Steve Bannon Knows Who’s A Lot Like Taylor Swift, It’s The MyPillow Guy
These people are not like us.
We’ve discussed a bunch how a big part of the white conservative MAGA delusion, the Big Lie they tell themselves, is that everybody — at least all people who look like them — is secretly just like them, they’re just too scared to say it. Everybody is just as racist as they are, everybody is just as scared of their shadow, everybody secretly wishes for Donald Trump to ride in naked on a white horse and Make America Great Again in their pants, just like they fantasize about.
That if they could just get the culture back, all the scared people would come out of the shadows, and then you’ll see, liberals.
On that day, they won’t hate themselves anymore. On that day, everybody will be forced to admit that they do have important things to contribute the culture, and people will thank them, instead of acting like nobody would miss them if they were suddenly raptured by Jesus. (Oh yes, these cultural resentments like that play bigly into such theologies.)
On that day, they won’t be lonely anymore. On that day, their kids will call them.
They have to keep up these delusions, because the alternative is terrifying.
Steve Bannon has a particularly fierce strain of this bug. On his show yesterday, he went on an unhinged extended babble that climaxed with him saying the MyPillow Guy Mike Lindell is an important cultural icon like Taylor Swift. (Stop laughing.) He thinks everybody just has to pretend they think the MyPillow Guy is a pathetically insane lunatic, because they’re scared to tell the truth.
Come along for the ride! It is absolute batshit. (Media Matters has the full clip if you want to really dive in, but since it’s Bannon we recommend a full-body hazmat condom if you do.)
BANNON: They hate Mike Lindell so much because of what he stood for and what he says, as the apostle of the stolen election.
The apostle. The MyPillow Guy.
BANNON: They hate, he’s like a saint from like the third century, right? They hate him so much that he had the highest profitability SKU at Bed, Bath & Beyond [ed note, it’s a merch-keeping term], and you think these companies need it? They were going bankrupt! That’s how much, they need him like mother’s milk!
Mother’s milk!
BANNON: This is why Walmart, when Walmart tossed him, the big stores, I said oh my God, this guy’s for real. That was the best validator I’ve ever had for Mike Lindell.
That’s what that told him? (You can still get his stupid DON’T SAY THEY’RE LUMPY pillows on the Walmart website, by the way.)
BANNON: I said holy moley, they (heavy breath) they (heavy breath) they hate this guy so much and they’re so afraid of his message and empowering people, and these conferences that he had, they hate him so much, they will take the most profitable thing they have and they will get rid of it.
They’re so scared of him they’ll kill off the thing they love the most, which is MyPillows.
This is where the babbling really starts to get into incoherent stream of consciousness territory. He’s angry, he’s out of breath, he is calling the manager to complain that the fish he ordered tastes too fishy …
BANNON: Unprecedented. I dare Walmart to show me any profitability on a SKU of things like the products of MyPillow, show me, I dare you to show me where you’ve ever gotten rid of anything like that, you know why? The only thing you’ve ever gotten rid of is MyPillow and Mike Lindell …
The only thing?
BANNON: and the same with Bed Bath & Beyond, and I’m so glad that you all went bankrupt, I hate the fact that people lost their jobs, but you people deserve to be in bankruptcy, and the executives deserve to be wiped out.
Disgusting. Why? Why? Why?
Why? Why? Why?
BANNON: Because they understood the election was stolen, and they were too cowardly to do it, the reason I kept saying the corporations are going to be your worst enemies, is because they’ll always go with the flow, they were with ESG and DEI and CRT, they’re the most progressive, why?
All these acronyms that mean absolutely nothing to normal people, but send MAGA weirdos into senile white boomer Yosemite Sam rage-gasms.
Now, the drugs really start to kick in:
BANNON: Those people in those C-suites are gutless cowards, they’re gonna go along because they want to be invited to the conference, they want to be on CNBC, they want to be at the country club, if you really talk about the truth, you talk about the truth, if you MAGA, if you support MAGA, you’re gonna be othered, and they can’t do that, they worked their whole career [unintelligible, the words are getting more unintelligible], they got to the best schools, they got MBAs, and they worked their asses off in the company, so when they’re in their 40s, they’re gonna sit there, “I can’t do that, I gotta keep my mouth shut, I gotta play along, and quite frankly, I’m gonna be like Saul of Tarsus, I’m gonna torture the good people, ‘cause I gotta show the bad guys that I’m with them. Even if maybe I’m not, and I’ll make it up somewhere, when I make enough money, I’ll make it up some other way.
Saul of Tarsus, y’all.
But there’s the fantasy: Everybody is secretly just like them. Everybody secretly thinks their Dear Leader Trump won the election. Everybody — or at least all the white people in their families who look at them across the Thanksgiving table like they’re freaks — wishes they could be MAGA, because that’s something people aspire to. But they’re scared of the woke people on CNBC and at the country club.
At long last we round the bend into Bannon explaining how the MyPillow Guy is a lot like Taylor Swift:
BANNON: Taking Mike Lindell out of Walmart was a monumental piece of the history of this political movement. Just like today, announcing Taylor Swift is Time's Person of the Year — I'll talk about this more later — is another major political statement. Because she's a powerful political force on their side, like Mike Lindell's a political force on this side. A cultural figure.
Cool political movement they have, full of really inspiring cultural figures. You betcha.
BANNON: You think Jimmy Kimmel talks about, makes jokes about Mike Lindell because he’s not a cultural icon?
That’s not quite it.
BANNON: Jimmy Kimmel, and Mike I disagree, he’s bad, he’s bad, he’s the epitome of a smart guy who knows what the score is but plays for the other side ‘cause they’re too afraid.
On this extended release version of the bathtub meth trucker speed, the hallucinations include even Jimmy Kimmel secretly agreeing with them.
It just goes on and on and on, but we can cut it off there.
These people are desperately broken. And this is the movement we have to beat into absolute oblivion in next year’s elections. For good this time.
All the rest is a distraction.
[Media Matters / video via Madeline Peltz]
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Also, Lindell's mom says he's the prettiest. Take that, libs!
An honest take on Mike Lindell is that here is a man who saved himself from drug addiction to build a very successful company and was doing just fine for himself but then he got associated with Trump and as a result of this went so far down the hole of dipshit crazy--as association with Trump will do to you--that he's crashed his company and may wind up bankrupt thanks to lawsuits resulting from this madness, and Trump will leave him in the dust like so many others who thought they could ride the lightning.