RUSH: You’re up first today. Welcome.
CALLER: Hi. I have read something, and it was quite a while ago, and I don’t know if there’s any basis for it. I’m not making an accusation. But that Steve Bannon told someone — I think it was in Politico or somewhere — that he’s a Leninist. And this kind of would make sense to me in a way because they want to cause conflict and get everybody angry with each other so that they can cause revolution. I’m not saying it’s true, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.
RUSH: Oh, come on, say it’s true. We need somebody who knows something here.
CALLER: Right. And I don’t know.
RUSH: Oh, that’s too bad. But you’ve heard that Steve Bannon is a Leninist.
CALLER: I heard that he told someone this. I think he was at someone’s home at a party or something and maybe the fellow he told —
RUSH: Somebody invited Steve Bannon to a party?
CALLER: Well, he was at someone’s home and he said he told him, and this is all — I read it in, I think it was, like, Politico.
RUSH: Oh, well. Why didn’t you say so.
CALLER: I did.
RUSH: Oh, I didn’t hear that.
CALLER: You didn’t hear me.
RUSH: Yeah. My bad.
CALLER: It’s okay.
RUSH: My bad. Okay. Let me put that in hopper.
CALLER: All right. I’m throwing it out there for anybody that might know.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: But it kind of rings — it’s bothered me, it upset me when I read it, and I just would like to know —
RUSH: Let me ask you, are you a Trump supporter?
CALLER: Yes!
RUSH: That didn’t take long.
CALLER: (laughing) Very much so.
RUSH: How much during the whole campaign, and in the first three to four months of the presidency, how important did you think Steve Bannon was to it all?
CALLER: I don’t know.
RUSH: Okay. So you didn’t think about Bannon much; you were thinking about Trump?
CALLER: I mean, I wondered about Bannon. He’s bothered me.
RUSH: Why?
CALLER: Because he’s inconsistent. He’ll say he supports Trump’s agenda, he supports Trump, and then he’ll turn around and stab him in the back.
RUSH: There’s one thing he’s very consistent on, though.
CALLER: What’s that?
RUSH: Being talked about.
CALLER: Oh, this is true. Maybe that’s the whole thing.
RUSH: Believe me. I think if you want to find out what’s wrong in America, do two things. Follow the money and then follow the media. And by that, I mean, look at what people will do for media attention. And it’s worse than it’s ever been. In fact, folks, I’m gonna jump the gun here. I’ve been actually preparing — if I were writing a book, which I’m not, this would be a chapter, and I’ve been trying to analyze the poisonous — and it’s not a conspiracy. It’s just the evolution of our society and culture.
Everything is media now. Everybody does everything, most everybody, while also calculating the media reaction to it. Let me explain when things were different, and let me use sports as the example. Back in the — and this is not old fuddy-duddy stuff. This is historical context.
There was a time when athletes, professional athletes, played the game to play the game, and they were not even conscious of the media. I mean, they knew the press box was filled with writers and so forth, but they went out to play the game and they lived their lives without any thought of what the media would say or do or any of that. It was not on anybody’s mind.
Many CEOs, many businesspeople, the media was always there, but it was not, the media was never a dominant factor in determining practically everything someone did. Today it is for a lot of people. And I’m still not making this clear. And that’s why I’ve been spending time trying to write it down. It goes deeper than just trying to be noticed. It leads to all kinds of insincerity. It leads to lack of substance replaced by behavior that will get noticed. And there’s value in getting noticed no matter what you get noticed for. That’s not new.
I mean, the old adage, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right” has been around forever. What is new — relatively new — and I don’t mean new yesterday — but what’s relatively new is that the large number of substantive things that are done, not for the reasons that you would think — good decision, bad decision, what’s the objective, how do we get it, if the media finds out, they find out, if they don’t, they don’t, but the media and what they’re thinking is not even a factor in the circumstances I’m talking about.
That’s not the case in so much today. Everything, everything that most anybody does, especially in politics, is done, is calculated, is executed, is performed with a desired media reaction in mind. And in my mind that corrupts. Take your average American street corner, whatever goes on there goes on. Put a camera there. Everything changes when people know the camera’s there. And there’s a camera on every corner in every room in every city in every place in Washington.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. About a million people have sent me this Daily Beast story where Bannon was telling somebody that he’s a Leninist. I remember it now. And they’ve even fact checked it on Snopes, and Snopes says that the likelihood is that the story’s false. It’s incredible. In a minute back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, so I went and looked at the story that the caller Zoe from Champaign, Illinois, said she heard that Bannon called himself a Leninist. He did, and it was August 22, 2016. The writer of the story was a guy named Ronald Radosh. R-A-D-O-S-H. He talked about a conversation that he had reportedly had with Bannon at a party that he attended in 2013. They
“had a long talk about [Bannon’s] approach to politics. He never called himself a ‘populist’ or an ‘American nationalist,’ as so many think of him today.
“‘I’m a Leninist,’ Bannon [said]. ‘Lenin … wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.'” I thought, that doesn’t make any sense. That’s not what Lenin did. Lenin wanted to become the state!