Alt-Right Slob Tries to Strong-Arm Freedom Caucus
Steve Bannon is the kind of childish vulgarian for whom being an unshaven slob is both the insecure, chubby school boy’s mask to shield feelings of physical inadequacy, and a calculated image, an affectation designed to make him appear “anti-elitist” in the eyes of his target audience. The affectation part is also, quite obviously, an attempt to ape the public persona of Andrew Breitbart, whose news organization and legacy Bannon has mangled with his “alt-right” crapola. (“Alt-right”: a label used to flatter simpletons in order to corral them into blindly supporting the Republican Party establishment.) Think of Bannon as the Michael Moore of the right.
Now, of course, as a reward for his service as an obedient mouthpiece and smear artist for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Bannon is a high-ranking member of Trump’s administration. (Notice how, as promised, Trump the businessman rewards his friends: in addition to Bannon, RNC chairman Reince Priebus was chosen for a major cabinet post, as was Mitch McConnell’s wife. Trump does know how to thank his friends — all of them people knee-deep in the establishment mire. “Draining the swamp,” then, was apparently a reference to his method of dredging up new allies.) In this role, Bannon was called into action to assist in negotiations with the House Freedom Caucus regarding the failed TrumpCare health reform bill. According to Axios, “people in the conference room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building” said that Bannon’s first words to the HFC were these:
Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill.
This is what negotiation looks like, Trump-style. “You have to do this, because I’m Trump.” Remember Trump’s comment, during a primary debate, when asked whether the military should be expected to follow his orders to commit illegal acts of torture, that the military will do whatever he tells them to do? That’s how this man thinks. That’s why he has sycophants among the weak-minded, for whom “schoolyard bully” equals “alpha male.”
To be fair to Bannon the Breitbart-Lite Bully, his demand was only a more grammatical version of the seemingly drunken diatribe delivered by faux conservative Charles Krauthammer in the earliest stages of discussion of the TrumpCare bill:
In the end, the Republicans are gonna have to…essentially the conservatives — the ones who are more radical — are going to have to fall on their swords, because there is no way they can have…this is the signature event for the new administration. If they were to, in the end, eliminate the entitlement, and put it down, I think it would destroy the presidency. I think there is nothing that they could do right now. They’re gonna try to get a more, a more serious, conservative entitlement. But if they were to ask the administration to give, in the end, a, um, to fall on their sword on this, I think it would be disastrous on the part of the conservatives. They are right now asking for destruction of the entitlement. I think after what Obama did, there is an entitlement that is now accepted, but in the end, there is no way that they’re gonna consolidate…they’re gonna consolidate a, um, a loss of the entitlement.
Trump needs a “victory,” and only those obnoxious constitutional conservatives with their damned principles are standing in his way. And that’s an interesting fact in itself by the way: Steve Bannon, the great rebel media master, was echoing the exact sentiments of one of the old guard pseudo-conservative establishment media masters. Gee, what a shock; for all the rhetorical difference, the alt-right and the progressive Republican establishment are working from the same playbook. Hence my use of the phrase “alt-establishment.”
Happily, according to the same report, one of the HFC members responded to Bannon’s Trumpism in pitch-perfect form:
You know, the last time someone ordered me to do something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.
Oh yes, dear constitutional conservative, but that was merely your daddy — this is Steve Bannon, a chief surrogate for everyone’s “Daddy,” as Bannon creation Milo Yiannopoulos proudly called Trump, back when Milo’s wistful fantasies of being raped by the old man seemed more, shall we say, metaphorical.
Now that the whole of America is being raped by his incompetence and that of his puppet-masters and minions (or puppet-masters posing as minions), it is incumbent on all those not susceptible to his tawdry but effective techniques of mass hypnosis (“The Wall“) to expose him and his merry band for what they really are and always have been: the progressive establishment’s ultimate weapon, Mitch McConnell masquerading as a populist demagogue.
In ultimate effect, Steve Bannon, the alt-right’s answer to Michael Moore, is no different from the alt-left’s original. Populist demagoguery of all stripes can only tend in one general direction, and it’s not a direction anyone who cares about liberty, rationality, or civil society ought to be willing to go.
