How Steve Bannon salvaged Moore's campaign, copying Nazi & Soviet propagandists

[highplainsdem]

Bloomberg article by Joshua Green, author of Devil's Bargain:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-11/how-steve-bannon-rescued-roy-moore-s-campaign-against-all-odds

Bannon worked to create a counter-narrative that ultimately would change many Republicans’ perception of the scandal. A former filmmaker, he’s long been captivated by the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi filmmaker, and the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein for their power to shape public sentiment. Earlier this year, Bannon told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer his 2012 anti-Obama film “The Hope and the Change,” had consciously mimicked Riefenstahl’s infamous, “Triumph of the Will.” Her film, he added, “seared into me” that unhappy voters could be influenced if they felt they were being conned.

“Riefenstahl and Eisenstein both created an image of their nation that coalesced in the minds of citizens and shaped public opinion through narratives, which is essentially what Bannon is doing in politics,” says Nadia Szold, a filmmaker and documentarian who has studied Bannon’s films and discussed his influences with him. “They all evoke emotions like nostalgia, patriotism or paranoia that strengthen a collective sentiment.”

In the run-up to the presidential campaign, Bannon’s narrative-building energies were chiefly directed at the mainstream media. He helped conceive and produce the book “Clinton Cash” as a way of injecting negative storylines about Hillary Clinton into major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post to discourage potential Clinton voters and grease the skids for the Republican nominee.

In Alabama, however, Bannon needed to move Republican voters, which entailed exerting a different, more direct influence. Early on, he sent two top Breitbart editors, Boyle and Aaron Klein, to attack Moore’s critics and churn out a fusillade of stories designed to raise doubts about the motives of Moore’s accusers and the mainstream reporters covering them. The general theme, Boyle explains, was that the whole thing was a Democratic ruse abetted by a compliant liberal press: “This was a missile launched at the conservative movement by the mainstream media.”

An ardent believer in the power of talk radio, Bannon turned his daily SiriusXM radio show into the broadcasting hub of the Moore counter-narrative that was fast emerging. It disseminated Breitbart’s stories across the conservative universe, parts of which remained committed to opposing Moore. “Our voters turn to the conservative media — or what people thought was conservative — because the rest of it is fake news,” says Young. “That includes Fox News, which follows Mitch McConnell’s lead. Hannity is a bright spot there, but Fox News has gotten more liberal.”

Local talk radio was especially important because it reached voters who would decide Moore’s fate. Bannon sent his reporters to appear as guests.

“Without Bannon and Breitbart, it would have been almost impossible for us to get the message out there,” says Scott Beason, a conservative radio host whose show broadcasts weekdays on the SuperStation FM 101.1 and blankets the Huntsville and Birmingham markets. “They had a big effect. They’re giving people information that’s not making it into our local reports, that gave us a reference point to refute these stories and say, ‘Here’s the part you don’t know.’ And that often flips the situation on its head and changes people’s minds. I really believe because of the work they did that that’s how Roy Moore is going to be able to get over the hump on Tuesday.”

Although support for Moore fell sharply after the sexual misconduct allegations, it has gradually returned, something Beason attributes to four weeks of steady bludgeoning that Bannon’s operation has administered to Moore’s accusers and the mainstream press. “Not everybody listens to my radio show,” he says. “It took time to get the message out so people were hearing these things. My listeners go to the gym, or the ballpark, or Sunday school, and say, ‘Did you hear what Scott said?’”

-snip-

As I've pointed out elsewhere, Bannon is an authoritarian.

His use of the media is not about factual journalism or even free speech.

It's pure propaganda copied from authoritarian regimes.


____


Editing to add thanks to Politico's Jake Sherman for tweeting about this article:

Link to tweet

I was traveling yesterday, so might have missed this. But Bannon was inspired by Nazi propaganda. That seems like a big deal.

[Botany]

1. I worry for my country

Bannon is the face of evil and hate and is bankrolled by the Mercers.

[Fred Sanders]

2. If Moore loses it is a tossup if I would be happier with it being his loss or Bannon's and Trump's.

[Johnny2X2X]

3. Just starting

The propaganda got him elected, but if there's one thing history has taught us is that once in power, fascists will put propaganda into overdrive to consolidate power and never give it up.

They will control the internet very soon, they already control talk radio, they are buying local news stations by the hundreds. They own FOX and are trying to buy CNN. Most Newspapers are now owned by them. My local newspaper reads like propaganda now, everything is framed the way Trump and his buddies want it to be.

We are way further down this path than most realize.

[KatyMan]

4. Here's a book folks should read:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01CO34OLQ/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o06_?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by Thomas Childers. It reads like the Repubs, Bannon and Trump's playbook. Scary stuff.


The dramatic story of the Third Reich—how Adolf Hitler and a core group of Nazis rose to power and plunged the world into a horrific war, perpetrating the genocidal Holocaust while sacrificing the lives of millions of ordinary Germans.

In The Third Reich, Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms of the Versailles Treaty that ended the Great War, he found his voice and drew a following.

As his views developed, Hitler attracted like-minded colleagues who formed the nucleus of the nascent Nazi party. The failed Munich putsch of 1923 and subsequent trial gave Hitler a platform for his views, which he skillfully exploited. Between 1924 and 1929 Hitler and his party languished in obscurity on the radical fringes of German politics, but the onset of the Great Depression provided Hitler the issues he needed to move into the mainstream of German political life. He seized the opportunity to blame Germany’s misery on the victorious allies, the Marxists, the Jews, and big business—and the political parties that represented them. By 1932 the Nazis had become the largest political party in Germany. Although Hitler became chancellor in 1933, his party had never achieved a majority in free elections. Within six months the Nazis transformed a dysfunctional democracy into a totalitarian state and began the inexorable march to World War II and the Holocaust.

It is these fraught times that Childers brings to life: the Nazis’ rise to power and their use and abuse of power once they achieved it. Based in part on German documents seldom used by previous historians, The Third Reich charts the dramatic, improbable rise of the Nazis; the suffering of ordinary Germans under Nazi rule; and the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. This is the most comprehensive and readable one-volume history of Nazi Germany since the classic Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.