the Weinsteins have the most impressive track record in the film industry” and that “Bob and Harvey are two of the most prolific studio heads in the history of Hollywood.”
Ultimately, Genius Products ended up in bankruptcy in 2011, but not before Bannon reported substantial revenues from the venture. His company Bannon Strategic Advisers had a consulting agreement worth $500,000 with Genius Products in 2006, and he was awarded bonuses of more than $200,000, according to SEC filings. Bannon also was awarded stock options in 2005 that were valued at well over $1 million at the time.
Weinstein has been fired as co-chairman from The Weinstein Co. The company’s board of directors has strongly denied that it knew about Weinstein’s behavior, which allegedly stretched back decades.
Goldman Sachs has written down to zero the value of its stake in the Weinstein Company, the movie studio whose co-chairman Harvey Weinstein stepped down last month following sexual assault allegations, a person familiar with the matter said Monday.
Goldman Sachs’ move comes as the Weinstein Company looks for fresh financing after more than 50 women claimed that Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them over the past three decades.
Weinstein has denied having non-consensual sex with anyone. Reuters has been unable to independently confirm any of the allegations.
Last month, Goldman Sachs said it was trying to find a buyer for its stake in the Weinstein Company. A Goldman Sachs spokesman had said at the time that the bank valued the stake at less than $1 million.
The source did not disclose how much of the Weinstein Company Goldman Sachs owns, but described the stake as small. He asked not to be identified because the bank has not publicly released its latest valuation.
A Weinstein Company spokeswoman did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment.
One of the Weinstein Company’s lenders, AI International Holdings Limited, an affiliate of billionaire Len Blavatnik’s industrial group Access Industries, filed a lawsuit last Friday in New York State Supreme Court demanding immediate repayment of its approximately $44 million loan.
Referring to the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, AI International stated in court papers that his actions and his departure from the company have “left [the business] in shambles” and “exposed to potentially massive liabilities [that] have severely, if not fatally, damaged its standing in the marketplace.”
A spokeswoman for Harvey Weinstein declined to comment.
The Weinstein Company’s other lenders include Bank of America and MUFG Union Bank N.A., according to the lawsuit. They did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Weinstein Company’s board of directors has been receiving advice from investment bank Moelis & Co. on its efforts to raise cash, including by potentially selling assets and finding a rescue loan, sources have previously told Reuters. A Moelis spokeswoman declined to comment.
Investment firm Fortress Investment Group was considering lending to the film and TV studio, but those talks ended without a deal last week, according to another person familiar with the matter. Fortress would consider providing the Weinstein Company with funding to help it through a bankruptcy process, if it came to that, the person said.
A Fortress spokesman declined to comment.
The Weinstein Company’s lenders have hired investment bank Houlihan Lokey for financial advice in a potential restructuring, a source close to that situation said.
The Weinstein Company has been one of Hollywood’s most influential forces since its launch in October 2005 and has produced and distributed films including “The King’s Speech” and “Silver Linings Playbook.”
By Chris Lefkow / 3 January 2018, 8:23 pm / Saved as PDF : [HM00E7][GDrive]
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has described a meeting between President Donald Trump’s son Don Jr. and a Russian lawyer during the 2016 presidential election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” The Guardian reported Wednesday.
Bannon made the scathing comments in a book to be published next week — the “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by journalist Michael Wolff, the newspaper said.
“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon reportedly said.
Bannon, who left the White House in August, was also quoted as saying that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election will focus on money laundering.
Bannon, an executive with right-wing news outlet Breitbart News, joined Trump’s White House bid two months after the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Trump campaign officials.
Besides Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended the meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
Donald Trump Jr. took the meeting with the Russian lawyer after an intermediary promised material that would incriminate Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers,” Bannon was quoted as saying in the book. “They didn’t have any lawyers.
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” he said.
The investigation by Mueller, a former FBI director, is looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to get him elected — a charge the president has repeatedly and vehemently denied.
Trump said in an interview with The New York Times last week that he expected the Mueller probe to be “fair” and Donald Trump Jr. has denied any wrongdoing.
Manafort and a business associate have been indicted on money laundering charges unrelated to the election campaign. Trump’s former national security adviser Mike Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians.
Using a hurricane metaphor, The Guardian quoted Bannon as suggesting in the book that the White House was being complacent about the Mueller probe.
“They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five,” he said.
Bannon’s relations with Kushner were reportedly strained during their tenure at the White House.
And Bannon had particularly harsh comments in the book about the wealthy New York real estate developer who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka and serves as a senior adviser to the president.
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon said of the probe by special counsel Mueller. “This is all about money laundering.
“Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner… It’s as plain as a hair on your face,” he said.
“It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit… The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that.”
Since leaving the White House in August, Bannon has staked out some positions at odds with the Trump administration.
In the most notable break, he defied the president and backed a rival Republican candidate in a Senate race in the southern state of Alabama. Trump eventually changed his position and also supported Roy Moore, who lost.
Wolff, whose books include a biography of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, reportedly interviewed the president and more than 200 members of his inner circle and others for “Fire and Fury.”
2018 (Jan 23)
The Far Right
2018-01-23-vanityfair-com-far-right-party-mike-cernovich.pdf
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In the post Fire and Fury era, the battle for far-right hegemony has begun.
By Tina Nguyen
January 23, 2018
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/far-right-party-mike-cernovich
he thing about the movement formerly known as the alt right—a far-right subculture whose anarchic ideology is inseparable from the Internet—is that its inhabitants are, by and large, painfully, haltingly awkward. They could be neo-Nazis, gleeful that Donald Trump disparages immigrants and minorities; they could be Internet trolls who while away their evenings making anti-Semitic Pepe the Frog memes in MS Paint. They could spend their time angrily fighting with Black Lives Matter on Twitter or flooding a woman’s DMs with rape threats that they’ve rebranded as jokes (irony, after all, is a useful tool in the proto-fascist playbook). But for the most part, they’re computer-dependent outcasts who find social satisfaction in watching far-right celebrities rant on the Internet. With very few exceptions, many of the attendees at Mike Cernovich’s party last weekend would never have made it past the door on a normal Saturday at FREQ, a Hell’s Kitchen nightclub regularly reserved for electronica parties.
But they did last Saturday night, courtesy of the man known as Cerno. The former club child and lifestyle guru, whose strident views on masculinity (and Pizza-gate) inadvertently led him into the Trump-era political-media complex, now commands a following of Internet trolls who excuse his conspiracy-minded leanings as long as he picks vicious Twitter fights with mainstream celebrities and journalists. And though the Night for Freedom party had been planned long before Fire and Fury’s release, Cernovich’s MAGA-sphere was all too eager to fill the power vacuum left by Steve Bannon. Seven hundred troll-army members showed up to do so; middle-aged libertarian intellectuals, dressed in suits and spangled dresses, mingled with neckbeards in uncomfortable formal jackets; drunken Proud Boys screamed behind Gavin McInnes about the virtues of straight white men; and Gateway Pundit writer Lucian Wintrich’s spiffy metrosexual posse bitchily dished on people they considered traitors to the movement. Stefan Molyneux, the men’s-rights radio host, decided to come out for the bash—an event in itself, given his years as a recluse—and spent the entire evening being bombarded by the young white men who worship him. College Republicans were manning the door, and Michael Flynn Jr., Twitter’s favorite conspiracy theorist, whose alleged misdeeds might have facilitated his father’s decision to cooperate with the Robert Mueller probe, stood in awe of the talent by the stage (surrounded by other far-right types who in turn stared in awe at him).
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Sprinkled throughout the crowd were several paranoid, newly minted bitcoin millionaires who had been invited to party with the troll army for the first time. “There’s a lot of crypto here, people who are really influential and deep in the game,” said a middle-aged man standing next to the speakers, who refused to give me his name but offered his opinion that the financial industry is full of crooks. “This is about trolling the establishment and breaking it up,” he explained of the disparate crowd. “This is about triggering people, and social engineering, and stuff.”
As the far-right D.J. duo Milk N Cooks spun 90s hits, punctuated by Jack Posobiec performing spoken-word poetry by Johnny Cash, Cernovich drifted around the periphery of the dance floor, wearing a pale gray suit, greeting guests, and anxiously keeping an eye out for anything that screamed MAGA—an errant Nazi, a pro-Trump hat, a schlubby T-shirt with a slogan. Perhaps aware that suits would serve as a social lubricant for his protégées, he enforced a dress code—cocktail attire or business wear. (Coat check was required.) No one was allowed to get belligerent, and the guests, who had paid up to $300 to attend, got three free drinks with their tickets. (The sponsors, largely said bitcoin millionaires, had access to an open bar, and it showed.) There would be NO fighting—armed goons hired from Bo Dietl’s security firm would see to that—and as little drama as possible. A friend of Cernovich’s who owns a security firm volunteered background checks on attendees’ e-mails, even employing facial-recognition software to weed out uninvited members of the press or Antifa protesters.
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Before he became involved in the strange Internet world of MAGA, Cernovich told me, he was a party animal, constantly raging in nightclubs in Cabo and Vegas—a pursuit that would seemingly have bewildered the majority of A Night for Freedom guests. The event brought to mind a tame high-school prom, had that prom been populated by men’s-rights activists, cryptocurrency anarcho-capitalists, and Gorilla Mindset fanboys, and featured intense drunken jeering against identity politics, liberalism, and select members of the Fake News Media (whom Cernovich, in all his calculated generosity, had invited as well). The night’s only hiccup occurred when a BuzzFeed News reporter spotted recently announced Maryland Senate candidate Chelsea Manning. The N.S.A. whistleblower was hovering at the party’s edges having a drink, trying to remain off the record, and quietly talking to Internet provocateur Cassandra Fairbanks, a former liberal who’d drifted to the right. Her appearance, tweeted out by Charlie Warzel, led to a heated online debate over whether she was attending as a guest, or whether she’d crashed the event and was trying to cover her tracks.
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Manning and her liberal supporters insisted that she’d crashed, with one pointing to McInnes’s speech mocking trans people as proof that she’d never go to something like this. But two people in Cernovich’s camp told me that Manning had willingly showed up, and, weirdly enough, had been welcomed. “I just need a picture that will show what it was like,” Posobiec said later. “Just to show everyone that yes, she was here, and yes, everything was fine, and cool, and that was it. I didn’t even notice when she left. It was almost a non-event.” (Never mind Manning, many attendees insisted to me. The night’s major news was that a 56-year-old man had been assaulted by the handful of Antifa protesters who’d shown up outside the club, beaten severely enough that he was sent to the hospital, and why wasn’t anyone covering that?)
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After a year that included Charlottesville and the near election of Roy Moore, the event seemed designed to be as inoffensive as possible, a bonding experience that swept the national turmoil—and their own role in bringing it about—under the rug. Fringe freaks having a normal night in New York City: that was the weirdest part.
Cernovich’s party could not have come at a more complicated time. The far right is still reeling from a string of high-profile failures. Weeks earlier, Steve Bannon, their most high-profile ambassador to mainstream America, had been branded a traitor by Trump and drummed out of Breitbart by its shareholders. (It didn’t matter, several people at the party thought; Breitbart wasn’t that relevant to them anyway.) Prior to that, Milo Yiannopoulos, its culture-war enfant terrible, had crashed in a spectacular fashion: he’d been dismissed from mainstream consideration for his jokes about pedophilia, then scorned by the far right after his much-hyped Free Speech Week, his own attempt at a nationalist bacchanalia, failed miserably.
Absent Bannon and his protégé, Cernovich was the last person on the right with the influence to pull off a convocation of trolls. The reclusive Molyneux had only agreed to come, Cerno said, because he was the host; Wintrich, Ali Akbar, Posobiec, and the rest had all eagerly followed him to New York, hoping to score a speaking slot. But when the venues he’d booked began to pull out less than two days before the party, his own reputation was thrown into limbo. It was one thing for his foray into mainstream media, bolstered by the takedown of John Conyers, to die after he promoted a document falsely accusing Chuck Schumer of sexual harassment. It would be another if he let down 700 people, many of whom had traveled across the country to attend, and embarrassed himself in the eyes of the far right. “If he couldn’t find a venue, he could have scored a political victory and held a happy hour,” said Akbar, one of the speakers at the event. “But he wanted a cultural victory.”
An attendee poses with Mike Cernovich while holding his book Gorilla Mindset.
By Andrew Kelly/Reuters.
When the first venue canceled one day before the party, Cernovich immediately pulled out his phone and began streaming his furious walk down the halls of Jack Studios in Chelsea, toting his infant daughter and venting to his fan base about how he was “set up” and the owners were suppressing his speech. But underneath the facade, he was terrified. After the stream ended and he left Jack Studios, trailed by a documentary crew from The Atlantic, he stumbled onto the pavement and began dry heaving.
When the second venue canceled the next morning, a desperate Cernovich called in every single favor he could muster to find some venue, any venue, to make the event happen. His crew delivered. Akbar told me that he’d called “every rich Republican woman in Manhattan,” while Posobiec tried shaking down his contacts to get to the far right’s own prince and Manhattan real-estate mogul, Donald Trump Jr. (he never heard back). The caterers, whom he’d already paid $45,000, kept calling him from Long Island, asking exactly where the party would be. “Just start driving towards the city,” Cernovich recalled saying to them. In the end, it took $20,000 in cash, which Cernovich withdrew from a Wells Fargo account and delivered to the owners of FREQ, a camera crew filming him the entire time.
“Everyone wanted me to fail. And that’s why failure wasn’t an option,” Cernovich told me later, referring to the mob of journalists and Internet foes who laughed at his travails as they unfolded. “If this event hadn’t happened, it would have destroyed—people would have understood and forgave me, but I don’t want people to understand and forgive me. I want people to know that if I’m gonna show up and make something happen, we’re going to make it happen. I don’t want forgiveness.”
While the far right celebrated its Night for Freedom, more profound questions loomed over Cernovich and his compatriots regarding the future of the movement. With Bannon in the White House, and then back at Breitbart, the Internet’s far-right misfits had a sense of organization, marching orders, and, most important, a vision for their political ascendance in the Trump era. Now, they are once again searching for meaning, and leadership, on the periphery of power. At one point last year, Cernovich had planned to launch a super PAC, along with two of his close allies, Jeff Giesea and Posobiec, to channel the energy of his online fan-base into a real-world political organization. Trump, after all, had elevated their station. Two months later, they shut it down, writing in a statement that they were too busy with other projects to see it through. On Saturday night, MAGAworld settled for a bar mitzvah, instead.
“Mike's branding—and his on and off attempt to pivot into mainstream respectability—depend on regular doses of media attention,” explained Will Sommer, the campaign editor for The Hill and the author of the Right Richter newsletter, noting some of Cernovich’s recent setbacks. “The problem is that, judging by the event's speeches, plenty of the leading New Right personalities aren't ready for Fox News, much less the mainstream media. Flanked by Proud Boys, Gavin McInnes went on his vile rant against trans people. Mike himself kept recurring to his obsession with supposed global pedophile networks—not exactly the stuff that gets the party going!”
Cernovich himself was more upbeat, as were many of the party’s attendees. As he was about to fly back to California, Cernovich told me that his “proof of concept” had worked; that there was a demand for these events, and that he and his silent partner had even more ambitious plans. His next party will be in D.C., on the same day as Reaganpalooza, CPAC’s hottest after-party hosted by college-aged right-wing activists. Or, as Cernovich called it, “the most boring party.”
“Not everybody is a party boy or was a party boy like I was,” he conceded. “But that’s the idea. I want people to know we throw real parties. We don’t need more boring libertarian or conservative conferences.”
By Chris Matthews / Published: April 25, 2019 at 3:09 p.m. ET / Saved as PDF : [HW00DT][GDrive]
Mentioned : Stephen Kevin Bannon (born 1953) / James Kyle Bass (born 1969)
Hedge-fund manager [James Kyle Bass (born 1969)] teamed up with former Trump administration adviser [Stephen Kevin Bannon (born 1953] to “raise awareness” about what they describe as an economic war launched by a “radical cadre” within the Chinese Communist Party against the United States.
At a conference in New York and in an interview with CNBC, the two argued that the Chinese government has engaged in a systematic effort to undermine U.S. economic power and that Wall Street banks and the leaders of large, multinational U.S. corporations have been aiding the Chinese in this effort.
