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0:02
Good evening. My name is Olly Thorn. Tonight’s show features an heroic fire-fighter, a villainous pyromaniac, a 10,000 year-old skull, and a fantastic musical number in the finale. But before the show begins, I’d like to say that at no point in tonight’s performance am I going to call Steve Bannon a racist, a sexist, a transphobe, an anti-Semite, or anything of the sort. Not because I don’t think those terms have weight to them, but
0:26
because I’m trying to reach the same audience as him and I want to try a different tactic. So what I am going to do is explain exactly where Steve Bannon is wrong, and exactly where he’s correct, which is in more places than I expected him to be. And there is a small chance that Steve himself is somewhere in the theatre this evening because he takes a lot of long flights and somebody might send this video to him as a way of passing the time - in which case, hi Steve. You’ve said
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before that you appreciate it when people who don't agree with you put in the work so… here I am. In case there's a fire during tonight's performance the exits are to the Far Left, and please remember - there is no smoking allowed in the theatre. Enjoy the show. <A synth cover of "Why We Build the Wall" begins ominously.. Today we’re going to learn all about fire! Boy, there sure is a lot of that around these days! I’m a fireman. I fight fires. I hate fire!
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You might say I’m anti-fire! <Sounds like 'Antifa'> A fire always starts with some combustible material, which we call fuel. That could be wood, paper, charcoal, the society in which we live anything really! Everything potentially. A fire also needs oxygen, an ignitor, and an accelerant – something to make the fire burn faster. And one of the world’s leading manufacturers and distributors of fire accelerants is Stephen K. Bannon.
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Bannon has had a storied career, at various times a naval officer, investment banker, film producer, writer, director; co-founder of Far-Right misinformation website Breitbart.com, Chief Executive of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and Chief Strategist to the Trump Whitehouse until he was either fired or quit in August 2017. Basically Bannon is still a movie producer: he produces and arranges stories. He used to do it with actual movies, now he does it
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in real life. Since leaving the White House he’s travelled around the world helping far-right causes, including but not limited to the National Front in France, the Bolsonaro Presidential Campaign in Brazil, and Tommy Robinson, UKIP, Boris Johnson, and Jacob Rees Mogg here in the UK. A lot of ink has been spilled over trying to figure out what it is that Bannon personally thinks, but I don’t really care what he
3:04
believes in his heart. I’m here to explain what he is philosophically doing. Steve, the colour of your soul is between you and God. But your ass belongs to me. <Sudden Epic Singing> WHY DO WE BUILD THE WALL? WE BUILD THE WALL TO KEEP US FREE, THAT'S WHY WE BUILD THE WALL, WE BUILD THE WALL TO KEEP US FREE!
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In 2010 Bannon wrote and directed a strange little film called "Generation Zero" about the financial crisis, a favourite topic of his that he brings up whenever he speaks at live events. The thesis is somewhat garbled but in essence the film claims that the 2008 financial crash was the culmination of a destined cycle of history that repeats roughly every 100 years, always ending in a crisis from which the next cycle begins. This is
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called ‘Strauss-Howe Generational Theory’ or ‘the Fourth Turning,’ and it isn’t widely believed to be true or a useful way of doing history. But it does make for a nice dramatic framing device – so points for style I guess. That’s just the flavour though: the real claim is that the crash was caused by baby boomers’ lack of moral character, as opposed to anything else. Bannon says that his generation grew up in the 60s, they became selfish, narcissistic, entitled hippies, and when they inherited
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the levers of political and economic control they made risky moves, they forgot all about personal responsibility, and they screwed it up for everyone else. This analysis of the financial crash is very similar to the one put forward by PragerU, if you’ve ever heard of them. Lots of ideas in common between them and Bannon. If you haven’t heard of them – lucky you, don’t worry about it. Moreover, the film claims that “they” (by which it variously denotes
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politicians in general, financiers in general, baby boomers, “elites,” the Democratic party and President Obama) made things worse after the crash by bailing out the banks with taxpayer money rather than letting them fail. Even though it was actually George W. Bush’s government who did that, not Obama. This is a falsehood that Bannon repeats in his speech at Oxford University and in his debate with David Frum in Toronto. Now he is critical of old-school Republicans like Bush and Democrats, so
5:18
ideologically it’s not a huge deal – in fact in the Frum debate he correctly says at the start that it was Bush, and then contradicts himself later on - but it’s maybe worth noting that he is leading his audience to be critical of Democrats in particular. But the basic thesis of the film seems simple enough, you might say. “The financial crisis was a problem not of capitalism, but of character,” as the film's tagline puts it. And whether you believe that or whether you’re correct, it’s a
