Back in July 2018, I told you that Steven Bannon wants to lead a European fascist movement. If you read Israeli newspapers you could have known this as far back as March 2018. Some people said he wanted to establish a Nazi Academy, although I think that’s overstating things a touch. He wasn’t thinking of extermination camps, at least not openly. He was more focused on good old fashioned white nationalism and supremacy. He wanted to call the place the Academy for the Judaeo-Christian West and his plan involved buying an old monastery in Italy.
One recent morning, Benjamin Harnwell, the Bannon acolyte, grabbed his ring of keys and moved from one building to the next, through hidden passageways and into frescoed rooms, where he said the next mission at this site was about to take form.
Soon, he said, the monastery would be filled with students who wanted to master the tools of populist politics. The halls with centuries-old oil paintings would serve as classrooms where students could learn “the facts” — the worldview espoused by Bannon, who, since being booted from the White House and Breitbart News, has turned to fomenting right-wing populism in Europe and beyond.
Can a place where monks once upheld vows of silence now produce the next generation of Matteo Salvinis and Viktor Orbans? Harnwell is still recruiting teachers. He hasn’t yet received accreditation. He has yet to test whether students will want to venture up into the Apennine Mountains for such an education.
But if all goes well, Harnwell said, a new generation of leaders will spend time here and then descend back down the mountainside road, returning to Rome, to other European capitals or to Washington, helping to ensure that Bannon’s version of a revolt might last for decades to come.
Fortunately, it’s all come to grief.
The Italian government has delivered a potentially fatal blow to Steve Bannon’s plans to transform a medieval monastery near Rome into a training academy for the far-right.
Italy’s cultural heritage ministry announced on Friday (May 31) that it would revoke a lease granted to Bannon after reports of fraud in the competitive tender process.
Something about bank fraud:
But earlier this month, Italian newspaper Repubblica reported that a letter used to guarantee the lease was forged. The letter had the signature of an employee of Danish bank Jyske, but the bank said that employee hadn’t worked there for years, and called the letter fraudulent.
The Economist reported last week that Benjamin Harnwell, the director of the institute, was surprised by the revelation. Bannon, meanwhile, claimed the letter was “totally legitimate.”
“All of this stuff is just dust being kicked up by the left,” Bannon said at the time.
They say they’ll fight this in court and start their classes in the fall as originally scheduled. But I wouldn’t bet on that.
This is only the latest hurdle that Bannon is facing in his attempt to help the far-right grow its reach in Europe. His funding of extremist parties ended before it even started last year, after the Guardian revealed that foreign donations, like the ones the millionaire was planning to make, would break electoral laws in a dozen European countries.
It’s pretty sad that Bannon is too much of a crook to pursue fascism in Italy at a time when the fascists are already running the place.
