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 Homeโs vote to carry Bannon in prison contempt of Congress.
The podcast, known as โWarfare Room,โ is a six-days-a-week alternate actuality thatโs type of like Trumpโs banned Twitter account revived in audio type. Within the fantasyland of Bannon and mates, Trump gained the 2020 election โin a landslideโ (he misplaced), Trumpโs victory (which did not happen) was ripped from his palms by a sprawling checklist of cheaters (pure fiction), and President Joe Bidenโs win can nonetheless be decertified (
nope).
On episode after episode, Bannonโs 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 โ whose pillow firm has been a repeat advertiser on โWarfare Roomโ โ 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 โinformation analystโ Seth Keshel, and an assortment of swing-state Republican candidates whoโre
running on election lies.
A Bannon spokesperson acknowledged having acquired CNNโs request for remark this week however didnโt present any further response.
A name to motion
The podcastโs 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 Individualsโ religion in โthe legitimacy of Joe Bidenโs regime.โ
However Bannon has additionally urged โWarfare Roomโ 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 โprecinct committeemen.โ
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 stateโs social gathering equipment. In addition they often
serve as local elections workers.
โItโs arduous to overstate how harmful Bannonโs phrases and actions are,โ 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. โHe 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.โ
There isnโt any arduous information on the affect of Bannonโs 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.
โWarfare Roomโ has
thrived on Appleโs podcast app even after it was banned from
Spotify,
YouTube and
Twitter following numerous election lies and Bannonโs informal
call final November for the beheading of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
โWarfare Roomโ has constantly been
in the top 100 on
US podcast charts; whereas exact listenership figures arenโt 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 Trumpโs 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 โactually good at creating neighborhood round his podcasts,โ turning the present into one thing greater than a passive listening expertise. She famous that there are tens of hundreds of members in โWarfare Roomโ fan teams on Telegram, an app well-liked for its group chats.
โThe followers can then lengthen the beliefs of the present, generally in dangerous methods,โ Squire stated.
Election lie after election lie
โWarfare Roomโ has come beneath scrutiny for Bannonโs
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 โall hell goes to interrupt unfastened tomorrow.โ
However Bannon by no means stopped touting the election lies even after the riot. Although โWarfare Roomโ covers different topics as properly โ latest segments have addressed the Covid-19 pandemic, immigration and the Virginia election โ Bannon is fixated on what he calls the โThree November Motionโ 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 โgained in a landslide.โ (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, โit was very clear that President Donald J. Trump had gained the election.โ (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 hadnโt been counted but.)
- Lindell stated Trump โgained New Hampshire and Minnesotaโ in 2020. (Trump misplaced each state by greater than seven share factors.)
- Former Trump White Home aide Boris Epshteyn stated Arizonaโs Maricopa County was โpollutedโ with โ74,000 further ballotsโ; Giuliani stated these ballots had been โmade out by Democratic operatives.โ (False and false. The declare about 74,000 unexplained ballots in Maricopa, which got here from the individual employed to run the sham Republican โauditโ 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 โ30 (thousand), 40,000โ illegitimate votes. (Thereโs, once more, no proof for these figures. And thereโs no proof that numerous undocumented folks voted illegally in any state.)
- Keshel, the supposed information analyst, stated there was a โ67-county operationโ to fraudulently โshaveโ Trumpโs vote totals in Pennsylvania. (That is simply utterly imaginary.)
- Keshel stated โthere was a plan in placeโ 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 โtremendously offโ 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 โsymbolize the vast majority of faux Democratic voters in Georgia, the place theyโd all of the fraud.โ (There isnโt any proof of widespread election fraud in Georgia, nor any proof that any Georgia county has a major drawback with โfauxโ voters.)
- Lindell stated the election expertise firm Dominion Voting Programs was a key participant in rigging the election after which engaged in a โcover-up.โ (Thereโs 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.)