Some of Steve Bannon's Biggest Intellectual Influences Are Fascists and White Supremacists

His fondness for a French reactionary has made headlines, but he has cited worse.

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By Ben Norton

Steve Bannon just can't help himself. The president's chief strategist, and former executive chair of Breitbart News, has repeatedly cited fascists and white supremacists without compunction or even discretion. 

A recent investigation by the Huffington Post exposed how Bannon's fondness for The Camp of the Saints, an obscure French novel that portrays a race war between the "civilized" white West and the evil brown hordes of the so-called East. The Huffington Post highlighted several interviews in 2015 and 2016 in which Bannon compared global politics and the refugee crisis to the plot of the book, which has been likened to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

The Camp of the Saints, which takes its title from the Bible, was written by ultra-reactionary French author Jean Raspail, who openly describes himself as a "royalist" who wants to restore the Catholic monarchy. In the book, he describes hordes of Indians trying to conquer white Western Christendom as "thousands of wretched creatures" and "turd-eaters."

The Huffington Post described the novel Bannon admires as "nothing less than a call to arms for the white Christian West, to revive the spirit of the Crusades and steel itself for bloody conflict against the poor black and brown world without and the traitors within."

Yet Bannon's admiration of The Camp of the Saints is by no means an isolated example of his extreme far-right politics. The New York Times pointed out that Trump's right-hand man cited Nazi-affiliated Italian philosopher Julius Evola in a 2014 speech at a Christian conference.

Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian fascism, greatly admired Evola. The Italian leader of the extreme right-wing Traditionalist movement wrote for fascist publications and journals, espousing anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian ideas. Evola was virulently racist and anti-Semitic and openly claimed that non-European races were inferior. He also condoned patriarchal domination of women and advocated rape.

A big fan of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler, Evola spent years in Nazi Germany, where he gave lectures. He personally welcomed Mussolini to the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's military headquarters. In a post-war trial in 1951, Evola denied being part of Mussolini's fascist movement, which was apparently not bombastic enough for his tastes; instead, he proudly declared himself to be a "superfascist."

Neo-fascist leader Richard Spencer told the Times he was excited that Bannon knew of Evola.

"It means a tremendous amount," Spencer said, adding that Trump's chief strategist "is at least open to them."

AlterNet previously reported on Bannon's 2014 speech, in which he described his belief in an intractable violent conflict between the "enlightened" Christian West and the forces of Islam, secularism and socialism.

"We're at the very beginning stages of a very brutal and bloody conflict," Bannon warned. "We are in an outright war against jihadists, Islam, Islamic fascism."

He condemned the "immense secularization of the West" and the increasing secularism among millennials, and insisted that Christians must "bind together and really form what I feel is an aspect of the Church militant, to really be able to not just stand with our beliefs but to fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity."

Right-wing pundit Glenn Beck went so far as to compare Bannon to the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, calling Bannon "quite possibly the most dangerous guy in all of American politics."