On Saturday, October 14, 2017, on the heels of President Trump's remarks the previous day to the Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C., Steve Bannon, in a speech to the same group, fired the official opening salvos toward Mitch McConnell in a gathering epic confrontation between the multinational corporations on one side (and their congressional politicians, to whom they have lavishly contributed) and the newly emerging Republican Party of the Little People on the other – the forgotten working class, championed by Donald Trump in his successful presidential run.

It is a crucial struggle, where, as stated best by Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse, "trillions of dollars are at stake."  It is a battle that will determine who controls the future wealth of the United States, where the manufacturing sector and portions of the service industry sector of the U.S. economy have been eroded, stripped from the United States and moved to cheap-labor countries, leaving behind a massive loss of jobs and wealth.

Steve Bannon is banking on a reversal of this trend with the enactment of the Trump agenda.  He is confident these new policies, once voted into law, will generate an economic renaissance with a dramatic infusion of wealth for middle-class workers.  And he rejects the notion that the demise of U.S. manufacturing is inevitable and irreversible.

The leader of this political-economic revolution is President Trump, a man who amassed his vast fortune by constructing real buildings with real workers rather than through the manipulation of Wall Street financial derivatives.  He is a man who has an intimate knowledge of manufacturing and who relates to, and understands, the concerns of its workers.  At the 2016 Republican convention, Jerry Falwell, Jr. described Trump as "America's blue-collar billionaire," a "true patriot," a "down-to-earth" leader and one who "loves America and the American people," a "champion of the common man."

Falwell's sentiments were echoed by noted author, columnist, American classicist, military historian, and farmer Victor Davis Hanson in a speech given in May of this year for Hillsdale College at the Kirby Center in Washington.  Mr. Hanson observed that President Trump has succeeded in turning the Republican Party into more of a populist, empathetic party, attuned to a frustrated, worried working class that saw its future declining under the Democratic Party of Barack Obama and his chosen third-term successor, Hillary Clinton.

Here's how Hanson answered the question of how a billionaire could possibly be a populist leader: "you can be a populist and be a trillionaire and you can be dead broke and be an elitist."  Hanson recalled a conversation he had with a New York developer who knew Trump: "I watched from my [mid-town Manhattan skyscraper] tower and I see Donald Trump ... when he gets out of his limo and he goes and talks to cement people and I see people clapping who are on construction sites."

This ability to naturally relate to construction workers stands in stark contrast, noted Hanson, to Hillary Clinton's admonitions to coal miners that they "have to learn how to build solar panels."  This populist bent, Bannon explained at the Values Voter Summit, is authentic.  Bannon told the audience that concern for the American worker and the deleterious impact on their wealth from the globalists' machinations has always been Trump's mantra, that President Trump has had these ideas "for thirty to forty years," that "he didn't come to this party late."

In drawing the battle lines of this populist revolt, Bannon focused his ire on the leadership of the Republican Party, who, in his view, are throwing constant, intentional roadblocks in the path of the Trump agenda while continually supporting establishment candidates in Republican primary elections.  Even though the Republican establishment is bankrolled with unending corporate dollars, Bannon is undeterred, for, in this struggle for the soul of the Republican Party, he feels that money is no longer an important ingredient to success.

He pointed to the $30 million in highly negative ads aimed at Roy Moore in the recent Alabama primary, paid for by Mitch McConnell and his cohorts, that was negated by counter-information freely available on the internet.  As Bannon put it, a good candidate with good ideas and people to back him up "can beat any amount of money."  He added, "The most powerful thing is an authentic candidate ... with good people going door to door ... and telling people, with passion, 'this is who you ought to vote for.'"  Evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics provided the foot soldiers in Moore's successful effort.  Bannon credited Barack Obama with showing how effective this type of get-out-the-vote campaign can be.

Building on the Moore success, Bannon shared his strategy to rebuild the populist Republican Party.  He plans to "primary out" the corrupt, bought off, unrepentant Republicans up for re-election in 2018, followed by a blowout re-election win for Trump in 2020.  Completing the transformation of the Republican Party, he warned, could take decades.

Democrats, on the other hand, appear hell-bent on maintaining their Obama strategy of seeing the world through the warped lens of divisive personal destruction.  In a recent article in The Hill, Brent Budowsky, a former aide to Senator Lloyd Benson, saw Bannon's Values speech in typical Democratic terms, painting Bannon as power-hungry and waging a war to purge the Republican Party of moderates, centrists, center-right conservatives, and bipartisan members in favor of fringe and far right candidates (whatever "far right" means).

Budowsky either doesn't see or won't acknowledge the fact that the Bernie Sanders left and the Donald Trump right movements were mirror images of anti-establishment reactions to globalist corruption of both parties.  He welcomes the Bannon "purge" as an opening for Democrats to retake the House and Senate in 2018.

Bannon is gearing up for a major battle in the 2018 Republican primaries.  It is here that the establishment anticipates that Bannon's efforts will fall short.  The opposition has reason to feel hopeful.  Sundance of The Conservative Treehouse quoted Fox News Research revealing the astounding increase in lobbyist greasing of congressional lawmakers' palms to keep them on the reservation.

In 1986, average lawmaker payments were $113,700.  In 2016, this average grew to $5,800,000 – a fifty-onefold increase.

The globalists are also confidently relying on historical trends to blunt efforts to remove incumbents in primaries.  It has been remarkably difficult over the years to remove incumbents from office, especially in primaries.  Incumbents know they can rely on:

• very low voter turnout,
• very high lobbyist-provided campaign financing,
• low to very low name recognition and policy positions of primary opponents,
• multiple candidates who divide the oppositional vote,
• very high campaign costs, and
• always available media exposure opportunities.

So much will depend in 2018 on how quickly and how well organized this MAGA movement can evolve, the strength of the MAGA candidates, and their effectiveness at reaching motivated populist voters.  New websites are emerging in this fight, such as Adam Gingrich's MAGAcoalition and Bill Mitchell's YourVoiceAmerica.

And as enormous as the economic rewards of this realignment of the political and business powers will be, Bannon has a deeper long-term concern, what he describes as "the convergence of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, the computer chip. There are going to be decisions in front of mankind in the next twenty years that man has never had to face before."

"And if you think," he concluded, "that the elites that got the world into this situation it's in today are going to make the right judgments twenty years from now, you're sadly mistaken."

Bannon believes that if we are to revitalize our moribund Obama economy and safeguard our future against the implications of profound technological advancements coming over the horizon, this economic and political reformation is essential.  Corruption through bribery of our political class by multinationals must be stopped.  Macro-level decisions concerning our national wealth must include the workers who build it and whose very future is at stake.

Bannon asked what's more powerful: "the money of the corporatists or the muscle of the people"?  His bet is on the people.

As he puts it, "the Hobbits are going door to door in the Shire."