[Steve] Bannon had actually spent about a year in the mid-2000s in Hong Kong as the CEO of this bizarre video game company. The company didn’t actually make video games, what it did was try to profit from something called gold-mining, where you have players go in to these games, win gold and special armor and prizes, and then go sell it to gamers in the real world so they can kind of cheat and skip ahead a couple of levels.
This was a serious business, it was actually backed by Goldman Sachs, but it crashed and went bankrupt because the gamers themselves who weren’t cheating became enraged basically that these other people were doing, they put so much pressure on the gaming companies. The gamers organized themselves on these “World of Warcraft” message boards. They put so much pressure on the video game companies, that they decided to basically ban gold-farming, which killed Bannon’s business, but it awakened him to the power of what he called “rootless white males” who spend all their time online. And five years later when Bannon wound up at Breitbart, he resolved to try and attract those people over to Breitbart because he thought they could be radicalized in a kind of populist, nationalist way. And the way that Bannon did that, the bridge between the angry abusive gamers and Breitbart and Pepe was Milo Yiannopoulous, who Bannon discovered and hired to be Breitbart’s tech editor.
From the time I met him in 2011, he’s had exactly the same politics. The same stuff you heard from Trump, you saw on the campaign trail.
You're exactly right: