Donald Trump’s former top strategist, Steve Bannon framed the 2024 Election in warlike language. Trump, Stephen Miller, and Bannon have a penchant for infusing almost any topic with the embers of incendiary speech. The kind of language conservatives consider threatening when directed toward them, but free speech, when they employ it.
This past weekend, Bannon met with the conservative group, Turning Point, in Detroit. Michigan is a battleground state and one that is expected to be pivotal in determining the outcome of this year’s presidential election.
Bannon served briefly in Trump’s White House. He was fired in August 2017, part of a major reorganization under then-chief of staff John Kelly, who was brought in to control a chaotic atmosphere. In the years since, Bannon has continued to advocate for Trump, and meanwhile, Kelly, a retired general, has sounded the alarm about Trump’s possible reelection.
The stakes of this election must be extremely high from Bannon’s perspective. Already pardoned by Trump for his role in a scheme to allegedly defraud donors of contributions intended to help build a border wall, Bannon was subsequently convicted by a jury in 2022 of the rarely prosecuted crime of contempt of Congress. Bannon refused to cooperate with subpoenas from the committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, insurrection when Democrats controlled Congress.
After delays, Bannon must begin serving a four-month prison sentence starting next month.
“Are you prepared to fight? Are you prepared to give it all?” he asked of young activists, telling them they would have to follow in the footsteps of “the team around President Trump” – who he views as Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Alex Jones, people whose fidelity to conspiracy theories has gotten them into legal and financial trouble, but who in Bannon’s mind are political freedom fighters.
“If they steal this election – and they fully intend to steal it – this republic ends,” Bannon said, before going on a riff about how top Department of Justice officials in President Joe Biden’s administration, like Attorney General Merrick Garland, should be prosecuted; the FBI should be completely deconstructed; and anyone convicted in connection to the storming of the Capitol building would be set free.
Comparing the presidential campaign to the D-Day invasion, Bannon encouraged a cheering crowd at the Turning Point Action convention in Detroit to see themselves as filling the positions of fallen soldiers in an assault.
“Are we at war?” he asked the crowd. “Is this a political war to the knife?”
“War to the knife” – Bannon recently used it in an interview with ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. A Google search yielded a 1998 book by that name about the Bleeding Kansas skirmishes in the years before the Civil War when pro- and anti-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas and feuded over whether Kansas should enter the union as a free or slave state.
The book, according to its description, attributes the term to the Atchison Squatter Sovereign, which the Library of Congress describes as a pro-slavery newspaper of the era. It’s not clear where Bannon got the term.
“Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield in 2024?” he asked of Turning Point activists. “It’s very simple: victory or death!”
He added, “We are going to purge DOJ. We are going to take apart the FBI. The FBI, the American Gestapo … there’s not going to be an FBI.”
While Trump has only said he would be justified in going after political opponents, Bannon is committed to targeting anyone he views as having opposed Trump.
“We are going to get every single receipt, and to the fullest extension of the law, you are going to be investigated, prosecuted and incarcerated,” he said.
Bannon is not alone. The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, for instance, has written up its Project 2025 road map to remaking the civil service by firing large numbers of career servants and replacing them with more political voices. For a good, in-depth look at what Project 2025 would and would not do, listen this recent “In the Room” podcast from Peter Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst. Bergen talks to one of the authors of the State Department portion of Project 2025. ““War to the Knife”: Victory or Death!”
I’m done; holla back!
Read my blog anytime by clicking the links: http://thesphinxofcharlotte.com or /http://thesphinxofcharlotte.blogspot.com.
A new post is published each Wednesday. For more detailed information on a variety of aspects relating to this post, consult the link below:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/18/politics/bannon-trump-election-what-matters/index.html
http://thesphinxofcharlotte.blogspot.com/2024/06/war-to-knife-victory-or-death.html
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment