Where are Bannon's 15 hours of Epstein videos?
A high-pressure system of antisemitism settled over the first Turning Point USA convention since the murder of Charlie Kirk, held last weekend in Phoenix. The faction of right-wingers who pretend to like Jews in order to send all Jews to hell publicly feuded with the faction that wants to skip the “pretend to like” part.
Some Axios bullet points:
How it went down: Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the Daily Wire, and one of MAGA’s most powerful podcasters, said Thursday at the convention’s opening session that Megyn Kelly is “guilty of cowardice” for failing to condemn Candace Owens for spreading conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death.Shapiro said the conservative movement is in “serious danger” from “charlatans,” “frauds” and “grifters.” He called Tucker Carlson’s hosting of antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast “an act of moral imbecility.” (The episode is now at 7 million YouTube views.)
Carlson, speaking shortly after Shapiro, said that as he watched the criticism backstage, he laughed the way you would “when your dog starts doing your taxes.” Carlson added: “Antisemitism is not just naughty. It’s immoral.”
Delighting in bad faith
As a Jewish man with a Jewish daughter, this farce exhausts me.
Shapiro is battling his fellow conservatives mostly to maintain the doctrine of Israeli Infallibility. Still, he’s undeniably correct that the GOP has given up any pretensions of caring about antisemitism, except as a cudgel to silence activists and torture universities. Candace Owens’ spew fumes with toxic antisemitism. Tucker Carlson—who “delights in bad faith,” as Jean-Paul Sartre described Nazi trolls of another era—recently platformed America’s most famous Hitler lover. That move appears to be a considered effort to elevate what almost everyone agrees is neo-Nazism.
And it worked. JD Vance, the ostensible leader of the GOP for, perhaps, the next 40 years, insists that those who openly hate Jews must be welcomed under the GOP’s “banner.” That’s not surprising, but it’s extraordinarily ominous.
With Jewish defenders like Ben Shapiro…
To make it obvious how much Republicans generally despise American Jews, we’re stuck with a defender, Shapiro, who hates me and nearly all American Jews more than most Klansmen would bother.
That even Ben’s survival instincts are triggered must be noted because of the incredible flexibility of antisemitism. The convenient fungibility of this hate makes it a weapon that can fit any crime when its proponents are motivated and powerful enough, as illuminated by this quote by Max Weinreich, which Andrea Pitzer highlighted in her incisive piece on antisemitism this summer:
“The Jew could be represented as the embodiment of everything to be resented, feared, or despised. He was a carrier of Bolshevism, but curiously enough, he simultaneously stood for the liberal spirit of rotten Western democracy. Economically, he was both capitalist and socialist. He was blamed as the indolent pacifist but, by strange coincidence, he was also the instigator to wars.”
Antisemites, of course, don’t need a reason to hate Jews. They only need an opportunity, which leads us to Steve Bannon and back to Axios:
Steve Bannon, an official in the first Trump administration who now heads the influential “WarRoom“ podcast, said onstage: “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads. [Lowers mike for dramatic effect.] It’s a cancer, and it metastasizes.”
I don’t need to call Bannon an antisemite, but his fellow Republicans seem to keep at least implying he’s one, as did his ex-wife.
Bannon, before Carlson and Elon Musk (the greatest popularizer of Nazism since Hitler), helped usher Jew haters into the adults’ table of the GOP. He did this mainly through how the comment sections on Breitbart in 2015 transmuted into MAGA and the Groyperization of the party that followed. Bannon’s efforts set the stage in 2025 for the GOP’s rift over how much Jew hating Republicans should allow in public.
Steve Bannon’s Jewish friend
But you might be thinking, “How could Steve Bannon possibly be an antisemite? One of his best friends is Jewish.”
Of course, the best friend we’re talking about is Jeffrey Epstein.
Jacobin has a decent piece explaining how the relationship between the two men was closer than most realized, something we now know for sure thanks to recent email releases. You get plenty of the vibe of the two men’s connection and how they flatter each other like Real Housewives desperately looking for a new friend after a rift, in hopes of staying on the show.
