Keith Koffler - Bannon: Always the Rebel

PRAISE FOR

BANNON

Darth Vader of the Right, populist Svengali, the real president, Stephen K. Bannon has been called many names, most counterfactual.

I have worked with Steve inside and outside the White House. He is more than a Renaissance man. He is one of the truly strategic thinkers alive today. Keith Kofflers book will help you understand why Steve Bannon still matters, and why he is one of the most powerful and important men outside the Oval Office.

SEBASTIAN GORKA, Ph.D. , former deputy assistant to President Trump and chief strategist of the Make America Great Again Coalition

By now, everyone in America knows Steve Bannon, the force of nature who has shaped the Trump presidency more than anyone except Trump himself. If you want to know whats behind that force of natureif you want to know Steve Bannon the manthis is the indispensable book for you.

DAVID HOROWITZ , founding president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey and Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left

At a time when we are witnessing the wholesale abandonment of the basic principles of quality journalismfairness, honesty, objective factual reportage, thoughtful analysisall across the American media, it is most heartening to see Keith Kofflers Bannon: Always the Rebel . Mr. Kofflers treatment of his ostensibly controversial subject is at once dispassionate, informative, objective, and insightful. He more than meets his objectives of demystifying this important and not well-understood figure, placing Bannon accurately in the broader framework of American conservatism. The book is also a very lively read.

KENNETH deGRAFFENREID , former national security advisor to President Ronald Reagan and deputy undersecretary of defense

Copyright 2017 by Keith Koffler

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For Rebekah, Adam, and Ariela

CONTENTS

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

William F. Buckley Jr.

T his book is an effort to demystify Stephen Bannon, to separate the real man from the caricatures, and to explain his brand of conservative populism.

Bannon has a good sense of humor, but he is an extremely serious man. This I learned during more than ten hours of interviews with him, conducted over three different visits to his home in Washington, D.C. Two of the sessions occurred in July 2017, while he was in the White House serving as President Trumps chief strategist, and the other in August, just two days after his White House service ended. He is an impressive man to interview, a man whose mind is immersed not just in current events, but in history and philosophy and religion. I dont think there is a major battle the United States has ever engaged in that Steve couldnt describe in minute detail, said one of his good friends. Indeed, during our conversations, generals and battles, world leaders and historical events, philosophers and theologiansfrom ancient times through the twenty-first centurydropped off Bannons tongue with the ease of a blackjack dealer throwing cards on a table. If you find yourself facing off against him on Jeopardy! just quit or pray for the Daily Double.

Bannon is not only fearsomely learned, and always reading to learn more, he is committed to applying his knowledge to the world around him. Combine that with an incredible energy and willpower, little need for sleep, and a capacity for ruthlessness, and you have a force to be reckoned with or, for his enemies, preferably avoided.

Bannon is a rebel by nature, but always a rebel with a cause. That cause today is America, American culture, and the survival and prosperity of the American working and middle class. But as his sister Mary Beth told me, He always had a purpose or something he was trying to fight for.

Central to Bannons thinking about America is his thinking about Western civilization, its Judeo-Christian tradition, and his own Catholic faith. Bannon is a deeply faithful Catholic, one of his friends told me, and when I asked Bannon to provide me a shortlist of the books that have most influenced him, he gave me six, and I was surprised to see that three of them had to do with Christianity. The books were The Imitation of Christ , by Thomas Kempis, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola , The Brotherhood of the Common Life and Its Influence , by Ross Fuller, The History of the Peloponnesian War , by Thucydides, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , by Edward Gibbon, and Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans , by Plutarch.

Western civilization today is under siege, in Bannons view, from within and without. Many in the West have forgotten their culture or actively chosen to despise it; and he believes the West faces implacable enemies overseas, both Islamists and the Communist Chinese, who believe they can become the next great hegemonic power. The result of Bannons thinking about how best to protect and defend America, its culture, and its Western tradition, at a time when its elites are manifestly corrupt, is a new conservative populism grounded in an old American economic system, known to historians as The American System or Hamiltonian economics. Unlike most intellectualsand indeed unlike many of the conservative intellectuals who run magazines and enjoy endowed chairs at think tanksBannons ideas have actually translated into real politics. Indeed, no thinker was more important in helping to shape the pro-Trump populist rebellion than Steve Bannon; and no website was more influential in that endeavor than Breitbart.com , which Bannon leads, and which attracts tens of millions of readers.

One note on sourcing. When it was needed for the sake of clarity, I attached a footnote to comments Bannon and others made to me during interviews. But often I did not, so any quoted remarks that are not footnoted can be assumed to have been made to me.

This, then, is Bannons story in brief; it is a guide to his principles and ideas, and perhaps a snapshot of Americas future if Bannons populist conservative movement succeeds.

Keith Koffler

August 25, 2017

T he crowds lingered on the Washington Mall, but the Washington political establishment had already drifted back into the Capitol, still in disbelief about the dreadful scene it had just witnessed.