Steve Bannon, The New Yorker, and the Merits of Deplatforming
Editor David Remnick invited Bannon to the magazine’s prestigious festival with the idea that extremism should be confronted and debated. The event’s cancellation suggests a different solution: that it not be given a platform at all.
Briefly — oh so very briefly — The New Yorker billed Steve Bannon as a headliner at its annual festival. On Sunday, the magazine announced Bannon’s top billing only to reverse course in less than a day, as other prominent guests, such as Jim Carrey, Judd Apatow, and Boots Riley, threatened to bail if the festival hosted Bannon.
The New Yorker Festival is a ticketed annual forum — a classic “ideas festival” — where the magazine’s journalists interview prominent artists, actors, authors, experts, and politicians on stage. The magazine’s top editor, David Remnick — an accomplished political journalist — was scheduled to interview Bannon, making the conversation one of the most prominent events on the festival’s schedule. The festival is also billing conversations with civil rights activist Harry Belafonte, gun control activist David Hogg, and police reform advocate Brittany Packnett. Bannon was the festival’s lonesome extremist.
Bannon, who cofounded the right-wing news website Breitbart News, associates with white nationalists and cultivated his former website’s alliance with neo-Nazis. He helped lead Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the general election. He helped craft the Trump administration’s most offensive messaging and policy during Trump’s first several months in the White House. Bannon is certainly “newsworthy.” Still, the figurehead of white nationalism is a repulsive choice to headline this chummy sort of forum for magazine devotees gawking at hyper-respectable conversations. The New Yorker’s invitation would seem to confer some credibility, if not agreement, upon a guest of so-called honor. Similarly, The Economist plans to host Bannon as a guest speaker at the magazine’s Open Future Festival next week. “Our premise has been that progress is best achieved when ideas are tested in open debate,” Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes said in a statement offered to defend its own invitation in light of Remnick’s disinviting Bannon to the New Yorker Festival. “Mr. Bannon stands for a worldview that is antithetical to the liberal values the Economist has always espoused. We asked him to take part because his populist nationalism is of grave consequence in today’s politics.”
For however little it’s worth, Remnick had also promised a skeptical interaction with Bannon; “I have every intention of asking him difficult questions and engaging in a serious and even combative conversation,” Remnick told The New York Times in a report published hours before he rescinded his invitation. Skepticism is a hollow promise that has disappointed before. Less than a month ago, New York magazine promoted an interview with Bannon as part of the magazine’s retrospective package about the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath — which, in Bannon’s estimation, catalyzed Trumpism. Ultimately, Bannon’s conversation with the journalist Noah Kulwin reads less like an interview and more like a filibuster; a successful one at that. “Until we get Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis with, you know, youth unemployment down to zero, and people making high value-added jobs, I don’t need any foreigners. And I’m not a racist,” Bannon argues. Kulwin challenges none of this.
For Bannon, the top billing at a New Yorker festival was — again, briefly — a public relations coup: Bannon is promoting Errol Morris’s forthcoming documentary about him while also seeking a broader rehabilitation in a supposedly hostile press. But Remnick’s swift disinvitation has created a different sort of opportunity for Bannon, and his supporters, to once again moan about hypocritical intolerance.
For Remnick, the backlash to his magazine’s invitation to Bannon has been a crash course in the “deplatforming” agenda, popular among left-wing critics of Trumpism and the alt-right. The term “deplatforming,” or “no-platforming,” applies to many recent discussions of right-wing extremists, such as Bannon and his former Breitbart lieutenant Milo Yiannopoulos, who manipulate, and humiliate, mainstream news media. Traditionally, “deplatforming” is a priority among left-wing campus activists opposing right-wing speakers and teachers. In the wider media context, “deplatforming” doesn’t prohibit news coverage of extremist movements, but it does ideally deny extremists, such as white nationalists, opportunities to promote their ideas.
Historically, the idea is that neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists have a fundamentally exploitative, bad-faith relationship with liberal norms. The Nazi Party abused the Weimar Constitution’s free-speech protections to build civic tolerance for the party’s fascist, genocidal outlook; and so neo-Nazi movements abuse free-speech principles to normalize, and thus popularize, the dehumanization of Jews, blacks, Mexicans, etc., making their civil rights and basic humanity a debatable matter. Of course, right-wing extremists are free to discuss eugenics and ethnic cleansing among themselves, but “deplatforming” denies them more respectable company in more prominent forums, such as, say, The New Yorker.
The New Yorker saga illustrates a certain recurring temptation among public intellectuals to debate a pretentious reactionary such as Bannon. In his invitation, Remnick represents the hackneyed suggestion that the remedy to hate speech is more speech. “By conducting an interview with one of Trumpism’s leading creators and organizers, we are hardly pulling him out of obscurity,” Remnick wrote. “The point of an interview, a rigorous interview, particularly in a case like this, is to put pressure on the views of the person being questioned.”
The concept of right-wing extremists debating reasonable conservatives, centrists, and liberals flatters any interlocutor who believes that extremism can be humiliated through rhetorical excellence. “If high-profile interviews with a racist like George Wallace or a theocrat like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were worth doing by a past generation of journalists, Remnick reasoned, why not one with Bannon?,” columnist Bret Stephens wrote for The New York Times. “If speaking truth to power isn’t the ultimate task of publications such as The New Yorker, they’re on the road to their own left-wing version of ‘Fox & Friends.’”
Remnick and Stephens, together, are describing a sucker’s game in which journalists lose to illiberal extremists 10 times out of 10. They cannot make the game make sense by gesturing vaguely toward the decidedly successful career segregationist George Wallace. The alt-right does not aspire toward intelligence or evidence, but toward power. They don’t cherish the debate so much as they cherish the attention and the credibility that the debate inherently suggests. Bannon doesn’t headline a New Yorker festival to subject his ideas to great scrutiny; Bannon headlines a New Yorker festival to reassert the dominance of his ideas, however contested, however detested by his “combative” host.
Despite the great urgency of post-Trump politics, news editors and social media companies have humored the merits of “deplatforming” with excruciating hesitation. For several months, YouTube and Facebook stopped short of banning Alex Jones, the right-wing conspiracy theorist who encouraged harassment campaigns against the survivors of armed massacres at Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas. Only after a rare consensus emerged among the various platforms in favor of banning The Alex Jones Channel did the major web media companies, except Twitter, ban Jones almost simultaneously. In the first three weeks since YouTube, Facebook, Stitcher, and Spotify all banned him, Alex Jones has lost nearly half of his web audience; he’s down from about 1.4 million daily visits on Facebook and YouTube to about 715,000 daily visits now. The deplatforming worked. Despite the right-wing pundit’s alarming insistence that a ban would only make him stronger, Jones is now plummeting headlong into marginalization. So, too, has Milo Yiannopoulos since Twitter banned his account and Simon & Schuster canceled his book; Yiannopoulos now sulks through life and discourse in a terminal state of marginalization and failure. The country is stuck with their ideas, perhaps, and the discourse suffers Bannon’s influence every day. But deplatforming has indeed demoralized and deligitimized the alt-right. Indeed, the very notion of “deplatforming” is more powerful and provocative than any familiar nonsense that Bannon might spout on stage.
