Bannon on LA riots: ‘We’re in World War Three’

It’s all war all the time inside Steve Bannon’s War Room in Capitol Hill.  “We’re in the Third World War,” he tells me. “And it’s a battlefield that’s everywhere, including in downtown Los Angeles.” The weekend’s riots in LA, he insists, are part of an orchestrated push by nefarious forces in America to stoke civil unrest in America.

The Democrats, he says, “allowed in 10 to 13 million illegal alien invaders into this country. They all must go home. All. Not some. All must go home. They must be deported. They must go home or we don’t have a country, OK?”

We’re in for another of summer of riots, says Bannon. “They just kicked it off,” he says.

It’s Black Lives Matter, the pro-immigration version, five years on and as the nation’s capital prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Army this weekend.

Yet whereas the Trump administration let the BLM riots swell in the summer of 2020, Bannon says this time Team Trump should ignore all the cries against “authoritarianism” and start locking up the political enemies who are stoking the unrest. 

“They’re calling for [unrest] nationwide,” he says. ‘And it’s already expanded to San Francisco. The question here is, who told the police to step down? I think there’s only ten arrests. The LAPD allowed that thing to metastasize. Who gave the order? Whoever. Whoever was the government official that gave that order should be arrested this morning.”

“We need to start arresting government officials, including the Mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, who’s stirring this pot up.” If that means suspending habeas corpus, so be it.

Bannon calls Governor Gavin Newsom, who is defying the Trump administration over the riots, “a neo-confederate” and compares him to John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery vice president under Andrew Jackson. “Andrew Jackson said, ‘hey, if this guy goes against me, I’m assembling the US Army, and I’m going to hang him from the first lamppost.’”

Bannon stops short of saying Newsom should be strung up, but he thinks he should probably be arrested too. “If Gavin Newsom is saying, ‘hey, come on, arrest me.’ Hey, well, if he gets in the way of federal officials trying to sort this mess out, he should be arrested.”

Bannon is on something of a roll at the moment, having just, in his words “taken out” Elon Musk from the Trump administration. He calls Musk a “dangerous narcissist” and repeats his claim that Musk is controlled by the Chinese Communist party. He feels “the tech bros” are running scared: Bannon claims the All-In podcast – cohosted by Trump crypto czar David Sacks – didn’t air last week after he unleashed a torrent of criticism of them on War Room “because they’re pussies.”

The Trump administration, he says, will use its legal powers to bust up the monopolistic power of Big Tech. “We’re going to break up Facebook,” he says. “We’re going to break up Google. We’re going to break up Amazon. We’re going to break… I think hopefully we get to eventually break up Walmart. You’ve got too much concentration of private power. It’s obvious it’s anti-populist. It’s anti-economic nationalist.’

What, I wonder, does Bannon think of Javier Milei, the man who presented Elon Musk with a chainsaw on stage at CPAC in February?

“I think he’s more of a libertarian right? More to the libertarian side.”

You don’t think he’s like controlled by Big Tech, I ask.

“When I say ‘libertarian type,’ that’s a code for being controlled by Big Tech.”

But how does Bannon expect the movement he speaks for, the Make America Great Again movement, to take on the might of America’s technological giants and win?

“The tech bros at their core are soft,” he says. “It’s like the elites in England. It’s like the elites know England went from a country that ran the world. You know why? Because it generated people that had character values and were tough. You’re not tough anymore. You’re a bunch of fucking pussies. Just like the tech bros. They lived a soft life. They’ve never had to make hard decisions. They’ve never had any kind of real challenges in their life, hard challenges. And that’s where they’re soft. And the soft will never beat the hard.”

In Steve Bannon’s War Room, in other words, the revolution is just getting started.