Who is Stephen Bannon? Not knowing the answer, the Left’s media filled in the blanks

by WorldTribune Staff, November 21, 2016

Stephen Bannon, who will be senior adviser to President-elect Donald Trump, said he wears the Left’s media attacks on him as an “emblem of pride” — and the The New York Times et al still don’t get what happened on Nov. 8.

“How can you take anything seriously from a media apparatus — paid the amount of money you people are paid — that systematically missed something that was so obvious, that missed Brexit, that missed the Trump revolution?” Bannon said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 18.

“You’d have thought they’d have learned their lesson on Nov. 8. They clearly haven’t.”

Stephen Bannon: 'The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what's wrong with this country.' /Getty Images
Stephen Bannon: ‘The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country.’ /Getty Images

Bannon, who played a key role in helping usher in the Trump revolution, rejects the Left’s penchant for assigning labels and filling in the blanks rather than, he charges, bothering to find the easily-obtainable facts.

“I’m not a white nationalist, I’m a nationalist. I’m an economic nationalist,” Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter’s Michael Wolff on Nov. 18.

“The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f—ed over. If we deliver” — by “we” he means the Trump White House — “we’ll get 60 percent of the white vote, and 40 percent of the black and Hispanic vote and we’ll govern for 50 years. That’s what the Democrats missed. They were talking to these people with companies with a $9 billion market cap employing nine people. It’s not reality. They lost sight of what the world is about.”

It was reality to the major media, however, which never gained any insight into what was happening beyond urban America, Bannon said.

“The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” he said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no f—ing idea what’s going on. If The New York Times didn’t exist, CNN and MSNBC would be a test pattern. The Huffington Post and everything else is predicated on The New York Times. It’s a closed circle of information from which Hillary Clinton got all her information — and her confidence. That was our opening.”

Bannon feels the Trump revolution triumphed over the conservative media as well — not least of all Fox News and its owners, the Murdochs. “They got it more wrong than anybody,” he says. “Rupert is a globalist and never understood Trump. To him, Trump is a radical. Now they’ll go centrist and build the network around Megyn Kelly.”

Bannon said the Trump campaign was most on target when the media insisted it was in total disarray. Also, while Hillary Clinton was largely absent from the campaign trail and concentrating on courting her donors, Trump — even after the leak of the sex tape — was speaking to ever-growing crowds of 35,000 or 40,000.

“He gets it; he gets it intuitively,” says Bannon. “You have probably the greatest orator since William Jennings Bryan, coupled with an economic populist message and two political parties that are so owned by the donors that they don’t speak to their audience. But he speaks in a non-political vernacular, he communicates with these people in a very visceral way. Nobody in the Democratic party listened to his speeches, so they had no idea he was delivering such a compelling and powerful economic message. He shows up 3.5 hours late in Michigan at 1 in the morning and has 35,000 people waiting in the cold. When they got [Clinton] off the donor circuit she went to Temple University and they drew 300 or 400 kids.”

“I knew that she couldn’t close,” Bannon said. “They out-spent us 10 to one, had 10 times more people and had all the media with them, but I kept saying it doesn’t matter, they got it all wrong, we’ve got this locked.”

And the Trump revolution rolls on.

“Like [Andrew] Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” Bannon said. “It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Shipyards, ironworks, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution — conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”

As the Trump administration takes hold, Bannon concluded he will have no interest in being a frequent presence on television.

“People say get out there. But I see no purpose in trying to convince a bunch of media elites who only ever talk to themselves,” Bannon told the Journal.

“I never went on TV one time during the campaign. Not once. You know why? Because politics is war. General Sherman would never have gone on TV to tell everyone his plans. I’d never tip my hand to the other side. And right now we’ve got work to do.”

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