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Three and a half years after he inherited Andrew Breitbart’s right-wing media fiefdom, Steve Bannon finally proved himself a worthy heir: he bet against Bloomberg Businessweek’s ability to read and won. “Steve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy,” ran the subhead to that week’s cover story, “and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.” Bannon, now months deep into his new role as chief executive of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had, at the time, been nurturing an ostensibly nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI), into a perverse mirror image of ProPublica. Clinton Cash, written by GAI’s lead investigator and president Peter Schweizer and published by HarperCollins, had already been subject to a New York Times front-page exposé. The nonprofit had even partnered with Newsweek, ABC News, and 60 Minutes on research-intensive scoops. That October, with the impending publication of Schweizer’s Bush Bucks, the team at Bloomberg had been somehow induced to believe that GAI was “as eager to go after establishment Republicans such as Boehner or Jeb Bush as Democrats like Clinton.” But it wasn’t true. At twenty pages of actual text and about 120 footnotes — less than ten of which were primary source documents remotely indicative of original reporting — Schweizer’s Bush Bucks was more term paper than tome. By page count, it was one full order of magnitude less labor-intensive than the 256-page Clinton Cash. Worse still: Bloomberg’s Joshua Green knew this, or should have — he reports that he had “obtained” an advance copy. (Green did not reply to requests for comment.) Just as his predecessor — the late outrage hustler Andrew Breitbart — had infamously “hacked the media,” a quintessentially amoral framing courtesy of Wired, Bannon had gotten the exact coverage he wanted simply by daring professional reporters to do their jobs. Back in 2009, Breitbart launched his libertarian title Big Government on the back of an explosive, but thoroughly dishonest, hidden-camera sting. He had simultaneously released full, unedited transcripts of those undercover videos. These publicly available transcripts so completely contradicted the claims professed by Big Government that its story, and the site itself, ought to have been dead within a week. And yet for months, no one — not CNN, not the New York Times, not MSNBC, not even the Daily Show — had the time or the resources to bother. The elevation of Breitbart’s unique brand of lightweight, gossamer junk to the status of national news tells — in part — the story of what gets dredged up by the low-friction vacuum of journalism’s protracted financial collapse. By tapping Bannon, Trump not only acquired a reliable conduit to Breitbart’s unruly community of libertarians, paleoconservatives, and alt-right brown shirts. He also acquired access to the GAI’s well-financed lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators — an opposition machine that the cash-strapped majors in the news media have already proven desperate to cut deals with. But just as importantly, the rise of Breitbart’s media network also tells the story of petit-bourgeois ideological entrepreneurship, fueled by white-hot, fame-hungry, and not especially consonant feelings of class angst, and the haute-bourgeois venture capital that it so easily located.

Hollywood Freaks A city without history — built on real-estate fraud, religious cults, and fantasy at the terminus of Western civilization — Los Angeles has produced its own breed of messiah-bullies for the American right. Before serving jail time for felony convictions of conspiracy, honest services fraud, and tax evasion, disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff wrestled for the team at Beverly Hills High, picked on local nerds, and at one point destroyed the cello of future public radio food critic Jonathan Gold. Abramoff worked in Hollywood for a decade, a career that culminated in the production of a 1980s action movie, Red Scorpion, intended to praise the CIA-funded Angolan mercenary Jonas Savimbi. (South Africa’s apartheid regime generously financed the film, which made back about a quarter of its $16 million budget.) Before running the Internet’s first widely trafficked news and gossip tip sheet, Matt Drudge worked in Hollywood too — at the CBS gift shop in Television City. Andrew Breitbart was an early subscriber to Drudge’s email newsletter, soon enough becoming a Drudge Report employee. Breitbart was a Brentwood brat, the adopted son of restauranteurs whose English-style steakhouse, Fox & Hounds, had been popular with California’s actor-cum-governor Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. In 1991, Breitbart returned to his hometown after four inebriated years at Tulane University in New Orleans, with nothing to show for it but an American Studies degree and a newly purchased Saab convertible. He soon scared up a low-paying gig driving scripts around Los Angeles, where — alienated by the shift on KROQ from eighties post-punk, like Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order, to what he called the “whiny, suicidal freaks” of Seattle grunge — Breitbart began his life-changing love affair with right-wing talk radio. Captivated by Rush Limbaugh, inching along in traffic between “every single Hollywood office of note,” according to his memoir, “including Michael Ovitz’s, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s, and Michael Eisner’s,” he found, “the