Steve Bannon: Agent of Anglo Oligarchy and Its Monarchist European Friends

by Daniel Platt and Margaret Scialdone

[Print version of this article]

April 30—Donald Trump’s surprise election in 2016 was in fact an expression of an international rejection of the “rules-based order,” which had come into place under the “special relationship” between Washington and London following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The “sole superpower” mentality had led the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations to believe that the Anglo-American cabal could wage wars of mass destruction with impunity, in total disregard of the actual international law codified in the Charter of the United Nations; that it could impose sanctions (also in total disregard for international law) on any and all nations due simply to the fact that the U.S. dollar was the universal currency for trade; and that it could run “color revolutions” against any and all nations who refused to submit. The 2014 Obama/Biden coup in Ukraine had set the Anglo-Americans on a course for war with Russia, with China also in the cross hairs, putting nuclear war on the agenda.

Trump rejected this “end of history” delusion that the U.S. should be the policeman of the world. He promised to end the “endless wars” of aggression in Afghanistan and Southwest Asia. He said, repeatedly, that “it is a good thing, not a bad thing” to be friends with Russia. During a visit to Beijing in 2017, Trump said that if the U.S. and China jointly addressed the world’s problems, “I believe we can solve almost all of them, and probably all of them.” He promised to rebuild the U.S. industrial economy which had been destroyed through globalization, and he rejected the Green New Deal lie that fossil fuels and industrial development were causing global destruction through climate change.

This was a rejection of the core ideology of the historic British Empire and of both major political parties, as well as the mass media information warfare against the idea of peace and development.

As EIR argued in June 2021, “Why Trump Failed, and Why Many Trump Supporters Fail To See Why,” Trump failed to deliver on any of these promises. The wars continued, the big lie about carbon causing disaster continued, the re-industrialization of the United States never materialized. The military-industrial complex refused to follow the Commander in Chief’s orders to end the wars; Wall Street refused to give up wild speculation or invest in the real economy; and the World Economic Forum and the British Royal Family made the Green New Deal the driving force in shutting down global development. Trump’s constructive cooperation with China to resolve the imbalance in trade fell apart when he joined the insane campaign to blame China for the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were many forces at work to undermine Trump’s original intentions, but perhaps the most deadly was his on-again, off-again dependence on the devious and destructive role of Steve Bannon. Trump is now projected by the Harvard-CAPS/Harris Poll to win a hypothetical race against Joe Biden by 47% to 41%, and against Kamala Harris by far more. If Trump were to re-emerge as a national figure in American politics, the possibility that Bannon could resume his pernicious role is something that must be taken seriously.

Bannon and Trump

Steve Bannon first met Donald Trump in 2010 through David Bossie, the head of Citizens United. Bannon worked for Texas Senator Ted Cruz during the 2016 Republican presidential primary races, then went on to serve as the chief executive officer of Trump’s campaign when Trump won the GOP nomination. Having established a relationship with Trump, Bannon quickly moved to try to neutralize those elements of Trump’s political orientation that made him a threat to the British imperial division of the world into East vs. West—to prevent Trump’s intention to work constructively with Russia and China.

A fascinating insight into how the Anglophiles view Trump was provided by author Thomas Wright, in a Sept. 20, 2020 article, “What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World,” in one of the flagship journals of the East Coast liberal establishment, The Atlantic:

Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently—likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union.

The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace—a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires.

On Her Majesty’s Service

Steve Bannon is plugged directly into the networks that enforce the “special relationship” between Britain and the U.S., to the effect of gradually extirpating any memory of the American System of economics and our nation’s (somewhat intermittent) history of opposition to the imperial world outlook.

In 2013 Bannon, along with American billionaire Robert Mercer and Mercer’s daughter Rebekah (the Mercers are major investors in right-wing causes, notably in Bannon’s Breitbart News project), joined forces with several well-bred, Eton-educated British operatives from a firm called Strategic Communication Laboratories to form the cyber-spook operation, Cambridge Analytica (CA).

CA billed itself as a one-stop shop for the covert manipulation of large groups of human beings, an area of professional interest to Bannon, who had previously worked as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs, as a Hollywood film producer, and as co-founder and Executive Chairman of Breitbart News. Bannon confided to his Hollywood script-writing collaborator, Julia Jones, that he wanted to be the “Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP.” Leni Riefenstahl was the celebrated propaganda filmmaker for the Nazi Party in Germany.

CA offered a cutting-edge synthesis of what in military parlance is called “information warfare,” combined with social media manipulation (“algorithmic targeting”), data analysis, and “election management.” In a Guardian article from March 18, 2018 by Carole Cadwalladr, one of CA’s resident geeks, Christopher Wylie, described CA as “Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare mindfuck tool.”

CA had contracts with British and U.S. military agencies, had “ties to the British Royal Family,” did extensive business managing elections” in the developing sector, and was contracted to both the Ted Cruz and Donald Trump campaigns in the United States. Cambridge Analytica came to an end in 2018 in the wake of a scandal in which it was revealed that CA had collected personal data belonging to 87 million Facebook users without their consent. However, his experience with CA had given Bannon a wealth of new connections to Britain’s aristocratic circles, the Anglo-American spook world, and the trans-Atlantic Military-Industrial complex.

In 2014, Bannon opened a London bureau of Breitbart News and hired Raheem Kassam to be the Editor-in-Chief. Kassam was a former Campaigns Director for the London-based Henry Jackson Society, one of the primary British neoconservative think-tanks running operations against Russia and China. Bannon also became involved that year with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, founded in 2011 by British subject Benjamin Harnwell. At the time, Harnwell was working as the Chief of Staff for Conservative Member of the European Parliament, Nirj Deva.

Nirj Deva is listed as a patron of the International Monarchist League. As Chairman of the British think-tank, the Bow Group, Deva initiated “trans-Atlantic conferences” with the U.S.-based Heritage Foundation, which latter institution was identified by EIR in the 1980s as a key conduit for British influence into Republican Party circles in the U.S. The Heritage Foundation disorients Republicans by promoting a revisionist version of American history, in which, believe it or not, the ostensible purpose of the American Revolution was to institutionalize British philosophical and economic doctrine in North America! Since 2008, Deva has been the Chairman of the International Committee on Human Dignity for the Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI).

DHI is a putatively Catholic organization. It courts the right-wing currents in the European Catholic community with denunciations of abortion and homosexuality. Founder Benjamin Harnwell is also active in the British Conservative Party, and is a proponent of “Austro-libertarian,” Ludwig von Mises-style economic doctrine, placing him squarely in opposition to the ideas of the American System.

Harnwell had converted to Catholicism in 2004, three years ahead of UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Both were brought to the faith by the same man: Fr. Michael Seed, SA, PhD, STD.[fn_1] In the 2014 directory of the DHI, Seed is listed as “Chaplain.” Four years later, after Bannon had left the Trump administration and was subject to more than his share of bad press, Tony Blair would tell The Economist, “We’ve got to be prepared ... to build bridges” to Bannon.

In 2014 Steve Bannon was invited to address a Dignitatis Humanae Institute conference. He was listed that year as a patron of the institute, sharing that distinction with the following luminaries:

• The self-proclaimed HRH Prince Charles of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, Duke of Castro (he is one of two claimants to a long defunct minor monarchy in Italy)

• Field Marshal Charles Ronald Llewelyn Guthrie, Baron Guthrie of Craigiebank, GCB, GCVO, OBE, DL (who for 20 years served as Gold Stick-in-waiting, personal attendant to the Queen of England on ceremonial occasions)

• Fra. Matthew Festing, GCStJ, OBE, TD, DL, who was the Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta from 2008 until his resignation January 28, 2017, following a dispute with the Vatican

• The erstwhile Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, Otto von Habsburg, who is well known to readers of EIR.

It is clear that by 2014, Steve Bannon had hit the oligarchical big time, fraternizing with the crème de la crème of Europe’s in-bred anachronisms. Two years later, he would be running Trump’s campaign.

In a January 19, 2017 interview with the National Catholic Register, Harnwell described Bannon and Trump both as being “ intuitive geniuses,” and had the following to say about Bannon:

My reading of the totality of Steve’s line of thought is that the onus is really on the individual to comport himself righteously, driven by his faith and a well-formed conscience, and that he’s not really looking to the state to force people to behave in a way it arbitrarily defines as “correct”—or certainly not in its omnipresent, omnipotent contemporary manifestation.

As to the coincidence between Steve Bannon’s idea of “enlightened” capitalism and the DHI’s vision of human dignity, I really think they are in perfect synergy with one another.

Harnwell went on to say that Bannon’s “enlightened” capitalism exemplifies the concept of imago viva dei, Man in the Living Image of God, which would certainly would be news to God.

The Institute announced a plan in 2018 to set up an academy at the Trisulti monastery in central Italy, which Harnwell proclaimed would become a “gladiator school for culture warriors.” The plan eventually came to naught, after a series of court battles with the Italian government.

U.S. media coverage has often depicted Bannon as representing the most backward, redneck racist in American society, of the sort condemned by Hillary Clinton as among those in the “basket of deplorables.” But Bannon’s association with the DHI demonstrates that he enjoys friendly relations with a much more elite class of racist, the sort that gave the world eugenics and IMF conditionalities. The corporate media have insinuated that Bannon hoped to influence the DHI in the direction of support for Europe’s “alt-right” parties, but it is likely that Harnwell & Co. were more actively influencing Bannon, and by extension, Trump.

Enter Guo Wengui

With the rapid emergence of China as an industrial power, the British/neocon forces signaled their displeasure and sought to return it to what they regarded as its proper role, as a provider of cheap labor and raw materials—in other words, a colony. To this end, they recognized a natural ally in the new class of super-aggressive financial speculators who had begun to appear in China, who could potentially divert large amounts of capital away from China’s fabulously successful industrial and infrastructure projects.

Guo Wengui (aka Miles Kwok, aka Miles Guo, aka Guo Wen Gu, aka Kwok Ho Wan) is a wealthy Chinese real estate investor (a “former billionaire,” according to Forbes) who fled China in 2014 to avoid being arrested on charges including bribery, kidnapping, money laundering, fraud, and rape.

Guo was allegedly a target of the Chinese government’s Operation Fox Hunt, launched in June 2014, “to punish political corruption.” Chinese President Xi Jinping’s slogan was “fight tigers, swat flies and hunt foxes.” In 2015, in only six months, 680 wealthy fugitives from justice who had fled China were brought back to face trial. Fox Hunt was augmented in 2015 by Operation Skynet, restricting financial flows of those who fled overseas, and recovering corrupt proceeds. Hu Ji, a police officer with the Wuhan Public Security Bureau, investigated those who fled to the U.S. He hired Michael McMahon, a retired New York City Police Department detective sergeant who had become a private investigator to track down these fugitives. By February 2021, 21.7 billion renminbi (RMB) had been recovered, according to the Chinese government.

Fox Hunt was a necessary complement to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The policy of vectoring investment toward real, long-term infrastructure projects required that there also be a clearing out of financial corruption. This tendency was recognized as well by the British/neoconservative opponents of the BRI (which the British House of Lords warned in 2018, “poses a threat to the current international governance system”). They rushed to characterize Fox Hunt as a policy of political repression, disguised as an anti-corruption campaign.

America’s politically hyperactive police agency, the FBI, jumped into the fray. FBI Director Christopher Wray addressed the neoconservative Hudson Institute by video on July 7, 2020:

Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world. We’re talking about political rivals, dissidents, and critics seeking to expose China’s extensive human rights violations....

I’ll take this opportunity to note that if you believe the Chinese government is targeting you—that you’re a potential Fox Hunt victim—please reach out to your local FBI field office.

Later that year, the FBI arrested NYPD officer Baimadajie Angwang for infiltrating the Tibetan community on behalf of Beijing. Five others were arrested for Fox Hunt activities, charged with “conspiring to act as illegal agents” of China and “conspiracy to commit interstate and international stalking.”

Meanwhile, Guo Wengui had come to the U.S. in 2015 and taken up residence in a $67.5 million, 15-room penthouse in Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel. A letter of reference for Guo was written by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who indicated that he had known Guo for seven years, praising his “dignity and intelligence.” Guo settled in, in New York, and presciently made a successful application for membership in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

Two years later, Guo made his debut on the American political scene. In January 2017, he began systematically contacting U.S. media and opened a Twitter account (@KwokMilaes), presenting himself as a “human rights” and “anti-corruption” critic of the Chinese government. Also in January, the Davos World Economic Forum for the first time hosted a speech by a Chinese president, and President Xi used the occasion to promote his Belt and Road Initiative, causing alarm bells to go off in the Anglophile establishment.

