Steve Bannon Is Terrified of the L.A. Protests

MAGA-whisperer Steve Bannon—while claiming that he's 'taken out' Elon Musk—believes the L.A. anti-ICE protests are the start of World War III.
'We're in the Third World War,' he told The Spectator in an interview published on Monday. 'And it's a battlefield that's everywhere, including in downtown Los Angeles.' He also posited that the clash between police and protesters is just the beginning of a summer-long Democratic psyop designed to destabilize the country.
'[Democrats] allowed in 10 to 13 million illegal alien invaders into this country. They all must go home. All. Not some. All must go home. They must be deported. They must go home or we don't have a country, OK?' he said. 'We're in for another summer of riots. They just kicked it off.… The question here is, who told the police to step down? I think there's only 10 arrests. The LAPD allowed that thing to metastasize. Who gave the order? Whoever. Whoever was the government official that gave that order should be arrested this morning.'
Bannon also echoed Trump, calling for suspension of habeas corpus and the arrest of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom, comparing the latter to John C. Calhoun and his conflict with President Andrew Jackson.
'Andrew Jackson said, 'Hey, if this guy goes against me, I'm assembling the US Army, and I'm going to hang him from the first lamppost.… If Gavin Newsom is saying, 'hey, come on, arrest me.' Hey, well, if he gets in the way of federal officials trying to sort this mess out, he should be arrested.'
Bannon, cantankerous as ever, then moved on to his plans to financially attack Elon Musk and the other monopolistic 'tech bros,' who he thinks are a 'bunch of fucking pussies.'
'We're going to break up Facebook,' he told The Spectator. 'We're going to break up Google. We're going to break up Amazon. We're going to break … I think hopefully we get to eventually break up Walmart. You've got too much concentration of private power. It's obvious it's anti-populist. It's anti–economic nationalist.'
This 'we' that Bannon keeps referring to is troubling. While he was relegated to the periphery of the MAGAsphere after his fallout with Trump a week after the white supremacist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, the former White House chief executive has returned to the fold with a more naked commitment to fascism. It is Bannon who lies at the heart of the internal GOP rift between more traditional conservatives, or 'neocons' to him, and the right-wing ethnonationalism of MAGA.
Trump's extreme immigration agenda, along with the recent ouster of Elon Musk, aligns seamlessly with Bannon's perspective, suggesting that he is very much back as a close confidant and adviser to the president. And that will only result in an even more brutal, more authoritarian Trump administration.

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