The Falwell affair is the shiny wrapping paper. There’s money laundering inside the shiny paper. Will the media notice?

Ha!!

trump is a #PornAgainChristian

In the most recent Senate Intelligence report on Russian campaign interference, a footnote quotes Steve Bannon, the former chief executive of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, disparaging Trump’s oldest son. Bannon said he thought “very highly” of Donald Trump Jr., but also called him “a guy who believes everything on Breitbart is true.”

Bannon, of course, ran Breitbart, the far-right media outlet, before joining the Trump campaign, and then for several months after leaving the White House. Yet he seemed to want the senators to know that he was never enough of a rube to take his own propaganda seriously.

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In “The Brink,” a 2019 documentary about Bannon, there’s a scene in which he speaks to supporters in a modest living room stuffed with furniture and bedecked with crosses. As his small audience sits rapt, he lauds the room’s similarity to one in his grandmother’s house and pays homage to the “working-class, middle-class” people who make up nationalist movements everywhere.

Then he and a young man traveling with him walk out and step into their chauffeured car. “You couldn’t pay me a million dollars a year to live in that house,” sneers Bannon’s associate. They head to a private airport. Bannon starts to make a crack about the luxurious locale: “This is the populist …” Then he thinks better of it and shoves some popcorn into his mouth.

So it’s fitting that when Bannon on Thursday became the most recent member of Trump’s 2016 campaign staff to be arrested, it was on charges of defrauding gullible Trump supporters. According to a federal indictment, Bannon, along with his associates Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea, ran a crowdfunding campaign, We Build the Wall, ostensibly to help fund Trump’s promised southern border barrier. The project became, said prosecutors, a source of illicit personal enrichment.

Reminder that the c4 nonprofit that Bannon allegedly used to hide personal payments he took from crowdfunded money was the same c4 that he created to promote “populism” and “economic nationalism” (screenshot from @TheBrinkFilm