By studying history. At its core, the sludge Bannon is vomiting isn’t any different from the garbage spoken by the right-wing populists of the past. Bannon doesn’t deserve a platform for any reason.
I’m afraid we don’t, because the very fact that fascism is resurgent at all at this moment in the West tells us that history isn’t being taught properly. Morris may have taken another misstep here, and the more I look into this the more of a pattern of willful blindness to the consequences of his work I see – despite my goodwill for him and admiration of his craft. I don’t think the legacy he’ll leave behind is the one he’s hoping for and expecting.
I haven’t seen the film yet (only the clips Morris has posted), but from the look of things, he eschewed the Interrotron completely and instead interviews Bannon face to face sitting at a table, likely to avoid that perception. And I saw one clip – included in the trailer – in which he accuses him of “mean-ness and racism” and then flat out calls him “crazy”. So I’d hope he’s not being accused of sympathy towards this subject.
That said, even if the film spends 90 minutes eviscerating Bannon, it’s still giving him a very large platform to speak his mind. And at this point, I don’t think he deserves even that.
Morris goes into the subject of interviewing unpopular people in Preet Bharara’s interview:
I just can’t blame Morris when: the high-level venture capitalists who invested hundreds of millions into her startup, the people who had everything to lose, the people who had the power (if not the will) to deeply investigate Theranos before she was exposed, were similarly duped.