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nice hot take and it makes for some good #Content. <Weird witchy music begins> However, within that basic thrust the film contains some stunning leaps of absolute Moon-logic. At various points it implies without outright stating that the financial crash was - the culmination of a decades-long deliberate plot by Leftists to crash the American economy in order to instigate revolution; that it was the fault of black civil rights
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activists who made white bankers afraid to deny loans to black subprime borrowers for fear of being called racist; and that Bill Clinton’s Democratic party was trying to make the United States part of a new global world order, which is vague and undefined and then just never mentioned again. None of these claims are backed up by any kind of evidence, and you’re not really supposed to notice that because they’re more implied than outright stated. And this tactic
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is used throughout. For instance at one point the film says that there was a plot in the 60s by two academics named Cloward and Piven to deliberately crash the American economy by signing loads of people up to welfare, and then it just leaves this hanging... It never gets brought up again but the implication is that the crash of ’08 might have had something to do with it? But what Cloward and Piven actually wrote
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in a public magazine was that a lot of people who were eligible for welfare weren’t getting it, and so if everybody who was eligible could be encouraged to actually sign up that would be a good way of getting the federal government to pay more attention to poverty... And that’s it. They just wrote an article about it. There’s no evidence I can find that anybody ever used it as a blueprint for organised action, certainly no evidence that anybody held
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onto it in a desk draw for 42 years until they got in a position to crash the economy! But you’re not really meant to notice that when you watch Steve Bannon's film, it’s just like “WoooOOOOOooooo, spooky Leftists!” It’s all presented as this Manichean pre-ordained struggle – with the destined cycle of history destiny and this bombastic, super-serious tone. Storm clouds! Scary music! Threatening graphics!
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It’s like reading the Book of Revelations: there’s this feeling of cosmic cataclysm and drama <Witchy music ends abruptly with a fart sound> but at the same time it’s really vague and just... it's kinda bullsh*t. It’s overwhelming trying to keep up with it – points get made, and then dropped, and restated later but never developed. Very often, huge claims get made out of nowhere really quickly like a truck screaming past you in the dark. If you’re thinking of watching the film to have a laugh,
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or just to see the weirdness for yourself, I would honestly say skip it. It’s not fun; the effect is just exhausting. All the more so because from a technical standpoint the film just isn't all that good. The stock footage and the animations look pretty cheap; the endless shots of statues and monuments get old fast; the sound editing is really choppy; it’s repetitive; the chapter markers are more confusing than helpful; it’s repetitive; the imagery
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is often painfully over the top; it’s repetitive,and it’s repetitive. Sometimes Steve Bannon’s film just flat-out wrong or bizarre. Of the financial crisis, it asks, ”How could so many authorities have failed to predict this?” ignoring the fact that some people actually did. Ann Pettifor, for one, is a Left-Wing economist who predicted the financial crash in detail several years before it actually happened but nobody listened… Presumably because her Wikipedia picture is so spooooooooky!
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When discussing the 60s and counterculture the film conspicuously omits any of the reasons why people were actually rebelling against things like the Vietnam War and white supremacy. Instead it says, “Cultures change because elites come up with ideas that then filter down into the culture…" <Creepy synth music builds> " They come through the newspapers. They come through the mainstream pulpit. They come through the universities and then down into the grammar schools. They
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come through the TV. They come through the movies. They come through popular music even.” <Sniff, sniff> Can anyone else smell petrol?
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<Chopin plays delicately> ???: "Have you heard about these arson attacks? Dreadful. Simply dreadful. Here it says, family of four burned alive… two little girls and a mother and father, charred to a crisp, and they’ve no idea who did it. Mind you, I hardly ever read the newspapers, load of old nonsense most of the time. I've never met a journalist I could trust, but just occasionally I do like to indulge. I like to read the horoscopes. What’s your sign?
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Oooh! Let's see what the future has in store! “With Mercury in retrograde your energies are depleted; beware of old friends or lovers who may be mocking you behind your back. You will strive for success, but until you make a breakthrough in yourself you will not attain it. Powerful energies swarm around you; by paying the proper attention you can learn to harness them.” Mmm! You must be somebody very special!"
