Italian Monastery Rejects Steve Bannon (DETAILS)

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2010

The roots of Donald Trump’s white supremacist-friendly fanbase was solidified with the appointment of his 2016 campaign CEO and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, but Bannon’s hopes for the future were, fortunately, rolled back when plans for a school to train far-right populists in Italy ended on a sour note.

A monastery in Italy was planned as the site for Bannon and his acolytes to train “culture warriors” for the future, youth taught that diversity is a terrible thing, that any fight against white, male, Christian dominance should be silenced, and that democratic ideals are foolish. That plan ended when Italy’s Cultural Heritage Ministry discovered fraud and dishonesty in Bannon’s efforts toward making that dream of his a nightmarish reality.

‘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. The former Breitbart chief and aide to US president Donald Trump was reportedly paying €100,000 ($110,000) per year to rent the 13th Century Carthusian monastery, but now will have to search for another spot.’

Unlike Trump University, where students never met Trump, Bannon planned to teach courses himself. Italy’s government planned to allow for the school and say that their revocation of Bannon’s lease is not political, but a matter of law, although it’s likely Bannon will just move on to another site.

‘The Italian state allowed the conservative Catholic organization Dignitatis Humanae Institute (DHI) to use the building early last year. Bannon happens to be a trustee of the institute, and planned to convert the space into a “gladiator school for cultural warriors,”where students would learn philosophy, theology, history, and economics, and receive political training from the former Trump aide himself.’

However, Bannon’s plans seem to routinely fail in recent months. Far-right populism and white nationalism are not as popular in the West as Bannon might have hoped, and many of his prior efforts have gone the same way as the plans for the monastery.

‘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 Guardianrevealed that foreign donations, like the ones the millionaire was planning to make, would break electoral laws in a dozen European countries.’

Featured image via Flickr by Don Irvine under a Creative Commons license