"The MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump" — NYT's Interview with Steve Bannon

I felt like I was talking with Leon Trotsky in the years before the Russian Revolution

quipped David Brooks (in typical Drama Queen fashion) in his "Unsettling" Interview With Steve Bannon. Lots of good stuff in the New York Times article, although the host of show “War Room”, as I have explained in the past, is totally out of his league with his views of Abraham Lincoln.

Do you see yourself in the same business that Fox News’s Roger Ailes was in, sort of right-wing journalism?

I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt. This is how we motivate people. This show is an activist show. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened.

I mean, Murdoch is a bigger enemy of ours than MSNBC. Because he’s the epitome of neoliberal neocon. And they’re the opiate of the masses. They’re the controlled opposition, right? They’re never going to want fundamental change. They’ll throw some shiny toys — Obama’s a Muslim, the kind of issues which we mock all the time.

Let’s get back to the big narrative. Do you think immigration is the core issue here? That seems to be one issue that drives populist support everywhere.

Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking.

 … If you look at it country by country, it’s all the same. The lack of jobs, the lack of opportunities, the lack of self-confidence.

What we should be doing is cutting the number of foreign students in American universities by 50 percent immediately, because we’re never going to get a Hispanic and Black population in Silicon Valley unless you get them into the engineering schools. No. 2, we should staple an exit visa to their diploma. The foreign students can hang around for a week and party, but then they got to go home and make their own country great.

Our movement is metastasizing to something that’s different than America First; it’s American Citizens First.

What does that mean?

It means Americans have to get a better deal. Right now, the American citizen has all the obligations of serving in the military, of paying taxes, of going through this grind that is American late-stage technofeudal capitalism. But tell me what the bonus is.

 … We’re ascendant in Europe. We’re ascendant here. We’ve had no money. We’re not organized. It’s self-organizing. But our enemies — and they are enemies — continue to overplay their hand, and so we continue to rise.

 … The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: Where’s Trump when we need him?

Read the whole thing™…