professor I always wanted, but never had the privilege to study under.” Nearby, but in another world entirely, former Goldman Sachs investment banker Steve Bannon was negotiating the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment to media mogul Ted Turner. Bannon took his payment in the form of royalties to five untested sitcoms, including Seinfeld. The gamble wound up funding his foray into conservative documentary filmmaking circa 2004, inevitably drawing him into Breitbart’s orbit. Individually, all of these men experienced as a visceral, unmediated reality what many of their future acolytes merely experienced as disaffected consumers: a deep-seated and ineffable alienation from the products of the entertainment industry. As kids, Breitbart and his childhood friend Larry Solov — his future legal counsel and currently the president and CEO of Breitbart News Network — were once repeatedly pelted with tennis balls by blockbuster action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, who reportedly cackled as they huddled in the corner of the court weeping. It seemed that proximity (so close and yet so far from the levers of fame, glamor, and wealth) had magnified the psychic sting everyone feels: the average American’s general state of Hollywood media bombardment, with its lens-greasing insinuation of perfection — physical, ethical, even spiritual — broadcast into every available market. Proximity ignited engines of rage in these men, genuine reactionary responses. Weirdly, this resentment made Andrew Breitbart kind of a big deal within Los Angeles’s creative underclass. “Every noncelebrity journalist in Los Angeles sort of hung out together,” according to the Daily Beast’s executive editor Noah Shachtman, one of those noncelebrity journalists at the time. “That’s how Breitbart knows everyone.” In 1997, at Drudge’s recommendation, a then-conservative pundit named Arianna Huffington poached Breitbart to help put together her proto-Huffington Post, called Arianna Online. He became her director of research and worked from an almost unbelievably hermetic office inside her vast personal study, up a spiral staircase, hidden behind a bookshelf and a large wooden door, that was itself masked by a painting of two Venetian cardinals. “She would have admired his work as the West Coast editor of Drudge Report,” another contemporary from Los Angeles’s journalism diaspora, Sploid founder and one-time Wonkette owner Ken Layne says. “That kind of minimalist blogging — just choosing links and writing a great headline and placing it on the page — is a real art form, and there’s maybe a dozen people who do it well.” (If you have a taste for this medium, these examples from Breitbart’s time at Drudge make the case as well as any: “George Michael admits losing dignity with toilet arrest” and “Bob Dole is now owner of Lewinsky’s condominium at the posh Watergate.”) Breitbart’s success grew with the rising tide. As Drudge’s traffic exploded in the wake of several eye-catching scoops — including the first word of the Lewinsky scandal and the disclosure of Jerry Seinfeld’s belligerent million-dollar-per-episode ultimatum — Breitbart found ways to monetize the relationship. Breitbart.com launched in 2005 as a site that aggregated and published news directly from the wire services, AP, Reuters, and others, generating ad revenue off the inbound hyperlinks from Drudge. Breitbart had also co-written a nonfiction book, Hollywood Interrupted, with a hardworking entertainment-industry muckraker and Spy magazine alum named Mark Ebner. A well-reported but conceptually muddy attempt at updating Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, the book codified Breitbart’s conservative politics in relation to the entertainment industry’s self-evident sins: its debauchery, its depravity, its profligacy, its aimless and vain do-gooderism, its hypocrisy, its shallow obsession with broad demographic consensus both in semantics and in etiquette (also known as political correctness). Crucially — with the disembodied voice of Professor Rush riding shotgun in his Saab — Breitbart located these ills not alongside the straightforward commercial imperatives obviously driving them, but beside something else that they only superficially resembled. Namely, “Liberalism”: libidinous, excessive, loosey-goosey. Discursively, these right-wing theories on cultural perversion hardly began with Breitbart. They echoed rhetoric whose origin lay somewhere beyond the House Un-American Activities Committee’s witch hunts that led inexorably to the Hollywood blacklist, somewhere even beyond the Third Reich’s obsession with Max Nordau and his theory of “degenerate art.” But what Breitbart had innovated was a potent recalibration of this argument into a Gen-X argot steeped in pop-culture garbage, distraction media, and HR-department corporate kitsch. For all that rot crowding the surface of American cultural life, and also for some really brilliant and genuinely transgressive art — basically for anything that ran counter to the sensibility of a certain malcontent suburban white male — Breitbart offered a new diagnosis. He called it the “Democrat-Media Complex” in his memoir, but what stuck was his sneering and repeated appropriation of “the Progressive Left.” A famously bad student — with minimal interest in intellectual coherence but with the conviction of a cornered animal — Breitbart began building this argument on the fly in whatever medium (panel show, radio phone-in, blog post, book deal) made available to him.

