I want to return to what I wrote last week about Steve Bannon which, for me, sits at the center of the moral and political fracture that ultimately made silence impossible. It is not rumor. It is not gossip. It is not something whispered in dark corners. It is material that has been publicly reported, publicly discussed, and publicly debated. The reported text exchange as I discussed here on The Alex Stone Show involving Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon is not a throwaway curiosity. It is a window into judgment, proximity, and the kind of company a man is willing to keep when he thinks no one is watching.
According to publicly circulated materials and media coverage, the following e-mail exchange was attributed to Epstein and Bannon:
“EPSTEIN: Just received a video of Stone attacking you and jeffret clintons pimp etc
BANNON: roger stone…… who cares, he says stuff like this all the time
EPSTEIN: Face to face
BANNON: of course not on alex jones”
Those words, if authentic, do not merely show contempt. They show casualness. They show familiarity. They show a comfort level that should trouble anyone who believes character matters. Even setting aside the legal questions around Epstein, which are well known and a matter of historical fact, the optics alone are devastating. Why was Epstein communicating with Bannon at all. Why was Bannon even in a position to be relied upon, consulted, or treated as a strategic ally.
From a rhetorical standpoint, and I am being careful to make clear that this is commentary and not an accusation, relying on Steve Bannon to rehabilitate your image is like asking the Gambino crime family to help you become a better Catholic. It is like asking David Berkowitz to train your dog. It is like asking the Boston Strangler to give you a neck massage. It is like accepting a dinner invitation from Jeffrey Dahmer. These are metaphors meant to capture absurdity, not to equate actions, but they illustrate how bizarre and indefensible the situation appears through any reasonable moral lens.
The larger question is not simply whether conversations happened. It is what those conversations reveal about instincts. When a man positions himself as a moral compass for a political movement yet shows willingness, according to reported messages, to entertain exchanges with someone so publicly disgraced, it speaks volumes about priorities. Even the appearance of that proximity matters. Public trust is built not only on what is proven in courtrooms, but on the company one chooses to keep.
There is also the matter of how this same man has reportedly spoken about President Trump in private. Multiple books and media accounts, particularly those by Michael Wolff in is book “Too Famous” allege that Bannon used language such as incompetent and untrustworthy behind closed doors. Those are reported claims, and I treat them here as such, but the pattern they suggest is consistent with what I experienced personally. Loyalty in public. Contempt in private. Performance for cameras. Calculation in shadows.
And that is the bridge to what this meant in my own life. There is no love lost here. There was an arbitrary betrayal that thrust my family and me into a kind of hell that I would not wish on anyone. For what. Personal amusement. Personal advantage. Ego. Jealousy. Perhaps it was simply boredom. We may never fully know what motivated those choices. But I know what they did. They revealed character.
If it was that easy for him to diminish me in private conversations while smiling in public, then it is not paranoia to wonder how easily that same instinct could be turned on anyone else, even on Donald Trump himself. Today it is a dismissive text. Tomorrow it is a knife in the back. That is not hysteria. That is pattern recognition.
I also cannot escape the symbolism of who he chose to align with socially and strategically. Dinners, flights, associations that have been reported widely enough to enter the public bloodstream. None of it sits well. None of it aligns with the moral seriousness that the movement deserved. And when movements allow interlopers to barge in and rearrange the furniture, the rot tends to spread quietly at first, then all at once.
Jonathan Turley himself was quoted as saying in The New York Post, “There does appear a glaring and irreconcilable conflict in what Bannon stated in testimony before Congress and the court. What is striking is that this was not a peripheral point but one of the main areas of inquiry,” said Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School who testified during President Trump’s impeachment hearings. “He has two diametrically opposite sworn statements in a high-profile controversy with dozens of attorneys in attendance,” said Turley.
There is something else worth stating plainly. I am not writing as a man who claims to have always been perfect. Before my redemption in Christ, I was not a saint. I made my own mistakes. But I never pretended to be something I was not, and I never sold myself as the moral north star of a movement while behaving in ways that contradicted that image.
The personal element still matters. Even Bannon’s own daughters have reportedly been estranged from him at times. I do not present that as gossip, but as reported biography that invites a very simple human question. If the people closest to you cannot trust you at certain points in your life, why should a nation, a movement, or a president.
And then there is the outward persona, which might seem superficial, but in truth reveals priority. Steve Bannon looks like his shirts fear the iron more than he fears accountability. His wardrobe appears to be sponsored by rumpled laundry baskets everywhere. He has the aura of someone who treats showers as theoretical. These are expressions of satire and opinion, not statements of medical or factual condition, but they underscore what people see with their own eyes. A man careless in presentation often proves careless in judgment.
While I cannot recall the exact first moment we met, I can recall the physical impression he left in rooms. There were times when his presence was so jarring that people instinctively moved away. It was like an unspoken stampede, people finding excuses to leave, to drift toward doors, to clear space. The image that stays with me is people rushing away from Bannon as if trying to hop onto the last chopper out of Saigon. Not because of violence. But because of instinct. The human body recognizes trouble before the mind catches up.
More than anything, what makes all of this painful is the larger betrayal of a cause that deserved better. And MAGA right wingers embraced Bannon and his stances and in doing so created a Golem. They believed they were elevating a visionary when, in truth, they were empowering a man driven by sloth and pride, two of the Seven Deadly Sins that never announce themselves loudly at first. They whisper. They flatter. They inflate.
He welcomed just about anyone on his podcast, not always experts, and played them up as if he were hosting his own virtual Algonquin Round Table for dummies. He spoke with a kind of swarmy confidence that seduced people who were hungry for validation and belonging. Meanwhile, the Trojan Horse rolled quietly through the gates. This was not about serving a movement. This was about serving himself.
None of this is jealousy. None of this is sour grapes. This is about betrayal and the record now supports it. So with Christmas approaching, let us hope Santa decides to bring him some soap with that lump of coal.
