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After the 2024 presidential election, I decided to try to make sense of the moment by listening to a full week of Steve Bannon’s podcast. It was, frankly, a slog, even listening at 1.5x speed: Bannon’s show produced an intimidating amount of content, and the relentless outrage, from both guests and hosts, made for an exhausting listening experience. But I did come away from the week with an understanding of Bannon’s appeal as a podcaster. He has a sort of bizarre rumpled charisma—the strange, compelling intensity of a man who has either had a mental break or discovered the dark secrets of the world. Bannon has both an insider’s knowledge and an outsider’s fury, a

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