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But even though the film in intellectually and technically pretty shoddy, it's still very effective. And affective. So why? <Paganini's "La Campanella" plays curiously> There is one bit of Generation Zero that is absolute genius: the bit where it says, “Ordinary Americans know what’s going on. They aren’t fooled. They’re outraged.” And again it provides no evidence for this. No polls, no surveys of what Americans think, not even an explanation
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of what it is that ordinary Americans supposedly know and are outraged about. It just says it! And this is what philosophers call “constructing a public.” We might think that the public just exists somewhere, just out there, but really when we talk about the public we create an idea of it And then actualmembers of the public get affected by what they think the public wants. We see this all the time: in the UK especially newspapers will say things like, “Concerns
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have been raised,” but won’t say who raised those concerns are or what they are! You just read it and you go, “Oh, damn! Concerns?! I also have concerns! I dunno whatI'm concerned about but I guess I’ll find out out later. In the meantime better keep buying more newspapers and sh*ttin’ on trans people.” Constructing publics is very important for understanding populism, which is politics that’s all about “the people” Vs “the
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elites.” There’s a lot of technical debate in philosophy about whether populism counts as an ideology or not; personally I lean more towards saying that it’s a style, since anybody can do it: if you’re very clever you’ll already have noticed that even though ‘populist’ is usually used to describe people on the Right-Wing like Steve Bannon, you could have left-wing populism, you could even have centrist populism – the devil is in how you define these
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two groups. But the other feature of populism is that these are moral groupings - not just descriptive ones. The people, whoever they are, are good; and the elites… well... concerns have been raised! There’s also a lot of debate about where populism came from and who is or isn't a populist. Some people have argued that Tony Blair was pretty populist when he was Prime Minister, but Tony Blair himself has since founded the Tony Blair Institute, one of whose stated goals is to combat populism, so…
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We might wanna take that with a pinch of salt though, I mean the Tony Blair Institute also says that one of its main aims is to support stability in the Middle East, which… That's kindof in poor taste, isn’t it? Isn't that like opening the PewDiePie Centre for Jewish Cultural Studies? Or the Jesse Singal Graham Linehan Clinic for Transgender Health? One thing the Blair Institute do point out though is that populism’s a sliding scale
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so it’s probably not a good use of our time to argue about who is or isn't one. Another thing to watch out for is to what degree populists present these two groups as being unified. The British National Party have been smoking that populist Kush for decades talking about “The Native British People” - and… who is that? Okay... we know who they mean when they say that.
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But even just within the group of white people who were born here you have a lot of different and sometimes irreconcilable interests. In his debate with David Frum in Toronto Bannon says that says liberalism is done for, and the only choices now are between left-wing populism and right-wing populism. He isn't the only one to say this: some Left-Wing people agree with him including political scientist Chantel Mouffe.
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(And also me.) But regardless, one of the reasons Bannon can be so persuasive is because he’s a great populist: he knows how to construct his public. He’s also very good at evoking emotional responses. And I don’t mean that in the sense that he uses FEELINGS rather than LOGIC and THE HAMMER OF REEEEEEASSSSON! No I mean he uses techniques to get people to feel as well as to think - and there's nothing wrong with that, I do it too - and Bannon's pretty good at it. Certainly in his Frum debate,
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he’s just way better onstage than Frum is: when Frum tries to muster an emotion to get the audience all teary-eyed about classical liberal values it’s just like watching a blancmange explain why it votes Liberal Democrat. <Wet schlepping sound, voice of a blancmange> “Oooeeewww, actually tuition fees aren’t real debt it’s just a tax on earning after education! But Bannon is relaxed, he’s confident, he plays off the crowd, he tells jokes, he gets passionate: he creates a mood.
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Generation Zero is where this really shines through because it’s almost all mood. As Ian Danskin from Innuendo Studios has pointed out, certain pieces of media cause the audience to reach a point called ‘Affective Override’ – where emotion shuts overwhelms critical thinking. Ian’s talking mainly about people getting riled up by inspiring patriotic propaganda, but it could just as easily be despair, or hopelessness, or anxiety, like the kind Generation Zero invokes in its audience.
