The Terrifying Way Literal Nazis Are Using Steve Bannon’s Podcast

An online collective of neo-Nazis is using Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast as a recruitment tool, according to an exclusive report published by The Guardian Tuesday.

The Terrorgram collective is a network of neo-Nazis and fascists that produces and disseminates right-wing propaganda using Telegram, encouraging acts of far-right terror and sanctifying those who commit them. 

The collective runs three main Telegram channels that mix mainstream news coverage with far-right content. The mainstream content gives the channels an air of legitimacy as administrators urge users to join group chats where more violent, extreme ideas are pushed, according to a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

The group has reportedly taken over a channel that is linked to Steve Bannon’s podcast, and markets itself as the “official home of the War Room Posse.” In a corresponding group chat, the channel’s administrator claimed that Bannon himself was involved in running the channel, according to ISD. The administrator has garnered more than 63,000 subscribers, only a few hundred short of the official War Room channel, and the channel’s contents have been shared by white nationalist Charlie Kirk to his nearly 170,000 followers. 

The Terrorgram collective disseminates its extremist propaganda to radicalize users and encourage racially charged violence. Nineteen-year-old Juraj Krajčík, who opened fire on people outside a popular LGBTQ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, killing two people and injuring a third, had published a lengthy creed thanking the Terrorgram for “building the future of the White revolution, one publication at a time.” The U.K. government declared the collective a terrorist group in April.  

The collective is clearly hoping to tap into Bannon’s audience, pulling the already far-right MAGA movement even further into extremism, and Bannon’s platform represents one ripe for a neo-Nazi takeover. 

Bannon, who remains an influential voice on the alt-right, once admitted that he admired Donald Trump because Trump reminded him of Adolf Hitler. Bannon, who worked as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a strategist in Trump’s White House, was the mastermind behind creating the MAGA movement, which he reportedly hoped would rule the United States for hundreds of years. He was ultimately ousted from Trump’s administration after Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Bannon is currently serving a four-month prison sentence for refusing to testify to Congress for his role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign is in financial trouble.

The campaign is spending more money than it is bringing in, according to Federal Election Commission filings. It has $3.9 million in cash on hand, but is nearly $3.5 million in debt. In July, the campaign spent over $7 million while raising only $5.6 million, almost half of which came from RFK Jr.’s running mate Nicole Shanahan, a Silicon Valley lawyer and investor.

The campaign’s spending remained high despite a cutback on events, according to Politico. Kennedy has not appeared at any public events since the beginning of July, instead sporadically showing up on podcasts and at conferences. Much of the campaign’s funds have gone towards ballot access, Facebook and Google ads, and a security firm run by a longtime associate.

Even with the help of a partnership with the Libertarian Party, the campaign’s fundraising, despite a slight uptick, hasn’t kept up with spending. The fact that Kennedy seems to be relying on Shanahan’s money more than outside donations suggests that he’s not bringing in a lot of new fans, either.

Kennedy seems to be aware of his diminishing fortunes. Last month, the independent candidate spoke with Donald Trump about getting a White House job in exchange for dropping out of the race and endorsing the convicted felon. Kennedy also reached out to the Kamala Harris campaign with a similar proposition, only to be rebuffed, probably because he might actually help her by staying in the race.

RFK Jr.’s campaign was in trouble even before President Biden stepped aside, with Kennedy failing to qualify for the first presidential debate. There were also a series of damaging revelations, from reports of a worm in his brain to the news that he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park to allegations of sexual assault. With diminished polling, all of this begs the question of what the point of Kennedy’s campaign actually is.

Several Republicans are slated to speak at the Democratic National Convention this week, as Democrats attempt to unify forces against a potential second Trump presidency. But on Tuesday, Democrats announced that they had secured one of Donald Trump’s former communications directors, and she’s expected to make a splash with an endorsement of Trump’s political rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham will join the liberal party’s long list of speakers, reported NBC News.

“I never thought I’d be speaking at a Democratic convention. But, after seeing firsthand who Donald Trump really is, and the threat he poses to our country, I feel very strongly about speaking out,” Grisham told NBC. “While I don’t agree with Vice President Harris on everything, I am proud to be supporting her because I know she will defend our freedoms and represent our nation with honesty and integrity.”

Grisham had served as Melania Trump’s chief of staff and press secretary before briefly joining Trump’s administration in 2019. She was the first member of Trump’s team to resign after the January 6 riot on the U.S. Capitol and has since been an outspoken critic of the former president.

“Jan. 6, of course, was my breaking point,” Grisham told NBC News’s Meet the Press in October 2021.

Last week, Grisham made waves when she wholly dismissed the Trump campaign’s new strategy of mini-rallies and hyper-focused press events in an effort to rein in the bloviating populist’s affinity for rambling, ad hominem attacks on Harris, which don’t seem to be doing him any favors with voters.

