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Bannon & Musk Frenemies No More [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-13
We already had the battle of H-1B visas between Bannon and Musk, but Steve Bannon is now taking it to a whole new level. Tolerance has become hate. But no one knows what triggered this final breakup.
"I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day." Bear with me. This is English translated into Italian and then back into English because Bannon gave an interview to an Italian daily newspaper named Corriere Della Sera.
"He will not have a blue pass to the White House. He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person."
I wonder how Bannon is going to control the situation when he isn't even a nominee for anything by Trump. Why does he think he is calling the shots?
"He is a truly evil guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down. Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it. I'm not prepared to tolerate it anymore."
Does Bannon have a relationship with Trump that we don't know about? He's talking like he is the White House Chief of Staff. He's not.
Then he launched into the whole H-1B visas scenario, saying that 76% of the engineers in Silicon Valley are non-Americans. This is the source of his attack on Musk. Musk has crossed a line that Bannon will not forgive.
When Musk posted his rant about the visas on X, Bannon shared a screenshot of it on Gettr and commented, "Someone please notify 'Child Protective Services'--- need to do a 'wellness check' on this toddler."
Then he got nasty about South Africans and racism.
"Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans. He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have white South Africans, the most racist people on Earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?"
Those damn foreigners! He sounds like segregationists in the 50s and 60s. Except the opposite way for whites instead of Blacks.
"He went out of his way to mock our movement as racist and retards, and he lost. We blew him out of the water. He won't fight. He's got the maturity of a little boy."
"Retards." That word has been retired. Use something else, Bannon. I assume that Bannon is MAGA, and MAGA is racist. How could you think anything else? Criticizing maturity is projection, just like Trump uses.
Bannon says that people around Trump are tired of Musk. Musk's only goal is to become a trillionaire. He's right about that one.
"He will do anything to make sure that one of his companies is protected or has a better deal or makes more money. His aggregation of wealth, and then, through wealth, power. That's what he's focused on."
I can't argue with any of that. It's amazing that Bannon said something that makes sense.
"What's not positive, is when all of a sudden he tries to put his half-baked ideas, which are really about the implementation of techno-feudalism on a global scale. I don't support that, and we'll fight it."
When I read techno-feudalism, I thought it was a made-up term. But it's not. Books have been written on the topic.
Techno feudalism is the idea that we are not transitioning from capitalism to something better, but slipping into a system where tech companies function like modern feudal lords. The cloud, big data, and digital platforms have become the "land" of this new era, controlled by tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Meta.
Okay, now it's starting to make a little more sense. It worries me that I have to give Steve Bannon credit for having some intelligence. Or maybe it's a buzzword that he picked up just like "woke."
Bannon was recently seen at Mar-a-Lago, where Musk is renting a $2,000 per night cottage where he has been staying since the November election. Both of them at the same place at the same time. Why haven't we heard about this? You'd think Bannon would talk about it for sure.
Let's backtrack a couple of days when Bannon said, "Money and information are the twin tactical nukes of modern politics, and he can deploy both on an unprecedented scale," Bannon said in an interview with Bloomberg about Musk. And yet, just last week he said he was going to rip Musk's face off over the H1B visas controversy.
"I support his participation because the enemy of my enemy is my friend." "Musk just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump. If he puts that same amount of money into all of Europe that he put behind Trump, he will flip every nation to a populist agenda. There's not a centerist left-wing government in Europe that will be able to withstand that onslaught."
So not long ago they were frenemies. What changed to turn Bannon completely off to Musk?
At the end of December, Musk posted on X, the statement that really ticked Bannon off.
Bannon posted, "American citizens have never bent the knee to the British Empire, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, ain't about to start with South Africa."
"The nerds don't take criticism. They're kind of, you know, they're a little bit all on the spectrum, right? They don't know, they're not deep on social skills."
Even earlier he said Musk needed to do some studying.
"You need to study modern political history of the fights we've been through for 12 or 14 years to get to this spot."
"Don't come up and go to the pulpit in your first week and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be. If you're going to do that we're going to rip your face off."
Okay, now we know where the rip your face off quote came from.
"No, no. This is central to how they've gutted the middle class in this country. And we haven't fought these battles for years and years to allow American citizens of every race and religion to be gutted by the sociopathic overlords in Silicon Valley."
He's even accused Musk of being a tool for the Chinese.
"He's using a social credit score. He's using it from his masters in Beijing --- have taught him through the Shanghai joint venture of how to use social credit scores."
China's so-called social credit system is about creating a master database, a blacklisting system, and a reward and punishment system that can be applied nationwide. Considering how MAGA would be aghast at a database of gun users, you can bet they would be totally opposed to this.
So along with everything else, Bannon doesn't like Musk or trust him because of his ties to China.
Let's go all the way back to 2023 where Bannon did not have kind words for Musk at all. He called Musk a traitor and that he wasn't an American at all. Bannon called him a complete phony and that he was owned lock, stock and barrel by the Communist Party.
So, just days ago, Bannon and Musk were frenemies. Now it seems that Bannon is completely done with Musk and wants to remove him from the scene. What single event, or series of events, caused the breakup?
It appears to have been during his visit to italy. Bannon has a history with Italy. Years ago he wanted to set up a right-wing gladiator school there. Last April he finally got authorization to start the school after winning a case to use an 800 year old monastery.
Every single account of Bannon's break up with Musk quotes the Italian newspaper article. But nobody explains why the frenemies broke up. Yes, Bannon was unhappy with Musk before, but he was willing to be a strange bedfellow with him. The best I can figure out is that during Bannon's trip to Italy, he finally snapped about the techno-feudalism that Musk represented, and he finally decided he had enough.
Now that Musk has spent his $277 million to help elect Trump, Musk is no longer useful. Bannon now sees him as negative baggage. Just like people have said that mega-celebrities for Harris created a perception of eliteness, Musk's money is the antithesis of MAGA. He is hurting the cause, not helping it.
At some point, Bannon might tell us the reason for his reversal. Until then, you've got my theory. Something happened at the 800-year-old monestary that he wants to use for his gladiator school. Inspiration to man up. Looking at history. Seeing an opportunity for change.
There's two other possibilities. One is censorship. MAGA is up in arms over what appears to be a change in X's operation.
Laura Loomer started complaining about X hiding comments on her posts.
Loomer highlighted one of her posts from Friday, where she said X had wrongly flagged some comments as "probable spam."" "I asked X how's this post could have 121 comments, and then all but seven of them are marked as spam. Every single person who commented below on the wall fire against Trump violated the 'platform manipulation and spam policy'? This is a lie being used to censor."
Could it be that X still hasn't unbanned Steve Bannon's X account? That's why Bannon is using Gettr.
Something told Bannon it was time to tell Musk to move on. Frenemies no more.
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