Lessons from the Trump-Bannon spat (for those capable of learning)

The comments attributed to ex White House Chief Strategist, Steven Bannon, in the much-hyped book by Michael Wolff (and which he has not denied), are mostly significant only in how the fallout from them provides a moment of absolute clarity to illustrate how very badly lots of people have been duped, and continue to be duped. Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr might have other ideas in rating the significance of what has passed for the sakes of the security of their own particular futures, and in fact for most people, the inference of criminality from what Bannon was reported to have said should magnify feelings of betrayal, and that is why this aspect of Bannon’s comments cannot be left untouched in any coverage of this issue (although certain alternative media outlets are managing to do exactly that).

To set this examination up, let us first examine a piece of writing from the “US Politics” section of the Guardian website. It is not known how widely-read Emma Brockes is – she being the writer – but ultimately it doesn’t matter. Reach comes from being a drop in the ocean; the main idea expressed in the piece stretches across all of corporate-media.

As details from Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s book, poured out, hearing Bannon describe Trump’s son as “treasonous” and daughter Ivanka as “dumb as a brick” was deeply satisfying. But it also triggered an uncomfortable response: some small surge of identification with the man. A ping of gratitude that took a second to squash, once I remembered who it was who was speaking.

This woman cannot be stupid – in another place she uses the word “verisimilitude”, after all. And yet, in her world, there is no realisation that things are more serious than Trump’s facility, or lack of it, for “kindness and decorum”. The title of the piece is “Did anyone else, just for a second, side with Steve Bannon?” – and this informs as to its purpose. The response that this writer describes is not really of her own experience, rather it is instruction to her audience regarding how it should have marshalled its groupthink so as to override any confusion that might have arisen as it was confronted by the appearance of Bannon battling Trump in the political arena. For corporate-media consumers, everything should be clear-cut and unambiguous; there are two sides. For Guardian readers in particular, there is their fellow-travelling side (little do they know about the Masonic origins of that phrase), and there is the other side that hates. When, suddenly, there is a disturbance of the equilibrium, then the mental-guardians against dogma must be deployed; more cognitive dissonance, less analysis of a situation that tells of things not actually being black and white. Most important of all, there can be no asking the question: “what does it all mean?” The very same safeguard is encouraged on the other side of the spectrum, where the Trump Cult refuses to be dented. Bannon is suddenly the enemy. The “Trump-right-or-wrong” cheer-leading site, Infowars, is currently acting like the chickens with a fox in the coop, as the headlines of a barrage of articles demonstrate: “Trump Swipes at Bannon: ‘I Don’t Talk to Him’”; “Breaking! Bannon Joins The Globalists In Act Of Treachery”; “Alex Jones Challenges Bannon To Confirm Or Deny Anti-Trump Comments”; “Breitbart Readers Side With Trump Over War of Words With Bannon”; “Trump Slams Steve Bannon: He’s ‘Lost his Mind’”.

There have been many more. The last one in the above list is about an issuance from Trump that is particularly of the school-yard which receives some more attention further down the page. The penultimate one in the list must be the firing-off of a White House talking point, because it mirrors something that comes straight from the horse’s mouth. Whether it is true or not, Trump Jr asserted on Twitter that Bannon was entirely without support, having lost the Breitbart readership:

Wow, Just looked at the comments section on Breitbart. Wow. When Bannon has lost Breitbart, he’s left with . . . umm, nothing.

And so, as we can, and will see, the demonization of Bannon comes from the very top, and in quite the petty, nasty and determined fashion – and any neutral observer should be able to see that it is not warranted. The volume and the manner of defence, then, cries out to have questions asked about it because Team Trump protests far too much. What is going on? Well, much has been made of Bannon’s perceptions of treason as far as a Trump Jr/Kushner meeting with Russians offering dirt on a Presidential candidate goes, but the real meat for the Team Trump frenzy is not there. It is in the implication of criminality:

“You realise where this is going,”… [Bannon] is quoted as saying. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [senior prosecutor Andrew] Weismann first and he is a money-laundering guy. Their path to… Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr and Jared Kushner … It’s as plain as a hair on your face.”

Let us note, again, that Bannon has not denied the sayings attributed to him in Wolff’s book. It looks as though he is standing by them. In the extract above, he appears to be a man exasperated by the possible prospect of careless low-level gangsterism, or spivery (the dealings of a spiv), making the Presidency of Donald Trump incredibly vulnerable. This is surely where the danger to the Trump White House comes from. Since Bannon publically aired his concerns, Manafort has been detained and is suffering house arrest on money laundering charges.  In this light, Bannon’s wasn’t some politically motivated backstabbing, it wasn’t even “Bulworth-quality… unsayable truth”, as the clever Miss Brockes styles it. Maybe, after all is said and done, it was an utterance of natural abhorrence?

Two notable Trump reactions to Bannon’s comments were a statement from the Presidents’ office, and a cease and desist order from Trump’s lawyers. The following is from the former. Remember, this is characterised as being a “Statement from the President of the United States”.

Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look.

The pronouncement goes on to blame Bannon for the Republicans losing a Senate seat in Alabama, which needs to be read between the lines to detect the “told you so” for rejecting the swamp-creature, and Trump’s man, Luther Strange (a slap in the face, then, for people who wanted to MAGA). To relate a general impression: the statement is packed full of ego-shoring vain glory for his Hong-Kong Phooey progress to the Presidency (the unsung cat character made it happen, Phooey took the credit). Frankly, it reeks of derangement.

