After high school Bannon joined the Navy where he served as an officer on a destroyer and later as a special assistant to the Chief of Naval Operations at the Pentagon. He attended Virginia Tech as an undergrad and then earned a Masters Degree in National Security Studies at Georgetown and MBA at Harvard.  Shortly thereafter, he made a fortune at Goldman Sachs. He has wisely picked moneymaking opportunities that have greatly enriched him (for example, by dint of an investment in the TV show "Seinfeld," he receives a healthy stream of royalties). But his main gambit has been to be part of rising political power and demonstrating a marked indifference to the collateral damage he does along the way.

Let us return to the example cited above. Bannon's modus operandi is goring established power structures both on the left and on the right. He specializes in appealing to the sometimes inconsistent and often contrary emotions of the American working class voter. And he does this successfully by keeping his opponents off balance. His comments on Catholicism bear this out in spades.

Back in 2014 Bannon somehow wrangled a plum presentation to speak before a Vatican conference on economics. Speaking to the gathering via Skype he echoed many of Pope Francis' themes about economic inequality, flavoring his statement with allusions to Distributive Justice. On its face it appeared to be an effort to be seen within the good graces of Catholic social justice. But just as quickly as Bannon will identify with the Church, he will not think twice about criticizing that same institution. Earlier this year in an interview with the Catholic neocon Robert P. George, The Hill reported:

I understand why Catholics want as many Hispanics in this country as possible because the church is dying in this country...

Earlier in that same interview, Bannon said of Ryan:

Paul Ryan is a Catholic in good standing. He's rubbing his social-justice Catholicism in my nose every second.

In one felt swoop Bannon was able to touch upon the criticism that many blue-collar Catholics would identify with while taking a simultaneous swipe at Republican party establishment figure Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. That was clearly by design.

It is not surprising -- indeed expected -- that such remarks would be criticized as anti-Catholic. To that end, several prominent Catholic groups and writers have made such criticisms (of course, our friend Bill Donohue was silent on the issue). Indeed his Paul Ryan comment was darkly ingenious. He managed to paint the Speaker of the House as a raging Catholic distributist when indeed his economic philosophy is still far more reflective of Ayn Rand than Pope Francis. But Ryan served a purpose and that was to criticize the very same faith Bannon had recently praised.

This is not the first time that Bannon has been charged with racial insensitivity. His associations with Breitbart News have reached a new low in appealing to the anti-Semitic prejudices of many on the Alt-Right. The often-cited headline about neoconservative William Kristol being labeled as a "renegade Jew" immediately comes to mind. But let us look closer at that article to better understand the game that Bannon is playing -- and it is a very dangerous one, indeed.

The hyperbolic Bannon has admitted that Breitbart News provides a platform for the Alt-Right. But when we understand that the Kristol hit piece was written by conservative writer David Horowitz, himself Jewish, we begin to get the full measure of Bannon's strategic recklessness.

Plausible deniability for his serial transgressions is a necessary element of the Bannon strategy. He will bump up to and even cross into anti-Semitism by a flagrant anti-Semitic remark but use a Jewish writer, conservative David Horowitz, to do so.  Likewise, with his blistering criticism of the Catholic Church's immigration policy he could again point to his own roots in Catholic economics and his Vatican appearance. In this way he can deny being either anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic but still tickle the prejudices of those who despise Jewish intellectuals or Catholic empathy for the marginalized immigrant -- hence the danger of his game.

Bannon likes to state that he is not a white nationalist but simply a nationalist of an economic bent. He understands the benefit of New Deal-style stimulus. To that end there is a dose of Keynesian stimulus in his ideas in that he believes in infrastructure investment. However, unlike Keynes he fails to advocate the use of fiscal policy to fund such final projects. This again serves him well to the unsuspecting observer to whom he may appear to be a Catholic distributist in the mode of Monsignor John A. Ryan.

But Bannon is no Monsignor Ryan.

A better analogy would be Reverend Charles Coughlin -- the anti-Semitic populist priest who subverted distributive justice teachings to fit a demagogic movement. Like Coughlin, Bannon is not above marrying very un-Christian bigoted overtones to Catholic economic pleas for justice. This is not a message that is neither fully pro nor anti-Catholic (or for that matter pro or anti-Jewish) but one that is truly opportunistic

Bannon exposed the heart of his message when he told The Hollywood Reporter that "Darkness is good ... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That's power. It only helps us when [liberals] they get it wrong. When they're blind to who we are and what we're doing."" The reader should take note of the very dark figures he pointed to. All of them, whether real or fictional, were power-above-all-else characters.   And much like those characters he so openly admires he is not above doing collateral damage to our civil discourse, notions of domestic tranquility, and the very civility of American democracy.  After all, it is not justice that he seeks