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It makes you so anxious with its high stakes and its dramatic presentation that you’re too busy being anxious to realise that the content is almost pure nonsense. Almost. And I say almost because it does get some things very right More like very right-wing! No I do actually mean ‘correct,’ and I think this is the main reason why Bannon is persuasive to so many. He often gets the first bit right. For instance, both in the film and elsewhere Bannon
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points out that the people responsible for the financial crash have not been brought to justice. Yet. He also says that it’s unfair for the banks to have been bailed out consequence-free by the taxpayer, which is something that I actually agree with, and although he doesn’t use the word ‘neoliberalism,’ he is critical of the way that for the past several decades successive governments of all parties both in the US and in Europe have just unleashed the market and hang the consequences
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for everybody else, particularly Millennials who got saddled with huge amounts of debt, and people of all generations who got sent off to fight and die in pointless expensive wars to secure profits for oil companies. A Leftist would point out that these things have happened because in capitalism stuff gets done cause it's profitable. Not because anybody necessarily needs it to be done. And so any kind of moral consideration or concerns about sustainability are always
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going to come second to the profit motive. Capitalism don’t have any brakes on the train: the mantra is MORE. And that gives companies a very strong incentive to mess with democracy through lobbying. But Bannon won’t go there. So although he can sometimes diagnose the problems with society quite effectively he then veers off into the wild blue yonder of weird sh*t. This almost being correct but then sashaying off into Moon Logic is common to a lot of people
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on the far right, and much as we might like to malign them as cranks or loonies that’s not always true – they do sometimes have part of the picture and that can be very appealing. <Chopin plays again> ???: "Tsk. Awful. It’s produced such a climate of fear, don’t you think? That's the worst part: the fear, the suspicion. A chap can’t walk down the street smoking a cigarette these days without being accused of being an arsonist.
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I say if I want to smoke a cigarette, that is jolly well my right as a free man. But light up in some places these days and people will yell, “Arsonist! Arsonist!” Take this chap Steve Bannon – I mean, dreadful chap, don’t misunderstand me, simply awful the things he says, most of things he says. Although you can’t deny his popularity, particularly amongst the white working class. I’m a travelling salesman, so I get about a fair bit – listen to a lot of people,
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real salt of the Earth people. I grew up very poor: no advantages in life whatsoever, so I’ve spent a lot of time around hard workers, know how they think. Do you believe in God? No need to say anything. I see the look on your face. I think that's a very brave stance, if I may say so. I think that’s the best stance one can take on questions theological. Not many people would. And this chap Bannon, dreadful chap. But here’s an article –– here’s an article about Steve Bannon lighting
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a cigarette at the Oxford student union and somebody called the fire department! They had people in the streets yelling “Arsonist! Arsonist!” Just for lighting a cigarette! Let’s take another non-Bannon example, just for a breath of fresh air and cause it’s hilarious. This video, which you can watch right here on YouTube dot gov, is a discussion between two far-right guys: Thomas Rowsell, who goes by the handle SurvivetheJive, and another YouTuber, who I swear I've seen before somewhere… <!!!>
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<Cheeky violin music plays> Yes, it’s Neo-Nazi Marcus Follin, AKA the Golden One – the living meme and the second most famous Swedish man ever to use YouTube to distribute anti-Semitic messages. Marcus and Tom have what starts out as an interesting discussion about Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old Stone-Age human skeleton found in Cheddar Gorge belonging to one of the first modern inhabitants of the UK. In 2018, for the first time, a team at the Natural
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History Museum got a look at Cheddar Man’s DNA and Channel 4 turned this story into a fun little edutainment program by Channel 4 called "First Brit." The investigation found that Cheddar Man had blue eyes, dark hair, and dark skin, at least darker than mine, for instance. A lot of media articles emphasised the dark skin, as did the documentary, which also featured a facial reconstruction of Cheddar Man by two artists who specialise in this kind of work. This
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is what they came up with, and this is the image of Cheddar Man that a lot of media coverage ran with. You can see the obvious differences between it and previous reconstructions done without the benefit of DNA sequencing, both of which have pale skin. Marcus and Tom point out in their video that ‘dark’ doesn't necessarily mean ‘black.’ We don’t know 100% that Cheddar Man was very dark skinned – just almost certainly a good deal darker than what
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we would call a white person now. And that’s actually kindof interesting – the fact that the artists and the documentary chose to portray Cheddar Man as being very dark skinned might prompt some interesting questions about how we today imagine racial otherness; about how scientific findings get presented to the public; and whether we can really use modern categories like race to reconstruct a past when it might not have been so simple.
