The Brooklyn Rail

These images appeared almost exactly eight years apart in time. Time magazine put Steve Bannon on its cover on February 13, 2017, and will put Elon Musk on the cover February 24, 2025. The headline of the Bannon story inside in 2017 was, “Is Steve Bannon the Second Most Powerful Man in the World?” and “President Bannon” jokes proliferated. Now Elon Musk is pictured sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, with the presidential flag at his side. Eight years ago, the fear was that Christian nationalist Bannon was really in control of the Trump presidency. Today, the fear is that Tech Billionaire oligarch Musk is actually in control.

In fact, the Bannon v. Musk/MAGA v. DOGE battle is now raging, and it is too soon to tell which will ultimately prevail. In the images above, Bannon is much larger, resolute in mien, coming out of the frame toward the viewer, hands active and pointed, while Musk is hiding behind the trappings of presidential power in a more passive pose and gaze, grasping a take-out coffee. Iconologically, Bannon is winning. But outside the image, Bannon’s involvement in Trumpworld is currently much diminished. He has no official position in the new Trump administration, and spends most of his time railing from the periphery, on his podcast, Steve Bannon’s WarRoom.

Musk highlighted the discrepancy in a post on X last week, quipping that “Bannon is a great talker, but not a great doer.” For his part, Bannon has been baiting and attacking Musk consistently for some time now. Musk’s post came a few days after Bannon’s conversation with Ross Douthat at the New York Times in which he said, “the defense budget is an obscenity and must be cut. Unless we’re prepared to do that, then your taxes are going to go up. . . . We’re looking to get a balanced budget, and we’re not going to do it on the back of the little guy.” In other words, If DOGE is not willing to take on waste, fraud, and abuse in the military budget, they’re not going to really get anywhere, and it will all be for naught.

In the conversation for the Opinion page of the Times, Bannon wanted to make it clear to Douthat that the oligarchs that have gathered around Trump, led by Musk, are not a part of the Right, but are opportunistic hacks in it for their own gain:

The oligarchs are nothing but a bunch of progressive leftists that had their Damascene moment between 10 and 11 o’clock on the evening of Nov. 5 when the Trump movement won Pennsylvania.

The oligarchs are not conservative. They’re certainly not on the right. Everything they’re doing—crawling on their bellies, to try to get into and pollute this movement—is because they see the raw political power of this movement. I find it disgusting and revolting.¹

Bannon describes himself as “a crazy right-wing” hardcore populist and a hardcore nationalist, and says Trump’s version of populism is both economic and cultural. Bannon believes the entire American working class has been shamefully mistreated. “The entire postwar international rules-based order, all of it, Bretton Woods and all of it—the Pax Americana—it is all on the shoulders of the little guy. It gets down to the shoulders of the working class and the middle class.” Bannon wants to halt all immigration, “because I want American citizens to get a shot at the brass ring. Which they deserve since the entire world’s economic system is on their shoulders.”

The capitalists are always trying to drive down wages. Now they do it two ways. They either allow illegal immigration at the border, which drives down wages of lower-skilled workers, particularly African American and Hispanic. But they also scammed the system with a whole set of visa programs, and they call it kind of fancy names—the H-1B visas.

All they’re trying to do is bring in indentured servants into the country at a third less or 50 percent less and are very compliant about what they have to do, to make sure they don’t have to pay American graduates. And this is why Silicon Valley is an apartheid state. It’s the reason you have no Hispanics or Blacks.

There’s no shot to get into Silicon Valley. It’s not because Americans are dumber. It’s not because Americans are lazy. It’s because American citizens are—you have a globalist system.

He thinks Silicon Valley is an apartheid state, and the billionaires run it all with digital serfs. What he calls “the Broligarchs” believe in technofeudalism. In Bannon’s terms they are transhumanist and don’t care about human life. Most of them are all wrapped up in life extension and/or interplanetary travel. Meanwhile, AI could destroy the world as we know it. “Soon you’re going to have to decide, for yourselves and your children, whether to be enhanced (with embedded chips) or not,” referring to the vision and business model of Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company, Neuralink.

Now here’s the point. In technofeudalism, you’re just a digital serf. Your value as a human being, as someone built and made in the image and likeness of God and endowed with the life spirit of the Holy Spirit—they don’t consider that. Everything is digital to them.

They are, at the end of the day, transhumanist. And what is transhumanist? A transhumanist is somebody who sees Homo sapien here and Homo sapien plus on the other side of what they call the singularity.

And that’s why they’re all rushing—whether it’s artificial intelligence, regenerative robotics, quantum computing, advanced chip design, CRISPR, biotech, all of it—to come to this point of which the oligarchs are going to lead that revolution. And why are they going to do it? No. 1, when you get to know them and see where they’re spending the money, it’s because they want eternal life.