Mixed Bizness Breitbart’s first foray into group blogging was, naturally, Big Hollywood in 2008. But he didn’t fully emerge from the shadows of his old collaborators, Huffington and Drudge, until the fall of 2009, when he launched Big Government off the propulsive energy of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s hidden-camera “sting” against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). For years, ACORN’s successful get-out-the-vote efforts had brought it into the crosshairs of Republican campaign apparatchiks who saw the organization as an acute threat: a demographically advantageous increase in voter turnout, particularly among minorities and the poor, that largely favored their Democratic opponents. The depth, convolution, and spuriousness of the accusations thrown at ACORN in the wake of Obama’s 2008 presidential victory primed many conservatives for this deceptively packaged footage. But ironically, it only dimly informed the production of the videos themselves. O’Keefe said in his memoir Breakthrough that he barely knew anything about ACORN prior to the operation, other than harboring “a deep suspicion” based on one news clip of Baltimore ACORN activists protesting unfair banking practices by squatting in foreclosed homes. Giles copped to the same level of ignorance on Hannity, telling Fox News viewers, “We didn’t know about them before we came up with the idea, really.” In his own memoir, Righteous Indignation, Breitbart also confessed to a cavalier disengagement with the subject: In June 2009, I didn’t know much about the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). My attitude toward it was a generic conservative’s attitude: I knew that the lack of interest the mainstream media were showing in ACORN — especially with all the accusations leveled against it regarding its illegal voter fraud and ties with the Democratic Party — meant that there had to be something really, truly horrific about it. To put the level of self-reported incompetence into context here, a LexisNexis search of print stories mentioning ACORN produces 4,468 articles from January 2007 to December 2008, right through the presidential race. Of these, 1,737 were published in October 2008 in the run-up to the election, and the majority of those stories dealt with the voter fraud allegations. It’s little wonder that O’Keefe and Giles were forced to pay $100,000 and $50,000 settlements, respectively, in defamation suits brought against them by an unjustly fired ACORN employee. When Breitbart released a similarly skewed video of US Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod, excerpted from her speech at an NAACP event, he too was forced to settle a defamation suit (albeit posthumously). Valuable resources have been, could be, and still should be, expended on fact-checking the dense feed of misinformation discharged from Breitbart’s content mill — but journalistic methods have never been one of the salient details explaining the organization’s rise to prominence. Those salient details have been, in ascending order of importance: Andrew Breitbart’s unique aesthetic of confrontational punditry and the cult of personality it engendered; the effective abandonment of working-class constituencies by both of America’s major political parties accompanied by the diffusion of middle-class, white America’s economic frustrations into scapegoats; and a long-gestating hostile takeover of the Republican Party by Libertarians Charles and David Koch and their billionaire donor’s club which — after three decades of deliberate chess moves, primarily in the form of bad-faith charitable giving — finally bore fruit in the 2010 midterm elections with the Tea Party wave. The career of Mike Flynn, the man Breitbart tapped to helm Big Government in 2009, almost perfectly demonstrates the confluence of these forces. Flynn held the lead role at Big Government for three years, continuing on for another four when the role shifted into political editor of Breitbart.com’s newly consolidated web presence, and until his untimely death last June. He was a gleeful confrontationalist well-suited to the Breitbart tonality, whose combat dicta — “always engage” and “always play offense” — were celebrated in at least one obit. Before joining this right-wing media powerhouse, Flynn worked for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) from 1997–2004, where he served as the director of legislation and policy for five years. For decades, ALEC has served as the primary mechanism by which the US Chamber of Commerce and the Kochs’ network of corporate interests have diluted federal environmental and labor laws and garnered other concessions. ALEC routinely drafts “model legislation” for its dim-witted, dues-paying underlings in state houses and local assemblies to dutifully pass into law. During Flynn’s tenure, ALEC managed to pass “truth in sentencing” bills in forty states. This misnamed legislation was codrafted with the massive for-profit prison firm Corrections Corporation of America, which had the morbidly self-interested goal of making it harder for inmates to get parole. Flynn then spent some time as the director of government affairs for the astroturfing specialists at Berman and Company before returning to the bosom of the Kochs’ nonprofit network, spending two years at the Reason Foundation and then finally joining Breitbart’s nascent media endeavor. A decade of experience as an advocate for corporate interests in government had exactly the effect one would expect on Mike Flynn’s tenure running a news website. In one telling episode, Flynn’s Big Government ran three anonymously authored hit pieces against the president of the libertarian Cato Insitute, Ed Crane, amid a seemingly accidental, but very bitter, public feud between Crane and his think tank’s paymasters, Charles and David Koch. Crane had spoken out of turn about Charles Koch’s goofy management-philosophy book to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer under circumstances that he had believed to be off the record. For “anyone who doubts the Kochs are narcissistic enough for that to be a motivating factor,” J. Arthur Bloom had only one question: “What kind of self-respecting billionaire writes a self-help book?” Obviously, no economics training is required to understand the conflict of interest in letting a career lobbyist run a news organization. In the theory toolkit available to Breitbart’s early Tea Party readers, this would be “common sense.” Flynn’s work as ambassador between self-interested global business elites and career politicians would constitute crony capitalism at its most refined. Educated libertarian operatives and senior personnel have since had to devise sophisticate rationalizations to alleviate their consciences.

Broken Train “Serious dissent requires enough money to sustain activists and carry a message to voters,” Eric O’Keefe (no relation to ACORN muckraker James) wrote in his 1999 book Who Rules America: The People vs. The Political Class. O’Keefe served as the national field coordinator for the Libertarian presidential ticket in 1980, when David Koch ran as the vice presidential nominee, very explicitly in an effort to bring his considerable wealth to bear on the campaign. O’Keefe spent the intervening decades as a quiet architect overseeing the Kochs’ plan to remodel the GOP in their own image. Though Eric O’Keefe is not a blood relation to James O’Keefe, he was one of the first people that James and Hannah’s lawyer — infamous Senate Watergate counsel, Mike “Mad Dog” Madigan — would reach out to. Sources close to James O’Keefe confirmed that Eric played a lead role in the management of James’s emergency legal trust. (This information was garnered from emails provided by an anonymous source to both myself and my frequent coreporter on the O’Keefes for Wonkette and Gawker, New York state-licensed private investigator Liz Farkas.) For Eric O’Keefe, then, private capital plays both a virtuous and necessary role in politics. It provides complex, nuanced, and counterintuitive policy proposals with the robust patronage that they so desperately need to get a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas. “In business,” he writes in Who Rules America, “entrepreneurs with innovative ideas frequently bring their product to market with the backing of just a few investors . . . Campaign-finance reform, as defined by the elite media and their partners in the seats of power, is a sham that uses high-sounding rhetoric in the service of incumbency protection.” In other words, for the professional technicians toiling away at the heart of the libertarian right, placing limits on campaign spending is tantamount to gerrymandering. It only aims to protect the tired, establishment politicians from courageous outsiders’ weird and innovative ideas. This comes from an alternate universe of radical theory, taking a parallax view on the persistent problem of money in politics. In this version, politicians — not wealthy donors — corrupt the system. It takes as axiomatic that all governments, even democratic ones, inevitably trend toward criminality and totalitarianism: a difficult presupposition to challenge in American political life considering the country was founded on it. This is the kind of carefully crafted intellectual scaffolding upon which Andrew Breitbart and his compatriots have swung, and scaled, and beat their chests. Very real financial and intellectual resources have been devoted to producing an entire corpus of literature to defend and legitimize the gut beliefs of a wealthy group of conservatives, libertarians, and Randian Objectivists. The dissemination of that literature to a mass audience operates on a highly coded, conscious level that has been partitioned from the preconscious bigotries that it simultaneously excites. This has been a seemingly arduous fact for liberals to properly grasp, but it is no less true for it. People who have been led to believe that they claim a direct lineage to “The Party of Lincoln,” that Soviet Russia manipulated the Civil Rights Movement to undermine America during the Cold War, that the welfare reforms of LBJ’s Great Society legislation were actually just a cynical ploy to purchase blocs of underprivileged voters, and so on, are people who simply cannot be shamed by charges of racism. They earnestly do not consider themselves racists; they perceive the charge as an ad-hominem attack. Andrew Breitbart’s confrontational style leaned into these hostile reactions and recognizeding the value of negative press. When the establishment media attacks “a Hannah Giles, or a James O’Keefe,” he once boasted to Politico, “it only weaponizes them . . . And that’s the reason they have a smile on their face — they know that they now have a platform. They’re not shying away from their notoriety here.” At the time, Breitbart had high hopes that he could somehow mass-produce the success he garnered by stumbling on O’Keefe and Giles. “My business model is I want to be a talent scout,” he told Politico during that same conversation. “I want to be an American Idol for weaponized freedom fighters.” Unfortunately for Breitbart, it was not meant to be. Savvier ideological entrepreneurs cut him out. James O’Keefe also wanted to stake out a position as “talent scout,” and, according to individuals formerly affiliated with his competing venture, Eric O’Keefe supplied the initial salaries for James’s “citizen journalism” group, Project Veritas. Then serving as the president and CEO of the Tea Party astroturfer the Sam Adams Alliance, Eric installed a former employee, Izzy Santa, as Project Veritas’s first executive director. “You’d be great at this,” another Sam Adams board member, Denis Calabrese, reportedly told Santa. “We need someone to control James.” This is how Project Veritas became the first stop for every aspiring hidden camera stunt-artist, fresh out of the College Republicans. His brand was selected; Breitbart’s was passed over. When Brietbart passed away in March 2012, many wondered whether or not his organization could survive. His larger-than-life presence, his proficiency in cable-news optics, his Barnum-like ability to pull off promotional stunts (like hijacking Anthony Weiner’s press conference at the height of his sexting scandal): all of these qualities left many with the illusion that Andrew Breitbart was the animating force behind Breitbart News. In reality, Andrew Breitbart was more like an ad-agency creative director — adept at getting his client’s message maximal attention, but ultimately replaceable. He primarily functioned as a passionate conduit between the media contacts he had built up during his early years in Los Angeles and the luxuriously financed political operatives who were hoping to place their narratives in the mainstream news cycle. A quieter Breitbart News emerged from the demise of their loudmouth standard-bearer, one that its opponents found blessedly (but deceptively) easier to ignore.