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So much of what we pay attention to in a human face – like expression, and hair length, and style, and facial hair – can’t be known from DNA: there is a lot of artistic license here. The artists chose to give Cheddar Man a cheeky little grin, a little bit of personality, and you can't tell that from the genes – he might have been a miserable git. So there is a lot here that
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goes beyond the science. Marcus and Tom are almost right. And to prove this point I’m going to bury my own head in the woods.
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<Birds chirping> <Drumbeat>
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<Documentary piano music> ANNOUNCER: For the first time in decades, breakthroughs in cutting-edge scientific technology have allowed scientists to resurrect the past. Researchers at the University of New London have sequenced the DNA of ‘Geordie Man’ – a 10,000 year-old skeleton found in the radioactive wasteland that was once the North of England.
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VOICE OF SCIENTIST: When Geordie Man was first discovered in the year 12,016 it was initially thought to have been the skull of a giant gorilla. But then we figured out that it was actually the skull of a humanoid male with a freakishly large head. Based on the genetic markers we can say with reasonable certainty that Geordie Man was probably around six foot tall; had pale blue/green eyes; dark hair; and required primitive some form of primitive corrective
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glass worn on the face in order to see. And from the shape of the skull we can deduce that he was probably an alpha buck that slayed mad puss on the reg. Definitely a chad. I mean, with a skull circumference like that he was probably so chad that he shared a border with Cameroon.
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To its credit, the Channel 4 documentary alludes to the fact that discovering one of the first Britons was probably what we today would have called a person of colour is a significant thing. One of the scientists who did the genetic analysis explicitly says this is a challenge to the idea that ‘British’ means ‘white.’ He enlists the help of an unknown expert in the US who emails him partway through the programme
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saying that there's a very high probability that Cheddar Man had dark to black skin but he quote "can't say for sure". You can actually see a snippet of that email in the documentary. So when Marcus and Tom say that this is a politically relevant discovery and the way we present the past reflects not just what it was like but also how we think about it through the lens of now, they’re not wrong in that bit,
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per se. They’ve hit upon an interesting philosophical point which is that the study of history is like a kind of storytelling. Historians try to construct stories out of bits and pieces that actually happened but somebody has to take those bits and pieces and put them into a digestible order, and the way they do that will reflect them and the context in which they live. But then – Moon-logic. Thomas claims that this is all part of a deliberate conspiracy to trick
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white people out of their heritage and their claims on European land. He calls this, “psychological terrorism that should not be forgiven by anybody.” And of course he provides absolutely no evidence of this conspiracy existing, but he isn’t the only one saying that it's out there: see also this anonymous article on Cheddar man from ‘FreedomPostUK.’ <Host's "Mars" builds dramatically> VOICE OF Hbomberguy: “‘Black’ Cheddar Man appears to be a
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mainstream media fabrication to rewrite history and claim that the original inhabitants of Europe were black in an effort to ‘justify’ multiculturalism and immigration.” What can I say but ‘Yikes’? “Curiously, their ‘sensational’ story also broke during ‘Black History Month’” <Sarcastically> Oh no! It must be a conspiracy! What are the odds of that happening?! One in twelve? <Fart noise> So they got the first bit right: it’s just that’s the spoonful of sugar that helps
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the poison go down. Similarly Bannon says some things which are true and they give his overall story more credibility, and whether he personally believes the falsehoods he says or not, it’s the overall story that he’s selling. <Chopin returns> Apparently most of the protestors outside Bannon’s speech at Oxford were typical students. Idealistic. Socialist. Oh yes. A surprising number. As if they don’t know that socialism/communism killed…I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of people?
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I used to be a lecturer so I know students quite well. I was a lecturer at London Saints University, years ago. Awful tragedy with the library at London Saints. All those books up in smoke. Let's stay in history for a moment and talk about Julius Evola, who is also absolutely f****n' hilarious. Julius Evola was an early 20th Century Italian writer, he was literally a Baron and he literally wore a monocle. Stephen Bannon has mentioned
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Evola a few times in passing; the now-disgraced former golden boy of Brietbart Milo Yiannopoulos credited Evola as one of the foundational thinkers of the Alt-Right movement, and it's not hard to see why: his influence is clear. It’s possible to take a very surface-level reading of Evola according to which he is just a ‘Traditionalist.’ Traditionalism being the philosophical idea that all the different ancient traditions
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of the world's different societies have a grain of truth in them that the modern world has lost sight of, and that we need to go back and recover. VOICE OF CONTRAPOINTS: “It is only by going back to the meanings and the visions that existed before the establishment of the causes of the present civilisation that it is possible to achieve an absolute reference point – the key for the real understanding of all modern deviations.”