“I imagine he will do some of them, and maybe for a week he’ll, you know, attempt to stay on message,” Grisham told CNN. “It depends on how tough his staff is being with him, but he will get bored. He doesn’t like those small events; he never has. And he will be demanding to do a large rally sooner rather than later.”

“They want him to be a fake version of himself,” she added. “Donald Trump is a bombastic narcissist, and he loves attention.”

In a wild right-wing technologist update of Thelma and Louise, it seems that both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have officially driven their respective social media companies off of a cliff. But hey, at least they’re going down together?

Trump’s Truth Social stock appears to be in serious jeopardy, according to a new report from Forbes published Saturday. Next month, Trump—who owns well over 50 percent of the company—and other shareholders will finally be able to sell their shares of the volatile stock, but that puts the stock at risk of collapse.

Earlier this month, Truth Social’s stock value plummeted following Trump’s apparent “return” to X, formerly Twitter. It was so bad that even a booming stock market couldn’t save it. This coincided with a poor second quarter earnings report that found the company lost more than $16 million, and raised just $836,900, down 30 percent from $1.2 million a year earlier. That was still far better than the previous quarterly report, which found that the company lost $327.6 million, and only raised $770,500 in revenue.

Truth Social stock has become particularly risky, because its volatility gives it a high chance of heavy selling as soon as it becomes unlocked in September, according to Forbes. This would only worsen if the board allowed Trump to sell his stocks early, capturing the current price instead of whatever they might drop to on the downward trajectory.

As for Elon Musk’s X, not even Trump returning could give it a much-needed boost. The platform’s billionaire technocrat owner has pulled the social media site into historically bad territory, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk acquired X in October 2022 for $44 billion, borrowing $13 billion from several banks, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, and Bank of America. Those banks have found themselves unable to quickly offload Musk’s debt to other investors, leaving it stuck on their balance sheets, or “hung” in industry terms, straining their loan books and, in one case, even curbing their compensation.

Apparently, Musk’s X loans have been on the books for so long, they’ve outlived every unsold deal since the 2008 financial crisis, according to data from Pitchbook LCD. While there were more hung deals during the crisis, banks were able to sell or write off their hung debt within 12 months after issuing the loan. Not only is X the longest lasting hung deal since 2008, it’s also reportedly one of the biggest.

While the banks have been able to collect a hefty interest, it’s unclear how Musk will ever repay the principal if X continues on its current trajectory. Last year, X reported that its value had plummeted by more than half, to around $19 billion. When the banks formulated a plan to restructure the loan, X didn’t follow through, according to the Journal.

Unfortunately for Musk, X has been unable to fully capitalize on its recent uptick in user engagement, because Musk went out of his way to make an enemy of all advertisers everywhere, suing a group of advertisers who didn’t want to use his platform filled with blatantly pro-Nazi content.

As Musk’s adversarial streak has continued, officials at Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, another bank that shelled out money for the acquisition, downgraded the bank’s internal credit rating on his loan, meaning they don’t think it’s likely they’ll get paid back anytime soon.

A spokesman for the bank told the Journal, “MUFG has had several constructive conversations with Mr. Musk and his leadership team. We anticipate reaching a positive outcome regarding repayment.”

While Musk isn’t in the business of robbing banks, he’s getting pretty close to the outlaw life of Thelma and Louise. One thing has become clear: When Trump and Musk started out on their right-wing social media experiments, they thought they were really goin’ somewhere. But this is it. They’re just going.

Several major lawmakers, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to President Joe Biden, made mention of the atrocities in Gaza during the first night of the Democratic National Convention on Monday. But among the crowd and behind the scenes, efforts to cover up mention of the genocide were still underway.

During Biden’s speech, a Jewish delegation unfurled a large sign revealing the text “Stop Arming Israel.” The effort was quickly stopped by nearby attendees, who blocked the sign with “We [Heart] Joe” sticks while another attendee in a row above the protesters attempted to snatch the banner away.

Another attendee, two rows away from the protesters, used one of the pro-Biden signs to repeatedly hit a woman wearing a hijab on the head.

“It matters to me so much because I’m a Jew,” Liano Sharon, one of the protesters holding the antiwar sign, told Al Jazeera after being escorted away from the arena. “And I was always brought up to believe that ‘never again’ means never again for anyone, anywhere, ever, period. And that’s not what’s happening right now.”

“What’s happening right now is that we are continuing to fund and support an ongoing genocide, the mass murder of children, and it needs to stop,” Sharon added.

The response is ironic considering that, earlier in the day, the DNC hosted its first panel on Palestinian rights. The war in Gaza has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians.