Bannon's Reading List

Update 4/5/17: Bannon ousted from NSC. (Original post 2/7/17)

Various White House sources are downplaying the significance of his departure. Given my skepticism of anything that comes out of the Trump White House, I'm going to believe this is good news.

Lawmakers of both parties welcomed the reversion to a more traditional NSC structure.

“I'd be very pleased that he would not be on the national security council,” Sen. Ben Cardin, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on Capitol Hill. “My hope is that he would have no role in government at all and would be completely out.”

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) said downgrading Bannon was a "good move" -- and praised the reinstatement of the joint chiefs chairman as a permanent member of the security council. "The chairman of the joint chiefs should be in a permanent position, so I think it's the right thing to do, but it's a decision of the president's," McCain said. "I said at the time that I didn't think a political adviser should be a member of that body because it's never been, so I think it's the right thing to do."

Here are excerpts from reporting on "Bannon's Reading List" by Eliana Johnson and Eli Stokols of Politico:

Bannon’s readings tend to have one thing in common: the view that technocrats have put Western civilization on a downward trajectory, and that only a shock to the system can reverse its decline. And they tend to have a dark, apocalyptic tone that at times echoes Bannon’s own public remarks over the years—a sense that humanity is at a hinge point in history.

“The West is in trouble. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, and Trump’s election was a sign of health,” said a White House aide who was not authorized to speak publicly. “It was a revolt against managerialism, a revolt against expert rule, a revolt against the administrative state. It opens the door to possibilities.”

“They look like the incarnation of ‘antifragile’ people,” Taleb said of the new administration. “The definition of ‘antifragile’ is having more upside than downside. For example, Obama had little upside because everyone thought he was brilliant and would solve the world’s problems, so when he didn’t it was disappointing. Trump has little downside because he’s already been so heavily criticized. He’s heavily vaccinated because of his checkered history. People have to understand: Trump did not run to be Archbishop of Canterbury.”

By the way, I've read several of Nassim Taleb's books, and I, like Bannon it seems, think he is a brilliant writer.

Curtis Yarvin: “nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth.”“To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable [sic] demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”

Michael Anton: “[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.”

Yes, things change. They've been changing since before 1776. Puritans from England, from Holland, later Irish and Italian, ... there have always been immigrants, and there will continue to be long after Trump has faded into the past. (I can't think of the right words for this, but also the enslavement of Africans working Southern plantations, the Chinese immigrants working to complete the transcontinental railroad. My point here is that the vast majority of Trump's voters descended from immigrants, and have benefited immeasurably from the work that slaves and low wage migrant workers have performed since the beginning of America.)

More articles on Bannon:

• DailyKos reporting on Bannon's 2014 presentation to a small conference on poverty at the Vatican
• Foreign Policy “But there is not a lot of infighting right now, because to have infighting, there needs to be a power struggle, and there is no struggle, the intelligence official said.”
• A 2015 article from Bloomberg Joshua Green

“In the 1990s,” [Bannon] told me, “conservative media couldn’t take down [Bill] Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and they always oversold the conclusion: ‘It’s clearly impeachable!’ So they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.”

"Bannon realizes that politics is sometimes more effective when it’s subtle. So he’s nurtured a Dr. Jekyll side: In 2012 he became founding chairman of GAI, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization staffed with lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators. “What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon says, referring to GAI’s president."Evola eventually broke with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists because he considered them overly tame and corrupted by compromise."