Around the turn of the second century, St. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was condemned by a Roman tribunal to be torn apart and eaten by lions in the Coliseum.  What was his crime?  Ignatius was condemned because his speech was subversive to the Roman social order.  Having a public audience worsened his exercise of free speech; speaking freely in front of an assembled mob was the real crime.

But Ignatius’s death sentence didn’t chill his speech.  He managed to preach in dozens of venues along the route of a condemned man from Syria to Rome.  There are at least seven letters from Ignatius, written during his death march, considered authentic, and perhaps another half-dozen attributed but of disputed origin.  His epistles ranged from declaring the divinity of Jesus to the central truth of the Eucharist being the body of Christ to the need for hierarchy and structure in the Church. 

Allusions to Christian martyrs when contemplating modern-day persecuted political victims are always perilous, ranging from the absurd to the grotesque to the sacrilegious.

Stephen F. Bannon is no St. Ignatius, but in his own domain, Bannon is a unique socio-political evangelist and pariah of an extraordinary order.  Bannon describes himself as a “populist nationalist” eschewing both the Republican and conservative labels.

Bannon, former chief strategy adviser to President Trump, is a voluble well read John Locke classical liberal — seasoned with Harvard Business School and Strategic Foreign Policy chops — further spiked with a strong tonic of pre–Vatican II doctrines, especially as seen in Pope Pius X’s 1903 encyclical E Supremi Apostolatus, along with pre-Reformation Roman Catholicism.

Bannon is blunt and uncompromising.  He doesn’t suffer fools, though he tolerates the stray radiation from the fringe orbits of Alex Jones,  Mike Lindell, and kin — perhaps as sacrificial zinc anodes to invite his unhinged critics in wasting oxidizing electrolytes.

Bannon draws from Jefferson-Jacksonian populism.  He is a practitioner of 19th-century frontier political proselytizing and pure local democracy, best exhibited by George Caleb Bingham’s 1850s paintings, “The County Election,” “Stump Speaking,” and “The Verdict of the People,” all three housed in the St. Louis Art Museum.  Bannon is a keen and persuasive promoter of the socio-political antagony not of left versus right, but the elitist intelligentsia versus the people, the rest of us.

Bannon’s streaming radio/simulcast broadcast, War Room, Monday through Saturday, is almost always a free-wheeling, bracing political and social barbeque, along with roving reports from all over the U.S., Central America, the U.K., and Rome, with few filters and edges not yet molested by a censor’s rasp.

Bannon’s America First ultra-MAGA bazaar combines Judeo-Christian nationalism,  sealed borders and sovereignty, ending foreign wars that only benefit the military industry and its sponsors, and deconstruction of the administrative state, along with die-hard anti-communism of the old order, devoted to vanquishing the Chinese Communist Party, extolling the pre–Mao Revolution Chinese diaspora.

Bannon was probably the first American political agitator to reveal the conspiracies and cover ups of the 2019 coronavirus as he asserted with temerity that the virus stemmed from a lab-based bio-weapon in China instead of the U.S. state-run propaganda that said it originated from bats.

The N.Y. Times, predictably in January 2021, savaged Bannon and his reputed pals — all high-profile members of the anti-CCP Chinese diaspora — whose plausible claims about the origin of COVID-19 were roundly condemned by all mainstream media, U.S. infectious disease bureaucrats, and all-purpose globalists since 2020.

The NYT has now backtracked, publishing a completely contrary narrative from a guest molecular biologist, Dr. Alina Chan, in June  2024.  No apologies offered by the NYT for smearing Bannon, but in all fairness, he wears the unremitting invective like the Navy Cross.

Thus, Bannon has dispensed a daily enema to flush regular-order uni-party pablum, such as Fox News, “TV for stupid people.”  His daily warm-up “cold opens” have been early-morning or overnight clips from those enemies of prosperity, natural rights, and liberty, the likes of MSNBC, CNN, the N.Y. Times and Washington Post, all grist for Bannon’s mill in the ensuing two hours.

Bannon is an intellectual pugilist, from the same electromagnetic polemic field as the late Christopher Hitchens, willing to dispense an arsenal of unvarnished, discomfiting truth-telling, be it good versus evil, beauty versus ugliness, justice versus oppression, elite globalists versus plain folk, and all that W.H. Auden envisioned as an artist with words — making, knowing, and judging.

Of course, Hitchens and Bannon shared nothing about faith — Hitchens the unrepentant atheist, Bannon the Tertullian-ish Roman Catholic, where the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God, in Jesus Christ, indeed is absurd, shameful, and impossible, thus must be true — indeed, the only transcendent truth of the universe.

Steve Bannon is now marinating as a proud political convict in the Danbury, Conn. federal prison for four months because he committed a misdemeanor by defying an illegitimate subpoena from Democrat party congressional cabal otherwise known as the J6 committee.

Bannon’s pre-lockup theatrics — contrails of his First Amendment jet A blasts engulfing the usual suspects, Nancy Pelosi, Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell, corrupt DOJ prosecutors, et al. — resembled St. Ignatius in unquenched defiance, with nary a tincture of contrition.

Once St. Ignatius reached Rome, his fate was perfected, according to St. Jerome.  It is said that St. Ignatius’s acolytes somehow secured his remains, returning the relics to Antioch.

Bannon’s entrails have yet to be burned alive or eaten by beasts.  Still, his enemies revel in a momentary retribution, as he languishes until a week before Election Day.  Yet Bannon’s ultra-MAGA “posse” cannot be suppressed.  They will roam, untroubled and resolute.

Bannon is not finished.  His athletic, full-throated advocacy is more persistent and widespread than any other political agitator, right or left.

Bannon’s enemies couldn’t have engineered a worse elliptical prosecution — soon enough returning with the furies to its origin.

He will use the summer in a cell block, free from distractions and noisy plumes, to apply solitary ruminations for constructing an even more devastating and durable political action roadmap and workbook for the people to take back their nation, freeing themselves from indignity, humbug, and tyranny.

“For every conservative in America, this is what happens in the last days of a dying regime.  They will never shut me up.  They’ll have to kill me first.  I have not yet begun to fight.”

—Stephen K Bannon

Image: Steve Bannon.  Credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.