But what the piece misses is the crucial context of how these two men connected, and it doesn’t even touch on the vast question of “Why was Bannon so eager to befriend old Trump’s pal, famed mostly for how he skated through massive allegations of child rape?”
Why?
We know Michael Wolff, who wrote Fire and Fury about the first Trump term, introduced them. Wolff claimed his inappropriate interest in Epstein was entirely journalistic in nature. And you could see that the effort to ingratiate himself with Trump’s old pals was an attempt to nurture sources, though the geniality suggests something far darker.
And this all misses crucial context that I only recall immediately because I worked with Marcy Wheeler on her Ball of Thread podcast series about Putin’s attack on the 2016 elections and the aftermath:
Bannon wasn’t just on the outs with Trump in this time period; he was warring with MAGA, at least a bit.
After Trump shoved him out of the White House, Bannon fingered Roger Stone to the Mueller team as the campaign’s connection to WikiLeaks, thus to Russia. And he sorta accused Don Jr. of treason.
No one, except Marcy, remembers this episode much. That’s because after all of his big donors threatened to cut him off, Bannon quickly retreated to being a hatchet man for Trump, playing key roles in the Hunter Biden operations and January 6th, while tricking Trump fans out of cash with a pretend wall.
Again, why?
This mess has me thinking about Bannon’s motives, which are the only interesting thing about him. Again, why was he so eager to befriend the man who must have had more dirt on Trump than anyone alive?
We now know that around this time period, August 2017, Epstein was telling Wolff highly inflammatory things about Trump, which didn’t come out until this year, like:
Why was Bannon so eager to rehabilitate Epstein’s image that he was working on a documentary that would gloss up his image? They’d recorded 15 hours of video before Epstein was arrested and then found dead in his cell back in 2019, an event that now looks very fortuitous to Donald Trump, who seems to be willing to do almost anything to cloak his ties to his old fellow “Playboy.”
Jacobin posits that this is just evidence that Bannon is a “fraud,” which is sure… fine… of course.
And the writer Branko Marcetic notes how useful Epstein was in Bannon’s global movement to spark a “populist rebellion against a corrupt elite that was quietly being backed by a sex-obsessed billionaire notorious for preying on young girls.” Adding that these emails “give us a firsthand look at the way that Epstein leveraged his elite connections to curry influence with the world’s rich and powerful.”
But what about those 15 hours of videos?
Epstein’s motives and modus operandi don’t interest me much. But Bannon, with his quest to make my family and me less safe pretty much everywhere in the world, does.
What was he hoping to get out of Epstein to use against Trump, given that he was in a season where he was using his leverage to at least unsettle the MAGA camp?
I wouldn’t trust anything Epstein says. But the fact that Bannon still holds these videos so tightly suggests a few things. The videos clearly do not help Trump make the case that he had “nothing to do” with the girls Epstein victimized. Likely, they would provide more evidence to what we already know: Trump was at least aware of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s abuse of these girls in real time. Or far worse.
Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, who has done a masterful job of exposing Trump’s Epstein cover-up, said Democrats were working on getting Bannon’s Epstein tapes during the summer. I can’t find any developments on that effort since.
I admit that I have a particular agenda for why I want them released; anything that hurts Steve Bannon helps the Jews. The Epstein cover-up, like the antisemitic conspiracy theories surrounding Charlie Kirk’s death, is tearing at the seams of MAGA. And I’d love to see Bannon exposed as siding with the dirtiest elite of the century in a fashion that even embarrasses him.
Yet, I think the public also has a vested interest in understanding the dynamics at play here. What was it about Epstein that made Bannon so eager to defend him? Epstein brought this quality out in many rich creeps. But with Bannon, the goal certainly seemed to be to find dirt on his old boss. And it sure seems like he succeeded.
I work for democracy, independently, full-time. Your support makes that possible. To help, subscribe to THE FARCE newsletter, join this Patreon, or drop a tip.
Member discussion