“The entire operation of the Chinese Communist Party and what they’re running in China is being funded by Wall Street,” Bannon said. “Corporate America today is the lobbying arm of the Chinese Communist Party and Wall Street is its investor relations department.”
Bass concurred, telling CNBC that American multinational firms have been fighting the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul trade relations with China, by protesting the use of tariffs and lobbying against recent legislation to expand the U.S. government’s ability to block Chinese investment in U.S. firms or assets on national security grounds.
“If you look behind the scenes its corporate America pushing Trump to do a [trade] deal,” Bass told CNBC. “And it’s corporate American chieftains that have their biggest businesses, let’s say most growth, coming out of China. And China plays that card. They play it better than anybody else. They open a market to very specific people to basically court influence with that person and going to — into the presidential office to actually change policy.”
While [Stephen Kevin Bannon (born 1953] and [James Kyle Bass (born 1969)] promoted the idea that Americans should fear Chinese economic policy, Bass in particular also argued Thursday, as he did in his first investor letter in three years this week, that the Chinese and Hong Kong economies are nearing a crisis point.
“Hong Kong currently sits atop one of the largest financial time bombs in history,” Bass said in the letter, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (paywall).
Bass, who made his name and fortune by betting on the subprime mortgage crisis through his hedge fund, Hayman Capital Management, believes there is a large economic bubble forming in Hong Kong, as evidenced by soaring real-estate prices, rising household debt levels and a banking sector that is nearly nine times the size of the country’s GDP — a similar ratio to that of Iceland before its financial system collapsed during the 2008 crisis.
Bass argued that the Chinese government has papered over weakness in its own economy by issuing debt to finance economically inefficient investments, and that some of this stimulus money has flowed into Hong Kong, fueling asset bubbles and forcing interest rates lower, making it attractive for Hong Kong investors to sell Hong Kong dollars to buy higher-yielding U.S. assets.
This in turn has forced the Hong Kong Financial Authority to spend 80% of its foreign reserves maintaining a fixed exchange rate of 7.85 Hong Kong Dollars to one U.S. dollar, Bass said.
[James Kyle Bass (born 1969)] has lost money in recent years betting against Asian economies, with his fund suffering a 17% decline in 2017 after a recovery in the value of the Chinese yuan soured his short bets on Asian currencies, the Journal report said.
Trade negotiations between the U.S. and China continue, with the next round of talks slated to begin April 30 in Beijing, followed by a another round starting on May 8 in Washington. On Wednesday, President Trump said, “we’re doing well on trade, we’re doing well with China’ in reference to the negotiations, echoing the positive tone other administration officials have taken in recent weeks regarding the talks. Nevertheless, few concrete details have emerged on what have been seen as key sticking points toward reaching a deal, like rules surrounding intellectual property protection and mechanisms to force China to adhere to a future agreement.
Bass said at the conference Thursday that China’s vulnerability puts the U.S. is in the perfect position to keep up diplomatic pressure on Beijing to reduce state subsidies to its businesses, crack down on theft of intellectual property belonging to U.S. corporations, and force the Chinese government to adopt a Western-style rule-of-law system that would create a fair playing field between U.S. companies and Chinese rivals.
“We have them exactly where we want them,” Bass said.
U.S. v. Jeffrey Epstein indictment[2]
On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey on sex trafficking charges.
https://fortune.com/2019/08/10/jeffrey-epstein-dies-of-apparent-suicide/
Note - learn more about in
by Sean Illing / Updated Feb 6, 2020 at 9:27 AM EST / Saved as PDF : [HM00DX][GDrive]
On Wednesday, the Senate voted to acquit President Trump of charges of abuse of power and obstruction of justice.
Despite all the incontrovertible facts at the center of this story, it was always inevitable that this process would change very few minds. No matter how clear a case the Democrats made, it was always highly likely that no single version of the truth was ever going to be accepted.
This fact underscores a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship — some people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.
But there’s another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times piece, “people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake, and fact.” This is partly why an earth-shattering historical event like a president’s impeachment did very little to move public opinion.
The core challenge we’re facing today is information saturation and a hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle are too much for anyone to process.
One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out. After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat into tribal allegiances. There’s Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and pretty much everyone knows which side they’re on. So you stick to the places that feed you the information you most want to hear.
The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.
I call this “manufactured” because it’s the consequence of a deliberate strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon reportedly said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
This idea isn’t new, but Bannon articulated it about as well as anyone can. The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the democratic process.
What we’re facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn’t really possible until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn’t achievable.
Bannon’s political objective is clear. As he explained in a 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference talk, he sees Trump as a stick of dynamite with which to blow up the status quo. So “flooding the zone” is a means to that end. But more generally, creating widespread cynicism about the truth and the institutions charged with unearthing it erodes the very foundation of liberal democracy. And the strategy is working.
For most of recent history, the goal of propaganda was to reinforce a consistent narrative. But zone-flooding takes a different approach: It seeks to disorient audiences with an avalanche of competing stories.
And it produces a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search. The fact that 60 percent of Americans say they encounter conflicting reports about the same event is an example of what I mean. In the face of such confusion, it’s not surprising that less than half the country trusts what they read in the press.
Bannon articulated the zone-flooding philosophy well, but he did not invent it. In our time, it was pioneered by Vladimir Putin in post-Soviet Russia. Putin uses the media to engineer a fog of disinformation, producing just enough distrust to ensure that the public can never mobilize around a coherent narrative.
In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”
One major reason for the strategy’s success, both in the US and Russia, is that it coincided with a moment when the technological and political conditions were in place for it to thrive. Media fragmentation, the explosion of the internet, political polarization, curated timelines, and echo chambers — all of this allows a “flood the zone with shit” strategy to work.
The role of “gatekeeping” institutions has also changed significantly. Before the internet and social media, most people got their news from a handful of newspapers and TV networks. These institutions functioned like referees, calling out lies, fact-checking claims, and so on. And they had the ability to control the flow of information and set the terms of the conversation.
Today, gatekeepers still matter in terms of setting a baseline for political knowledge, but there’s much more competition for clicks and audiences, and that alters the incentives for what’s declared newsworthy in the first place. At the same time, traditional media outlets remain committed to a set of norms that are ill adapted to the modern environment. The preference for objectivity in political coverage, in particular, is a problem.
As Joshua Green, who wrote a biography of Bannon, explained, Bannon’s lesson from the Clinton impeachment in the 1990s was that to shape the narrative, a story had to move beyond the right-wing echo chamber and into the mainstream media. That’s exactly what happened with the now-debunked Uranium One story that dogged Clinton from the beginning of her campaign — a story Bannon fed to the Times, knowing that the supposedly liberal paper would run with it because that’s what mainstream media news organizations do.
In this case, Bannon flooded the zone with a ridiculous story not necessarily to persuade the public that it was true (although surely plenty of people bought into it) but to create a cloud of corruption around Clinton. And the mainstream press, merely by reporting a story the way it always has, helped create that cloud.
You see this dynamic at work daily on cable news. Trump White House adviser Kellyanne Conway lies. She lies a lot. Yet CNN and MSNBC have shown zero hesitation in giving her a platform to lie because they see their job as giving government officials — even ones who lie — a platform.
Even if CNN or MSNBC debunk Conway’s lies, the damage will be done. Fox and right-wing media will amplify her and other falsehoods; armies on social media, bot and real, will, too (@realDonaldTrump will no doubt chime in). The mainstream press will be a step behind in debunking — and even the act of debunking will serve to amplify the lies.
UC Berkeley linguist George Lakoff calls this the “framing effect.” As Lakoff puts it, if you say “don’t think of an elephant,” you can’t help but think of an elephant. In other words, even if you reject an argument, merely repeating it cements the frame in people’s minds. Debunking it is still useful, of course, but there’s a cost to dignifying it in the first place.
There is some research that points to the utility of fact-checking. Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown that repeated exposure to fact-checking does tend to increase the accuracy of beliefs. But the issue with zone-flooding is an overabundance of news, which diminishes the importance of any individual story, no matter how big or damning.
In this environment, there are often too many things happening at once; it’s a constant game of whack-a-mole for journalists. And we know that false claims, if they’re repeated enough, become more plausible the more often they’re shared, something psychologists have called the “illusory truth” effect. Our brains, it turns out, tend to associate repetition with truthfulness. Some interesting new research, moreover, found that the more people encounter information the more likely they are to feel justified in spreading it, whether it’s true or not.
