Getty Steve Bannon
The New Yorker announced today that President Trump’s former Chief Strategist Stephen K. Bannon will be headlining The New Yorker Festival this year. Members are cancelling their subscriptions, other speakers are dropping out and usual festival-goers are boycotting the event.
This year’s festival will take place in New York City starting on October 5th and ending on the 7th. Bannon is scheduled to be interviewed by David Remnick, the magazine’s editor.
“I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” said Remnick, but that doesn’t matter to some of the magazine’s members, who don’t want Bannon given a platform at all.
Many have tweeted that they’ve cancelled their subscriptions with the magazine:
The normalization of white supremacy is a cancer that continues to grow in our country.
Steve Bannon should never be given the prestigious platform of The New Yorker Festival.
He is a hate-filled bigot. Period.
I’m disgusted that @NewYorker Ideas Festival has invited Steve Bannon as their headliner. He’s not a public official. He’s not a legitimate intellectual. But he is a far-right organizer drawing intellectual cred from their platform.
I know some brilliant and amazing folks at @NewYorker. I am embarrassed on their behalf that their company would pull this cynical, disgusting, racist nonsense. I just cancelled my subscription, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. This is unacceptable.
Here’s what you need to know about Steve Bannon:
1. Bannon Co-Founded Breitbart News: The Platform For The Alt-Right
Bannon was an officer in the United States Navy in the late 1970s and spent time at the Pentagon in the early 80s where he served as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations.
After leaving the military, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker. He was with the company for five years. He was the Vice President when he left for a small bank called Bannon & Co. that focused on media deals. Bannon has a Masters degree from Georgetown University and an M.B.A. from Harvard.
From 1993 to 1995, Bannon ran a research facility in Arizona called Biosphere 2, designed to mimic Earth’s environment. He left after a lawsuit was filed against him by one of his employees, stating that Bannon called her a “29-year-old bimbo,” and said he would “kick her a**.”
After leaving Biosphere 2 research facility, Bannon focused on producing conservative films and documentaries including “Occupy Unmasked,” a critique of the Occupy Wall Street movement and “The Undefeated,” about Sarah Palin.
In 2007, Bannon co-founded Breitbart News, “the platform for the alt-right,” defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”
Bannon himself dubbed the publication “the platform for the alt-right,” admitting his connections with white nationalists and white supremacists.
2. Bannon Was The CEO of Trump’s Campaign And Then Chief Strategist to His Administration Once he Won The Election
Bannon helped Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential race. He was his Chief Executive Officer until he took office, then he became Trump’s Chief Strategist. His appointment drew opposition from the Anti-Defamation League, the Council on American–Islamic Relations and the Southern Poverty Law Center because of statements produced by Breitbart News that were considered racist and anti-Semitic.
Trump was presented with a letter on November 15, 2016 that was signed by 169 Democratic House Representatives and spearheaded by U.S. Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island. The letter urged President Trump to dismiss Bannon as Chief Strategist. “Appointing Bannon sends a disturbing message about what kind of president Donald Trump wants to be,” the letter read. The letter listed Bannon’s “ties to the White Nationalist movement,” stating that there is plenty of proof and that it’s been “well documented.”
Bannon denied these claims, calling himself an “economic nationalist” rather than a white nationalist. Bannon told The Hollywood Reporter that “Darkness is good: Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
In an interview with The New York Times Trump defended Bannon saying, “I’ve known Steve Bannon a long time. If I thought he was a racist, or alt-right, or any of the things that we can, you know, the terms we can use, I wouldn’t even think about hiring him.”
Bannon was released from his position about a year later on August 18, 2017. He went back to solely focusing on running Breitbart News. He claimed his aim was to become “the infrastructure, globally, for the global populist movement.”
3. Bannon Believes The Media is “The Opposition Party”
While working for the Trump Administration, Bannon called the media the “opposition party,” saying that “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”
President Trump shares the same view, tweeting almost daily that most news being published in America is fake news.
“The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said in interview. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
The New York Times and The Washington Post were among the publications he criticized, saying they had “no power” over the results of the election.
Another little know fact is Bannon’s involvement with the travel ban in America. He helped write the travel ban that continues to block seven predominantly Muslim countries from entrance into the U.S. and has stopped many refugees seeking refuge here.
4. Bannon is Not a Fan of Liberal Women
Bannon has spoken out against liberal women more than once on the record. “There are some unintended consequences of the women’s liberation movement. The women that would lead this country would be pro-family, they would have husbands, they would love their children,” Bannon said in an interview with Political Vindication Radio.
“They wouldn’t be a bunch of dykes that came from the Seven Sisters schools up in New England,” said Bannon. You can listen to the full audio clip here. Bannon has said multiple times that women like Sarah Palin would be best at running our country.
Bannon was accused of sexual harassment while working at Biosphere 2. A female employee filed a lawsuit saying that Bannon and other men would make sexually suggestive remarks about her and other female employees and would also discuss them in a “lewd and derogatory fashion.”
The employee gave a detailed account of a situation that happened at a company party where she says Bannon grabbed her wrist while dancing with her. “He said once I’d done it with him I’d never want to do it with anyone else,” she reported.
That lawsuit was eventually settled.
5. Bannon’s Been Married Three Times And Was Raised a Democrat
Shockingly enough, Bannon was raised by liberal parents. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia and describes his parents as “blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union Democrats.”
“I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f—ed things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f—ed up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster,” Bannon said in an interview with Bloomberg back in 2015.
Bannon has been married three times. All of his marriages ended in divorce. He has three daughters, one with his first wife, and twin daughters with his second wife. One of his ex-wives accused him of making anti-Semitic remarks and claimed he was a violent husband. According to The New York Times, Bannon pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence charges that were eventually dropped.