Tim Dillon, Nazi

Fresh off giving a Nazi salute at CPAC last month, former Trump strategist Steve Bannon appeared on Tim Dillon’s podcast to explain that actually he was only waving at the crowd, just like he did in a speech before the French far-right party Front National seven years ago. "I gave a motivational talk and at the end I always give a wave to the audience," Bannon said. "I'm waving to the crowd.” Dillon, of course, happily accepted the lie. “Nothing you've said today indicates that you have any adoration for, or any sympathy for any of the Hitlerian…” he responded, trailing off as Bannon launched into a complaint about the media’s failure to cover his speech. That settles that—nothing more to be said.

The episode, recorded in Bannon’s own podcast studio, represents an astonishing (if not entirely surprising) new low for Dillon, a full-throated embrace of a fascist propagandist who once worked as a media consultant for Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex trafficker whose powerful associates are a frequent target of Dillon’s ramblings. As you might expect, Bannon in fact said quite a bit that indicates his “Hitlerian” sympathies. The episode covered a range of straightforwardly fascist talking points, including Bannon’s insistence that Democrats stole the 2020 election and his call for the mass deportation of millions of immigrants, including visa-holders. At one point he described Trump as “the American Cincinnatus” and “one of the two or three greatest Americans we’ve ever had,” adding that he wants to see “if he can’t stick around as long as possible… at least for another term after this.” When Dillon pointed out that this would require a constitutional amendment, Bannon replied: “We’ll see about that.”

Let’s back up first to his election denial, a torrent of easily disprovable lies that Dillon only barely feigns any skepticism towards:

Bannon: …What I find so laughable is we're actually winning elections. Let's take '24. After having the 2020 election stolen from us and being now de-banked, deplatformed—remember, I'm deplatformed everywhere, War Room's not—

Dillon: How did they do that? When you talk about that, because I will have to ask you this, people will jump on that and they will say that nobody found any proof and then the Republicans—

Bannon: That's not true.

Dillon: ...And the courts, yeah.

Bannon: Here's the proof. Here's one of the pieces of proof we got. In 2022, the people—remember, we got 63 and a half million votes in '16. I thought we did a pretty damn good job. We got 74 million votes in 2020, including we picked up 12 house seats. So you're telling me—in a Nancy Pelosi—I think we won 14 and then they won two, so net 12, we picked up 12 house seats in that election.

Dillon: What do you think the mechanism is for—

Bannon: It's mail-in ballots. I'm not a machine guy. I think it's mail-in ballots. It was very evident what they did in Pennsylvania and in Wisconsin and in Michigan. It was mail-in ballots. And remember, he only won by the same margin that we did, the 72,000. When you accumulate Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that's what Biden won by. You take the other states, these are small numbers, right? It's 10,000 in Georgia, 9,000 in Arizona. It was mail-in ballots. But here's the point. Where are those guys—

Dillon: But the argument—

Bannon: Where have they gone since then? They didn't vote in the midterm elections. They didn't vote in 2024, and so where are—

Dillon: Are they disoriented, disenchanted or—

Bannon: They're not, no—

Dillon: —They don't exist?

Bannon: They don't exist.

Dillon: Okay, that's fair.

Bannon: They don't exist. They 100% don't exist. They're disenchanted? They don't hate Trump? "Oh, they only vote because they hated Trump." They don't hate Trump any less. They see him as a hero. It's ridiculous. We can win. This is why, on democracy, we love democracy, because you're not going to beat us. Right now, our coalition is building.

Dillon: Right.

That’s fair, Dillon says, about the claim that 72,000 Biden voters didn’t exist. From here he prompts Bannon to explain why he’s advised Elon Musk not to cut Medicaid—apparently that’s Musk’s domain—and Bannon again responds with straightforward lies about undocumented immigrants: 

Bannon: Medicaid is now for the working class, the white working class and the Hispanic and Black. These are our voters. You have to be very careful. Medicaid, you have to get the illegal aliens off and you have to put work requirements, but dust. Don't think you can go and put a meataxe to it

Dillon: This project to destroy the distinction between citizen and non-citizen is entirely—not only to drive down wages, but to kind of destroy any idea of what a contract, a social contract—

Bannon: A national identity. Yes, a hundred percent. One thousand percent.

Dillon: A national identity and a contract between the citizens and the government saying, "I give you this, I am owed that." But if we destroy the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, right—

Bannon: Look at the noncitizen Medicaid. It is shocking, right? The noncitizens been given everything. Look at the 10 to 12 million illegal alien invaders, and I don't blame them. You and I would do the exact same thing. You were invited here by the federal government, right? People shouldn't, your audience should not lose track of the fact that in these reconciliation things we're talking about, for the mass deportations, it's $175 billion. We're asking for not just to secure the border, but for the mass deportation—

Dillon: And you're talking really about the people that came in the last four years.

Bannon: I'm right now not concerned about anybody that came in before January 20th, 2021 because the way I calculated, there's 10 to 12 million, plus a million bad hombres, right? Criminals.