This all intersects with political polarization in troubling ways. One consequence of pervasive confusion about what’s happening is that people feel more comfortable siding with their political tribe. If everything’s up for grabs, and it’s hard to sift through the competing narratives to find the truth, then there’s nothing left but culture war politics. There’s “us” and “them,” and the possibility of persuasion is off the table.
It’s worth noting that this polarization is asymmetric. The left overwhelmingly receives its news from organizations like the New York Times, the Washington Post, or cable news networks like MSNBC or CNN. Some of the reporting is surely biased, and probably biased in favor of liberals, but it’s still (mostly) anchored to basic journalistic ethics.
As a recent book by three Harvard researchers explains, this just isn’t true of the right. American conservative media functions like a closed system, with Fox News at the center. Right-wing outlets are less tethered to conventional journalistic ethics and exist mostly to propagate the bullshit they produce.
All this has created an atmosphere that has helped Trump. The Trump administration was remarkably successful at muddying the waters on Ukraine and impeachment, and Republicans in Congress helped by parroting the administration’s talking points.
The fact is, Trump did what Democrats have accused him of doing. We know, with absolute certainty, that the president tried to get a foreign government to investigate a family member of one of his political rivals. And we know this because of the witnesses who testified before the House Intelligence Committee and because Trump’s own White House released a record of the call proving it.
Yet all the polling data we have suggests that public opinion on Trump and Ukraine basically held steady. Again, some of this is pure partisan recalcitrance. But there’s good reason to believe that the right’s muddying of the waters — making the story about Ukraine and Hunter Biden, pushing out conspiracy theories, repeatedly trumpeting Trump’s own version of events, etc. — played a role.
The issue is that the coverage of the trials, in both the mainstream press and right-wing outlets, ensured that these counternarratives are part of the public conversation. It added to the general atmosphere of doubt and confusion. And that’s why zone flooding presents a near-insoluble problem for the press.
The way impeachment played out underscores just how the new media ecosystem is a problem for our democracy.
It helps to think of zone-flooding less as a strategy deployed by a person or group and more as a natural consequence of the way media works.
We don’t need a master puppeteer pulling the media’s strings. The race for content, the need for clicks, is more than enough. Bannon or Conway can shake things up by feeding nonsense into the system.
Trump can dictate an entire news cycle with a few unhinged tweets or an absurd press conference. The media cycle is easily commandeered by misinformation, innuendo, and outrageous content. These are problems because of the norms that govern journalism and because the political economy of media makes it very hard to ignore or dispel bullshit stories. This is at the root of our nihilism problem, and a solution is nowhere in sight.
The instinct of the mainstream press has always been to conquer lies by exposing them. But it’s just not that simple anymore (if it ever was). There are too many claims to debunk and too many conflicting narratives. And the decision to cover something is a decision to amplify it and, in some cases, normalize it.
We probably need a paradigm shift in how the press covers politics. Nearly all of the incentives driving media militate against this kind of rethinking, however. And so we’re likely stuck with this problem for a very long time.
As is often the case, the diagnosis is much easier than the cure. But liberal democracy cannot function without a shared understanding of reality. As long as the zone is flooded with shit, that shared understanding is impossible.
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/what-do-steve-bannon-s-covid-supplements-gwyneth-paltrow-s-ncna1268190
May 21, 2021, 8:44 PM EDT
By Lynn Stuart Parramore
As Americans try to push past the pandemic, a tsunami of sketchy products and suspect regimens threaten our health — though likely the only thing
purge is our bank accounts. From Trump buddy Steve Bannon’s vitamin “defense pack” to Gwyneth Paltrow’s apparently exploding vagina-scented candles, ever more celebrities are using their star power to hawk the evidence-free, the ridiculous or the downright dangerous.
https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/jeffrey-epstein-new-interview-times-up-b1942041.html
Jeffrey Epstein gave a series of interviews on film in 2019 in which his interviewer said the financier and convicted sex trafficker was “engaging, not threatening … [not] at all creepy … a sympathetic figure”.
Perversion of Justice review: how Julie K Brown brought Jeffrey Epstein down
The interviewer was the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
Bannon, a hard-right political gadfly who chaired the Trump campaign in 2016, was a major source for Fire and Fury, Wolff’s huge bestseller about the first year of the Trump presidency.
He claimed instead he was making “a previously unannounced eight to ten-hour documentary” showing how Epstein’s “perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence”.
Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting sex from underage girls. He killed himself in custody in August 2019, awaiting trial on new sex-trafficking charges. His death has been the subject of multiple conspiracy theories from those who believe he was murdered, despite a medical examiner ruling he took his own life.
Wolff reportedly used transcripts of what Epstein appeared to think were practice interviews to verify what Bannon said during the interactions, but would not reveal his source. The journalist, who has become well known for his access to controversial figures such as Trump, also recounts an offer from Harvey Weinstein made during his rape trial to co-write an autobiography.
Wolff also told the paper Epstein “wanted me to write something about him – a kind of a book – though it wasn’t clear why”.
By SETH HETTENA / OCTOBER 18, 2021 / Saved as PDF : [HN02HK][GDrive]
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign, Jeffrey Epstein told associates something they would never forget: He was advising both Republicans and Democrats.
“He would say things like ‘Trump’s people were here this morning. Hillary’s people were here for lunch,’” a former Epstein associate tells Rolling Stone. Epstein “would claim he was impacting the campaign dramatically.” But he would never name names, and these meetings always took place behind closed doors.
Like many things Epstein said, it may have been a wild exaggeration with a kernel of truth. Years earlier, when Epstein’s influence was at its peak, former President Bill Clinton flew multiple times on his private plane and future President Donald Trump famously described him as a “terrific guy.”
There’s no evidence that Epstein’s connections to either president had survived the 2008 scandal that branded Epstein a sex offender — with one notable exception: Steve Bannon, the chairman of the Trump campaign and a White House strategist, was a frequent visitor to Epstein’s New York mansion.
A former Epstein associate, who spoke to Rolling Stone anonymously for fear of professional reprisal, recalled being introduced to Bannon at Epstein’s Manhattan home. “He was the main person that [Epstein] would brag about to literally everyone. It wasn’t a secret,” this person said. Epstein “loved having this ‘one famous person’ around that he would talk about and introduce to everyone. Almost like [he was] using Bannon to get more people to accept him. That’s my sense.”
Bannon did not respond to several messages left seeking comment. His spokesperson declined to comment on the record.
Although Epstein’s reputation was badly damaged after he spent 13 months in a Florida jail for soliciting sex from a teen, the conviction didn’t stop the flow of wealthy and famous people who flocked to his $77 million Upper East Side mansion. Behind the 15-foot oak front doors, Epstein played host to old friends like Wall Street billionaire Leon Black, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and new ones like Steve Bannon.
According to Too Famous, a new book by journalist Michael Wolff, Epstein and Bannon had been introduced in December 2017. The two men had bonded, in part, “out of a shared incredulity about Donald Trump,” Wolff writes. Bannon liked to compare notes with Epstein and “was often astonished by what Epstein knew.”
Why would the media-savvy Bannon run the risk of associating with a sex offender? Two Republican operatives who worked for Bannon offer an explanation. While reporting on MAGA world, and Bannon in particular, merits an extra degree of caution as it often involves unreliable sources with questionable motives, these independent accounts line up and point to an alluring thesis: Bannon was intrigued by Epstein’s reputed role as middleman for intelligence services in the United States and abroad.
One of the operatives, who spoke anonymously to discuss private conversations, asked Bannon in 2018 about reports that he was spotted entering Epstein’s mansion. Bannon admitted they had met and then said, cryptically, “Have you seen the Turkish currency?” which the employee took to mean that Epstein was somehow involved in the recent collapse of the Turkish lira. “He [Bannon] always insinuated that he was still working with the CIA, even when he was outside the White House, which is completely bullshit,” the former employee said. The Wall Street Journal and New York magazine reported that Epstein claimed to have a currency-trading business that earned tens of millions of dollars.
