New Observer, “UK: Two Black Gangs “Barred” from Birmingham City Center”, 23 Aug 2017:

Two violent black gangs—the “Burger Boys Gang” and the “Johnson Crew” have been banned from the city center of Birmingham, England in what is a last desperate measure by the authorities to try and halt the nonwhite crime plague that is enveloping Britain’s second largest city.

       

According to a report in the Telegraph newspaper, eighteen blacks from the two notorious crime gangs have been banned from entering areas of Birmingham “following a landmark court ruling.”

The action, which also forbids the gangsters from associating with each other or participating in music videos that promote gang-related violence, was taken after a spate of firearms offences “that brought terror to the streets of the city during the summer of 2015 and start of 2016.”

Ten of the blacks are currently serving prison sentences, including Reial Phillips, 21, who was at the heart of a series of turf war shootings in the city, which left eight people injured.
The shootings were part of an ongoing feud between the Burger Boys Gang and the Johnson Crew, which escalated when members of the opposing factions uploaded rap videos online to taunt one another.

       

West Midlands Police and Birmingham City Council have now secured full injunctions against the 18 men in what is believed to be the largest group gang injunction ever secured.
The blacks, who are aged between 19 and 29, are forbidden from associating with each other and also from entering areas of Birmingham, including the city centre, Handsworth, Newtown, Winson Green and Lozells—all completely overrun by the Third World immigration invasion—for the next two years.

Another condition of the injunctions is that they are banned from participating in the music videos that promote or support gang-related violence.

The injunctions were granted after more than 80 witnesses gave evidence at Birmingham Crown Court and also allow police to restrict the vehicles and mobile phones they use.

Police and the council previously secured interim injunctions following a spate of gun and drug-related crime in the city during 2015.

Earlier, it was revealed that fewer than two out of five primary school pupils in Birmingham are white.

When considering that the population of North Korea has virtually the same genetics as South Korea (demographic “twins” - not all that different from Japan, either) an interesting case study is presented for the influences of social construction, as the contrasts of North Korean and South Korean society are vast despite indiscernible genetic differences. Nevertheless, let us not lose site of the obviously important evidence and factors of biological determinism either: the high i.q. of North Korea (like the south) can account for their capability to rapidly develop full nuclear capacity on their own.

DT, “North Korea shows Guam attack in new video as it warns of ‘merciless revenge’ against US over drills”, 22 Aug 2017:

North Korea has unveiled a propaganda video of its threat to fire missiles near the US territory of Guam as it threatened the US with “merciless revenge” for ignoring Pyongyang’s warnings over annual military drills with South Korea.

Displaying images of Donald Trump staring at a cemetery filled with crosses and Vice-President Mike Pence enveloped by flames, the nearly 4 minute video showed the island of Guam being targeted by intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

“Americans should live with their eyes and ears wide open. They will be tormented day and night by the Hwasong-12 rockets without knowing when they will be launched,” the caption reads, according to Yonhap. “They will be in jitters.”

“(We) just wish US policymakers should seriously think twice ahead of an obvious outcome (of a war),” another caption says, showing a photo of US Defence Secretary James Mattis. “Time is not on the US side.”

With the exercises continuing on Tuesday,  North Korea upped its rhetoric, saying it would be a misjudgment for the US to think that Pyongyang would “sit comfortably without doing anything,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, citing an unidentified military spokesman.

The ongoing drills and visits of US military officials to South Korea create the circumstances for a “mock war” on the Korean peninsula, KCNA said.

The comments represent a more belligerent tone after a war of words between the US and North Korea appeared to have subsided.

Mr Trump praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last week for waiting to launch missiles over Japan into waters near Guam, after previously warning of “fire and fury” if he continued to threaten the American homeland.

Tensions increased in July after North Korea conducted two intercontinental ballistic missile tests. Mr Trump has said military force is an option to prevent Mr Kim from gaining an ICBM that could deliver a nuclear weapon to the US.

Missile launch shown in new North Korean propaganda video, which threatens the US generally and Guam specifically.

North Korea targets Guam in propaganda video

Unperturbed street scene in Seoul, South Korea.

“Garden of Morning Calm”, South Korea.