In April, the Chinese government posted an official Interpol “Red Notice,” indicating a request for the extradition of Guo to stand trial for bribery, kidnapping, money laundering, fraud, and rape. Steve Wynn, an American casino magnate and Republican Party activist with business interests in China, is said to have hand-delivered a letter from Xi to Trump, requesting Guo’s extradition. Steve Bannon, who had been appointed Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President, is said to have played a key role in persuading Trump to deny the request, boasting to The Wire China in 2020:

I was the protector....When I was inside the White House, I took the files and put them in my office and said, “Whoever wants this guy, this guy is a pretty valuable hombre.”

At the same time that Bannon was running interference for Guo, he was trying to ensure that the unpredictable Trump did not veer in the direction of LaRouche’s ideas. In May 2017, China hosted the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. It is clear from various accounts that during this period, Bannon, in his capacity as Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President, was arguing vociferously against the option of participating in the Belt and Road. He was assisted in this effort by the Assistant to the President and Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, the deliriously Sinophobic Peter Navarro, and by the equally delirious Asia Director on the National Security Council, Matthew Pottinger. Pottinger not only led the U.S. delegation to the 2017 BRI conference in Beijing, but was later key in blaming China for the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

During May, Liu Yanping, Secretary of the Disciplinary Committee of the Ministry of National Security of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), visited Guo Wengui in New York, bringing with him Guo’s wife and daughter from China. He met twice with Guo, attempting to negotiate some sort of agreement for Guo to return to China and/or temper his media campaign against the Chinese government. These visits drew the hostile attention of the FBI, which considered arresting Liu and his associates for carrying out law enforcement activities that violated their visas. The arrests were averted after negotiations between the State Department and the FBI, but Liu’s cell phone was confiscated. Recordings of the negotiations between Liu and Guo were later made public.

On August 18, Bannon was fired from his position at the White House (Trump later accused Bannon of “leaking false information to the media,” adding, “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”) A few months later, in October, Bannon and Guo met in person for the first time, and entered into a collaboration fired by their shared hostility toward the government of China. Among the fruits of that collaboration:

• The Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation, which finance propaganda projects to discredit the government of China.

• Gnews, an online news source published by the Rule of Law Foundation. Typical article: “The CCP’s Fox Hunt Against Mr. Guo Wengui Never Stops.” There is also a TV network called GTV. The “ G” in all cases stands for the self-effacing Mr. Guo.

• The New Federal State of China, a Juan Guaidó-like entity which purports to be a Chinese “government in exile.” It has an “embassy” in New York City, and is said to have “ambassadors” and its own currency.

In 2020, Bannon was arrested on Guo’s 151-foot yacht and indicted on a charge that he had siphoned millions of dollars from “We Build the Wall,” a group whose stated goal was to raise private funds to build a U.S. border wall with Mexico.

Although many of the Bannon-Guo duo’s joint endeavors may appear zany (they also collaborated on a rock video called Take Down the CCP), Bannon also has a more sophisticated side to him that reflects his closeness to the British establishment. He has concocted a novel theory that the Belt and Road Initiative is a Chinese scheme to synthesize the theories of Halford Mackinder, John Spykman and Alfred Mahan, three variants of the British doctrine of geopolitics.

Geopolitics has always been an effort to construct an intellectual edifice around the practice of imperialism. Mackinder, Spykman and Mahan presented different schemes by which an empire, by establishing control of specific geographical regions, could achieve world domination. Bannon’s theory was that China, through the Belt and Road Initiative, would gain control of all these regions and thus take over the world. But Bannon’s theory, like other purported analyses by neocons of Chinese policy objectives, is the result of looking at the world through British imperial glasses, unable to imagine a country or a leader who believes there could be a common destiny for mankind rather than a geopolitical “survival of the fittest.”

