Sadly, you read that right. I saw it first in The European Conservative, which I don’t take very seriously, and then in Politico, who reported back on March 7, that the Italian courts had determined that the state-sponsored eviction of the Trisulti Abbey occupant in 2021, a Steve Bannon ally, was unlawful. And that occupant, Benjamin Harnwell, can reestablish occupancy at the Abbey, located southeast of Rome.
So, technically, the Bannon project that was originally planned during the Trump administration, but after Bannon had been expelled from Trump’s inner circle at the White House, when he made his infamous ‘tour’ of European right wing groups in 2018, like some latter-day Paul of Tarsus, spreading his Leninist gospel, in the form of global MEGA-TURPP (Make Europe Great Again (Through Unspoken Racial Purity Policies)), might be resurrected.
No word so far from the Bannon camp about this re-enchantment of an old chestnut of an idea, that I’m aware of.
For the uninitiated as to the meaning of Bannon’s Romancing the Nihilism of a right wing ‘gladiator school’ set in an Old World monastery on the outskirts of Rome, to churn out the new vandals of European post-war democracy:
The proposed academy’s curriculum — a cocktail of libertarianism and conservative Catholicism — had planned to include courses on “Cultural Marxism,” “The Church as an Early Business Enterprise” and Islam, and aimed to provide the world’s future populist politicians and influencers with the rhetorical skills needed to challenge liberal worldviews.
Funded by Bannon and a coterie of unnamed associates (ed. fronting billionaires and autocrats who prefer to remain anonymous) in right-wing circles, Harnwell had been the sole applicant to lease the monastery when the government was seeking new buyers in 2016 after the friars who had occupied it for seven centuries began to dwindle and could no longer manage the upkeep.
www.politico.eu/...
In Steve Bannon’s jaundiced imagination, it’ll be a veritable Castle Wolfenstein for grownups.
Unfortunately, this whole sordid court case, surrounding the apparently unlawful eviction of Bannon-follower, Benjamin Harnwell, from the abbey, is also an example of prosecutorial overreach in the Italian judicial system, that can only strengthen the European right wing’s Trumpian claims of “they’re all lawless, so we can be too”. It can be a reminder for us, that we don’t need to become like MAGA to beat MAGA.