Steve Bannon sure keeps himself busy these days. Between calling for Dr. Fauci’s head on a pike and celebrating his white-collar crime pardon from former President Trump (which isn’t working out totally well for him, by the way, because prosecutors aren’t dismissing the case), he’s always stirring up far-right fury in podcasting land. The Associated Press, however, is reporting that one of Bannon’s dreams has gone up in smoke, given that Italy is not at all happy that the ex-White House advisor and white supremacist wanted to set up tentacles in their country by launching a “gladiator” school on the hilltop grounds of a 13th century monastery.
The Culture Ministry in Italy moved to shut down those plans, and the country’s top administrative court upheld the sentiment while ruling that a Bannon-affiliated (and Human Dignity Institute-backed), far-right think tank could not spread its rhetoric in this school. A forty-page ruling laid down the law, so to speak, and the AP reveals how Bannon planned to raise money to run the school to train some sort of far-right hive mind. Australia news adds that the battle to shut down the school’s plans has been an ongoing fight for years, and here’s Bannon’s original vision for this thing:
Former Breitbart chief Bannon, a Catholic, is a trustee of the institute, and planned to turn the space into a hub where students would learn philosophy, theology, history, and economics, and receive political training. He was aiming the courses at right-wing Catholic activists and had been paying €100,000-a-year rent ($A153,000) on the former Carthusian monastery for the DHI to use the building from early 2018.
Bannon told CBS News in February 2019 that the school, called the Academy of the Judeo-Christian West, will be a “modern gladiator school” that teaches the foundational tenants of Western people. “It’s to give people kind of in mid-career that are looking to do something different, maybe get involved in media, maybe get involved in politics, maybe get involved in NGOs, to give them kind of the underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West,” he said.
Naturally, Bannon is quoted by the AP as calling the court ruling a “joke” that “brings further shame on Italy’s already stained judiciary in eyes of the whole world.” He further slammed the Italian government as “corrupt” and “incompetent,” and he firmly believes that the shut-down of his school is a political move, which is, you know, not quite the insult that Bannon probably intends it to be. Certainly, Italy already has enough sinister organizations like the Mafia angling for greater power within its borders amid this pandemic. Dealing with cleaning up Bannon’s white-supremacist ideology is clearly an issue they hoped to ban ahead of time, rather than deal with after the fact.
(Via Associated Press & News.com.au)