Get Real Paid It’s possible that the Brexit referendum would have played out in nearly the same fashion as it did last June even if Breitbart hadn’t opened its London offices in February 2014. Even so, expanding the media organization in an alliance with Britain’s nativist wing would have remained a shrewd tactical maneuver for Steve Bannon. As with Big Government’s ability to serve as an intermediary between right-wing political operatives and Tea Party audiences, Breitbart London could occupy a similar nexus at a similarly critical time. “In London,” the New York Times reported, “Breitbart News Network hopes to support a nascent European Tea Party before parliamentary elections in May.” Funding this expansion was some $10 million in outside investment Andrew Breitbart garnered in 2011 — less than a year before an unexpected heart attack would end his life. One of the two investors was rumored to be an eccentric, Islamophobic tech billionaire, Aubrey Chernick, who had previously backed the conservative PJ Media blog network. Chernick had befriended Breitbart while also living in Brentwood, in a stately Mandeville Canyon mansion one visitor described as secured behind “a gate that looks a little bit like the gate in King Kong.” These investments kept Breitbart News above water for years, operating like an even more opaque version of the dark-money patronage system that propped up its nonprofit allies. Conservative new-media journalism ventures being — just like all new-media journalism ventures — hopelessly unprofitable, Breitbart’s websites had claimed shockingly paltry revenue, somewhere between one dollar and one million dollars. As Fortune noted, this shortfall represented a critical failure to monetize the sites’ twenty million page views per month. But business plans matter less when you are someone else’s business expense. Breitbart London’s first managing editor and its future editor in chief, Raheem Kassam, was hired away from the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society: a UK think tank whose early signatories included members of George W. Bush’s Iraq War brain trust (former assistant secretary of defense Richard Perle, his former Defense Department subordinate Bruce P. Jackson, and some imperial cheerleaders from the late neocon think tank Project for a New American Century, including Bill Kristol and Clifford May). The society’s goals during Kassam’s four years within the group appear to have been to ratchet up public anxieties about Islamic radicals at home and to lobby for new regime-change adventures abroad. At some point, a London-based college newspaper caught Kassam running a sham student group, Student Rights, out of the Henry Jackson Society’s offices. Through Student Rights, Kassam would pressure local universities to disinvite Muslim speakers, while simultaneously defending the free-speech rights of the extreme xenophobes of the British National Party. Kassam — a Westminster-educated son of Indian Muslim immigrants — is a very weird young man who has had an outsize impact on British politics despite being too marginal and obscure for Wikipedia to let him write an entry about himself. In a move presaging Bannon’s career change this summer, Kassam stepped down from Breitbart London in October 2014 to become a senior adviser to Nigel Farage, the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Mission unaccomplished — Farage failed once again to secure a parliamentary seat in the May 2015 general election — Kassam returned to his old day job as editor in chief of Breitbart London like, for example, a crony capitalist through a revolving door. There — with Bannon’s aggressive support and over the objections of some of the site’s editors, including rising star Milo Yiannopoulos — Kassam began using the vertical as a mouthpiece for the most virulently anti-immigration and pro-Brexit wing of the fractured UKIP party. “It’s a known thing,” the party’s former media leader Alexandra Phillips told BuzzFeed, “especially when you speak to young UKIP activists; Raheem and Breitbart are the best tool. In terms of internal communications it’s become a great force, in terms of party infighting.” Though Roger Ailes perhaps first pioneered this vulgar synergy — with Television News Incorporated in the 1970s and then again with Fox News in the 1990s — Breitbart appears to have been the first to successfully adapt the model to new media. Plausibly deniable and demonically effective, Breitbart News has become an only ostensibly independent organization, operating in practice as the for-profit communications wing of various political campaigns. Bannon accepted a commission from billionaire TD Ameritrade founder and Chicago Cubs owner Joe Rickets to produce a series of documentary-style commercials featuring disillusioned Obama voters who were planning to support Romney in the 2012 election. Rickets also funded Eric O’Keefe’s electioneering nonprofit projects, like his “Campaign for Primary Accountability” Super PAC. Last year, Breitbart News received substantial funding from Long Island–based hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, who has donated upwards of $15 million to conservative groups since 2012. (It was happy, satisfied customer Mercer, and his daughter Rebekah, who reportedly pushed for Trump to hire Bannon as his new campaign chief.) More recently, and most significantly for the general election, four anonymous sources, three of them Breitbart employees, told BuzzFeed that Donald Trump’s campaign itself had “provided undisclosed financial backing to the outlet in exchange for glowing coverage.” One source explicitly described it as a “pay-for-play” relationship, with written contracts. When he resigned last March, Breitbart’s national security correspondent Jordan Schachtel said the site had transformed into “something resembling an unaffiliated media Super PAC for the Trump campaign.” Regular visitors to Breitbart.com might be surprised to learn the full extent of the site’s shady operations: a gray-market information bazaar with so many countervailing grifts and mercenary positions as to render the routine questions of journalistic bias quaint by comparison. It’s not even clear that Stephen Bannon thinks Donald Trump would actually make for a good president. As he described it to former NPR executive Ken Stern, writing for Vanity Fair, Trump is “a blunt instrument for us,” adding, “I don’t know whether he really gets it or not.” But what is “it” for Bannon?