Apparently, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Greene are no longer Biffy and Buffy,
they're no longer friends.
And it's because of the fact that now Bannon sees Marjorie Greene as more
of a moderate, which is one of the most insane things anyone could possibly think.
But he has lost control of her, lost control of how she votes, and
he's very upset about it.
Now, look, this all started when the apparently Daily Beast had leaked text
messages between Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Greene.
And in them, Marjorie Greene had some stuff to say about Steve Bannon.
She said specifically, Steve and I aren't patching things up.
And if he keeps coming after me, I'll take the house and kids.
I hope you'll pass this along to Steve.
Because I'm over it.
Now, there's more explosive texts, but before we get to those texts,
let's find out why they're fighting in the first place.
So Steve Bannon led the charge in this conflict,
calling Greene to be primaried by a more right wing candidate who is real
MAGA because of the fact that she voted in favor of the debt ceiling bill,
Bannon did not want her to do that, but she did anyway.
He made the comment in response to a POLITICO article that detailed how she and
Jim Jordan helped Kevin McCarthy get his debt deal through.
Now, real quick, as we all know, the debt deal had everything Republicans wanted, so
why wouldn't Marjorie Greene vote in favor of it?
And she is trying to suck up a little bit to Kevin McCarthy,
that's been an ongoing trend that we've noticed as well.
Now, Greene's debt ceiling vote and her previous support for
Kevin McCarthy's leadership role within the House didn't sit well with Bannon,
who wants the party to go further to the right.
And in another getter post, he wrote this, the 149 must be
held accountable for the most anti-MAGA vote in history, okay?
So with that said, he wasn't done, he wanted to keep going, so
after The Daily Beast had leaked Marjorie Greene's text to Gaetz,
he actually upped the ante during his war room podcast, let's watch.
>> Republican Party, those 149 who voted for it, who all have to be primary,
let me repeat that, all of them, including people we're quite fond of and
some who we used to be fond of, have to be primary.
You know why? They have to stand on the debate stage
when the primary season and they have to justify what they did with the knowledge
they had at the time of what went on and then what the impact is, because
the impact during primary season is going to be a lot worse than it is today.
>> So, Cenk, thoughts on this growing conflict between Greene and Bannon?
>> Yeah, I can definitely break it down.
So, number one, why is Steve Bannon so
angry when the Republicans got most of what they wanted?
Did he want, okay, instead of getting $20 billion cut from IRS auditing the rich,
let's get $80 billion, the whole thing cut so the rich are protected forever, etc.
Did he just want more?
And he thought it was just on it, because he thinks, and this would be a fair thing
to say, Biden is such a Republican, all you had to do was ask.
If you were even tougher, he probably would have given you more.
He would have given you the whole enchilada, okay?
Yeah, maybe a little bit of that.
But I don't think that's the main thing.
I think that you don't get this angry over it should have been 30 instead of
20 billion, right?
No, he wanted them to actually crash the economy, because then the main guy he's
supporting, Donald Trump, would have said, the economy crashed under Biden.
You know how Republicans are 10,000 times better at messaging than Democrats.
The Democrats would have been, my God, if they actually didn't lift the debt ceiling
and the market crashed and the interest rates went higher, etc,
as every economist predicts, Biden would have panicked and be, it's my fault,
I love the Republicans, I'm so sorry, right?
And he would have gotten blamed for it because he's the president.
And Bannon is not wrong about that political calculation.
Now, in order for you to advocate for that calculation, though, you have to be
a monster and think, yeah, that's going to cost millions of Americans jobs.
It's gonna destroy so many businesses, so many lives.
But monsters like Bannon and Trump, they don't care about that at all.
And would it have been a significant political advantage for them?
Probably.
>> And isn't Bannon this big believer in this traditionalist
philosophy where he almost wants chaos in order to implement it?
>> Yeah, so, look, we talked about this,
Bannon believes in this Russian philosopher, the one that the Ukrainians
probably almost killed, but his daughter blew up in the car bomb instead.
>> Yeah, Aleksandr Dugin, right?
>> Yes, and so the Duginists believe in going back to the Medieval ages.
>> Literally.
>> Yeah, in terms of how we live.
They want to go backwards, that's the progressives want to go forwards,
these conservatives are so ultra conservative, they want to go backwards.
So what does that mean?
Religion, Christian nationalism, so screw science and
vaccines and doctors and the tech companies and
everything that's involved with going forward, they hate it.
And if you go forward, it's about equality, because now, wait,
it's not predominantly just white people in the country anymore, it's a mixed bag,
and they don't want that.
They want white people to be in charge, etc.
So for them, chaos is not such a bad thing.
You're breaking things, and when you rebuild them,
you could rebuild them in the way that you want, which is authoritarian.
And Dugin doesn't hide that at all.
Putin is a huge advocate.
Steve Bannon is a huge advocate.
And so they're, burn it to the goddamn ground and
then rebuild it as basically a dictatorship for just us.
>> Yeah, exactly, that's why, I mean,
as you were talking about what the motivations are here, I couldn't help but
think about how much Bannon would rejoice in burning it all down, right?
So I don't know.
