On Sunday, November 13, 2016, President-elect Donald Trump named Stephen K. Bannon as his Senior Counselor and Chief Strategist in the White House. Newspapers across America focused on Bannon’s background as an executive at the right-wing Breitbart News. But Bannon’s more revealing role is that of a seasoned propaganda filmmaker, churning out documentaries that target liberals as haters of America while his films are actually being financed by billionaires who like their plutocracy just the way it is.
On September 21, 2012, less than two months before the Presidential election, a Bannon documentary titled “Occupy Unmasked” was released in select theaters in an effort to discredit the Occupy Wall Street movement. The Breitbart web site urged its followers to create “buzz” about the film. Writing at The Nation, Michael Tracey called the film “a deranged hodge-podge of bizarre memes, wild dot-connecting and unadulterated fury.” In reality, it was a skillfully scripted propaganda film engineered to redirect the anger from the robber barons on Wall Street to the protesters demanding change. To do that successfully, those engaged in this grassroots uprising had to be demonized using ingenious means by Bannon.