From an interesting article that talks about Bannon's background. Born middle class in Richmond, Va, UVA undergratuate, Navy, stand-out at Harvard Business School, Goldman Sachs, Breitbart. An all-around great guy, by most accounts.
"Harvard Business School [c]lassmates remember him wearing his conservative beliefs like a badge: He would carry it into almost any discussion.
Several of his fellow students are shocked at the comments they now see attributed to Bannon, and those that come out on Breitbart, the conservative website that he runs. A May 2016 article called Bill Kristol, a longtime Republican and Weekly Standard editor, a “renegade Jew.” In July, an article said that if women did not want to be harassed online, they should log off.
Women, the article said, are “screwing up the Internet for men by invading every space we have online and ruining it with attention-seeking and a needy, demanding, touchy-feely form of modern feminism.”
“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy,” Bannon told The Washington Post in January. “We think of ourselves as virulently antiestablishment, particularly ‘anti’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”
It’s the kind of language that was virtually unheard of in his Harvard days, from Bannon or anyone else. And some of those who got to know Bannon back then say they don’t think he believes some of those things, even now.
Instead, they believe he is simply doing what he was taught more than three decades ago: exploiting a business opportunity, this time in the furious, neglected legions of the white middle class. He saw a market in their sense of alienation, and Trump’s election suggests that his forecast was truer than most.
“If you were asking me about some of the articles published and things clearly intended to be lightning rod, I’m not sure Steve subscribes to those beliefs,” said one former classmate, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But there’s a strong argument to be made that he was doing whatever any good business leader would do, which is serving his customers and providing a product.”
In that sense, the classmate said, they see Bannon now as the same brash and driven striver they saw 32 years ago when he joined their class.
“A lot of people give him credit for being the brains behind this political revolution, almost as if it’s coming out of nowhere,” the classmate said. “That’s very consistent in the behavior I saw from Steve in the HBS environment
“In a way, he would surprise people with his insights and the extent of his understanding of a complex situation. But doing it from the fringe. And the fringe in that case was skydeck [section of the lecture hall]."
The perch Bannon will soon occupy as Trump’s chief counselor and strategist is no longer the fringe of the classroom, or the fringe of anywhere. It’s the Oval Office."
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