Robert Kuttner revealed his conversation with Bannon: “To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything.” ... “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.” ...“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

Democracy Now, “American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner on His Extraordinary Interview with Steve Bannon”, 22 Aug 2017:

Democracy Now, Juan Gonzalez: Bannon’s departure came after a series of meetings last week with billionaire funder Robert Mercer who funds Breitbart and funded Trump’s campaign. Bannon met with Mercer on Wednesday and Trump met with Mercer on Thursday. Bannon departed the White house the following day.

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now: Just before he was ousted, Steve Bannon granted an extraordinary interview to Bob Kuttner, co-editor and co-editor of the liberal magazine the American Prospect

American Prospect Editor Robert Kuttner on His Extraordinary Interview with Steve Bannon:

Robert Kuttner: “Every once in a while you get lucky as a journalist, and he never bothered to put the conversation off the record. As you know in journalism if a high public official or anybody calls you and doesn’t bother to say that its off the record it’s the default is that its on the record ...and he proceeded to say a bunch of staggeringly incuatious things; on the assumption because I had also criticized America’s China policy as having been dominated by corporations at the expense of workers; and because that sort of overlapped his critique that we were sort of old buddies and soul-mates…and he spent to first few minutes of the interview kind of ingratiating himself with me, telling me what a thrill it was to meet me after all these years, he’s been reading my stuff…

It was one part naivete (which is an odd word to use for Bannon), it was one part bravado, it was one part recklessness, and it was weird, because if he knew that he he was on thin ice, what’s he doing reaching out to me? Can you imagine Bannon trotting into a meeting of the National Security Council saying, “you’ll never guess who agrees with my analysis, Bob Kuttner’ ...that would push him over the edge and in fact it kind of did.”

... (the best explanation is that) he was on the ropes and he was negotiating with General Kelley and Trump to postpone his departure to after labor day and he thought he could rally his forces on let’s get tough with China….

....if he’d already been fired it would have been completely bizarre that he would have called me and said, ‘hey won’t you come to the White house?’ because that would have been complete fantasy land.

...this is not the world’s most stable person; on the other hand he has a very strategic analysis of how you connect ‘neo-Nazi’, ‘White supremacy’ nationalism to economic nationalism. What’s interesting here is that he’s been able to sell his boss, Trump, on the get in bed with the White supremacist parts of nationalism but he hasn’t been able to sell the rest of the administration on economic nationalism because of course they’re in bed with the corporations; its complete fake populism:

The most recent example of that is the idea that he would use crony capitalism, hiring these private armies and masquerade as isolationism. Who does he think pays for those private armies? It’s the US taxpayer and expensive as the pentagon is, these private armies are even more wasteful and more expensive; so he’s all over the map on a lot of stuff.

But on one thing he’s quite coherent and that came through in the interview: he thinks the winning strategy is, you connect racist nationalism, anti-immigrant nationalism, to economic nationalism.

The other interesting question going forward is whether Bannon is going to play a kitchen cabinet role, where he talks to Trump in the middle of the night, coaches him; Trump is famous for these midnight phone calls.

Or is he going to join a Breitbart who right now is kicking the president in the shins as kind of a sell-out.

....and in that interview with The Weekly Standard he was kind of on both sides of the question, he said that the Trump presidency that we fought for was over….so, even Bannon can’t have that both ways, especially because Trump hates being upstaged by his advisors. That’s what did in Bannon, its what did in Scaramucci.”

Amy Goodman: Talk about the other issues he addressed with you, for example, Charlottesville. ...with Charlottesville his brand of White supremacy, neo-Nazi, the whole issue of The Confederacy, he suddenly comes front and center…and this is when he’s talking to you ...in the midst of this catastrophic news conference on Friday…in fact what was the timing and Trump saying both sides were responsible on Saturday…

Kuttner: He called me about 20 minutes before the press conference started and its pretty clear that his finger prints were all over Trump’s strategy of doubling down on the racism.. there was a kind of a war between the people like Jared and Ivanka, who wanted him to back off, General Kelley, and Bannon who wanted him to double down, which makes the timing of the phone call even weirder.