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On the surface, Evola’s traditionalism might seem pretty innocuous – something’s wrong with the modern world and we need to go back in time in order to discover what it is. But remember: history reflects the storyteller. It matters what those traditions are and it matters who gets to pick them. <Duh-nuh-nuunn...> <WEEP WOOP WEEP WOOP WEEP WOOP WEEP> Oh I'll get to you another day. <DUN DA-NUN DA DUN DUUN!> Our old pals Marcus and Tom discuss Evola in the same video they discuss Cheddar Man,
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and they read him as simply a Traditionalist. They distinguish between traditionalism and conservatism – conservatism being, according to them, the tendency to preserve the familiar - whereas Traditionalism being the idea that we need to go back even further to find deeper truths. In their video, Marcus and Tom ask if the goal is to go back to traditions, how can we discover authentic traditions that haven’t
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been distorted over time? In other words how can we do accurate history for this Traditionalist project? And that would be an interesting question, but Marcus gives the game away and he says that the traditions we live by need to be in line with “our values as Europeans,” and that means that rather than choosing values based on the traditions, Marcus is doing it the other way round: he’s choosing which traditions
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to follow based on the values he currently has! And choosing the traditions based on the values is exactly the same mistake that Evola makes as well. He was heavily involved with the Italian fascists and the Nazis, which makes sense once you read him. The fact that he was a facist is not an incidental detail that we can separate from his philosophy: because there is no neutral history there can be no untainted
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Traditionalism that doesn't contain some of the values of the present being projected back. And if you carry on reading "Revolt Against the Modern World" beyond the introduction you'll find that all the traditions Evola thinks we need to go back to are terrible! For instance, he says that miscegenation and racial equality is messing with the naturally ordered hierarchy of the races, which we need to bring back.
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In an interesting twist, unlike a lot of modern racists Evola didn't believe that biology or IQ or genetics made white people superior; he was a spiritual racist. He says it might seem unfair to say that some people are born racially inferior, but: <La Danse Macabre begins> VOICE OF CONTRAPOINTS: “A person is endowed with a certain spirit by virtue of being born in a given caste, but at the same time, one is born in a specific caste because one possesses, transcendentally, a given spirit.”
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In other words, if you weren’t such a screwup your immortal soul would have had the good sense to have been born a HWITE person! The same is also apparently true of gender. To be born a man you have to first be transcendentally male; to be born female you have to first be transcendentally just a piece of sh*t. Just, just, just the worst. What it is to be transcendentally trans, he doesn’t say. We can guess. Men must realise their soul’s potential
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by becoming either warriors or ascetics; and women must realise their soul's potential by becoming either mothers or lovers! And Evola doesn’t mean ‘lover’ in the fun way of consensual sexual explorations between loving and equal partners; he means women giving themselves entirely to men and “being for another being" again, not in the fun way. According to Evola, “so-called feminism” – direct quote - is really taking women
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away from what will make them happy! It's turning all the, all the dudes are becoming femoids! <La Danse Macabre Intensifies> It's the degeneracy of the female and male types! And it's happening because men aren't virile enough and it's a threat to the West! VOICE OF CONTRAPOINTS: “Hence the types of the woman-garçonne and the shallow and vain woman, incapable of any élan beyond herself, utterly inadequate as far as sensuality and sinfulness are concerned
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because to the modern woman the possibilities of physical love are often not as interesting as the narcissistic cult of her body, or as being seen with as many or as few clothes as possible.” Also harem anime is the ideal model of Western femininity: Tenchi Muyo was redpilled as fuuuu-! Evola predicts that if this goes on, relationships and gender norms as he knows them in 1934 are doomed! And in fairness he was right about that: it just turned out that was rad.
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The West really did decline after 1934, but it wasn’t degeneracy or a lack of racial purity that killed so many people and destroyed Europe; it was people like Evola worrying about that stuff so much that they invented fascism and committed genocide over it. Although when he was tried in 1951 he said, <Epic anime music builds> "I'm not a fascist. I’m a SUPERFASCIST.” "You’re not dealing with an ordinary fascist anymore, Kakarot! I have realised the legend!"
