Nearly five years after Steven Bannon’s suspension from Spotify, his podcast “WarRoom” has returned — a move which may cement his role as the most influential MAGA voice for a global audience, given the platform’s massive reach of 268 million subscribers.
Bannon, like now-president Donald Trump, managed to grow his audience during the years Joe Biden was in office despite his removal from YouTube, Facebook, and X.
His team says his following is well into the millions and was fortified by his unwavering support of Trump through his mass media shadowbanning and even being sent to jail, which helped solidy his MAGA bona fides.
While he has been welcomed back to Spotify, Bannon said “WarRoom” — which produces four hours of programming six days a week from a studio in Washington, D.C. — hasn’t changed its tone or style at all since it was banned in 2020.
“I think our content’s the same, probably more hard hitting than ever,” Bannon, 71, told The Post.
“WarRoom” was removed from most platforms, but not Apple Podcasts, in November 2020 after Bannon said, “I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them [then-NIAID chief Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray] at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats.
“You either get with the program or you’re gone – time to stop playing games.”
In a statement, a Spotify spokeswoman said, “Following its temporary suspension and a constructive dialogue with the show’s team, new ‘Bannon’s WarRoom’ episodes are available on Spotify.”
Bannon told The Post his comments were metaphorical rather than literal, “I made a comment two days before about Thomas More in ‘A Man for All Seasons’, where they put his head on a pike, and we said it metaphorically about Christopher Wray and Dr. Fauci.”
As well as making a comeback on streaming, Bannon is also making a resurcence in mainstream media, with appearances on the Democrat California Governor’s “This is Gavin Newsom” podcast and Bill Maher’s “Real Time”.
“I can give a punch and I can take a punch — the MAGA movement prides itself in being resilient,” Bannon said of how he has adapted from being banned to now being welcomed on even left-wing programs.
He’s glad for the opportunity to reach Americans on the left who have never heard him. He’s also focused on content that has a global reach (Although MGGA — Make the Globe Great Again doesn’t have the same ring to it). Spotify’s presence in more than 180 countries can help that.
“At least an hour we try to give over to just the international populist nationalist sovereignty movement,” Bannon said. “We have a lot of coverage of Hungary, Poland, Romania…”
During his career, Bannon has worked as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a Hollywood producer on nearly two dozen films, co-founder of Breitbart News, CEO of Trump’s 2016 campaign, and a chief strategist at the White House until 2018, when a report broke that he had made damaging comments about Trump’s children.
But Bannon has moved away from jockeying for power in the White House and is now wholly focused on learning his audience and building “War Room.”
Part of “War Room’s” appeal, Bannon says, is that the show respects its listeners, “Our audience is into the receipts [the evidence and data], it’s a working class and middle class audience.”
He says media snobs are clueless about his audience, citing a recent example of a reporter who described his show as him discussing a lot of “boring stuff” before going on a “rant.”
“Well, in that show, what he would call the boring stuff is what the audience wanted most,” Bannon explains.
“We do a lot capital markets, detailed politics, the precinct strategy, geopolitics, a lot of economy, a lot of the bond market, you know, things like the [Trump’s] Big, Beautiful Bill, we will drill down on the math.”
While Bannon is admittedly glad to be reinstated, he isn’t taking it for granted. He is also aware of how any company with the power to ban and then reinstate someone can change its policies on a whim, which is part of the reason he tells me he is “adamant” about breaking up giant tech companies.
“The oligarchs go beyond big tech, but I think Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google all need to be broken up,” he said.
“Big tech, I think, is the most dangerous thing in the country. It has potential great upside, but right now it’s oligarchy power and we have to go after them.”
“And I remember at the inauguration [this January], they were all sitting there thinking they own President Trump… It turned out President Trump started crushing them, whether in federal court or with other anti-trust efforts. They can’t be trusted as far as you can throw them… that’s why I think they have got to be broken up.”
But Bannon is also very critical of Elon Musk, who he tells me is an “apostate of the left” but who he has also slammed as a “parasitic illegal immigrant.”
Bannon and Musk are pitted against each other in an idealogical war over MAGA. When asked whether X offers a sufficient antidote to other tech behemoths, Bannon replied, “If you mention getting rid of H-1B work visas, you’ll see how suppressed you become.”
“Although Twitter’s been a sea change with the political right… Elon Musk could flip in a second… that’s where the danger [is].”
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