Goodman: He said to you ‘the Democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ‘em; I want them to talk about racism every day; if the left is focused on race and identity and we go with economics we can crush the Democrats.’

Kuttner: Yeah, and I pushed him very hard on that in the interview. I said look, even if we agree that our China policy is basically selling-out to a combination of Bejing’s economic nationalism and our own corporations who are happy to take the subsidies, happy to take the slave labor in China and then re-export back to the United States, that really does hurt American industry, hurts American workers; but, I said, even if we agree on that, why do you have to get in bed with neo Nazis on order to take a harder line on China on behalf of American workers? And that’s when he kind of drew this picture of a grand strategy where you connect the economic nationalism and the racism to the idea you box in the Democrats by forcing the Democrats to defend people of color.

You know, I was listening before we went on, Amy, to the fellow who was talking about pulling down the statue of Columbus, because it all started with Columbus. If that’s the strategy that the left adopts, it almost plays into Bannon’s hands…  I think if you took a vote and asked people do you agree that we ought to pull down the statue of Columbus because the racism and the anti-native peoples all started with Columbus, most people would side with Bannon; so he’s very astutely playing off of liberals and decent people against this idea that the White working class is beleaguered; he does this much more deftly than his boss does. You get the feeling that Trump’s default setting is now just pure racism, pure jingoism, nativism and even getting in bed with Neo-Nazis; whereas Bannon at least (((has a grand theory))) about what he’s doing.

There are two ways to look at what’s going to happen going forward, either with Bannon out Trump becomes even more unhinged, left to his own devices, or he decides to pull back and make more (((an alliance with the mainstream - laughs - far right, otherwise known as the Republican Party.)))

I think we’ll get an indication of this in Phoenix, if he does pardon Sheriff Arpaio, that’s doubling down on the Bannon recipe, because Bannon was the buy who really coached him, using Breitbart, about the genius of going after Mexicans as rapists, and going after anti-immigrants and building a wall, that was pure Bannon.

Juan Gonzalez: I would like to ask you about his remarks on North Korea?

Kuttner: He made it very clear that he completely disagreed with his boss and on this point Bannon was actually right, he said unless someone can explain to me how ten million South Koreans in greater Seoul are not going to be killed by conventional weapons in the first thirty minutes, this talk of war is not sensible, and of course that directly contradicted what his boss had said just days earlier.

Bannon’s view is that because the Chinese are not really helping us out with the North Koreans, they just go through the motions of that, it’s the logic of mutually assured destruction that prevents Kim from launching a nuclear attack on The United States, even Kim is not that crazy. And because that’s the reality, says Bannon, and I agree with him on this one point, we could be taking a much harder line on China. But State Department, Defense Department, U.S. Trade Rep. are all backing off on China on the belief that China is going to pull its chestnuts out of the fire with regard to North Korea.

That’s a shrewd analysis, this is not a stupid man. But its a hundred degrees opposite to what his boss says.

And iterestingly, both Trump and Kim have pulled back in the last few days and that’s also classic Trump, ‘oh, that was yesterday, never mind.’

Goodman: In fact, after pulling back on North Korea, Trump said he was going to bomb Venezuela.

Kuttner: Yeah, and what’s really interesting about bombing Venezuela is that he’s given a free pass dictators from the Philippines to Turkey to Hungary, to Moscow… but somehow..

Goodman: to Saudi Arabia

Kuttner: to Saudi Arabia, we could go on, but somehow he picks Venezuela to go after, so if you have a left wing regime violating human rights you go after them, if you have right wing dictatorships going after human rights, god bless them.

Goodman: So, he talked about the White supremacists at Charlottesville as clowns; can you talk about his evaluation of what took place there?

Kuttner: I think that was another effort in his part, completely insincere to ingratiate himself with a progressive journalist..  ...it’s like the guy who’ll say anything to get a woman to got o bed with him, so he starts improvising, ‘oh, they’re clowns, we don’t take them seriously, we’ve got to crack down on them’ ...you don’t think he believes that for ten seconds and his base knows he doesn’t believe that for ten seconds.

....it’s very encouraging to see the upsurge of activism on the anti-racist side. What is tricky is that most Americans who are not well defined left or well defined far right...

