The long-term Stephen Bannon collaborator and first producer of “Bannon’s War Room” told RedState the moment he knew the MAGA news show broadcast four hours daily had become a political juggernaut: once Real America’s Voice installed cameras in the studio.
“RAV came in, and they set up all the video stuff, and so we started growing immediately,” said Dan Fleuette, the author of the book “Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws: A Pictorial History of WarRoom,” scheduled to drop Oct. 29 — the day Bannon is expected to be released from the Federal Incarceration Center, Danbury, Connecticut.
“We started going up, not just on their networks, but if you remember, this was back in the glory days, in the old salad days when we had Facebook, Spotify, YouTube,” he said.
“It was once we got on those platforms and started kicking, that’s when I knew it was fricking huge because I could literally watch the numbers on YouTube,” the Bellingham, Massachusetts native said.
“You could see how many people are watching live, and it’s like half a million live. That doesn’t even count going back and watching it after it’s been on or watching certain clips or whatever,” he added.
“The book itself is — I know it says a portrait history, and it is a portrait history — but it is a bunch of spreads of different people who have been on and different stories about these people,” he said.
“The stories could be about ‘War Room’ and their appearances. What I wanted to do was get away from bios and ‘Oh, he came on, and he talked about economics, and it was great,’” he said.
Fleuette said the book is about the show but really about the people who came together to make the show work.
“I try to understand some of the people I know really well, and I’ve got a history with them,” he said. “I talk about what kind of person they are and how they affect the movement or how it really ends up being a book about courage and fear and the rebel spirit.”
Today, even with Bannon held in Danbury, “War Room” continues for two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and two hours on Saturday morning.
“Bannon’s War Room” launched on October 21, 2019, and its first iteration was inspired by the war room set up by President William J. Clinton’s staff and legal team when Capitol Hill Republicans impeached him in 1998.
In a sense, it was and is the fulfillment of the war room Bannon created in the summer of 2017 when he was the White House chief strategist. He recognized that the May 17, 2017, appointment of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III directly threatened President Donald J. Trump’s tenure.
It was not a bad guess. After all, President Richard M. Nixon won 49 states in the 1971 presidential election, but as he started his second term, he was also handed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox Jr., appointed May 18, 1973.
As Bannon was organizing the White House staff and outside supporters to answer the Mueller threat, the incoming White House Chief of Staff, retired Marine Lt. Gen. John F. Kelly, told Trump he would only take the job if Bannon were shown the door.
Fleuette said he always told Bannon to do a podcast because he knew Bannon’s natural manner as a broadcaster that he demonstrated as a host on Breitbart Radio on SiriusXM and the Sunday night show he hosted on WABC.
The WABC show was the real beginning of “War Room,” he said.
“He’d have Andrew Breitbart all the time on, and dude, let me tell you, those were some of the funniest shows I’ve ever listened to,” he said.
“Freaking — those two together, they were killing me, man. Genuinely, it was like comedy, but it was serious and hard-hitting, and the way that Steve’s able to connect with people because he is a broadcaster, but really what he is, is he’s a connector.”
The author said that in addition to Bannon’s natural grace at the microphone, the former Breitbart executive chairman draws on an encyclopedic understanding of history, economics, and culture.
“He’s able to put all these crazy events that have happened throughout history, which he’s very knowledgeable about,” he said.
“He’s got this incredible — this thing [I] was always jealous about him. I read a ton of books, but I forget a ton of what I read,” he said.
“He’s able to take all that broad knowledge and put it all together and weave a story for people, so people walk away and they’re like, ‘Whoa, not only was I entertained, but I just learned something, and now I feel empowered.’”
That is the magic for the show, he said.
“I think [that’s] what his special power is,” Fleuette said. “First of all, he cares about his audience. He connects with his audience, but he leaves them not feeling miserable.”
One of the first struggles was the search for a home. For a time, Fleuette spoke with One America News about using the channel’s studio at 101 Constitution Ave, N.W., in D.C., which is a short walk from Bannon’s home at the Embassy.
I was working at OAN at the time, and having worked for Bannon and with Fleuette at Breitbart, I was part of trying to connect the dots to bring the show to OAN. However, it was too difficult to resolve the studio schedule since, in those days, talk show guests came to the studio rather than dialing in from home.
When it did not work out with OAN, Fleuette secured space in the basement of the Citizen’s United Capitol Hill headquarters with microphones and equipment borrowed from the “Godzilla of Truth” John Fredericks, and the show was carried on the John Fredericks Radio Network from the beginning through this spring.
“We turned into a podcast as well, so we were basically doing the show through an old Comrex system, and it was just people sitting around — we did that for, I would say, probably three weeks, three to six weeks,” he said.
The two men had worked on projects in the past going back as early as 2004 when Fleuette was a producer for the Bannon documentary “In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed.” Among the other films they worked on together were the 2011 “The Undefeated,” about former Alaska Republican governor Sarah Palin, and the 2016 “Clinton Cash,” based on the research and book by Peter Schweizer.
“I had been telling Steve for years, dude, you got to do a podcast. Let’s do it,” Fleuette said.
“We were super busy at the time–if you remember, we were traveling in the world and all that stuff, getting ready for the 2020 election,” he said. For context, this was also when Bannon and “War Room” regular Benjamin Harnwell tried to stand up the Dignitatis Humanae Institute at an abbey in Trisulti, Italy.
“It was something that I had been wanting to do for a long time, and the thing is, I knew there would be an audience — that we would grow into the audience for sure,” he said. “And we did. We did, and it was really pretty quickly.”
Fleuette said that from the beginning, the concept was to create a command post for MAGA activists across the country, especially for those who felt isolated.
Bannon uses the show to connect people to ideas, other like-minded people, and action, he said.
“When you add that voice together and you get other people to do it, dude, it becomes incredibly powerful,” he said.
“The power of the show is how he’s able to motivate people and engage people and get them to take action,” he said.
“One hundred percent, it is the most activist audience I have ever seen in my life,” the producer observed.
“They’re not just listeners. They’re freaking activists.”
