Steve Bannon, a man who once favorably compared himself to Darth Vader, Dick Cheney, and Satan, speaks with Kellyanne Conway on January 31, 2017 (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Steve Bannon, the white nationalist currently helping President Trump dismantle the United States, has produced a number of low budget conservative films. But the movies that Bannon couldn’t get made over the years are even more interesting than the ones that were released—like an unmade documentary-style film from 2005 about the dangers of futuristic technology.




The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the proposal for the movie, which was being shopped around Hollywood in the mid-2000s. The working titles were The Singularity: Resistance Is Futile and The Harvest of the Damned. The unproduced film focused on a number of scifi elements, including human cloning, immortality, and eugenics. But based on the proposal, this wasn’t just about the dangers of technology gone mad.

The entire film was to have a very ham-fisted political bent, drawing lines between the eugenics programs of the Nazis to the abortion and contraception advocates that were to come. Bannon is staunchly anti-abortion. The proposal even includes a frozen Walt Disney, presumably related to the urban legend that Disney was cryogenically frozen.


“The acceleration of technological progress is the central feature of the 20th /21st century,” one part of the proposal explains, according to the Daily Beast. “We are on the edge of change brought about by Man’s ability to create… Man, the toolmaker, is on the verge of creating greater-than-human intelligence.”

The film appears to have nods to various Illuminati conspiracies about an anti-religious elite that would take over the world and survive a “post-humanity” landscape. Much of this fear would likely be informed by his staunchly Catholic beliefs. Or at least a conspiratorial version of them.

China, a country that President Trump continues to needle over trade relations and military security, also seems to play a large part in instigating whatever the last “futuristic” element of the documentary was supposed to entail.

Bannon allegedly secured funding from conservative filmmaker Mel Gibson at one point. But when the Daily Beast asked about that, Gibson’s publicist called it “fake news.”


This is far from the first unmade movie by Bannon (he’s listed as a writer, director and producer) that’s been making the rounds recently. The Washington Post recently found a 2007 proposal for a futuristic film titled The Islamic States of America. The proposal blamed the media and the Jewish community for allowing radical Islam to overtake the United States due to a “culture of tolerance.”

One scholar told the Washington Post that Bannon’s proposal for The Islamic States of America was “designed to generate hate against not just Islamists, not just extremists, but Muslims writ large.”


Bannon has previously cited Leni Riefenstahl as an influence on his filmmaking career, much to the concern of people knowledgable about the history of Nazi propaganda. Riefenstahl’s most famous film is 1935's Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda movie that remains one of the most infamous examples to date of mass media that glorifies murderous dictators.

“People have said I’m like Leni Riefenstahl,” Bannon told the Wall Street Journal in 2011 during the debut of his documentary The Undefeated, which celebrates Sarah Palin.


“I’ve studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style,” Bannon continued. “I’m a student of Michael Moore’s films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.”

You can read more about the proposal for The Singularity: Resistance Is Futile at The Daily Beast. Say what you will about the proposal, at least it looks like the Nazis were supposed to be the bad guys in this one.


[The Daily Beast]