Goodman: Interestingly, the White nationalists have just cancelled a bunch of rallies after getting trounced in these organizing counter measures from Boston on…

Kuttner: I was very proud of Boston. We had upwards of 40,000 demonstrators.

The far right people who called for this rally were revealed to be the pitifully small group that they really are. And that’s what we need to show them up for.

....at the end of the day, there are not that many Neo-Nazis.

Part of the way that the way this is playing out makes it look as if a lot of American sympathize with neo-Nazis, they don’t. And they need to be contained, and the fact that decent Americans all over the spectrum are willing to come out, demonstrate, contain them, that’s fantastic.

Related article: Bannon’s disregard of ethno-nationalism is “leaked.”

  Mark Collett on the Jewish role in the refugee crisis.
 

  Related Story - J CORE: It’s All Worse, More Organized & More Them Than Even You Think.

Related article: A Bridge Too Near

  Oukabir confirmed shot dead in Cambrils

Daily Telegraph,  19 Aug 2017:

“Barcelona attack: Police raid home of imam linked to cell behind twin terror attacks.”

  Moussa Oukabir confirmed shot dead in Cambrils
  ​Cambrils shoot out ’ was like a horror movie’
  Who are the victims? British boy, seven, among the missing
  Who are the suspects in the Spanish terror attacks?
  Everything we know about first attack on Spain in 13 years

Catalan investigators on Saturday raided the house of an imam in the town of Ripoll they believe may have overseen the cell which killed 14 people in twin terrorist attacks in Barcelona and the seaside resort of Cambrils.

Police are trying to piece together how a cell composed of multiple sets of brothers from the same sleepy Pyreenes town came to carry out the devastating attacks, amid reports they planned to blow up the Sagrada Familia.

The home of the imam, named as Abdelbaki Es Satty, was raided overnight from Friday to Saturday, with officers reportedly seeking - among other evidence - DNA samples which might link him to a building in the town of Alcanar believed to be where the attack was prepared.

El Pais, a leading Spanish daily, said they were investigating whether the imam, who apparently left Ripoll around a month ago, might be one of two dead bodies discovered in the Alcanar house. Sources involved in the investigation told El Confidencial they believed he was a “spiritual or idealogical leader” to the cell members, radicalising them and helping them to plan the attacks.

The sources cited the lack of previous terror links among the group, and said they had detected a number of trips by some members to France and Morocco. Police did not officially confirm or deny the reports.

A spokesperson for the Catalan force told the Telegraph they were working on the “principle hypothesis” that the cell was comprised of 12 members, 11 of whom have now been identified and hail almost exclusively from Ripoll.

Five members died at the hands of police in the attack on Cambrils late on Thursday night, which killed one woman and injured several others.

Telegraph, “Barcelona terror attack: van crashes into crowd at La Rambla, killing ‘at least 13”, 17 Aug 2017:

Terror in Barcelona as van hits crowd in Las Ramblas

Driver arrested after escaping scene on foot

Spanish media reports 13 people killed

A white van plowed into a packed summer crowd this evening in Barcelona’s historic Las Ramblas district. Barcelona police called it a terror attack and local media reported 13 dead and dozens more injured.

The driver was arrested around two and a half hours after the attack, reports said.

The vehicle hit pedestrians in Las Ramblas, a busy tree-lined promenade in the centre of the city.

Catalan police tweeted “there are mortal victims and injured from the crash” without specifying any numbers. Spanish media, including Cadena SER radio station and TV3, reported up to 13 dead, while other media had varying death tolls.

The street is one of the most well-known and popular parts of the city, visited by tourists and locals alike.

Images posted on social media appear to show people being tended to as they lay on the street.

Reports said the driver escaped the scene on foot and was holed up in a bar in Tallers Street. Armed police ran down the streets and through a market, checking in stores and cafes.

In photographs and videos, at least five people could be seen lying on the ground in the streets of the northern Spanish city on Thursday afternoon, being helped by police and others. Other video recorded people screaming as they fled the van.

Telegraph, “Barcelona attack victims: dead named, as fate of seven-year-old boy remains unconfirmed”, 19 Aug 2017:

Family and friends have confirmed the death of loved ones following the attack in Barcelona which killed at least 14 people and left many others injured.

