Bannon’s showmanship key factor in Munk debate
Protesters delay start of event
Over and over again, the Toronto audience laughed at Steve Bannon, the Donald Trump campaign mastermind and former White House chief.
They laughed when he said Trump has not yet made a bad decision, and when he said Trump was trying to “rejuvenate” NATO. They laughed when he said Trump’s economic nationalism does not care about your race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual preference. They laughed when he said Trump was not an Islamophobe because the first country he visited as president was Saudi Arabia. They laughed when he said Trump would admit he is not perfect.
But this was not the laughter of scorn, mockery, and rejection. Rather, it was an aloof sort of intellectual mirth as Bannon and his partner in this Munk Debate, former George W. Bush speech writer David Frum, played with the darkest themes of Trumpera politics as if they were pieces in a rhetorical board game.
When it suited, they were folksy and good natured. Bannon once jokingly thanked his mother when one single person applauded. Sometimes they were earnest. Bannon especially was often self-deprecating. This jovial tone was exactly what the hundreds of protesters outside feared it was. This debate was not some crucible of truth in which Bannon’s retrograde revolutionary zeal would be put to the proper test. This was entertainment.
Massive protests delayed the start of the debate by nearly an hour. Hecklers targeted people as they entered, calling them fascist supporters, everyone from comedian Rick Mercer to Nobel laureate John Polanyi. Unusual for such an obviously largescale protest, attendees had to pass within arms-length of protesters yelling at them. Host Rudyard Griffiths said a police officer was injured.
Inside, there was also disruption. A woman interrupted as soon as Bannon started. She started chanting and hung a banner from the balcony: “No hate. No bigotry. No platform for Bannon’s white supremacy.” She got intense boos. Griffiths invited her to stay. She said she would, but kept talking. Griffiths was quick to rescind the offer. Police removed her without incident. A few minutes later, another woman stood up with another banner, but did not chant. She left after a minute or so.
Bannon’s thesis was that a revolution is coming, what he calls a Fourth Turning, citing an arcane theory of historical evolution. He said it was spurred by the 2008 financial crisis, and the bailout devised in Washington in anticipation of global economic meltdown.
“Who did that? Who’s responsible for that? The populists? Donald Trump? No. The elites, the financial, corporate, permanent political class that runs Washington, D.C., that’s who did it. What was their solution? To create money to bail themselves out.” They “flooded the zone with liquidity. The party of Davos bailed themselves out.”
The inevitable consequence is populism, he said. The only question is whether it will be left or right wing. He foretold a revolution, not only in Europe where he has created The Movement to act as the “interconnective tissue” for nationalist parties, but in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East.
“It shouldn’t be lost on you,” he said, that Angela Merkel is leaving German politics as Jair Bolsonaro takes over Brazilian politics.
He mocked the caricatures of economic problems based on Freemasons or Illuminati or Protocols, many of which are endorsed by Trump’s own supporters.
“There’s no conspiracy. It’s in your face,” Bannon said, and predicted that millennials will be especially receptive to his logic, as they are trapped in a gig economy with no hope of owning a home or securing a pension.
Bannon cited J.D. Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy for drawing the link between factories closing, jobs leaving, and the opioid crisis.
“They took away people’s self-worth and dignity,” he said. “It’s pretty easy to create things when you’re flooding the zone with capital and destroying the basis of the Judeo-Christian West, which is saving.”
This got not laughter, but “oohs” of controversy.
The elites and the political class “look at the populist movement as a bunch of racist, nativist, xenophobes,” Bannon said. “Well, it’s not. They’re the backbone of our country, the most decent people on earth. Here in Canada, you’re built upon the same building blocks of the little guy, the little person, what do you call it, for the common good?”
Frum’s main counterpoint was that Bannon’s populism offers nothing but anger and fear, and its adherents are “smashing things they do not understand.” In this, he referenced Kristallnacht.
He acknowledged that populists have been winning for five years, but predicted they will lose, not just in the upcoming U.S. elections, but in the long run.
“When you lose you’re children will be ashamed of you, they will disavow you, and the future will not belong to you,” Frum said. “And it starts tonight.”