The Real RocknRolla
Well, that's got to have done some damage. All those guns, nuns, and cowboys.
“Be careful. When a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health.”
Albert Camus
Recently, Russian spymaster and fascist mastermind Nikolay Patrushev said that “to achieve success in the election, Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations....he will be obliged to fulfill them.” A French security firm Intrinsec analyzing fake news articles from a linguistic perspective concluded that the articles were written in Russian and then translated for various audiences. In the past I have written extensively on the impact of Russian ethnofascism.
You have probably seen plenty of pundits rhetorically asking what would Trump do differently if he really was an actual asset of the Russian Intelligence Services. Trump’s abhorrent behavior with Zelensky should be a moment of clarity. Trump and Vance in that meeting in White House made it abundantly clear that US is now firmly on the side of the global fascist movement and the post-war order has been turned upside down. None of this was hidden and as it’s played out it’s happened exactly as it was planned, I mean have you read Alexander Dugin?
You have also probably read plenty of takes that Elon Musk has “bought” himself a Presidency and is fully in control. Nazi salutes, excerpts from ‘Character Limit’, the book on Musk’s Twitter takeover. I think it's worth remembering that Musk developed his so-called "management style" in companies that had at the time no real competitors. Ask yourself what all this DOGE stuff is supposed to accomplish, besides breaking the government. What efficiencies is it supposed to ferret out? Elon Musk is trying to do to the government what he did to Twitter:
Cut the number of people down to about 30%
Truly terrorize the rest into fear and submission
Remove all guardrails
Turn it into a Nazi machine
Reduce its value by 50% (or whatever number you may prefer)
Hmm who’s wet dream does this remind me of? Oh, right. Steven Bannon.
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
I’ve alluded to the fact that neither Musk or Trump are really in charge. Both are useful idiots. Perfect marionettes that are very easy to control. All of my allusions in this case were of course towards Putin pulling the strings. I still stand by the premise that as far as Russia is concerned, World War 3 has officially began in 2014 and that the fascist takeover across the globe ultimately has its roots in Putin’s imperial ambitions.
Putin is not a comic book villain capable of simultaneously controlling multiple complex scenarios and situations. Neither he nor really anyone else in Kremlin is planning or running day-to-day operations across the globe. Again, it’s not Trump or Musk who are actually running things. Right now it may seem that Musk is like a black hole sucking everything and everyone in. It may look like Trump is choreographing his Dear Leader narrative. As history teaches us, it is someone in the shadows, someone who is capable, devious, ruthless, and most of all a dedicated zealot to the cause.
“People ask the question... what's a RocknRolla? And I tell 'em - it's not about drums, drugs, and hospital drips, oh no. There's more there than that, my friend. We all like a bit of the good life - some the money, some the drugs, others the sex game, the glamour, or the fame. But a RocknRolla, oh, he's different. Why? Because a real RocknRolla wants the fucking lot.”
Guy Ritchie
I have tried to write the essay about the real RocknRolla since Thanksgiving. What stopped me was the fear of writing something that in the near future will turn out to be wrong, fullish, silly. The identity of the real RocknRolla kept shifting in my mind from one potential candidate to another. A couple of months ago I’ve narrowed the list of the usual suspects down to two: Stephen Miller and Steven Bannon. Every draft I started to write needed to be re-written with the focus shifting from one to the other. In my mind I convinced myself that I can’t be wrong. I am not allowed to be wrong. My therapist told me to write it as an internal debate and struggle in my mind. How and why I kept going back and forth. To be frank, I am still not sure, but if you are an astute reader your probably noticed that I used past tense in this paragraph.
There is a reason for that.
In many ways, which would require an entire separate essay, Stephen Miller, for all his creepiness and supervillain appearance is simply another demagogue akin to Christopher Rufo. I do not want to downplay the danger that Rufo and Miller present. I do not want to minimize how abhorrently awful both of these men are. I would love to have my personal “cousin Rhonda” moment with both of these bloody Nazis, but at the end of the day neither has the patience, resilience, imagination, and sheer will power to be the real RocknRolla.
That is pure Steven Bannon. As I started doing research for this essay I realized that his entirely life is a premise for arguably the greatest Netflix series ever. I was 50 years old, so when I started working on this piece, when I learned just how impossibly weird Steve Bannon’s life has been. I won’t copy the entire Wikipedia entry, but here are just a few highlights:
To this day, Steve Bannon gets a piece of money from Seinfeld. It's completely bonkers and apparently true.
Yet, he was actually in charge of the Biodome. No, not the movie, the actual one.
Did you know that he had a hot tub full of acid? No, not the hallucinogenic kind, the melt your body type.
