The thing everyone missed about Steve Bannon’s downfall
For far too long, far too many people on our side have spent far too much time obsessing over how “dangerous” Steve Bannon was, how much “damage” he was doing, and how it was going to be “devastating.” But now we’re getting a look at the real Steve Bannon. He’s the broken loser muttering about how he’s more powerful than ever, even as he’s being led away in handcuffs.
Everyone can now see that Steve Bannon isn’t some evil genius who’s going to raise an army or whatever else he’s vowing to do. He’s a two bit con artist whose rhetoric is empty, whose power is imaginary, whose threats should be laughed at. You never cower to these types. Ever.
What far too many folks on our side don’t get is that people like Steve Bannon and Ron DeSantis want us to sit around all day talking about how “dangerous” they are, because this helps feed the narrative about how powerful they are. People like Bannon and DeSantis don’t care how much you criticize or bash them, so long as you’re portraying them as powerful, omnipotent, and inevitable. That’s their entire brand. It’s how they market themselves to the dupes on their own side. It’s how they get the middle to take them seriously. And it’s how they trick our side into sitting around helplessly fretting about them, instead of actively fighting back against them.
If you want to defeat a wannabe strongman, you do it not by portraying him as omnipotently evil, but by portraying him as an incompetent joke. That’s how you take away his power. Our side has been naively and unwittingly propping up Steve Bannon’s ghost for far too long, and he’s spent a long time playing our side like a fiddle. Now everyone on our side can see that this clown wasn’t someone to cower or fret over. He was always a paper tiger we should have been punching holes in, so no one on any side would take his empty rhetoric seriously enough to keep him in the game.
Bannon is now being finished off by prosecutors. But we could have gotten him off the stage years ago if more people on our side had the sense to accurately portray him as a two-bit punchline, instead of unwittingly helping him build his brand by portraying him as an omnipotent strongman capable of getting his way on anything he wanted. When you cartoonishly overstate your enemy’s abilities, you’re not being “vigilant.” You’re just naively handing your enemy leverage.
