Steven Bannon, now part of the West Wing and perhaps the closest adviser to President Trump is, first and foremost an Apocalypticist, meaning that he believes that war is inevitable. He derives his views from William Strauss and Neil Howe who postulated that history operates on four-stage cycles of war followed by awakening, then followed by another war, etc. These crises are called “Fourth Turnings.”
Bannon has referred to this in interviews, speeches and writing. In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now.
“What we are witnessing,” Bannon said, “is the birth of a new political order.”
According to Strauss and Howe, in their first book Generations (published 1991) the U.S. was, and still is, going through the most recent cycle’s tail end. In their book, The Fourth Turning, which the authors published in 1997, they focus on the final, apocalyptic part of the cycle.
“Strauss and Howe postulate that during this Fourth Turning crisis, an unexpected leader will emerge from an older generation to lead the nation, and what they call the “Hero” generation (in this case, millennials), to a new order. This person is known as the Grey Champion. An election or another event — perhaps a war — will bring this person to power, and their regime will rule throughout the crisis.”
“Regardless of its ideology, that new leadership will assert public authority and demand private sacrifice. Where leaders had once been inclined to alleviate societal pressures, they will now aggravate them to command the nation’s attention.”
Bannon has frequently said that we’re about to see another major global war.
“This is the fourth great crisis in American history,” Bannon told an audience in 2011. “We had the Revolution. We had the Civil War. We had the Great Depression and World War II. This is the great Fourth Turning in American history…” he said.
Major crises “happen in about 80- or 100-year cycles,” Bannon told another conference. The “Judeo-Christian West is collapsing. It’s imploding. And it’s imploding on our watch. And the blowback of that is going to be tremendous.”
“Against radical Islam, we’re in a 100-year war,” he said in 2011.
“We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism,” he said in a speech to a Vatican conference in 2014. “And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it.”
“You have an expansionist Islam and you have an expansionist China,” he said in a 2016 radio appearance. “They are motivated. They’re arrogant. They’re on the march. And they think the Judeo-Christian West is on the retreat.”
“We’re going to war in the South China Seas in the next five to 10 years, aren’t we?” Bannon asked during a 2016 interview.
In a 2015 radio appearance, Bannon described how he ran Breitbart. “It’s war,” he said. “It’s war. Every day, we put up: America’s at war, America’s at war. We’re at war.”
Bannon believes that the Judeo-Christian West must fight back, lest it lose as it did when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453.
“Secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals,” he argued at the Vatican conference. The “aristocratic Washington class” and the media, he has claimed, are in league with the entire religion of Islam and an expansionist China to undermine Judeo-Christian America.
“We’re gonna have to have some dark days before we get to the blue sky of morning again in America,” Bannon warned in 2010. “We are going to have to take some massive pain. Anybody who thinks we don’t have to take pain is, I believe, fooling you.”
What are they planning? All this would be one thing for a regular citizen to say. It is another for the man who is at the right hand of the President of the United States. Bannon’s thinking is influencing the president. He is looking for a great champion leader. What leader will that be? Could that be the pope? The “aristocratic Washington class” and the media, Bannon claimed, are in league with the entire religion of Islam and an expansionist China to undermine Judeo-Christian America.
“And there shall be wars and rumours of wars.” Matthew 24:6.