Most people don’t exactly have warm and fuzzy thoughts when it comes to Steve Bannon. And for good reason! The former Trump campaign manager and current White House chief strategist who has murky ties to the White Supremacist movement has literally gone on record admiring Darth Vader and Satan as role models, stating that “darkness is good,” because nothing you say about Steve Bannon can top whatever Steve Bannon says about himself. He’s probably one of the few politicians ever to actually be flattered by his own Saturday Night Live impersonation.
But long before he became a cartoonish personification of right-wing evil, Bannon was apparently just another far left-wing, liberal hippie college student in the ’70s. In a detailed new profile, The Daily Beast spoke with several of Bannon’s old friends and classmates who knew him during his years as a Virginia Tech undergrad, and what they describe is a charismatic student government leader, “history nerd,” and so-called “ladies man,” as well as a huge fan of jam bands like The Grateful Dead and Bruce Springsteen.
One of Bannon’s former roommates who The Daily Beast spoke with, a self-employed engineer named John DePaola living in Virginia, does not care for Bannon’s politics (having voted for Bernie Sanders in the primaries), but has nothing but glowing words for his old college buddy whom he says once saved him from homelessness. And the picture he paints is a far cry from the paranoid caricature we know of today:
“While we were out chasing co-eds, he was at home reading [British historian] Arnold Toynbee,” DePaola said. “But let me tell you, Steve didn’t have to chase girls back then. We had to work hard. Steve didn’t have to work hard. Let’s leave it at that.”
“He was well-known, he was popular, he was charming, he was good-looking,” DePaola continued. “He started dating his first wife at that time, but all the women loved Steve. He was handsome, and he had that ability to get [people] to like him.”
As for what happened to Bannon to reshape with worldview so drastically, many point to his years serving in the United States Navy during the Iran hostage crisis after graduating from Virginia Tech in 1976. It was during that time period in his life he supposedly became a “conservative Reagan-worshipper,” which only paved the way to his extreme right-wing political leanings later in his career.
(Via The Daily Beast)