You know why? Because they’re complete atheistic 11-year-old boys that are kind of science fiction “Dungeons & Dragons” guys, and we’ve turned the nation over to that. And yes, I’m going to fight it every fucking step of the way. This is taking us back a millennium to feudalism. Their business model is based upon that.

Bannon says “Musk is our greatest applied engineer since Edison,” but Bannon is making a religious-humanist critique of Big Tech. He thinks Obama made a deal with Silicon Valley to let them all become monopolies, and to let these individuals become the richest people in history, if they left government alone. It’s gone too far, and Bannon thinks Lina Kahn should stay on at the Federal Trade Commission and break up the Big Tech monopolies before they wreck everything.

I think Neuralink is one of the most aggressive about Homo sapien 1.0 or Homo sapien 2.0. Elon is at the tip of this, and Elon is actually on an applied engineering basis, not bullshit talk, he is probably the farthest advanced for transhumanism.

People have to understand in the life, and when I say “life” I mean the next 10 years, of your audience, we’re going to be facing a dilemma for yourself and your kids: Do you enhance yourself? Do you enhance yourself either by genetic engineering? Do you enhance yourself by advanced chip design plugged into you? Do you advance yourself by artificial intelligence?

Elon is one of the top accelerationists about driving this thing faster. Accelerating at an increasing rate. You’re going to have to make a choice in your own life, not just politically in society—your own life.

Do I do this? Am I a Luddite? Will I get left behind? More important, will my children get left behind? Do my children have a shot to really play sports at a Division I level? Or will my kids have the ability to go to an Ivy League school unless I get them enhanced? These questions, deep questions, never before handled in mankind’s history, are going to happen in the next couple of years.

. . .

And I would just tell people—and particularly your readers, who do not agree with me politically on anything—if I can beseech you for one thing, it’s that you must start to understand the moment we’re in. This is an inflection point not just for this country, this is an inflection point for the world.

The Tech Billionaires, of course, hold a different view. Musk’s principal intent is to remove all restrictions on monopolies and all regulations of any kind, giving a free rein to monopoly Capitalists to run their companies and let the Market decide, and to run the government as if it was a for-profit corporation, just as Trump intends.

The first big trophy head in the DOGE’s effort to completely transform and downsize the federal government was the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Trump and Musk see USAID as a Leftist bastion of do-gooders and democrats. Even though its budget is only $40 billion, which is less than 1% of the federal budget, USAID is a long-standing symbol of democracy and freedom, and ransacking it sends a message. As Susan Glasser said in the New Yorker, “They are killing one agency to terrify a thousand others.”² And also to send a clear signal to other autocratic regimes. USAID was established by JFK in 1961 as a Cold War counter to the Soviet Union’s influence globally and to promote US soft power and democracy through economic aid and development.

One of the most worrisome things about the first two and a half weeks of Trump and Musk’s trashing of the beneficial parts of the federal government and rapid moves toward autocracy was that there were no people in the streets. That has changed now, with tens of thousands of people in the streets, all over the country, in all fifty states, protesting the actions of Trump and Musk as the extreme effects of those actions become glaringly apparent. And those effects are crossing a lot of lines among constituents.

The curtailing of USAID, for instance, has raised alarms with farmers in Kansas and elsewhere who point out that USAID purchases $2 billion worth of wheat and sorghum every year to send to people in peril worldwide. Stopping that aid, and eliminating that revenue stream, will have a big effect on farmers. The stop-work orders on USAID also threaten to eliminate an estimated 52,000 US jobs. USAID currently works in 120 different countries and the sudden suspension of USAID is already causing an international crisis.

Appearances by Samantha Power, who was the USAID administrator under President Biden, and previously the youngest ever UN ambassador under Barack Obama, have also had a tremendous effect on the populace. She’s talked about the USAID role in eradicating smallpox and nearly eradicating polio, controlling Ebola, monitoring bird flu in forty-nine countries, and producing life-saving medicine for AIDS. And she’s pointed to USAID’s work to bolster democracies and American values around the world, and that authoritarian regimes, especially in China and Russia, are thrilled with these recent attacks on USAID. The bet the Trump administration made when they sicced Musk and his right-wing Geek Squad on USAID was that Americans wouldn’t know what USAID does and wouldn’t care when it is destroyed. That’s beginning to look like a bad bet.

One of our most important assets right now is Trump’s desperate need for approval. He will push into authoritarianism as far as he can until it meets with widespread disapproval, especially in public demonstrations: Direct Action. And as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it on February 3rd, “It reminds me of the end of The Wizard of Oz, where you yank back the curtain—and it’s a little guy.

It’s a small, scared, incompetent little man.”

If the American people stand up to him, he’ll back off. It’s time for Americans to rediscover what it is the government actually does, and what part of that is worth fighting for and saving. We also need to decide whether or not we want to be governed by unelected billionaires and their right-wing intern-hackers, and/or Christian nationalist autocrats, and if not, we need to rediscover the power of direct action now.