CNN airs report on Steve Bannon 'Divided We Fall'; a note on Bruckner 'imitation' (in music), Rued Langgaard.

On Sunday, July 16, 2022, CNN aired a one-hour special report “Steve Bannon: Divided We Fall”, narrated by Drew Griffin.  CNNPressroom offers a preview writeup here. 

The film does summarize Bannon’s shenanigans before Trump's election in 2016 up to the plotting before January 6.  He allegedly worked with Cambridge Analyitca starting around late 2014 and tested out Trumpian catch-phases like 'drain the swamp'.  Bannon is also 'credited' with trying to start a 'movement' to place right-wing heads of state (more or less like the softly 'fascist' Orban in Hungary) through out the EU.  It also covers his activities up to January 6, including stating that Bannon believes election officials should be willing to overturn elections and turn them back to state legislatures (so Trump wins).   Bannon wanted to start some kind of movement at a former monastery in Italy, and the Italian government shut him down.  Bannon seems to think the Catholicism demands a personalized social conservatism imposed on everyone, even as other religions disagree on many major doctrinal and personal points (and even as most Catholics, like Biden, disagree). 

A lot of this makes little sense.  There is a good question, what to the “Trumpist’s” want? 

I could understand that many people would fear the expropriationist behavior of the far Left, was with the riots in Portland, Seattle, and other places (especially after George Floyd's death), the reported confrontational localize violence from Antifa, and the abandonment by local politicians of law and order.  It seems to my recollection that most of this started to fire up in 2017 after Trump took office.  Relatively much less of it had happened before Trump’s run, except for the Ferguson MO riots in late 2014 and the Baltimore riots in April 2015m all while Obama was in office. 

In fact, most of the concerns from 'conservatives' during the late years of Obama seemed to focus on immigration and to a lesser degree the clumsiness of the Obamacare implementation.  To some extent, the “conservatives” were right:  unchecked immigration, especially through the southern borders, poses public health and other national security risks that sometimes endanger ordinary citizens. The other concerns seemed to focus particularly on radical Islam overseas (as with incidents in France in 2015), with justification. (There was an attack in San Bernadino in 2014).

The suddenness of the shift in emphasis from the danger of overseas threats (radical Islam and to some extend North Korean style communism) to domestic white supremacy (as with Charlottesville in August 2017 provided quite a surprise to me personally.  But the situation got much worse with the lockdowns and unequal suffering (by race and class) during the 2020 pandemic (which arguably had national security implications in how it started, as forbidden such a view was on social media for a long time). Conservatives and Trumpists rightfully opposed the lawlessness of the riots, and the extreme indoctrination with which some on the far Left tried to impose critical race theory and now “critical gender theory” on others, even in lower grades in schools. 

At the time of Obergefell (June 2015), and previously with the repeal of DADT (2011), the LGBTQ segment of society was more moderate and seemingly less controversial than it had ever been as a whole. 

Yet, suddenly we find even before 2016 right wing radicalism growing online, perhaps with foreign manipulation of social media, at first hidden, and seeming to be cultist and believing on conspiracy theories.  It is still very difficult to make complete sense of what has happened, as some of it was going on even when Trump started his candidacy in 2015.   Trump had not sounded that extreme on his 'The Apprentice' series (although in an early episode one contestant, Troy McClain, had has legs waxed online to 'take one for the team', something Trump mentions in his book How to Get Rich).

In the past I reviewed Steve Bannon's 2010 film “Generation Zero' on the 2008 financial crisis where, as I recall, he believed individuals needed to accept more 'moral hazard' from their own financial activity.

I also wanted to play catch up in recovering my coverage of some music items.  Was Rued Langgaard the 'Danish Bruckner'.  Certainly his 5-movrment 67-minute Symphony #1 in B Minor (“Cliffside Pastorals") sounds like it with its massive B Major conclusion with a hymn tune that will sound familiar but seems to be original.  The tune actually opens the first movement as a leitmotif.  The performance is by The Danish National Radio Symphony Orchestra Conductor: Leif Segerstam, posted by KuhlauDilfeng2 in 2013

His “Music of the Spheres” (1916) is much more radical and seems to use a lot of tone clusters and odd effects with instruments (strings played directly).

(Posted: Monday, July 18, 2022 at 1 PM EDT)