Charles Johnson, a conservative provocateur, worked with Bannon at Breitbart News, the right-wing website Bannon led for several years, and also got the impression that Bannon’s visits to Epstein involved the intelligence world. Johnson says that Bannon made several visits to Epstein’s New York mansion after he was ousted from the White House in August 2017. “He also offered to introduce me to him at one point,” Johnson tells Rolling Stone. (Johnson declined the offer.) “What I was told about that meeting by people close to Bannon was that he was trying to replace Epstein as a source for information from various intelligence networks. He saw Epstein as a rival or a partner but he wanted what Epstein had.” Johnson, who says he’s now a Biden supporter, said he has been cooperating with law-enforcement officials investigating Bannon.
Reports have circulated for years that Epstein had a foothold in the murky world of intelligence. Journalist Vicky Ward reported in Rolling Stone earlier this year that Epstein had dealings in the arms world in the 1980s that led to his work for multiple governments, including Israel’s. Epstein had been introduced to the Israelis by British publisher Robert Maxwell, who had done his own work for Israel. Epstein then began to gather compromising material on influential people, Ward reported. Before he died, Epstein told James Stewart, a columnist for The New York Times, that he collected dirt on powerful men.
Epstein’s ongoing friendship with Ehud Barak suggests that his high-level relationships with the Israeli leadership are still active. One of the places where Epstein may have been useful was Saudi Arabia. The former Epstein associate tells Rolling Stone that Epstein had close relations with the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia was one of the only places where Epstein would travel by himself — the source says obtaining a visa wasn’t easy and, until recently, Saudi Arabia did not welcome unmarried women. Epstein told the associate in 2018 that the Saudis were willing to pay him, although he was vague about what work he would be doing. A picture of Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman hung on the wall of Epstein’s home along with photos of Bill Clinton and Woody Allen.
Whatever Bannon’s purpose in meeting with Epstein, a former Trump adviser said she doubted that it involved women. Bannon, in her experience, was respectful to women, and she never even heard him comment on a woman’s looks. In some ways, the two men had much in common. Both Epstein and Bannon grew up in blue-collar homes and spent time on Wall Street. They were both prodigious collectors of information and gossip and had a knack for befriending wealthy and powerful people and getting them to finance their far-flung endeavors. “Bannon and Epstein, birds of a feather,” says Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime advisor (who has a long-standing beef with Bannon).
Bannon wasn’t the only member of Trump’s inner circle who knew Epstein, but he was the only one who was willing to risk being seen with Epstein after his 2008 conviction.
Not surprisingly, given the circles they traveled in, Trump and Epstein had been good friends for many years. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump told New York in 2002. The two later had a falling out, reportedly over a Palm Beach mansion they were vying to purchase. After Epstein’s arrest, Trump told the White House press corps he was “not a fan.”
In September, Bannon told The New York Times that he had recorded more than 15 hours of interviews with Epstein, and that he encouraged Epstein to tell his story to 60 Minutes. Bannon told the newspaper he was making a documentary to illustrate how Epstein’s “perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged, and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and his influence.”
But media reports suggest that Bannon himself was enjoying sponging off Epstein’s lavish lifestyle. Epstein’s French butler claimed that Bannon stayed at the convicted sex offender’s luxurious Paris apartment in the fall of 2018. “I was even his driver in Paris,” the butler, identified only as Gerard, told Franceinfo. (The former Epstein associate tells Rolling Stone that Epstein loaned his Paris apartment to multiple people as a favor.) The New York Post reported that Bannon was spotted entering Epstein’s New York mansion in September 2018.
And the claim that Bannon was filming a documentary was news to the former Epstein associate who shook the former Trump White House strategist’s hand. The associate said they never saw a camera and never heard Epstein mention a film. “I am surprised how quiet they kept it. Usually he would brag about it,” the former Epstein associate says. “That was just his nature to boast.”
Every relationship involves a give-and-take, and this was no exception. For Epstein, Bannon conferred some legitimacy in a political world that wanted to nothing to do with him; it was a name Epstein could drop that would show that he was still a player, notwithstanding his sordid past. Epstein proudly showed off his new friend, inviting James Stewart, the New York Times columnist, to dinner with Bannon. (Stewart declined and Bannon says he didn’t attend.) Bannon phoned in to a discussion on how to rehabilitate Epstein’s image with Ehud Barak and attorney Reid Weingarten, according to Michael Wolff.
Epstein also introduced Bannon to his patron Leon Black, the Wall Street billionaire who helped finance Epstein’s lifestyle and was a frequent guest at Epstein’s mansion. Epstein’s former associate tells Rolling Stone that Black met Bannon during a breakfast at Epstein’s mansion. (Black’s spokesman disputed this, calling reports of such a meeting “completely inaccurate” and declining further comment.) However, in his 2018 testimony to the Senate intelligence committee in its voluminous investigation of Russian election interference, Black said that he and Bannon shared a “common friend” who had introduced them over breakfast.
Black, a founder of the private-equity giant Apollo Global Management, has since joined the list of people who have paid a severe reputational cost for associating with Epstein. Black left Apollo Global after an investigation by the law firm Dechert revealed that he had paid Epstein a whopping $158 million between 2012 and 2017 for financial advice. In a phrase that underscored Black’s flawed judgment, the Dechert report notes that “Black viewed Epstein as a confirmed bachelor with eclectic tastes, who often employed attractive women.”
Black had known Epstein since the 1990s, when Epstein was still partying with Trump and Black flew to Moscow to do a real estate deal with the future president. After Epstein’s arrest, Black told investors that he had made a “terrible mistake” when he decided to give him a second chance.
Others who paid a similar price include Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose friendship with Epstein reportedly played a role in the collapse of his marriage. Britain’s Prince Andrew stepped back from public life after he faced questions about why he visited Epstein after his 2008 conviction. Even those whose associations were more fleeting have paid a price for having their names linked time with Epstein.
As for Bannon, arrested last year (and later pardoned) for defrauding donors out of $1 million and now facing contempt charges for stonewalling an investigation into his role in the January 6th insurrection, his relationship with Epstein lines up with everything we know about his character and record.
In recent years, Bannon has become a close to Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese billionaire living in New York who has been locked in a dispute with his homeland. Guo has accused Chinese Communist Party officials of corruption; China has accused him of bribery, fraud, and blackmail. At the same time, Guo has been accused by one of his former business partners and a Chinese media star of, among other things, sexual blackmail. According to a lawsuit filed in New York and reports in Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Guo allegedly used prostitutes and hidden cameras to compromise powerful figures as a means of clout and control. A message sent to Guo’s representative seeking comment was not returned.
Just as he helped elevate Epstein’s status, Bannon has attempted to legitimize Guo. He has served on the boards of companies and nonprofits linked to Guo, some of which are reportedly under federal investigation. He had been living on Guo’s yacht when he was arrested last year for defrauding donors to a group trying to build Trump’s border wall.
Billionaires with scandal and nasty allegations swirling around them seem to be the company Bannon likes to keep.
The House of Representatives voted to hold Trump administration adviser Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress on Thursday for defying a congressional subpoena by the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol.
The vote fell largely along party lines: 229-202, with nine Republicans voting with Democrats. Select committee Chair Bennie Thompson, DMiss., said in debate ahead of the vote that allowing Bannon to ignore their subpoena would set a dangerous precedent.
"To my colleagues who choose to vote against enforcing the subpoena, you are saying to all future men and women who are called before this body that they can ignore a subpoena from Congress without consequence," he said. "The consequences of that vote won't be limited to this investigation and this subpoena alone. Your vote will be given serious long-lasting damage to Congress. And that, in turn, will do serious damage to our country which we all love dearly."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed the resolution shortly after the House vote and tweeted out a photo.
Her office told ABC News the referral has now been formally transmitted to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. The Justice Department will now decide whether to prosecute Bannon.
The select committee, a nine-member panel, voted unanimously Tuesday evening to send a report recommending contempt charges to the full House.
GOP Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill, the two Republicans who sit on the committee, voted with all Democrats to advance to debate on Thursday. House GOP leaders had whipped their members to vote "no." But Democrats argued on the House floor that lawmakers have a Constitutional responsibility of oversight.
