Bannon Deflects Criticism for Engaging California Governor in Podcast

Going on more conservative platforms won’t help him reach more Democrats, Bannon said.

Steve Bannon in Huntington Beach, Calif., on Sept. 18, 2022. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Conservative media personality Steve Bannon has dismissed criticism from some Republicans who say he shouldn’t have agreed to be a guest on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new podcast.

“It’s very simple: I was there to move the project of economic nationalism and populism,” Bannon told The Epoch Times in an interview after the hour-long podcast on March 12.

Bannon, a former advisor to President Donald Trump and host of War Room, a podcast on Real America’s Voice, said he wants to promote these themes to a broad range of Democrats who don’t hear about them in the mainstream media.

“You have to engage these people,” he said. “I got to a massive audience of Democrats that are looking for answers—and populism is an answer.”

Going on the governor’s podcast was worth it “to have Gavin Newsom, the most progressive governor in the most progressive state, sit there and essentially agree with me on every topic regarding populism and regarding economic nationalism and the apartheid state of Silicon Valley,” Bannon said.

Political Flak

Newsom, who launched the “This is Gavin Newsom” podcast launched earlier said he intends to bring on guests who disagree with him, but has also taken flak from his own political camp for giving Bannon a platform and not grilling him.

The governor has exchanged a few political barbs with MAGA Republican guests, including Bannon—and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk in his debut podcast—but has agreed with them on many points.

He told Bannon he is “100 percent aligned with him on industrial policy” and bringing manufacturing back to the United States.

“We’re on the same page on that,” Newsom said. “I say that as governor of the largest manufacturing state in America.”

The podcasts, so far, have revealed both common ground between Democrats and Republicans as well as where the parties differ on key issues.

Skeptics see Newsom’s motives as based on his presidential ambitions and a strategy to reach a political middle ground before the 2028 election. Neither Newsom’s office nor his podcast crew responded to a request for comment on the criticism.

While Newsom moves further toward the center to try and make himself a viable national candidate, at the same time, “it tells you the California model is not sellable,” Bannon told The Epoch Times.

“He’s jettisoned and he’s proven that he can’t sell the California [model]—He is running for president and he can’t sell the California model. That, in and of itself, is a huge, huge break,” he said. “He is definitely pivoting.”

Bannon said he’s received feedback from thousands of Democrats who want to know more about his views on oligarchs, populism, and taxation of the wealthy.

Going on more conservative platforms won’t help him reach more Democrats, Bannon said, noting his more than 20 hours a week of hosting “the most MAGA podcast out there with the largest audience with all conservatives.”

“The problem with the conservatives in California is it’s all talk, no action,” he said. “I took action. I got in there—into the arena, and I didn’t back off.”

Trump’s Tariffs

Newsom began his interview with Bannon by questioning Trump’s plan to impose on April 2 reciprocal tariffs on Canadian products and the economic upheaval they could cause, as well as how Trump used the threat of tariffs as leverage against Canada to secure the northern border and crack down on the flow of fentanyl.

“Now, I understand the way it was rolled out. Because of the emergency nature of it, the focus was on fentanyl and this chemical warfare,” Bannon said.

But a big part of the Trump tariffs are the president’s “systematic” strategy to bring manufacturers and jobs to the United States, even though they were rolled out with a focus on fentanyl and border security.

“Yeah, which is a little BS, isn’t it,” Newsom interjected. “I mean, there’s a larger economic populism frame here. Let’s just be honest with folks. It had nothing to do with the tyrannical nature of Prime Minister, 51st governor, America,” referring to Trump’s taunting of former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who recently stepped down.

Trump had relentlessly called Trudeau the “51^st governor” and suggested that Canada become the 51^st state.

Canada as the 51st State?

Bannon told The Epoch Times after the podcast he has a message for Canadians who scoff at Trump’s suggestion that Canada become the 51^st state over the Chinese Communist Party’s expansionist intentions in the far north.

In January, 2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared China was a “near-Arctic state” and with plans to become a “polar great power"” by 2030. China’s Arctic Policy outlines the CCP’s intentions to develop infrastructure, extend military reach, and excavate resources within the Arctic Circle, even though none of China’s borders reach that far north.

“It’s a great power struggle,” Bannon said.

Canada, which has the longest unprotected coastline in the world, doesn’t have the military might to protect its borders and needs U.S. protection from a potential invasion, he said.

Without the United States, Canadians would be caught in a jam “vis a vis Russia and vis a vis the Chinese in the Arctic,” Bannon said.

“They’re going to take territory and dare you to take it back,” he said. “You need a big brother. You need a partner.”

Otherwise, Canada could end up being a “vassal state,” he said.

“I say to Canadians very simply, you were a dominion until 1981 … You have your head in the sand, or in this case, head in the ice,” he said.

Whether Canada ever becomes the 51^st state, or joins the United States as several states, Bannon said some type of economic union between Canada and the United States makes “total geo-strategic sense.”

Addressing the Fentanyl Crisis

The amount of fentanyl made in Canada isn’t anywhere close to the massive volumes coming into the United States, across the southern border with Mexico, Bannon told The Epoch Times, comparing the problem in Canada’s western provinces to that of states like Missouri and Arizona, where “economic distress” is fueling the drug crisis.

“They can’t afford to live, so they go to selling drugs,” he said. “There are labs all over the place.”

The fentanyl crisis is so “terrible” that it may involve the United States working more closely with the Mexican Marines to block supplies from China used to make the deadly synthetic opioid, which is responsible for hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths.

An actual war on drugs involving a “military assault into northern Mexico” may be the only way to stop the flow of the deadly substance from Mexican cartels into the United States, Bannon said.

The cartels have to be taken down like ISIS, Bannon said.

“There’s a city in northern Mexico … that has 100 major fentanyl labs and about four or five cartels that own them. That’s all going to get leveled,” he said.