Although Trump had distanced himself from Bannon, particularly after Bannon’s arrest in 2020, Trump pardoned him before he could be put on trial, and the two joined forces last October for a campaign event for Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin. Bannon has used his access to media to promote the theory that Trump actually won the 2020 election, and Bannon possesses a proven ability to connect with America’s populist movement, which is likely to become larger and more enraged as the Democrats and the Biden Administration continue to alienate their base through their mix of incompetence and indifference. Trump vacillates, but may well swing in Bannon’s direction as the 2024 Presidential race approaches.

Bannon, meanwhile, is keeping his hand in the game. He has recently hooked up with Dan Schultz, a local Arizona GOP official and attorney who has been promoting an innocuous-sounding organization called “Precinct Strategy,” a plan for getting everybody to become a Republican precinct committeeman and thus take over the GOP from the bottom, as well as taking back control of election officialdom and school boards. Schultz’ 2017 book is succinctly titled How To Get Into the Real Ball Game of Politics Where You Live and Help President Donald J. Trump Make America Great Again. His website boasts of Trump’s Feb. 27, 2022 endorsement of his efforts and promotes a simplistic platform consisting primarily of Trump’s most popular buzzwords and slogans.

Thinking locally, but acting globally, Bannon participated in an August 2021 cyber-symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota that was held to boost President Jair Bolsonaro’s re-election campaign in Brazil. Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo also participated. In 2017 Bannon met with Marine Le Pen in France, praising her candidacy. He returned the following year for the launching of her re-branded party, and then again in 2019, when the French Journal du Dimanche noted “Each of his nights during this week in Paris in one of the Bristol Hotel’s most beautiful suites costs €8,000, six times a minimum-wage earner’s net income.” In 2019, he also visited Germany and met with leaders of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

Bannon, the Trojan Horse

After firing Bannon, Trump also refuted the claim by Bannon and others that Bannon was a major force in Trump’s election victory. “Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating 17 candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party,” Trump said in a statement.

In reality, the architects of Trump’s successful campaign were Roger Stone and his old friend Paul Manafort—both of whom were early targets of the COINTELPRO-style “Russiagate” campaign which was launched by the U.S. and British intelligence community to neutralize Trump’s better foreign policy impulses and prevent any further deviations from the neocon agenda. Stone, in particular, was seen as a threat because of his public statements of support for Lyndon LaRouche and his ideas. Bannon inserted himself into Stone’s Russiagate trial, lying under oath to support the prosecution’s false accusations. (Bannon later contradicted that testimony, also under oath!) It was Stone and Manafort who had influenced Trump’s announcement that he wanted restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, as called for by LaRouche, to be included in the GOP platform.

From the earliest days of the LaRouche organization and its associated publications, the organization has warned of the “Delphic method,” by which intelligence networks loyal to the European oligarchy will feign agreement with the philosophical principles of a targeted institution in order to gain its trust. They will then proceed to subtly introduce a counterfeit version of those principles, which will incorporate an epistemology more to the liking of the oligarchs and their intellectual courtiers. The United States, which came into existence through history’s first successful rebellion of a colony against the British Empire, has been a major target of Delphic operations that are designed to obfuscate the philosophical conflict which sparked the Revolution, and lure the U.S. back into the imperial fold. Bannon’s message for the hoi polloi, on behalf of his royal sponsors in Europe, is Delphically populist.

In his public statements, Bannon embraces the “deplorables.” Although he poses as the foe of the “Davos elite,” he does not offer the obvious antidote: the principles of the American Revolution, a world of sovereign republics committed to the General Welfare, as envisioned by Lyndon LaRouche in his Four Laws, and the World Land-Bridge conception which is now becoming a reality in the form of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Instead, Bannon reaches back to an older, more medieval form of society, a world reminiscent of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War, before that world was transformed by that Peace of Westphalia which so aggravates the neocons to this day. Bannon is attempting to market this as a “return to Judeo-Christian values,” but it should be seen for what it is: a return to miserable feudalism. Bannon’s mission is to sidetrack hundreds of millions of citizens who are presently alienated from the Anglophile elites in both parties, and prevent them from gravitating toward the only effective solutions, the solutions which LaRouche offered during his long and productive life, as carried on today in the LaRouche movement in the form of The LaRouche Organization and Schiller Institute.

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