"Mr. Bannon's willful disregard for the select committee's subpoena demonstrates his utter contempt for the American people's right to know how the attacks on January 6 came about," Kinzinger said. "His own words strongly suggest that the actions of the mob that stormed the Capitol and invaded this very chamber came as no surprise to him. He and a few others, were by all accounts, involved in planning that day's events and encouraged
"I have no doubt that Mr. Bannon's scorn for our subpoena is real. But no one, and I repeat, no one is above the law," Kinzinger said. "And we need to hear from him."
Cheney, also speaking with Democrats in favor of the bill, said Bannon's statements on his podcast on Jan. 5, the day before the attack, were "shocking and indefensible."
"He said all hell is going to break loose. He said, 'We are coming in right over the target,'" she said. "There are people in this chamber right now who were evacuated with me and the rest of us that day and during the attack. People who seem to have forgotten the danger of the moment. The assault on our Constitution, the assault on our Congress.
People who you will hear argue that there is simply no legislative purpose for this committee, this legislation and this subpoena," she said. "There is no doubt that Mr. Bannon knows far more than what he said," she continued. "There is no doubt that all hell did broke loose. Just ask the scores of brave police officers who were injured that day protecting us. The American people deserve to hear his testimony."
Including Cheney and Kinzinger, nine Republicans voted with Democrats to hold Bannon in contempt: Reps. Anthony Gonzalez, Peter Meijer, Fred Upton, Nancy Mace, John Katko, Brian Fitzpatrick and Jaime Herrera Beutler. Rep. Mike Simpson had voted "yes" but changed it to "no."
Two of the nine Republicans who voted with Democrats -- Fitzpatrick and Mace -- did not vote to impeach former President Donald Trump earlier this year. And several Republicans who did vote to impeach Trump did not back the effort to hold Bannon in contempt.
Mace, who spoke to reporters outside the Capitol after her vote, said she wanted to uphold the subpoena power of Congress, given that Republicans could retake the chamber next year.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., earlier Thursday argued that the Jan. 6 select committee's subpoena for Bannon's testimony was "invalid" because Republicans aren't serving on the panel and claimed Democrats are using the panel to target their political opponents.
However, Republicans decided not to sit on the panel after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to seat two of five members recommended by McCarthy for making baseless claims about the validity of 2020 election. That came after Republicans killed an effort in May to establish an independent commission of members selected by both parties to investigate the Jan. 6 attack.
"Issuing an invalid subpoena weakens our power, not voting against it," McCarthy said, defending Republicans' plans to overwhelmingly vote against holding Bannon in contempt of Congress this evening. "[Bannon] has a right to go to court to see if he has executive privilege or not. I don't know if he has it or not, but neither does the committee."
His message follows a memo circulated to Republican lawmakers on Wednesday, in which House GOP leaders argued that the Jan. 6 select committee that subpoenaed Bannon for records and testimony is "pursuing a partisan agenda to politicize the Jan. 6 attack" instead of "conducting a good faith investigation."
Asked about the importance of GOP support on the effort, Pelosi said at her weekly press conference that it's Republicans' duty to vote to hold Bannon in contempt.
"Because they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," Pelosi told reporters.
"The genius of our Constitution and our founders was the separation of powers checks and balances, if in fact you went to negate the ability of one check of another branch of government over another, then you are undermining the constitution," she said.
"This goes beyond Bannon in terms of its importance. And you would think that if they take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, they would vote for the system of checks and balances," she said.
It's been 38 years since the Justice Department pursued contempt of Congress charges: Environmental Protection Agency official Rita Lavelle was indicted in 1983. A jury eventually found Lavelle not guilty.
The Democrat-led House held former Attorney General Bill Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress in 2019 for defying subpoenas for records, but the Trump Justice Department did not take up the case.
Bannon could face up to a year in prison and up to a $100,000 fine if the Justic Department charges him and he is eventually found guilty.
November 13, 2021 / By Timothy Bella / Saved as PDF : [HN02HX][GDrive]
[ NOTE: More on Rita Lavelle on page for William Pelham Barr (born 1950) ]
When former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon was charged Friday on two counts of contempt of Congress after refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, his indictment was the first of its kind in decades.
It’s rare for the Justice Department to bring contempt charges against government officials refusing to comply with subpoenas, but it can happen, like in the cases of Bannon or Watergate mastermind G. Gordon Liddy in 1974. But in between the presidential advisers for Richard M. Nixon and Donald Trump, another GOP official was the last to face such charges: Rita M. Lavelle, a federal environmental official under Ronald Reagan.
Lavelle, who refused to submit to questions regarding why she was removed as the head of a toxic waste disposal program at the Environmental Protection Agency, was acquitted of the contempt of Congress charge. She was sentenced in 1984 to six months in prison after she was convicted of lying to Congress, becoming the first Reagan appointee to be found guilty of a crime.
Lavelle, now 74, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post on Saturday.
The history surrounding those tried for contempt of Congress comes as Bannon faces charges that carry a maximum sentence of one year in prison. The indictment of Bannon may serve as a warning to others seeking to avoid or defy the Jan. 6 committee. He is expected to turn himself in next week ahead of his first court appearance in the case.
“We have NOT had a contempt of Congress case since Rita Lavelle in 1983!” tweeted Maya Wiley, a legal analyst for MSNBC and NBC News. “This is a big milestone.”
[ Steve Bannon indicted after refusal to comply with Jan. 6 committee subpoena ]
Lavelle, a Californian who was one of eight children in a tightknit Irish American family, was a rising star in the state’s GOP politics. She held numerous positions with Reagan’s administration when he was governor of California before joining the chemical industry. Her contributions in the aerospace industry resulted in Aerospace Magazine naming her one of the most outstanding women in the industry in 1981.
In 1982, Reagan, in his second year in the White House, appointed Lavelle to be the EPA’s assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response. At the time, the EPA was run by Anne Gorsuch Burford, the mother of future Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. Lavelle’s appointment drew both misogynistic commentary — she was repeatedly described by reporters in coverage as “blond” and “plump” — and blowback from critics who pointed to a potential conflict of interest due to her employment in the chemical industry.
As Lois Romano wrote in The Post in 1983, it wouldn’t take long for Lavelle to turn into what was, at the time, “the biggest political spectacle of this administration.” Lavelle was tasked with directing the agency’s $1.6 billion Superfund program for solid waste and emergency response.
Her problems began when Burford initially refused to turn over to Congress subpoenaed documents related to the mishandling of the EPA’s Superfund, which was called “Sewergate” by some newspapers at the time; friends told reporters that she was acting under orders from Reagan. The EPA eventually handed over the documents several months later after the White House dropped its legal challenge. Burford later resigned.
“When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only ‘crime’ was loyal service, following orders,” she wrote in her 1986 memoir. Burford died in 2004 at 62.
Lavelle, the head of Superfund, was at the heart of Sewergate. She was accused of not only ignoring environmentalists but also eating restaurant dinners that were paid for by industry executives. At the time, she claimed that she was never shown the EPA ethics code because no one had ever instructed her to read it.
“I was never shown an ethics code, and it’s typical of what happens to a lot of people when they come to Washington,” she told The Post in 1983. “You’re not trained; you’re not told how to conduct yourself.”
Lavelle was fired from the EPA just one year into her tenure, and she was charged with criminal contempt of Congress after she failed to heed a House subpoena. A House subcommittee had sought Lavelle’s testimony following reports that she engaged in possible “political manipulation” of the $1.6 billion fund to help Republican candidates in the 1982 congressional elections.
At the trial, Lavelle testified that she failed to submit to questions because she was “emotionally and physically drained,” saying she suffered from a lump in her throat that made it sore, and feared she could have cancer, according to the New York Times.
“I was extremely depressed during that time,” she testified. “I basically was falling apart.”
While her defense attorney said her symptoms amounted to “an incapacitating illness,” a federal prosecutor derided Lavelle’s excuses as “blue smoke and mirrors.”
She was found not guilty of contempt of Congress in July 1983. But at the end of the Justice Department’s five-month investigation following the verdict, she was found guilty of lying to Congress. In January 1984, she was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $10,000.
“You have indeed violated the public trust,” Judge Norma Holloway Johnson told Lavelle at her sentencing. “The perjury offense strikes at the very core of the trust that had been conferred to you.”
Rep. Elliott H. Levitas (D-Ga.), who was the chairman of one of the subcommittees investigating the EPA at the time, told the Los Angeles Times in 1984 that Lavelle’s conviction for lying to Congress was “a sacrifice to still the rumblings on the mountain.”