   

   
 

Vice News, “ISIS claims responsibility for deadly Barcelona van attack”, 17 Aug 2017:

A speeding white Fiat van plowed into pedestrians walking down Barcelona’s popular La Rambla boulevard Thursday, killing at least 14 and injuring more than 100, in what Catalan police are calling a terror attack.
Advertisement

The Islamic State group, through its media arm Amaq news agency, claimed credit for the deadly attack.

Police arrested two suspects in connection with the attack, identifying one as Driss Oukabir, a Moroccan man in his late 20s and another, still unnamed, as a Spanish national from Melilla. Oukabir reportedly rented the van from the town of Santa Perpetua de la Mogada, just north of the city. Neither of the two men arrested were driving the van, according to a senior police official. Police are actively searching for the driver.

The van mowed down dozens of people driving for about 500m before the suspects fled on foot, according to local media. Police say it was an attack “intended to kill as many people as possible.” The Spanish newspaper El Pais, quoting unnamed police sources, reported the perpetrators of the crash were holed up in a bar on Tallers Street, near Las Ramblas. Police said rumors circulating on local media that a hostage situation had unfolded after the crash were unfounded.

Catalonia’s Interior Minister Joaquim Forn confirmed that 13 people were dead, and more than 100 wounded.

  “It looked like something out of a film, guts and flesh.”

Officials initially described the incident as a “massive crash” and emergency services warned people to stay away from the area, closing metro and train stations in the general vicinity.

Eyewitnesses described the unfolding chaos as the reality of a terror attack set in.

“It looked like something out of a film — guts and flesh,” Alec Rugo, an American vacationing in Barcelona, told VICE News.

“It was really crazy. I didn’t know it was happening on the Ramblas,” said vacationer Moran Keren. “I saw some lady that I think was dying. It was crazy. A lot of people injured.”

Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said he is in contact with the authorities and that the priority for now was to attend to the wounded. Barcelona’s mayor said she was suspending her vacation to attend to the emergency.

[...]

In the last 12 months across Europe, there have been multiple incidents where vehicles have been driven into crowds of people, killing well over 100 people in Nice, Berlin, London, and Stockholm combined.

New Observer, “Africans Storm Cadiz Beach as Invasion Force Tops 118,684 as of August 6”, 10 Aug 2017:

African invaders have been filmed storming a beach in the Spanish city of Cadiz, after crossing the 60 miles between that city and the North African coast—and then scattering before authorities could catch up with them, in a vivid demonstration of the mass Third World invasion of Europe, just as the official number of nonwhite invaders of Europe has topped 118,684.

       
The video clip, filmed on August 9 on the Cadiz beachfront, shows a rubber dinghy full of nonwhites racing towards the beachfront, and just before it lands, the Africans disgorge and break out in a run for the beach, racing passed shocked holiday makers as they storm up into the city to vanish.

Invasion groups such as these are not counted in the official figures, which, according to the United Nations’ “International Organization for Migration” (IOM), reached 118,684 of 6 August 2017.

Of this number 116,692 of the nonwhite invaders had landed by sea—mostly by being transported to Europe by either the European Union’s own naval units or the race-traitor private far leftist European “charity” boats.

According to the IOM, the main nationalities of the nonwhite invaders arrivals (in descendant order) for June 2017 were as follows:

To Italy: Nigeria, Bangladesh, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Gambia; and to Greece: Syria, Iraq, Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

For July 2016, the main nationalities of the invaders arriving by land in Bulgaria were Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Turkey.

However, the IOM figures do not tell the full story of the extent of the nonwhite invasion.

According to the European Union’s “European Asylum Support Office” (EASO) “Latest asylum trends – June 2017” report, in June this year, there were 58,403 “applications for international protection” made within the borders of the EU.

Of that number, “only” 7, 7 916 invaders claimed to be “Syrians,” only 14 percent of the total number of recorded applications. In June 2017, Nigeria became the second main citizenship of origin, with 4,010 applications lodged—an indication that the fake refugee invasion is increasingly becoming sub-Saharan African in origin.

