The Fall of Facebook

Plus the insurrection subcommittee prepares to confront Trump and the debt ceiling fight continues

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted on Monday afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void ...
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The Fall of Facebook

Steve Bannon and the Struggle for America’s Post-Pandemic Soul

Why populist-nationalist movements detest international cooperation

But however grave Bannon’s crimes, to write him off back then—to assume he would never again be a significant force within Trumpism—would have been to underestimate his resourcefulness and determination. A pandemic is a time of opportunity as well as tragedy, and Bannon is seizing the moment. And the way ...
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Steve Bannon and the Struggle for America’s Post-Pandemic Soul

Bannon at Booth

A conflict between principle and strategy?

Bannon, surely, needs no introduction, nor need we long belabor the reasons why the decision to invite him to speak at the University of Chicago proved controversial. Still, let’s note that in a letter of protest signed by over 100 members of the University of Chicago faculty, the rationale for objecting to ...
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Bannon at Booth

Breitbart, Bannon, Trump, and the Frankfurt School

A strange meeting of minds

Breitbart's stated goal in creating the news outlet that bears his name was to attack the "Democrat media complex" with the help of the Internet and social media. Bannon, inspired by Lenin, Julius Evola (a darling of the Italian fascists and today popular with Greek neo-Nazis and Hungarian nationalists), and ...
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The False Premises of Alt-Right Ideology

Academics must understand how the Alt-Right sees the world if we are to resist it

Adequately understanding the alt-right ideology requires us to see how it is different from other strains of racism, how it is different from political frameworks that it might seem superficially similar to (e.g. Marxist critique) and how it understands and responds to the left’s own narratives, frameworks, and discourse. Once ...
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“We Are At War!”

Steve Bannon’s Warmongering

“We’re in a war. We’re clearly going into, I think, a major shooting war in the Middle East, again.” November 27, 2015 “It’s war. It’s war. Every day, we put up America’s at war. America’s at War. We’re at war.” December 14, 2015 - Steve Bannon A warmonger, by definition, is someone who promotes ...
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