Former Trump advisor and former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon fears the Time’s Up movement’s ability to wield power like the tea party, and is a potential threat to populism.
“There are two important movements in this country right now: the populist nationalist movement on the right, and the [Time’s Up] movement on the left,” Bannon told GQ in an extensive interview.
The power of Time’s Up, which grew out of the MeToo hashtag on social media that encouraged women to speak out about experiences of sexual harassment, is that it rejects thousands of years of human society, Bannon said.
“MeToo is about sexual predators and everything like that. The Time’s Up movement is much more fundamental and actually many steps above MeToo. It’s basically going against 10,000 years of recorded history. That’s the power of it. You see here something that’s in a very early, raw stage, but I’ve never seen such potential power in something,” Bannon said.
Part of the problem with Time’s Up, according to Bannon, and why it is opposed to his own populist goals, is that it may have the ability to uproot established order it doesn’t have a commitment to economic nationalism or put regular Americans at its center. “I don’t believe this is nationalistic in its center of gravity,” Bannon said of the movement, “and I’m not so sure it’s populist at the end of the day in its center of gravity.”
He sees the movement as having a similar raw power to the tea party movement that sprang up as a reaction to the election of President Barack Obama and called for a return to America’s founding principles. The tea party was unorganized from the beginning, but inspired tens of thousands of people to become politically active and changed the makeup of state and national legislatures.
“People say, ‘Oh, Steve, [Time’s Up] doesn’t have any policies yet,'” Bannon said. “It doesn’t need to have policies yet. The Tea Party didn’t have policies in its first couple of years, but it was against Obamacare. There’s plenty of power in just being against.”
Throughout the interview, Bannon mentioned how Time’s Up has been able to assemble a “vast cadre of foot soldiers,” like it did at the second Women’s March in New York City.
Bannon, who departed the White House in August claiming to be able to better serve Trump and the movement from the outside, doesn’t appear to have any sway in the administration. Bannon’s political power flagged even more after his preferred candidate in the Alabama senate, Judge Roy Moore, was accused of dating teenagers in his thirties and contributed to the election of the first Democratic senator from Alabama in decades. He left his position as executive chairman of Breitbart in January.
After Bannon revealed numerous negative opinions about Trump in Michael Wolff’s gossipy book about White House drama “Fire and Fury,” Trump christened his former campaign CEO “Sloppy Steve.”
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Despite losing multiple jobs in the past year, Bannon still believes himself to be a leader in the populist movement that elected Trump, and says he plans to form a group to continue the work.
“It’s going to be focused on the promulgation of ideas, the weaponizing of ideas and building and binding together through affiliate groups,” Bannon said of his new organization. He hopes to assemble his own vast cadre of foot soldiers, perhaps working with populists on the political left who supported the Democratic presidential primary campaign of Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Both Bannon’s populist movement and the Time’s Up movement rely heavily on social media. “It’s the way this new movement, Time’s Up — or what I call the ‘anti-patriarchy movement’ — is coordinating right now. This movement is using social media just like the Tea Party when it first came about,” Bannon said.
That may partially be why Bannon believes tech giants like Facebook, Google and “maybe even Amazon” are “out of control.”
“Maybe the companies don’t have to be regulated per se, we have to get into that—maybe like the regional Bell companies were [regulated] with state commissions or whatever,” Bannon said. He added that “the data has to be held in public trust. People have to have access to it and build entrepreneurial companies.”
Facebook’s ability to change its news feed algorithm shows a dangerous power to restrict communication and the flow of information. “It just shows you the power of an apparatus to shut down dissent, right? And by the way, I’m saying dissent on the left,” Bannon said. “I mean, I’ve had so many guys come in and talk to me about starting a Breitbart on the left. They understand now that they need — and do not have — an anti-establishment platform on the left.”
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