In the weeks following the publication of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and his resulting exit from Breitbart, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has kept relatively quiet, popping up briefly to get interviewed by Robert Mueller. However, he claims he’s been working on something that will “weaponize ideas.” So he sat down for an interview with GQ about how the Time’s Up movement is trying to end the patriarchy.
In the interview, Bannon says he’s studying Time’s Up because he considers it the flip-side of (and a reaction to) the populist nationalist movement:
“There are two important movements in this country right now: the populist nationalist movement on the right, and the MeToo movement on the left. Excuse me, not the MeToo. It’s the Time’s Up movement. MeToo is about sexual predators and everything like that. The Time’s Up movement is much more fundamental and actually many steps above MeToo. It’s basically going against 10,000 years of recorded history. That’s the power of it. You see here something that’s in a very early, raw stage, but I’ve never seen such potential power in something.”
Bannon added that he didn’t agree with it (naturally), but he did respect it, citing the millions of marchers for the second Women’s March and the headlines it generated (“A Movement’s Vast Cadre of Foot Soldiers”):
“People say, ‘Oh, Steve, it doesn’t have any policies yet.’ It doesn’t need to have policies yet. The Tea Party didn’t have policies in its first couple of years, but it was against Obamacare. There’s plenty of power in just being against. The Five Star Movement in Italy, it’s just against, right?
“What I do know is that it’s against what I call the patriarchy, it’s against the way things have been run for the previous 4,000, 5,000, 10,000 years. It’s just opposed to that.”
He concluded the interview by saying that he is concerned with the rise of China, so it might be too late for the patriarchy.
(Via GQ)