The cease and desist notice has been characterised as a “desperate attempt to silence Bannon”, which is an interesting concept, given that Bannon already spoke. Clearly, there is concern that Bannon will reveal more of what he knows.

When Trump ran for the office of President, he appeared to promise that he would punish Hillary Clinton for her own past villainy. “Lock her up!” chanted the attendees at his rallies. Now, these people might find out that they have been conned by a set that is comparable – that they have elected a latter day Borgia (which would make Ivanka Lucrezia) – if only the news media that they trust would not relentlessly trigger them, through the Cult of Trump that has been carefully constructed, into reflexively defensive postures [a great example of this is conveniently provided by a very recent visitor to this site who doled out an unresponsive comment under a previous FBEL article that argues coherently about Trump failure in Iran – please follow the link]. Infowars is the main culprit – in the last few days it has been deploying the Alinsky tactic of delegitimisation and alienation of not only Bannon, but Wolff too, through ridicule and vilification. FBEL has written extensively about the double-cross that is Breitbart (please search the term in the box at the top of the page). While not as rabid as Infowars, Breitbart has tended to press the “Trump-right-or-wrong” buttons of its audience, with its latest offering containing a new and typically infantile Trump Twitter remonstrance in its body that, again, compliments the MO employed by Infowars:

Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book,” Trump wrote. “He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!

Moreover, neither Infowars or Breitbart have bothered to run headlines decrying the apparent alleged meetings between Kushner and the likes of Blair, Kissinger, and Murdoch – all stalwart globalist enemies of the said publications, supposedly.

So-called patriot alternative media is clearly badly compromised, and in a recent FBEL article, the author takes a cautious step towards understanding by whom this has been done†. As demonstrated at the top of this article, corporate-media is engaged in managing perception and the very manner of thinking and appreciating current affairs. Additionally, in the author’s opinion, alternative media is mostly gate-keeping. 99.9% of the people in the USA, UK and Canada, which is where the internal fight against the NWO is coming from, are always backing a losing horse; always barking up the wrong tree. Indeed, if the reader wants to know what the value of alternative media is, this is an exercise that he can do. Attend your local library. Try to look at the Hour of the Time website. This is your control. If the author’s experience is typical in the UK, it will probably be banned. Then try to look at any of the sites from the big names of US, UK or Canadian alternative media.†

Ultimately, nothing shouts “threat to the Globalists neutralised” like murdering an alternative media proprietor on his doorstep in a hail of gunfire. The reference, of course, is to the Hour of the Time’s William Cooper – a veritable danger because of how, to him, the enemy weren’t a nebulous “they”. The enemy was the people who met in the lodges up and down America and who ultimately empowered the evil at the top – yet more identifiable enemy who, to boot, had their faces splashed all over the corporate-media. Moreover, Cooper pointed out that this higher-level enemy was trampling all over law with legislation to enrich itself to the detriment of the little man. But all was not lost, and the solution was self-empowerment through law, through withdrawing from the system, and by exposing the criminality and the multitude of places where it nested.

The author sees the value of such work (the author’s bookshelves are now stocked with Masonic literature – expect reports to appear in these pages) and this is why he has no doubt that people come to this FBEL site and don’t like what they read, or indeed having to read at all, or so much. This is good, because FBEL expects its audience to do some work, and then to be confronted with some home truths. We are not about leading anyone by the nose, and not about hooking suckers from which to milk the rent. FBEL is about finding solutions (not crypto-currencies, by the way) and realising them; its readership needs to be of a tough breed that is going to bear the brunt of restoration – if you are strictly audience (inactive), then go away and don’t come back. A little part of the work to do must be promoting this site and supporting it, because the alternative-media environment, which is as good as entirely controlled, isn’t going to give it any breaks. There is serious work to do and expansion needed in order to do it; at the same time there are no resources, and thus only limitations. Yes, to your detriment, big alternative media sucks up the patriot/libertarian/anti-globalist audience and its dollar because it appears to offer salvation, and folks think they are making a difference in engaging with it (it looks and sounds so convincing, after all). But all it amounts to is Danegeld; the marauding Dane never goes away. It is true is it not, after all these years, the Dane never goes away.

In the American World Pax – the supposed New World Order as intended – there wasn’t meant to be any power on Earth that could challenge the World State. Such a precaution included dumbing-down citizenry; the creation of the Idiocracy. Well, the Idiocracy is here in the West, but it is ill timed, because there are still nation states in the world that will surpass our stupid, feminized countries, and make us – you – reap the whirlwind that you, inexplicably, wouldn’t act to stop from being sown. Time will run out.

† The following extracts are from the Daily Mail article titled “‘Ivanka is terrified’: Kushners fear Russia probe will unravel their family finances – as book claims Trump boasted Jared ‘knew all the crooks in Israel'”.

Jared Kushner had to make numerous revisions to his financial disclosure reports when he joined the administration and got a security clearance.

He failed to disclose his role as a director fo the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation from 2006 to 2015, which funded Israeli settlement construction considered illegal at the time under international law, Newsweek reported.