Commentary
For better or for worse, Donald J. Trump has come to represent the populist movement in the United States. And as the Biden administration escalates its cold civil war against Trump, and the corporate media against his followers and supporters, a very important question goes unanswered in the noise. Do populists, as represented by the MAGA movement, present a threat to democracy, as the establishment tells us? Or are they actually an expression of the democratic will of a large group of ordinary people?
To get an answer, I spoke to Ben Harnwell, who, in his role as the international editor for the very popular daily news podcast “Steve Bannon’s WarRoom,” is the MAGA voice in Europe. Bannon and his juggernaut of a show are widely blamed—or credited, depending on who you ask—with the continuing popularity of Trump and his populist America First movement, as evidenced in recent weeks by Kari Lake’s victory in Arizona and Liz Cheney’s defeat in Wyoming.
This has been a busy year for political upstarts across the West, energetically taking on established parties and dynastic families, backed by similarly rambunctious new media outlets. In turn, these rising politicians and new media figures are reviled by both establishment politicians and a legacy media that once prided itself on speaking truth to power.
Harnwell, a practicing Catholic and self-described mainstream conservative who is originally from the East Midlands in England, is also spearheading an increasingly Quixotic attempt to open a school called the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West in a 13th-century monastery outside of Rome. In 2018, a think-tank run by Harnwell, the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, with backing from Bannon and some Catholic clergy, signed a lease with the Ministry of Culture for use of the property, only to be unceremoniously kicked out in 2021, despite having won earlier legal battles, by the court that oversees the administration of Italy’s bureaucracy, the Council of State. The case is now awaiting a verdict from Italy’s highest court of appeal, the Corte Suprema di Cassazione.
“In all the legal cases I haven’t once been called to give evidence,” he told me. “There is so much documentation that has not been presented in court yet. It’s all political. Basically, Italian Communists and Pope Francis’s Vatican did not want Steve Bannon’s Academy for the Judeo-Christian West under their noses.”
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that populists, American or European, are consistently portrayed in the legacy media as either wannabe despots or irrelevant weirdos. Obscure yet somehow powerful; clownish yet at the same time dangerous.
But if you were to somehow stumble upon the unedited and un-editorialized statements of these figures, you would hear what many consider to be commonsense statements on immigration, family policies, and the economy.
A lot of it sounds very much like what I used to think were left-wing positions—fairness for the working class, the reining in of corporate power, and an end to the American empire. So which one is it? Are they crazy, like the media suggest? Or are they what they themselves claim to be—a much-needed voice for the little guy?
When I met Harnwell in a café in Rome last week, he had a simple explanation for this discrepancy.
“If the [mainstream media] communicated our arguments the way we communicate them, without changing them, the Democrats would be finished. They’d be done. Nobody doesn’t want what we are proposing.”
Nonetheless, mainstream media continues to portray MAGA supporters as dangerous extremists. In one recent NPR segment, a journalist speculates whether Bannon—who was convicted in July of criminal contempt of Congress, a charge for which a custodial sentence is rarely handed out—would be allowed to continue his podcast from prison. The report includes no specifics about Bannon’s political positions. Instead, it goes heavy on loaded but vague phrases that lead the reader to connect Bannon’s name with attempts to “incite ... [the] anti-democracy movement,” “promote extremism and hate,” and “adopt fringe viewpoints.”
As political tensions ratchet ever-upward in the United States, Harnwell is busy delivering frequent news bulletins from Rome to the WarRoom’s audience of millions, while awaiting the outcome of his legal battle with the Italian state. He is honest about how his own personal political philosophy diverges from much of the insurgent Italian right. The freedom-minded MAGA movement is not perfectly interchangeable with the Italian right’s platform, he tells me.
Harnwell’s personal political preference, he says, “is to get the state out of people’s lives. No one really wants that in Italy. They all want something from the state. There’s no 1776 philosophy, and there’s also no 1215 Magna Carta. The state in Italy is what gives you what you want. There’s no libertarian tradition in Italy as there is in the Anglosphere—and you absolutely need to understand that before talking about the Italian right.”
And therefore Harnwell readily acknowledges Fratelli d’Italia’s historical roots in Italian fascism, while saying of party leader Giorgia Meloni: “She’s not a fascist. It would be like saying the Democrats support slavery because Democrats in the mid-19th century supported slavery.”
His own libertarian instincts have been tempered somewhat, he says, by Bannon’s populism. “Here’s the influence of Steven Bannon on me, if you must spend $53 billion, spend it on Americans, not Ukrainians. Don’t give it to the oligarchs in the world’s third most corrupt country. You’ve got to be crazy to do that.”
Bannon’s greatest strength, Harnwell says, was his transcendence of the traditional political labels. While establishment media loves to whip up panic over Bannon’s supposed far-right positions, Harnwell says, “I sometimes think he’s really just an old-school blue-collar Democrat—but the bought and paid for [mainstream media] pretends to confuse radicalism for extremism.”
“This is the genius of the Bannonite paradigm,” Harnwell said. “He abolished the horizontal left-right schematic and replaced it with the vertical elites versus the ordinary guy. The genius of that paradigm is that Donald Trump was the first president to be elected according to it when Hillary was still trying to win on the old left-right battle.”
As this populist movement continues to pick up support from ordinary people alarmed by raging price hikes, decrepit public services, and political corruption—problems the United States now shares with Italy—the liberal-left seems determined to carry on waging a culture war.
“They are the ones who lost that base by changing their political agenda. Instead of the welfare of the working class, they started going on about unisex bathrooms and pronouns and drag queen story hour. Well, tell me how that’s going to help the guy working in the factory or his wife who works two jobs?" Harnwell said.
“All you have to talk about as a party is not only drag queen story hour but the right to start trans-ing your child, without even the parents knowing about it. If that’s the market stall you’re offering, you’re finished. And what do you have left? Rage against those who came and took your territory.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.