“Ms. Lavelle was not the only liar who appeared before our committee,” Levitas said. “The problem was much broader than Rita Lavelle.”
When she showed up to serve her sentence in 1985, she told reporters: “It is totally ludicrous that I have to go through with this. But I’ve made a decision to end two years of hell and go through with it.” Lavelle was released after serving more than four months, according to the Associated Press.
Though she later got involved again with GOP politics in California, it wouldn’t be the last time Lavelle faced prison time. In 2004, she was convicted of wire fraud and two counts of lying to the FBI in connection with an investigation into another California company linked to a Superfund dispute. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison and was released in 2007.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/wpIiODL63pfL - thanking GNews, rebroadcasts in Mandarin ..
First time RFK was on Bannon, was a couple of months ago (Sep? Oct? 2021) ... talking about misinformation ... promoted tony Fauci ...
Now here we are talking the Real Anthony Fauci book
https://www.the-independent.com/tv/us-news/steve-bannon-alex-jones-interview-b2130070.html
Just one day after Steve Bannon was found guilty of contempt of Congress, he told Alex Jones he’s one of the greatest political thinkers since the ‘revolutionary generation’.
Jones is known for being a prominent conspiracy theorist and is about to face trial for a Sandy Hook defamation case.
“You are one of the great thinkers of this. That’s very rare,” the former Trump adviser told the far-right radio host. “You have to go almost back to the revolutionary generation to see that.”
In a recent Wall Street Journal article it was revealed that a number of high-profile figures had contact, were associates, or met with convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein, years after his crimes were outed. Young female companions are mentioned present a number of these occasions, always being in Epstein's entourage or in his service as house staff or employees. The schedule makes note in some cases to limit exposure of contacts of Epstein to them or how many they see. The meetings dated are all years after Epstein was publicly accused of sexually abusing girls as young as 14-years-old in Florida in 2006, pleading guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring minors for prostitution, and avoiding federal charges with only a 13 month work-release program. While at the time number of his associates cut ties, many did not. Epstein's crimes would continue and so would uncovered cases of his victims being brought to light in the years coming before his his mysterious death while in law enforcement holding while under trial for more sex crimes. Notably these people below did not appear in Epstein's infamous "black book" of contacts or in the public flight jets of his passengers on his "Lolita" jet. Multiple meetings took placed with all of them after he had served jail time, the documents include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, previously unreported.
Information was uncovered from a trove of documents, including Epstein's private calendar. Such people include Williams Burns, current director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who scheduled and attended three meetings in 2014 with Epstein when Burns was secretary of state in Washington and at Epstein's townhouse in Manhattan. Kathryn Ruemmler, former White House counsel under President Obama, met with Epstein dozens of times after her time at the White House, before she became a high-ranking lawyer at Goldman Sachs, with more trips found planned for Paris and Epstein's island in the Caribbean in 2015 and 2017. President of Bard College, Leon Botstein, welcomed Epstein to his campus, who brought reportedly young female guests. Linguistics professor, author, and activist Noam Chomsky also had scheduled to fly with Epstein to the Manhattan townhouse in 2015 for dinner. Chomsky also reportedly flew with Epstein, Woody Allen, and his wife, Soon Yi Previn, in 2015. Ariane de Rothschild, CEO of Swiss private bank Rothschild Group, met with Epstein over a dozen times. Former board member of Starbucks and FedEx, Joshua Cooper Camo, then co-CEO of Henry Kissinger's corpo consultant firm met with Epstein more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2017. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was a regular guest at Epstein's townhouse as well reports WSJ.
(AP) This also comes as it has been announced that JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon must undergo up to two days of questioning by lawyers handling lawsuits over whether the bank can be held liable in financier Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of teenage girls and women, a federal judge said on April 18th. The New York bank, the nation's largest, has been sued by the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands and two women, both identified as Jane Doe, who say they were abused by Epstein. The lawsuits contend JPMorgan should have seen evidence of Epstein's sex trafficking and avoided profiting from it. The bank, besides denying the allegations, has sued one of its former executives, saying the man hid Epstein's decades of sex abuse and trafficking to keep Epstein as a client reports.
The nature of these meetings, with such a wide range of individuals, varied greatly according to the documents and from testimonials given by the individuals Epstein met with. The townhouse mentioned as a meeting spot for many, "is where Epstein sexually abused female victims for years, many underage, and that he paid some of them to recruit their friends to engage in sexual activity, [prosecutors alleged in 2019]." Some for business, others to thank or ask for philanthropic donations, a number were apparently networking meetings with Epstein being the matchmaker, sometimes apparently just to facilitate geopolitical conversations. Epstein reportedly asked for advice and help for some, offering positions to others. For instance:
"Ms. Ruemmler first met Epstein after he called her to ask if she would be interested in representing Mr. Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Goldman Sachs spokesman said… A spokeswoman for Mr. Gates said Epstein never worked for Mr. Gates, misrepresented their relationship, and that Mr. Gates regrets ever meeting with him. Epstein and his staff discussed whether Ms. Ruemmler, now 52, would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women who worked as assistants and staffers at the townhouse, the documents show. Women emailed Epstein on two occasions to ask if they should avoid the home while Ms. Ruemmler was there. Epstein told one of the women he didn't want her around, and another that it wasn't a problem, the documents show. Ms. Ruemmler didn't see anything that would lead her to be concerned at the townhouse and didn't express any concern, the Goldman spokesman said. "I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein," Ruemmler told the paper."
"[Epstein] sought [Ariane Rothschild] help with staffing and furnishings as well as discussed business deals with her, according to the documents… In September 2013, Epstein asked Mrs. de Rothschild in an email for help finding a new assistant, "female…multilingual, organized." "I'll ask around," Mrs. de Rothschild emailed back. She bought nearly $1 million worth of auction items on Epstein's behalf in 2014 and 2015, the documents show. Mrs. de Rothschild was named chairwoman of the bank in January 2015. That October, she and Epstein negotiated a $25 million contract for Epstein's Southern Trust Co. to provide "risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms" for the bank, according to a proposal reviewed by the Journal. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, the bank said that Mrs. de Rothschild never met with Epstein and it had no business links with him."
"Mr. Barak said he often met with Epstein on trips to New York and was introduced to people such as Mr. Ramo and Mr. Chomsky to discuss geopolitics or other topics. "He often brought other interesting persons, from art or culture, law or science, finance, diplomacy or philanthropy," Mr. Barak said."
"In March 2015, Epstein scheduled a gathering with Mr. Chomsky and Harvard University professor Martin Nowak and other academics, according to the documents. Mr. Chomsky said they had several meetings at Mr. Nowak's research institute to discuss neuroscience and other topics… Epstein donated at least $850,000 to MIT between 2002 and 2017, and more than $9.1 million to Harvard from 1998 to 2008, the schools have said. In 2021, Harvard said it was sanctioning Mr. Nowak for violating university policies in his dealings with Epstein, and was shutting a research center he ran that Epstein had funded. MIT said it was inappropriate to accept Epstein's gifts, and that it later donated $850,000 to nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse. In a 2020 interview with the "dunc tank" podcast, Mr. Chomsky said that people he considered worse than Epstein had donated to MIT. He didn't mention any of his meetings with Epstein. Mr. Chomsky told the Journal that at the time of his meetings "what was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and had served his sentence. According to U.S. laws and norms, that yields a clean slate."
