Steve Bannon spots a Satanist: Takes one to know one, Steverino!

From Newsweek (which has become a truly noxious rag of late):

Bannon implied that Fetterman, who's running for U.S. Senate against Trump-backed celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, is a follower of Satan in a Gettr post on Wednesday. The remark was made while Bannon shared an article from the right-wing website The Washington Free Beacon, which alleged Fetterman was part of a "Democratic Grooming Scandal" because his family was photographed next to a person dressed as an anime character.

"Is Fetterman satanic??" Bannon wrote. "His look, his vibe, his associations ... has there been anyone in the history of the country that exudes more just pure evil than this guy ... the Citizens of the Commonwealth need to ask themselves—do we want someone who hangs with Satanic Groomers to represent us in the US Senate."

Hilarious! Bannon himself is a worshipful devotee of Julius Evola, who was the living embodiment of occult evil.  

In recent times, quite a few writers (though still not enough) have discussed Evola's philosophy of Traditionalism, which we may partially define as a return to feudalism. If you don't know much about that worldview, this book is an absolute must.

But first and foremost, Julius Evola was a Hermetic thinker who genuinely believed in ceremonial magic. Most people are not aware of that fact.

Evola's lover was a self-styled "Satanic Woman" named Maria De Naglowska. Here's a book about her. The cover of the book should tell you much. The blurbage will tell you more:

Maria taught her sex magical doctrines to the symbolist and surrealist artists of 1930's Paris. Her techniques included sensory deprivation, ceremonial magic, sexual intercourse with demons and angels and erotic asphyxia. Please note that this 175 page hard cover book contains approximately 170 illustrations detailing every aspect of Maria's life including Rasputin, The Mariavites, the cafes of Montparnasse, the Surrealists, alchemical diagrams and the magical rituals of the Third Term of the Trinity. Her students included William Seabrook, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and her lover, Julius Evola. 

Let us pause to savor the majesty of Bannon's hypocrisy. 

We are supposed to consider Fetterman a "groomer" because a member of Fetterman's family showed up in a photo with someone dressed as an anime character. (If you or anyone you know has ever visited Comic Con, give up all notion of ever entering politics!) But it was perfectly all right for Bannon's hero, Julius Evola, to engage in sex magic and erotic asphyxiation with dear old Maria. 

Oh, but the story gets even weirder. 

Maria's other lover was Georges Bataille, the French philosopher who -- in my view -- made a swift left-to-far-right transition after World War II. Maria helped inspire Bataille to set up his own death/sex occult group called Acephale.

The symbol of that group was a headless man. Why? Because logical thinking is bad. Or so said Bataille.

Some consider Bataille the founding father of postmodernism. Foucault would never have become Foucault without Bataille. 

In recent years, the right has spent a great deal of time and energy assailing postmodernism. They hate the stuff. I hate it too -- in fact, I've hated the pomos since the early 1980s, long before doing so became cool. The rightwingers continually try to convince their easily-gulled followers that postmodernism is a form of Marxism, which is a complete lie: The pomos were and are anti-Marxists to the core.

Postmodernism is the pre-eminent anti-Enlightenment philosophy of our time. It's a virus. Foucault caught the virus from Battaille, who got it from Evola -- the same Julius Evola that Steve Bannon just loves loves loves. 

So here's the question: What substantive thing separates Foucault from Bannon? Both are anti-Enlightenment, anti-science and anti-democracy. Those similarities are the only points that matter; everything else is insignificant

The two are really one. 

We battle a monster who sometimes wears a right-wing mask and sometimes a left-wing mask -- but it's always the same monster, a beast who detests both reason and democracy.

For decades, I've struggled to come up with a workable definition of fascism. Here's where I've landed: The term "fascism" may be applied to any anti-Enlightenment philosophy pressed into the service of political action in the modern age. By this definition, there can be right-wing and left-wing fascisms, nationalist and anti-nationalist fascisms, libertarian and "Big Gummint" fascisms, religious and atheist fascisms, materialist and mystical fascisms. There is a fascism for every race and ethnic group, including blacks and Jews. As was pointed out long ago, there can even be a fascism that calls itself anti-fascist -- that truly believes itself to be anti-fascist.