To state the obvious, undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federal Medicaid funds beyond certain forms of emergency care; states that have expanded Medicaid access to undocumented immigrants have done so using their own funds. Contrary to Bannon’s fearmongering, the people he’s talking about have “more than five times the uninsured rate of U.S. citizens" according to one estimate. Bannon’s characterization of them as “illegal alien invaders”—cosigned by Dillon—is Nazi propaganda, plain and simple. So is his call elsewhere in the episode to deport not only undocumented immigrants, but also documented ones:

Bannon: And here's the problem, is we've invited the world. It is not acceptable in this nation to bring in foreign workers to compete against American workers for these jobs. This is bullshit. It should be—I want a total moratorium until we get sorted exactly what's going on. And until those billets—on HB1, H1Bs, which are just so corrupt, I would shut it all down. All of it. I deport, immediately, everybody. I would give every billet in 60 days, every job in 60 days to an American citizen. And Bob's your uncle. And we have to be this hardcore. I am very hardcore on these things. 'Cause if you don't take it to an extreme, you're never going to change.

That line at the beginning of the excerpt, “we’ve invited the world,” is a reference to the anti-immigrant slogan used by neo-Nazi Steve Sailer, “Invade the World, Invite the World.” It was later adopted by Breitbart, the alt-right rag Bannon used to run; and Dillon himself has trotted it out in his various anti-immigrant screeds, including this very episode:

Bannon: So the mainstream and liberal media have become—

Dillon: Just perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Bannon: Invade everywhere and invite everyone in. 

Dillon: Invite everyone in, it’s a Steve Sailer quote, invade the world, invite the world. And then you have a citizenry here that's immiserated, that is paying for all these wars. Their lives are terrible and getting worse.

Bannon: And their kids’ futures are shot. And they’re manning, remember, it’s the children of this eviscerated middle class and working class, their kids are walking patrol in the Hindu Kush, are with the 101st Airborne Brigade in Romania, are in the two carrier battle groups in the Red Sea—

Dillon: They’re calling this democracy. They’re calling you a fascist. They’re saying, “Steve Bannon’s a fascist.” What he’s describing right now is democracy. Have you noticed the way this is being presented? I’m sure you have. That this is democracy. The guy in the woods with the goat head is democracy. The council is democracy. You know what I mean?

A friend of mine joked the other day that Dillon doesn’t even do comedy anymore, he’s just a full-time Nazi. The funny thing is that he does still perform standup, and in fact he’s still quite popular. As usual, he’s currently touring clubs and theaters around the country, and in May he’ll perform at the annual Patrice O’Neal Comedy Benefit in New York City with luminaries Bill Burr. Like it or not, we’ll soon find out how high a tolerance his peers have for an unabashed Nazi propagandist. 

Before I leave you, I want to share something interesting that happened on today’s episode of 2 Bears 1 Cave, the podcast Tom Segura cohosts with Bert Kreischer. Segura was out, and Kreischer’s guest was Chris Distefano, the NYC comedian currently promoting his new Hulu special. (His other promotional efforts have included praising Donald Trump and complaining about trans people on Fox News.) Here’s a section where he explained to Kreischer that not all Nazis were so bad:

Distefano: A lot of these German soldiers, these Nazis—you know, there were definitely the SS and the bad ones, 1000% pieces of shit garbage people… But some of the Nazi army, the German army, they had no choice. They were like, either you join the army right now or we kill you. And so they weren't working the concentration camps, they weren't even, maybe some of them were not antisemitic at all. They were like, we don't want to do this. But then they gave them this crystal meth, basically. They would even give it to the soldiers. They would definitely give it to the SS guards. Then they'd give it to the army. 

And then the war ends, the drugs start to go out of your system, you start to have these mental health crisis. They would—suicide through the roof, and when they went back to Germany or whatever country they had to join the Nazis from, they were hated and they would be murdered. So it was like there's a period of 10 years after the World War II, it's really bad for quote-unquote innocent German people. 

This interests me because later in the episode, Distefano tells Kreischer about two experiences that made him realize Trump was going to win the 2024 election. The first was a conversation with his 18-year-old nephew, who told Distefano he wasn't going to vote for the Democrats because the Democrats are gay. The second was a gig he did for service members on an aircraft carrier in San Diego. During his set, he said, his mic stopped working when a generator ran out of gas. After struggling to keep the audience with him, he pivoted to political material he'd been warned away from.

Distefano: I said “Guys!” I was like—I didn't tell 'em to do this. This just happened organically. And I was like, oh shit. I go, “Guys,” I was like, “Fucking microphone broke.” And they were like, “Boo.” I was like, “Yeah.” I was like, “You know why?” I was like, “There's no gas in the generator!” And they were like, “Boo!” And I was like, “You know why?” I was like, “'Cause we're sending all the money to Ukraine.” And they were like—and then they, and then they go, “Ahhh!” And then out of nowhere, 5,000 of the United States Army start going, “Fuck Joe Biden! Fuck Joe Biden!” 

And I was like, is this bad? And then I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait!” I was like, “No, we can't say, can't say that!” To like, calm ‘em down. I was like, “My family's Puerto Rican!” And I started doing fucking Puerto Rican accents trying to get it back. But they started screaming “Fuck Joe Biden” and I was like, wowsers. I was like, oh shit, it’s over. And I knew it then. 

What a striking tension between those two anecdotes, no? On one hand, his apologia for the fascists he believes didn’t want to be fascists; on the other, his own personal encounter with the ones who do.