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<Anime music ends; Olly falls about the place> But the world actually got a tiny bit better again in 1974 - when Julius Evola f****n’ died. Like a cuck. If he was really all that great, his soul wouldn’t have been born into a body susceptible to liver disease. VOICEOVER: He was then reincarnated as Davis Aurini. But if you strip Evola of all of that context and pretend neutral history is possible you can present this watered-down version where he’s just a Traditionalist.
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And here’s the real kicker: if anybody then comes to you and tries to bring up that relevant context you can them of just poisoning the well, of being a biased virtue-signalling SJW who’s afraid of new ideas, and they won't debate you on Evola's terms. Kindof like if a cigarette company put out an ad saying that smoking makes you cool, and you pointed out that smoking gives people cancer, and they said, "Why won't you debate us on "The Cool Question?"
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And here we come back to Stephen Bannon, because he is really good at this! When Bannon gave his speech at Oxford Univeristy there were antifascist protestors outside, and he said he wished that they understood fascism cause fascism is about trying to worship the state and he’s trying to shrink the state, so he can’t be fascist. And again, not entirely wrong, but incomplete, because fascism is also often characterised by racial ideology. It’s really more about the worship of the
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in-group versus the out-group, where that in-group is often (though not always) defined racially; and yes, if and when that in-group gets into power there is a certain amount of state worship but that's because the state then becomes the proxy for the Master Race from which all others are excluded. On the topic of immigration Bannon says that immigrants drive down wages, but that's not actually true. It's not true when Steve Bannon says it and it isn't true when Jeremy Corbyn says it either!
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Immigrants don't lower wages; bosses do. And they do it because we live in a system where things are done because they're profitable, not because people need them to be done. He also says that welfare states can't take the burden of mass migration, which would only be true as long as the people who got rich under this current system are allowed to keep that money, which we don't have to let them do!
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Another very slick surface-level claim that Bannon makes is that President Donald Trump’s policies don’t care about whether you’re black or white or Asian or Hispanic; they care about whether you’re a citizen. He calls this ‘Economic Nationalism,’ and says it’s about maximising the value of citizenship. And yeah, okay, but in countries like the USA and UK, where for a long time only white people were allowed to be full citizens, who gets seen as a citizen now is still very much affected by
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that history. This is not about blame or guilt or victimhood - those are all ways that people like Bannon will try and get you to say, “Look, they won’t debate us on the question of whether smoking is cool or not!” When he talks about ‘not being guilty for being white’ or as he said to French National Front, “Let them call you a racist: wear it as a badge of honour,” that’s a way of encouraging white people in the audience to take conversations about philosophy
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and history and instead make them about our white feelings, which can cause that Affective Override. So please note that I still have not once called Steve Bannon a racist - I’m just putting the warning labels on the cigarette packets. Facts don’t care about your feelings, Steve! It is important to realise though that these sleights of hand will work best on white people because we are used to thinking that race doesn’t have anything to do with anything because it isn’t
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ever made a problem for us. Constitutional Law Professor Barbara Flagg this ‘The Transparency Phenomenon,” the tendency for white people to think that categories like citizen and criminal or citizen and immigrant are race-neutral because nobody has ever used them against us in a racialised way. Nobody has ever said to me in Britain, “Where are you from? No I mean, where are you from?” And that means that if and when fascism does make
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a comeback and these categories start overlapping more and more with race and other marginalised identities we might not be the first to smell the smoke, so we should probably listen to those who can. <Chopin begins sweetly> ???: "Apparently they arrested one of the ringleaders of the Oxford protest. Some transgender boy. Or? Or girl? (I don’t really understand that whole thing myself; I mean, I’m not a bigot, I’m
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quite willing to call people by whatever name, you know, but I don’t understand why they make such a fuss? These activists, they demand that you not merely… tolerate, but... believe as well. It's Orwellian. Orwellian. I was young and brave too once, but never made that sort of fuss in my day. As I say, I grew up very poor, still almost penniless to this day. I was a waiter. Before I was a lecturer, before I was a travelling salesman, a waiter at a luxury restaurant in Piccadilly.
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Did you ever visit the hotel Mill and Smith? Magnificent, gorgeous establishment. This was all years ago, of course. Terrible what happened to that place; apparently it started in the kitchen. <Chopin starts going sour, creepy synth drones rise...> Somebody left a stove on. All those people! Not to mention the furniture! Although that was an experience, let me tell you, waiting tables at the Hotel Mill and Smith!
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You see the way the other half lives. All dressed up in their finest, nattering away. You’re closer to the centre of power in a restaurant in Piccadilly than you are if were in the front row of the Commons, let me tell you. The extravagance with which the elites of the world operate, the circles in which they move, the amount of shekels changing hands… It is extraordinary. In the Frum debate Bannon says the choice is between Trump populism or Bernie Sanders/Jeremy
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Corbyn populism but even then he’s not giving you the full picture cause if you want you can keep going! Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? They could be just the beginning! I'm not trying to tell you what to do here but you don’t have to settle for rent controls and more affordable housing – you could demand that we confiscate landlord's property and abolish rent and give it to people for free.
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You don’t have to settle for ending unjust wars – you could dismantle the military and spend that money on other stuff. You don’t have to settle for taxing fuel slightly more; you could break up the biggest polluting companies. You don't have to settle for making healthcare "more efficient," you could make it free for everyone. Not just citizens. Everybody! You don’t have to settle for a 44% marginal tax rate on earnings above five million a year
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which is something Steve Bannon allegedly pushed for or even a 70% one! You could take 100% of that money and establish a maximum wage. And a lot of rich people would lose a lot of money… But that’s the other kind of populism than Steve Bannon won’t tell you about. Bannon says, in my opinion correctly, that when people lose faith in liberal capitalism you got two choices: it's gonna be socialism or it's gonna be fascism. The sugar, the kernel of truth, in what he
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says, is that the old way of doing political philosopher, where politicians and capital are in bed with each other, has knackered us. It is provably a disaster. I would go one step further and say that climate change is a problem of liberal capitalism’s making that it is unable to solve in time and so we really do need some new ideas or we really are gonna face an apocalyptic scenario. Marxists would go even further and say that it’s not just
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in its consequences, but in its very form that capitalism is morally unjustifiable. But regardless of that: arguably we really have reached a kind of turning point in human history and the choices really are socialism or barbarism. But Bannon won't entertain the possibility of socialism. And he won’t overtly tell you that fascism is the answer… <Fire sirens> Ah, thank you ever so much, would you mind putting that over there with the others? You can leave this, if you like.
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Can I offer you a drink? No? Very healthy of you. I don’t know what the world’s coming to these days. Nobody’s trusts anybody anymore, what with these arson attacks. To be perfectly frank, I think there’s something fishy going on. I mean, who appoints these so-called fire-fighters? Who are they accountable to? Running around, breaking down doors, covering their faces – bullying people for something as small as not changing the batteries in
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a smoke alarm! I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were one or two fire-fighters working with the arsonists!
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I like you. I feel like we've known each other a long time. We’re a dying breed, you and I. The world is changing. Seems like everywhere you look, flames are beginning to rise. And we have to be so careful not to lose everything we’ve built! <A synth cover of "Why We Build the Wall" builds> I say… You wouldn’t by any chance happen to have... A match? SINGING: Why do we build the wall? My children? My children? Why do we build the wall?
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Why do we build the wall? We build the wall to keep us free! That's why we build the wall, we build the wall to keep us free! How does the wall keep us free? My children? My children? How does the wall keep us free? How does the wall keep us free? The wall keeps out the enemy! And we build the wall to keep us free! That's why we build the wall! We build the wall to keep us free! Who do we call the enemy? My children, my children? Who do we call the enemy?
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Who do we call the enemy? The enemy is poverty! And the wall keeps out the enemy! And we build the wall to keep us free! That's why we build the wall! We build the wall to keep us free! Because we have and they have not! My children, my children! Because they want what we have got! Because we have and they have not! Because they want what we have got! The enemy is poverty! And the wall keeps out the enemy!
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And we build the wall to keep us free! That's why we build the wall! We build the wall to keep us free! <Sick instrumental bit> By the way, even though this cover is fair use it's been copyright claimed and the record label are trying to take the money, so if you wanna sign up to my Patreon that'd be a big help... What do we have that they should want? My children, my children? What do we have that they should want?
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What do we have that they should want? We have a wall to work upon! We have work and they have none! AND OUR WORK IS NEVER DONE, MY CHILDREN! MY CHILDREN! AND THE WAR IS NEVER WON! THE ENEMY IS POVERY! AND THE WALL KEEPS OUT THE ENEMY! AND WE BUILD THE WALL TO KEEP US FREE! THAT'S WHY WE BUILD THE WALL! We build the wall to keep us free! WE. BUILD. THE. WALL. TO. KEEP. US. FREE.
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