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Steve bannon vox spain11/7/2023 ![]() (The team has been renamed Big Green, to Fantini’s chagrin.) He applied to the academy in 2018, sending Harnwell a few clips blasting political correctness from the magazine he edits, The European Conservative. He bitterly recalled being labelled a “fascist” in college for wearing a Dartmouth Indians sweatshirt. “It’s wrong to accuse someone of racism and xenophobia, or Nazism, or any other ‘-ism’ without knowing their beliefs,” Fantini said by phone. ![]() The student he called, Alvino-Mario Fantini, is a fifty-two-year-old Ph.D. “We want people who have a sense that Western civilization is under threat,” Harnwell said. Applicants range in age from eighteen to eighty and include Italian academics and former U.S. Students were to have resided in old monks’ cells (no Wi-Fi), among a few lingering brothers. If the plan goes ahead, gladiatorial training in the Catholic conservative arts will be offered to about seventy-five students, who will receive academic credits, toward a master’s degree, from an as-yet-undisclosed Catholic university in the States. Bannon blames “corrupt bureaucracy,” saying, “This is the sort of thing you expect from third world countries, not a founding nation of Western Civilization.” He has until June to appeal, before the carabinieri drag him out. Harnwell spent the past two years battling lawsuits, and now the Italian government is trying to evict him. With Trump’s defeat and Bannon’s 2020 arrest, on wire-fraud charges (he was pardoned), the work of setting up the school feels newly urgent. Set high in the mountains and decorated with frescoes, the monastery is a lonesome outpost on Bannon’s European frontier. The aim, Bannon said, was “to generate the next Tom Cottons, Mike Pompeos, Nikki Haleys: that next generation that follows Trump.” ![]() Bannon has long been trying to foment populist insurgencies across Europe, and he viewed Trisulti as the perfect location for the Academy for the Judeo-Christian West, in which a new class of right-wing “culture warriors” would be trained. Several years ago, encouraged by his friend Steve Bannon, the strategist behind President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, Harnwell, a forty-five-year-old British Catholic, began leasing the monastery, for about a hundred thousand dollars a year, from the Italian Ministry of Culture. He then sped off in a white Fiat Punto, heading to the Certosa di Trisulti, a vast, eight-hundred-year-old charterhouse that is both his home and the site of his school. Harnwell hung up, saying that he’d been kidding about the skinhead thing. “A journalist is looking to speak to some students,” he said into the phone, “and I don’t want him to wind up talking to some skinhead.” He listened, a religious medal rattling against his chest, his slicked-back hair shining. At a café in a mountain town east of Rome, Benjamin Harnwell was wondering which of the five thousand applicants to his right-wing “gladiator school” he could introduce to a reporter without embarrassment. ![]()
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