‘Populist national revolt’ grips west and is coming to Australia - Bannon warns

Former Trump advisor and right wing firebrand Steve Bannon, who has been sharing his political philosophy in a series of interviews across the globe, has claimed that Australia is a “hotbed of populism” and is ripe for revolution.

In a contentious interview with ABC’s Sarah Ferguson, the former executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News website, said that the West was in the midst of a “populist national revolt” and that the global revolution was “coming to Australia” soon. His comments echoed those he made recently in Europe, where he envisions helping to form a pan-European far-right political bloc.

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Bannon’s major focus in the interview was on China and its relationship with Australia, which he said had been “too much of an appeaser” under former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was recently ousted by his own party and replaced by social conservative Scott Morrison.

Bannon said that Australia was at the “frontlines” of the “economic war” with China. “Australia is at the tip of the spear of this,” he said, referencing the currently strained relations between the two countries over China’s policies in the South China Sea, Australia’s new foreign interference laws which were seen to be targeting China, and Australia’s decision to ban Chinese telecoms companies Huawei and ZTE from supplying equipment for a 5G mobile network over national security risks — a move which Huawei called “politically motivated”.

China, Bannon said, was a “totalitarian mercantilist system” that was at war with the West and does not play by any rules. “They [China] don’t have any internal rules. It’s a completely totalitarian regime,” he said. Bannon called himself a “hawk” on China, reasoning that if the country is not confronted “bad things are going to happen”.

Asked who he thought might end up challenging Trump in the 2020 election, Bannon said that since we are living in a “media age,” it was possible someone like Oprah Winfrey or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson could end up having “real opportunities”.

Some Australians who took to Twitter after Bannon’s interview weren’t so sure about the revolution prediction, however, with some suggesting that Americans like Bannon were known for thinking they were “God's f*cking gift to the world” and could tell other countries what to do.

One Australian media personality criticized ABC for giving Bannon such a huge platform for her revolution “recruitment efforts”.

Another user said Bannon’s rhetoric about revolution was a ploy to “get workers to vote against their self interest by using nationalism as a cloak for policies that aid the wealthy,” while another said the former Trump advisor was “deluding himself” if he thought his brand of politics would work in Australia.