I don't know if that's motivating the ire he's directing toward Marjorie Greene, but
I wouldn't be surprised.
I mean, he loves the chaos.
Now, immediately after he said what he said during his podcast, other right
wingers fell in line and started saying that they would absolutely love to, by
the way, I have no problem with primaries, primary the hell out of anyone, right?
There's nothing wrong with primaries.
But a bunch of people on the right decided to back Bannon's calls to essentially
primary the Republicans who voted in favor of the debt ceiling bill.
Stew Peters, who's the host of the Stew Peters Show, says,
I 100 percent support a challenge to Marjorie Greene and
look forward to meeting and helping a serious challenge to her.
Far right activist and
former Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer also chimed in, saying,
she took a job from me when she publicly accused me of being crazy.
You're not crazy at all, Loomer.
You're totally stable, not unhinged, okay?
Don't worry.
But she continues to say, and told Trump not to hire me.
I think it's only fair that I get a shot at taking her job, too.
You know what Donald Trump always says?
An eye for an eye.
And so we do have some more of the text messages between Marjorie Greene and
Matt Gaetz.
Any comment before I get to them?
>> Yeah, so, look, don't get us wrong.
Laura Loomer is totally nuts.
>> Absolutely. >> And she might be
even more nuts than Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But go ahead, have a nuts off, right?
When Republicans are going eye for an eye and leaving themselves all blind,
I'm all for it.
But I've got to also tell you why Marjorie Taylor Greene is on the other side.
So why do the Republicans mainly vote against Steve Bannon and his wishes?
It's because they have giant donor money now.
And they're all in office, and so when they have the donor money,
they want to keep that money flowing.
So they know that if they'd actually crashed the market and the economy,
the donors would have been furious.
And so that's the dynamic in the Republican Party.
Neither side is good.
They're both horrible in their own way.
>> Now, we do have more of the text message exchanges between Marjorie Greene
and Matt Gaetz.
We're gonna read the text from Marjorie Greene.
You can tell that she's bothered by Bannon and what he's saying.
She writes, I have almost the same identical voting record as Thomas Massie,
the most fiscally conservative member of Congress.
And I voted with him on this bill.
And Bannon, who was senior counsel to Trump in the White House and
responsible for the first debt ceiling increase because Bannon is reckless and
nowhere near fiscally responsible, is now telling everyone I should be primaried.
Then she writes, Steve, meaning Steve Bannon, Loomer, and
any other POS attacking me will not beat me.
Because of that people have been reaching out to me because they don't like
what Steve is doing to me, I'm at a place in my life where removing toxic and
bad people out of my life makes me very happy.
Steve and I aren't getting back together.
>> Well, how are you going to remove yourself from your life?
That's the problem, okay?
So good luck with that one.
Look, you by the way, you get a sense of how Marjorie Taylor Greene probably
conducted her divorce proceedings with that.
Would you push me any further?
I'm taking the kids and the house.
>> Yeah.
>> That was it, and that gives you a sense of who she is, okay?
>> Yeah, but to be fair, that's common in divorce proceedings which is unfortunate.
>> Yea h i's very unfortunate.
Anyway, all right, on Bannon, but
to be fair to Marjorie Taylor Greene, she does make a good point.
Bannon was the chief advisor to Donald Trump when they raised the debt ceiling,
and they didn't hesitate.
They didn't wait for a second, they didn't ask for any cuts, they didn't do anything.
They were just like, let's lift it right away.
Right away. And they did it three times.
Bannon was, I think, around for only the first one, but not a peep, why?
Because he didn't want the economy to burn while Trump was president.
>> He didn't want to harm daddy.
>> Yeah, but he does want to harm the country if it's a Democratic president,
so that is crystal clear.
See, look, we're fair.
We don't like either one of them, right?
But I'll tell you, when someone makes good points, and
Marjorie Taylor Greene there has an undeniable point.
Steve Bannon, should you be primaried on your own show?
Should we get a new host in there who's more pure?
Because apparently you're a piece of crap, sellout to the establishment and
to the donors and probably to the globalists.
Why did you raise the debt ceiling?
Why did you do it?
You had a perfect opportunity to destroy everything in the world, but yet
you didn't do it.
Now, look, according to your logic, it would have been great,
flowers would have bloomed everywhere if you didn't raise the debt ceiling.
So he has to answer that question, but
my guess is not many people will hold him accountable.
But one last thing about the good thing about an internal civil war among
the Republicans is that they actually fight dirty.
So among the Democrats, there's no civil war at all.
>> There's no fighting.
>> There's no fighting the corrupt wind.
Time after time after time progresses almost never challenge them, right?
Among the Republicans, they eye gouge, they rip each other's hair out.
And so when they get dirty, they're gonna shive each other, okay?
They're gonna knife each other really hard.
And that's pleasant to watch.
>> And use some Taylor Swift lyrics to make their point, as Marjorie Greene did.
>> Okay. >> When she says Steve and
I aren't getting back together.
>> Interesting, they are all right.
>> I think those are Taylor Swift lyrics, right?
Yeah.
>> [LAUGH]. >> Anyway-.
>> It sounds like could be.
>> [LAUGH]