New Observer, “Violent Africans Storm Spanish Enclave of Ceuta in “WW Z” Type Zombie Attack”, 7 Aug 2017:

At least 300 Africans—out of a mob of thousands—on Monday broke through the border fence surrounding the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, in an attack which mirrored the mass zombie attack portrayed in the Hollywood film WW Z.”

     
The co-ordinated mass African attack started at 5 a.m. at the fence near Tarajalat. They stormed the fence en masse, nearly overwhelming the border guards.

Many were stopped, but around three hundred managed to break into the tiny enclave, which is located on the Moroccan coastline on the North African coast.

The invaders were remanded then to an immigration detention center where they submitted formal “asylum” requests, even though none of them come from countries which qualify in the slightest manner for “refugee” status.

Their intention is—as has previously been shown—to simply get to mainland Europe, where they quickly “vanish” while the race-denying liberals “consider” the “asylum” applications.

The African invaders were filmed celebrating their successful attack.

Last week, 73 African invaders used wire cutters to break through the razor-wire fencing to gain access to Ceuta. Spanish border police stopped another 180 invaders from entering through the hole.

Spain’s Interior Ministry estimated the number of invaders who had reached Spain via the border fence route had totaled 3,200 in 2016. So far in 2017, they say, that number has already doubled.

In February alone, about 850 African invaders pretending to be “refugees” stormed over the Ceuta border in a concentrated attack lasting four days.

Native blood trashed amidst aliens: Tarku, Finland.

Daily Mirror, 18 Aug 2017:

“Finland ‘terror attack.’

‘Three’ knife-wielding attackers ‘shouting Allahu Akbar’ stab five women and man in sickening rampage leaving two dead.”

Police have confirmed “several people have been knifed” in the centre of Turku this afternoon - and there are reports ‘a woman and a baby’ was attacked.

Armed police have opened fire on knife-wielding attackers who witnesses claim were ‘screaming Allahu Akbar’ as they went on a rampage ‘randomly stabbing people’ in Finland.

Two people have died in what is suspected to be a terror-related incident - although police say it’s too early to be certain.

Police have confirmed “several people have been knifed” in the centre of Turku this afternoon - including ‘a woman and a baby’ in a pushchair, according to local media.

Early confused reports appear to suggest there may be as many as three attackers - and at least five women and one man stabbed, possibly more.

Other reports say there was just one “young male” assailant spotted covered in blood instead - who bystanders tried to fend off with a baseball bat while others rushed to help victims.

Video footage has emerged of police arresting a man on the ground near a pool of blood - and an assailant is being treated in hospital, police say.

One person is reported to have died at the scene - while another died in hospital.

        ...purposefully leaked or not, apparently kissing-up to YKW

Robert Kuttner revealed his conversation with Bannon: “To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything.” ... “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.” ...“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

American Prospect, “Steve Bannon, Unrepentant”, by Robert Kuttner, 16 Aug 2017:

Trump’s embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea, and his enemies in the administration.

You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss’s continuing indulgence of white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led, to vilify the security chief. Trump’s defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday press conference, was tepid.

But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. “They’re wetting themselves,” he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I’d just published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon’s boss.

“In Kim, Trump has met his match,” I wrote. “The risk of two arrogant fools blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since October 1962.” Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?

I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak by phone. Bannon promptly called.

Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, “It’s a great honor to finally track you down. I’ve followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China.  You absolutely nailed it.”

“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”

Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China’s trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”

But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing’s aid on the North Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don’t want to mess with the trading system?

“Oh, they’re wetting themselves,” he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence. “I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State.”

But can Bannon really win that fight internally?

“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting. There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.” “We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, every day.”

Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.

There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First, to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon’s China trade strategy are other Trump administration officials, it’s not clear how reaching out to the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.

More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump’s election were “Resisting Trump” and “Containing Trump”) and assume that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.

The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the press. He’s probably the most media-savvy person in America. I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it’s losers. It’s a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

From his lips to Trump’s ear. “The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His enemies will do what they do.

Either the reports of the threats to Bannon’s job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting. Given Trump’s impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes. The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We’ll see if he’s still there.