"Mr. Botstein, 76, president of Bard College since 1975, had about two dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein over about four years, which were mostly visits to the townhouse. "I was an unsuccessful fundraiser and actually the object of a little bit of sadism on his part in dangling philanthropic support," said Mr. Botstein. "That was my relationship with him." Mr. Botstein said he first visited Epstein's townhouse in 2012 to thank him for unsolicited donations to Bard's high schools, then he returned over several years in an attempt to get more donations. In 2015, Epstein donated 66 laptops, the documents show. "We looked him up, and he was a convicted felon for a sex crime," he said. Bard has a large program providing education to prisoners, he said. "We believe in rehabilitation." Mr. Botstein, also the longtime music director for the American Symphony Orchestra, invited Epstein to an opera at Bard in 2013, then a concert at the college in 2016, the documents indicate. Epstein planned each time to bring some of his young female assistants and arrive by helicopter. Mr. Botstein said he was expecting Epstein to support classical music causes and that the school took precautions when he visited. "Because of his previous record, we had security ready," he said. "He did not have any free access to anybody." At Epstein's home, Mr. Botstein was led to a dining room where they discussed classical music and other causes, he said. "He presented himself as a billionaire, a really, really rich person," he said. "I found him odd and arrogant. And what I finally came to believe, which is why we stopped contact with him, is that he was simply stringing us along." Despite all his meetings, Mr. Botstein said, Epstein never made another donation to Bard. "It was a blessing in disguise," he said, "that we never got any [more] money."
https://www.newspapers.com/image/990874007/?match=1&terms=%22steve%20bannon%22%20%2B%20%22FDA%22
By Samantha Delouya, Jeff Winter and Lauren del Valle, CNN / Updated 10:45 PM EST, Tue January 9, 2024 / Saved as PDF : [HM00DU][GDrive]
The third round of documents from a lawsuit connected to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who died in jail before he could face trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, was publicly released Friday.
Friday’s release included over thirteen hundred pages as of mid-afternoon, and it follows hundreds of pages of documents already unsealed on Wednesday and Thursday, with more expected.
The unsealed documents are part of a 2015 civil defamation suit brought by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an American woman who claimed Epstein sexually abused her as a minor and that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, aided in the abuse. The unsealing this week stems from a December 18 court order from the judge overseeing the lawsuit, a response to media’s legal efforts to publicly release the documents.
The documents in total, including material yet to be unsealed, are expected to include nearly 200 names, including some of Epstein’s accusers, prominent businesspeople, politicians and potentially more.
CNN is reviewing the documents.
A former Jeffrey Epstein employee recounted a litany of famous and influential people, including two former presidents, in Epstein’s orbit during a 2009 deposition unsealed on Friday.
Juan Alessi told attorneys that he had dinner with former president Donald Trump in the kitchen of Epstein’s Palm Beach home and met former president Bill Clinton on Epstein’s plane. He also said he met Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, at the Palm Beach home, according to the deposition.
Alessi also said he met foreign beauty queens and an unnamed winner of a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, according to the document.
When asked on Wednesday about the appearance of Clinton’s name in an earlier batch of unsealed documents, a Clinton spokesman reiterated a 2019 statement that Clinton had flown on Epstein’s private plane but said Clinton knew nothing of the financier’s “terrible crimes.”
The spokesman said that it has now “been nearly 20 years since President Clinton last had contact with Epstein.” Clinton has not been accused of any crimes or wrongdoing related to Epstein.
Trump has also not been accused of any crimes or wrongdoing with regard to Epstein. When asked earlier this week about Trump’s name appearing in the newly unsealed documents, a Trump spokesman reacted by attacking the media.
Alessi also spoke about the young women who came to the house to give Epstein massages.
Alessi answered questions about one female whom he understood to be under the age of 18. Her name was still redacted from the unsealed documents. Alessi said her mother would occasionally accompany her to Epstein’s home.
In terms of payment, “everybody got $100 an hour,” Alessi said.
Famed magician and illusionist David Copperfield is also among the high-profile men identified as a friend to Epstein.
Copperfield’s name is mentioned during deposition testimony released Friday of one of Epstein’s then-employees, Sarah Kellen. A lawyer for the plaintiffs asked about Epstein’s relationship with the illusionist and whether they recruit girls for each other. The lawyer questioned if Copperfield gives tickets to Epstein for young women when he is performing shows and if the girls are invited backstage after the shows.
To all questions, Kellen asserts her Fifth Amendment right and refuses to answer the question.
Copperfield is also named in a 2016 deposition released Wednesday by a woman who massaged Epstein for years in the early 2000s. She said she met the illusionist at a dinner at Epstein’s Palm Beach residence and testified it was her observation the two were friends.
Johanna Sjoberg testified in the deposition that Copperfield performed magic tricks while he was at the Palm Beach House and asked her what she knew about Epstein’s methods for procuring girls to work for him.
“He questioned me if I was aware that girls were getting paid to find other girls,” Sjoberg said.
Copperfield didn’t elaborate at the time, Sjoberg said.
She also said there was another girl at the house that “seemed young” at a dinner that included Copperfield. She recalled thinking at the time that the girl could have been in high school.
CNN has reached out to representatives for Copperfield for comment.
The name of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein appears in a 2005 handwritten note left for Epstein as well.
The handwritten note, dated March 1, 2005, appears to be a telephone message left for Epstein that Weinstein attempted to call Epstein that morning. “She had on the phone Mr. Harvey Weinstein,” the message reads. It was included among nearly 200 written phone messages.
Brad Edwards, Giuffre’s lawyer at one point, wrote a book titled “Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein,” released in 2020, in which he discusses Weinstein’s involvement in Epstein’s world. Edwards wrote that Epstein told a victim he would introduce her to Weinstein. In another excerpt, Edwards wrote Epstein ended his relationship with Weinstein after he acted too aggressively with one of his “favorite girls.”
There is no implication of wrongdoing by Weinstein in connection to Epstein in the documents.
CNN has reached out to an attorney for Weinstein.
Weinstein, 71, remains in prison after being convicted on sex crimes charges in New York and California linked to allegations that he used his influence to lure women into private meetings, assault them and then silence any accusations.
Some of the documents are unsettling.
In a newly unsealed excerpt from a deposition of Nadia Marcinkova, an Epstein assistant who was accused in civil lawsuits of having perpetrated abuse alongside Epstein, an attorney asked her: “Were you with Jeffrey Epstein on his birthday when one of his friends sent to him 12 – sorry, three 12-year-olds for the purposes of Jeffrey Epstein sexually abusing them?”
He then asks if “these three 12-year-olds were from France. Were they sent to him on his birthday by Jean Luc Brunel or by somebody else?”
Marcinkova invoked the Fifth Amendment to that question and throughout her deposition, which includes multiple still-redacted names.
Brunel, a French modeling scout, died in a jail cell in 2022 while under investigation by French authorities for his ties to Epstein.
Virginia Giuffre has also recounted the story of 12-year-olds being sent to Epstein in her own court depositions.
Previous document releases included information about Epstein’s associates and accusers, though much of the information had previously been reported on by various media outlets or released through other court proceedings.
Giuffre and Maxwell settled their civil suit in 2017, but some court documents remained sealed until now.
Most of the documents from the suit were unsealed in 2019 – one day before Epstein died by suicide in jail.
Epstein was indicted in 2019 on federal charges of operating a sex trafficking ring in which he allegedly sexually abused dozens of underage girls.
Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial. Prosecutors in New York indicted Maxwell on sex trafficking charges involving multiple victims. She was convicted in 2021.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/04/tucker-carlson-demon-war-room-podcast
Richard Luscombe / Mon 4 Nov 2024 16.04 EST
Demons that Tucker Carlson claimed attacked him as he slept were also responsible for the invention of nuclear technology, the conservative former Fox News host said on Monday in another bizarre contention.
Carlson made the claim [ see https://rumble.com/v5lw34q-carlson-and-bannon-explore-the-impacts-of-spirituality-nuclear-technology-s.html ] on the War Room podcast hosted by his fellow rightwing extremist Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser in the Trump administration who was released from prison last week after serving a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress.
“Nuclear weapons are demonic, there’s no upside to them at all, and anyone who claims otherwise is either ignorant or doing the bidding of the forces that created nuclear technology in the first place, which were not human forces obviously,” Carlson said during a discussion on the perceived “spirituality” involved in the US development of atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in August 1945, hastening the end of the second world war.
“Let me ask you this,” he continued. “What was the moment we can point to that nuclear technology was invented? I’ve never met a person who can isolate the moment where nuclear technology became known to man. German scientists in the 1930s? Really? Name the date? It’s very clear to me that these [nuclear weapons] are demonic.”
Carlson’s talk about demons follows remarks he made last week about how he was allegedly “physically mauled” by one a year and a half ago. The former Fox News host claimed that it was a nighttime attack where he was left bleeding and scarred by “claw marks”.
https://thehill.com/business/5051716-steve-bannon-tax-increase-wealthy/
2024-12-31-nytimes-com-search-steve-bannon-img-1.jpg