Trump may be the Golden Calf, but Bannon is the true mastermind in the shadows. He comes off as a crazy weird uncle but it’s a facade to pretend to be part of the working class and to trick the marks. Yet, while he may be a millionaire if not a billionaire himself, Bannon is thirsty for tech oligarch blood.
People been underestimating Bannon for far too long...
The visa fight a couple of months ago was a trial balloon. Bannon, the astute politician that he is, made it look like Musk won and ostensibly Trump came out on top. However, if you read all of the fine print, it is Bannon who keeps the control over immigration, including H1B visas which are vital for Elon’s slave trade, it is Bannon who is the ultimate powerbroker with control over the MAGA movement.
In Guy Ritchie’s movie RocknRolla, the very last shot states that “The Wild Bunch will return in The Real RockNRolla." Ritchie never made the sequel but there is a more than apt comparison between the movie and our current reality. Uri, the Russian billionaire who is clearly inspired by the real-life Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, is a perfect stand in for Elon in more ways than one. We never get to see the magnifcent painting that plays such an important connection between all of the characters and plot twist of the movie, but that’s practically the point. You never see a good magician or a good conman coming, they are stealth.
Elon is a clown and will fuck it up, either because of ketamine or who he is. Bannon is not even trying to hide his disdain for Elon: “Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to…play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values or traditions.” Trump only cares about adoration, respect, fealty. Don’t even get me started on Vance and the rest.
In Ritchie’s movie the ostensibly main villain, Lenny Cole says that “there's no school like old school, and I'm the fucking headmaster.” Well, Bannon is an old hand at this and knows how to play this game. A whole lot has been made of how much the the fascists dominate the proverbial airwaves:
It is of course absolutely true, yet Bannon, of course, was at the root of it all. No matter how much damage Fox News may have done to journalism and the world as a whole, it was Bannon and Breibart that pioneered the way. Milo and his ilk danced to Bannon’s tune a decade ago already working on dominating the news cycles and most importantly the propaganda wars.
This is why it is Steve Bannon who gets a starting role and a clap from Gavin Newsome on his podcast. This is why Trump intermittently “jokes” about his unconstitutional 3rd term. It is Bannon. He just came out and said.
"True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
This is what Bannon always said was his goal. It’s why Bannon is so content these days. Only 78% of Trump-loyal Republicans view democracy positively.
The same people who created this mess still believe that Trump is an aberration. This is why besides AOC, Waltz, Pritzker, Crockett, there is practically no opposition. Gavin Newsome and Chuck Schumer are only symptoms of the decease of the Democratic party. Elise Slotkin firmly demonstrated that the party of FDR and LBJ is now fully a Reaganite Republican party ready to assist and enable fascism. This cartoon is 133 years old and in 133 years the problem has only gotten worse.
“We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic, strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values, as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.”
What does that sound like to you?
They want you to be worried about men transitioning to women so much that you do not notice that the United States of the America are being forcefully transitioned into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Well more accurately into a Union of Soviet Fascists States of America.
But who is counting?
At the end of Ritchie’s movie, when asked what he is going to be now, Johnny Quid says: “You wanna watch out, 'cause I'm gonna be just like you, uncle. Now, I'm gonna be a REAL RocknRolla.”
After a decade of experience with Bannon's "flood the arena with shit" strategy, people should be able to realize "they want you to argue whether or not it was a real Nazi salute instead of what it means that the world's richest man, key to the US government, is an open Nazi."
He's a Nazi.
But I as much as I am an anti-fascist, I worry about Steve Bannon more.
Nicole Bedera writes:
"I’ve seen a lot of assumptions in the media that Trump (and Musk) are targeting institutions with loyalty tests. But that’s not quite right. They’re using dominance tests. And the difference between these two things matter. In a loyalty test, there is something for the tested party to gain by complying. If you do what the tester asks, then you’re given benefits—including access to power. But in a dominance test, compliance leads to a loss of power for the tested. The whole point is that the initiator wants to increase their own power by proving they can convince their adversary to act submissively.
Hegemonic masculinity is a cornerstone of fascism. So we can see the same dynamics in an altercation with a schoolyard bully. If a bully forced their victim to submission, it only makes the bully more powerful. It gives him legitimacy in the eyes of other peers who care about masculine domination.
It’s worth nothing that, in masculinity contests, domination is most impressive against a formidable opponent. If the schoolyard bully only picks fights everyone expects they can win, it won’t confer them as much legitimacy as it would if they took on another powerful/high status student. And that’s a big part of what Trump and Musk are doing now. They’re taking on powerful institutions to prove they’re too big to fail—and to scare everyone else into submission."
I completely agree. Except I do not believe that either Trump or Musk are intelligent, capable, knowledgeable, focused, determined enough to actually pull any of this off. I am tempted to quote John Wick here, but I am sure you know which specific quote I have in mind in regard to Mister Bannon.
The Real RocknRolla.
“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” Howard Zinn