Is Trump putting fascists in charge of the Voice of America?

But by far the most astonishing and chilling rapprochement recounted in Teitelbaum’s book is the one Bannon attempted with Aleksandr Dugin during at least one eight-hour-long meeting in Rome in November 2018. Dugin has come to espouse his own distinctively Russian form of Traditionalism through the intermediary of Martin Heidegger, the brilliant German philosopher who became a committed Nazi and continued to express admiration for a highly idealized form of National Socialism long after Hitler’s defeat in 1945. The concept that Dugin has developed most fruitfully from Heidegger is the idea that the modern world is on the cusp of “another beginning” in which its reigning ontological dispensation will fully give way to nihilism as a prelude to giving birth to a new form of being, knowing, and acting.

How does the modern world — and the United States in particular — appear in light of this apocalyptic vision? Just last week, Dugin let us know. In a brief statement posted to his public Facebook account, he gave us his interpretation of the Black Lives Matters protests sweeping the country. Dugin describes two “poles” at war with one another in the U.S. The first, dominated by BLM and Antifa, is “incompatible with the future existence of the United States of America as [a] strong and dominant country.” The other pole, represented by Donald Trump and his supporters, is “deep, strong, patriotic, and (relatively) sane.” The clash between these two Americas will lead to an “existential war.”

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