Thursday, September 3, 2020

Steve Bannon’s Band of Bookworms: Avatars of the Pre-Modern Promise

 

Traditionalism fascism neopaganism books Steve Bannon alt-right

Steve Bannon made headlines this past week when he was arrested on the 150-foot mega yacht of a fugitive Chinese billionaire and business associate, Guo Wengui, and was charged with conspiring to cheat hundreds of thousands of donors for a private fundraising effort, “We Built the Wall” by falsely promising that their money had been set aside for new sections of the wall.

Bannon’s arrest, combined with the growing popular backlash against the extremism of President Donald Trump, makes War For Eternity, Benjamin Teitelbaum’s excursion into Steven Bannon’s mind and social milieu, very timely.

Prior to his arrest, Bannon was known as the free-thinking gadfly who co-founded Breitbart News, a major platform of the alt-right. He is also a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, filmmaker, and was White House chief strategist for the first seven months of the Donald Trump presidency.

Teitelbaum is an anthropologist and professor of ethnomusicology at UC Boulder who has written for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic on Nordic nationalism and the ultra-right. The course of his research over several years has acquainted him with a century-old “philosophical and spiritual school with an eclectic if minuscule” following known as Traditionalism “—with a capital T—” he adds. His interest increased during the 2016 campaign season when Bannon began dropping names that he, Teitelbaum, knew were associated with Traditionalism, a sign that this obscure and underground movement was now surfacing in real-world politics.  (more...)

Steve Bannon’s Band of Bookworms: Avatars of the Pre-Modern Promise

Related:

What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read

Steve Bannon Is Charged With Fraud in We Build the Wall Campaign



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