Bring It on, Bannon

Mohan Dutta

Steve Bannon is a convicted criminal and a far right actor. He served four months in a federal prison for refusing a congressional subpoena, pleaded guilty in a New York court over a fundraising operation that separated small donors from their money in the name of a border wall, and escaped the federal version of that case only because the president he served signed him a pardon on the way out the door. He is useful to anyone studying this movement for one reason. He says in plain words what its respectable end prefers to launder through a think tank paper and a panel on viewpoint diversity. Last week a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School invited this man to address a class, and the only thing that kept him out of the room was a clash in his diary.

He rang the Boston Globe from Texas, where he has been working turnout ahead of the midterms, to whinge that a year of frozen research grants, revoked visas, threats to Harvard's tax status and lawsuits dragged through the federal courts has delivered nothing he can call a win. He has seen no fundamental shift. They have not scratched the surface. The error, by his account, was aiming the campaign at antisemitism, which narrowed the target and lost the movement support even among its own, when the quarrel he wants is with a professoriate he calls Marxists who hate their country. His remedy is a bigger dose of the medicine that already failed: a harder squeeze on federal money, an end to work authorisation for international students, fewer academics born anywhere else, the whole thing pressed ten times harder. The college towns, Charlottesville and Madison and Chapel Hill and Austin and Tucson and Boulder, he calls "a hotbed of radicalism", and he is candid that without them the electoral map would run solid red. A man who has never taught a class, never sat an examination he could not buy his way around, never put a page of his own thinking in front of a reviewer, is explaining to the country which scholars deserve to eat.

Read it again and the war talk comes apart in his hands. Here is the id of the movement, a man with the ear of a president, a podcast operation of his own and the machinery of the federal state swinging in behind him, sitting down with a reporter to admit that the universities have not broken. He has the Justice Department, the immigration apparatus, a compliant Congress and a friendly bench above the ones he is cursing, and he still sounds like a diner complaining about his steak. The thing he set out to burn is standing, teaching, full of people who will not say what he wants said. Every grievance in that interview is a receipt for work that somebody did, usually someone with no power and often at real cost.

He has a theory about who wrote those receipts, and he blames the courts. A federal judge threw out the administration's antisemitism suit against Harvard in August. Another found that cancelling the university's research funding in the name of fighting antisemitism was unlawful. A third protected its right to host international students. Bannon calls the bench rigged, which is the standard complaint of a man who keeps losing on the facts. Cases do not file themselves. Behind each of those rulings sit faculty who put their names on affidavits when their deans advised discretion, graduate workers and postdocs who had the most to lose from a revoked visa and testified anyway, union locals that found the money for counsel, lawyers who took the brief at cost. The American Association of University Professors did not wait for a committee to form a view. What Bannon experiences as judicial sabotage is a record of ordinary people choosing, one at a time, to make the state prove its case in public.

Where he did make ground, he made it through the offices, and that should be said plainly. The weak points in the wall were never the picket lines or the seminar rooms. They were the presidents who rewrote protest policy before anyone asked them to, the provosts who suspended students to buy a meeting in Washington, the deputy vice-chancellors who quietly renamed an equity unit and called it a restructure. A managerial class trained to read a government threat as a planning assumption will always surrender the people furthest from its own pay grade first, because surrender is cheap when someone else pays for it. These are the same figures who will tell you, in a tone of great reluctance, that the moment calls for pragmatism. Nothing in the history of this fight was ever won by a compliance workstream. The universities that held held because somebody inside them refused, usually without a title, usually at some cost.

None of this stays in one country. The same script arrives in Britain as a free speech statute that functions as a grievance subsidy, and as a press pack that spends weeks dismantling a Black professor for sport. It arrives in Aotearoa with a tour schedule, a think tank prescription written somewhere in the Atlas circuit, a campaign to strip te Tiriti of meaning by referendum, a Māori health authority abolished on the argument that need has no colour. The actors are different and the funders overlap. Anyone who has traced the money knows the grammar travels before the policy does.

So does the answer. Our unions are where the floor gets held, which is why the Tertiary Education Union, the UCU and the AAUP are attacked with the same vocabulary on three continents. Our disciplines are where the knowledge survives being defunded, in the journals that keep publishing on settler colonialism and caste and empire, in the curricula that teachers protect by teaching them. The courts are where the overreach gets tested and found unlawful, again and again, because someone sat in a room and prepared the file. Community organising is where the base lives, in the marae and the mosque and the migrant centre and the union hall, among people who were never going to be consulted and organised anyway. Movement struggle is where it all comes together, in the hīkoi that filled Molesworth Street, in the Palestine marches that outlasted every attempt to criminalise them, in students who kept the encampments going after the suspensions came.

We will dismantle the MAGA universe, in the United States, in Britain, here in Aotearoa. I am certain of that. It will not be done by compliant middle managers or careerist administrators chasing the next appointment, and it was never going to be. It will be done by organised people who have already proven, over a year that Bannon himself describes as a failure, that this movement can be stopped and held and pushed back. He says it is a major plank of MAGA and that the fight will continue. Good. We are organised, we are patient, and we are not going anywhere. Bring it on.