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Bannon, a bellicose right-wing nationalist who served as White Home chief strategist beneath President Donald Trump in 2017, is fighting a subpoena from the Home committee investigating the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. The Justice Division is contemplating whether or not to behave on the Home’s vote to carry Bannon in prison contempt of Congress.
On the similar time, Bannon continues to host a popular podcast that is among the nation’s most essential promoters of the very stolen-election lies that incited the January 6 mob.
The podcast, known as “Warfare Room,” is a six-days-a-week alternate actuality that’s type of like Trump’s banned Twitter account revived in audio type. Within the fantasyland of Bannon and mates, Trump gained the 2020 election “in a landslide” (he misplaced), Trump’s victory (which did not happen) was ripped from his palms by a sprawling checklist of cheaters (pure fiction), and President Joe Biden’s win can nonetheless be decertified (nope).
As Bannon proudly noted on one October episode, “Warfare Room” provides its listeners election-related “data” that even Fox Information avoids.
On episode after episode, Bannon’s podcast goes into elaborate, incorrect element about how the election was supposedly stolen. One in all his common visitors is Mike Lindell, the pillow businessman who makes conspiratorial election claims so ludicrous that Fox has refused to air adverts which have invoked them. Lindell — whose pillow firm has been a repeat advertiser on “Warfare Room” — appeared three times last week alone.
Bannon has additionally offered a pleasant platform for the debunked election claims of individuals like former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former Trump White Home official Peter Navarro, wildly inaccurate so-called “information analyst” Seth Keshel, and an assortment of swing-state Republican candidates who’re running on election lies.
A Bannon spokesperson acknowledged having acquired CNN’s request for remark this week however didn’t present any further response.
A name to motion
The podcast’s relentless barrage of election deception can be damaging sufficient to American democracy if it had been simply discuss. Bannon spoke approvingly in October about how his efforts have diminished Individuals’ religion in “the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s regime.”
However Bannon has additionally urged “Warfare Room” listeners to take long-term motion. He has made frequent pleas for supporters to reshape the Republican social gathering by signing as much as function “precinct committeemen.”
These are low-level native positions. As Bannon has emphasised, although, they matter. Folks in precinct posts may be influential in selecting representatives to serve on native elections boards and to fill key places of work inside every state’s social gathering equipment. In addition they often serve as local elections workers.
“It’s arduous to overstate how harmful Bannon’s phrases and actions are,” stated Rick Hasen, a professor of regulation and political science and co-director of the Honest Elections and Free Speech Middle on the College of California, Irvine. “He is creating a military of duped individuals who will go into positions serving to to run elections with the false understanding that the 2020 election was stolen. Who is aware of what such persons are able to doing when answerable for operating polling locations or counting votes.”
There isn’t any arduous information on the affect of Bannon’s name to activism. However ProPublica reported in September that counties across the nation had seen an uncommon surge in folks wanting to enroll in Republican precinct positions after Bannon started advocating the thought early this 12 months.
“Warfare Room” has thrived on Apple’s podcast app even after it was banned from Spotify, YouTube and Twitter following numerous election lies and Bannon’s informal call final November for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Warfare Room” has constantly been in the top 100 on US podcast charts; whereas exact listenership figures aren’t out there, Bannon claimed in late October that the podcast had been downloaded a complete of 100 million occasions because it was launched in late 2019 with a concentrate on Trump’s first impeachment.
Megan Squire, an Elon College pc science professor and Southern Poverty Regulation Middle senior fellow who research the podcasts and different on-line communications of right-wing extremists, stated Bannon is “actually good at creating neighborhood round his podcasts,” turning the present into one thing greater than a passive listening expertise. She famous that there are tens of hundreds of members in “Warfare Room” fan teams on Telegram, an app well-liked for its group chats.
“The followers can then lengthen the beliefs of the present, generally in dangerous methods,” Squire stated.
Election lie after election lie
“Warfare Room” has come beneath scrutiny for Bannon’s comments in December and early January, when he pushed election lies, spoke vaguely of his conversations with Trump advisers additionally trying to overturn the election, urged supporters to get angry and are available to Washington on January 6, and predicted on January 5 that “all hell goes to interrupt unfastened tomorrow.”
However Bannon by no means stopped touting the election lies even after the riot. Although “Warfare Room” covers different topics as properly — latest segments have addressed the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration and the Virginia election — Bannon is fixated on what he calls the “Three November Motion” concerning the 2020 election.
Listed here are simply 10 of the election lies which have been instructed on the podcast since mid-July.
- Bannon stated Trump not solely gained the 2020 election however “gained in a landslide.” (Trump lost by 74 votes within the Electoral School and greater than seven million precise votes.)
- Navarro stated that, at midnight on Election Night time, “it was very clear that President Donald J. Trump had gained the election.” (To anybody who truly understands elections, it never seemed that Trump had gained. Trump did have midnight leads in some key states, but it surely was clear on the time that many mail-in votes and votes from Democratic-leaning cities hadn’t been counted but.)
- Lindell stated Trump “gained New Hampshire and Minnesota” in 2020. (Trump misplaced each state by greater than seven share factors.)
- Former Trump White Home aide Boris Epshteyn stated Arizona’s Maricopa County was “polluted” with “74,000 further ballots”; Giuliani stated these ballots had been “made out by Democratic operatives.” (False and false. The declare about 74,000 unexplained ballots in Maricopa, which got here from the individual employed to run the sham Republican “audit” within the county, had already been definitively debunked by the point Giuliani repeated it.)
- Giuliani stated that in Georgia, 68,000 folks voted despite the fact that they had been beneath the authorized voting age of 18. (There was no evidence that any underage individual voted in Georgia, not to mention tens of hundreds of underage folks.)
- Throughout a dialog about Arizona, Giuliani asserted that undocumented immigrants can be proven to be chargeable for “30 (thousand), 40,000” illegitimate votes. (There’s, once more, no proof for these figures. And there’s no proof that numerous undocumented folks voted illegally in any state.)
- Keshel, the supposed information analyst, stated there was a “67-county operation” to fraudulently “shave” Trump’s vote totals in Pennsylvania. (That is simply utterly imaginary.)
- Keshel stated “there was a plan in place” to rig Florida, which solely failed as a result of Trump did higher than anticipated with voters within the south of the state, and that the election outcomes had been “tremendously off” even in Texas. (Nonsense and nonsense. There was merely no such Florida plot; the Texas outcomes, exhibiting that Trump gained by greater than 5 share factors, are correct.)
- Radio host John Fredericks stated the Georgia counties of Cobb, Fulton, DeKalb and Gwinnett “symbolize the vast majority of faux Democratic voters in Georgia, the place they’d all of the fraud.” (There isn’t any proof of widespread election fraud in Georgia, nor any proof that any Georgia county has a major drawback with “faux” voters.)
- Lindell stated the election expertise firm Dominion Voting Programs was a key participant in rigging the election after which engaged in a “cover-up.” (There’s zero indication of any wrongdoing involving Dominion, not to mention in depth fraud, and thus, clearly, no cover-up. Dominion has sued Lindell for defamation, searching for $1.3 billion in damages.)
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