Jason Horowitz

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Steve Bannon seems like one of those voracious if prejudiced consumers of media who might be persuaded that ancient aliens helped Hitler become Führer. He has read widely not to debunk his crackpot theories and deep-seated bigotry but to collect fuel for them. The Chief Strategist reminds me of a line from the jacket of Blaise Cendrars’ Moravagine: “He is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire.”

Until recently, I never connected him to a 2004 film I reviewed called In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed, which is one of the more deranged, heavy-handed and paranoid pieces of propaganda I’ve ever seen, Riefenstahl included. I remember thinking then that the director must be a unhinged person badly in need of mental help. Until the last five years or so, I watched 250 to 300 films a year during my entire adult life, and because of the quantity I don’t remember many of them, even some good ones, but I still can vividly recall how delusional and chilling this work was.

When not busy making his pseudo-documentaries, Bannon was a decade ago trying to sell virtual gold for real money, then peddled tin-pot despotism at Breitbart, and now he’s trying his hand at political alchemy, a white nationalist in the White House, serving as a Rasputin or Alexander Dugin to Trump. As Jason Horowitz of the New York Times reports, one of the Oval Office insider’s influences is the monocled Italian philosopher Julius Evola, who swayed Mussolini and embraced Hitler, and now serves as a hero to Internet-friendly neo-Nazis.

An excerpt:

Born in 1898, Evola liked to call himself a baron and in later life sported a monocle in his left eye.

A brilliant student and talented artist, he came home after fighting in World War I and became a leading exponent in Italy of the Dada movement, which, like Evola, rejected the church and bourgeois institutions.

Evola’s early artistic endeavors gave way to his love of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and he developed a worldview with an overriding animosity toward the decadence of modernity. Influenced by mystical works and the occult, Evola began developing an idea of the individual’s ability to transcend his reality and “be unconditionally whatever one wants.”

Under the influence of René Guénon, a French metaphysicist and convert to Islam, Evola in 1934 published his most influential work, “The Revolt Against the Modern World,” which cast materialism as an eroding influence on ancient values.

It viewed humanism, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution all as historical disasters that took man further away from a transcendental perennial truth.

Changing the system, Evola argued, was “not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing everything up.”

Evola’s ideal order, Professor Drake wrote, was based on “hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual.”

That made a fan out of Benito Mussolini.•

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It takes a village to create tyranny. It takes all kinds. 

One type is Thomas Williams, a former Catholic priest defrocked after fathering a child, who proselytizes for Breitbart in Europe despite having major reservations about Steve Bannon, a gutter-level bigot who’s soon to be White House Chief Strategist. Somehow the former holy man talked himself into accepting and keeping the job despite disagreeing with border walls and Brexit. The story is a little Thorn Birds with a generous helping of The Turner Diaries.

What allowed Williams such latitude in his moral judgement that he could aid Bannon and his disgraceful worldview? Well, he doesn’t appear to be a financial opportunist nor a hatemonger (despite some unfortunate opinions about Muslims). Perhaps his brain is just programmed to accept missions? Or maybe he fell prey to the same blind spot that allowed him in his earlier incarnation to steadfastly defend the innocence of a Catholic leader ultimately proven to have sexually abused children. 

Either way or some other way, Williams is on board and in Rome, using his skills to promote a platform that spreads the word of white nationalists and anti-Semites, while fully understanding the destructive nature of Bannon. As he says of his boss in Jason Horowitz’s excellent New York Times profile: “I think he prefers tearing down to building up, honestly.”

An excerpt:

Mr. Williams, amiable and soft-spoken, seems a discordantly gentle voice in the strident Breitbart chorus.

He said his time in the public eye had made him extra sensitive to inflicting harm and he lamented the “horrible” Breitbart commenters. Referring to the laptop computer on his dining room table, he noted, with a hint of sarcasm, that his home office — where he keeps a reliquary of bone chips of Dominican saints and framed photographs of Pope Benedict XVI smiling with his mother-in-law, a former United States ambassador to the Holy See — was “pretty nondescript for a subversive, alt-right, world-changing organization.”

From the beginning of his talks with Mr. Bannon, he said, Mr. Williams had expressed wariness about the website’s tone.

“Breitbart seemed like the exact opposite of everything I had been trained for and naturally tended towards,” the former priest said. “Which was help people understand each other, smooth over differences, show maybe you are not as far apart as you think.”

Mr. Williams had first met Mr. Bannon in 2003 through a mutual friend who was producing Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” on which Mr. Williams worked as the theological consultant. (“Mostly just to say things like, ‘You can’t do that,’” Mr. Williams said.)

“I thought he was a little crazy,” Mr. Williams said of Mr. Bannon. “I knew he was in this media stuff and he had all these theories about everything.”•

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