Steve Bannon labeled America’s teachers “terrorists” while speaking from Charlie Kirk’s massive memorial service in Arizona on Sunday.
The former Trump adviser made the comment during a broadcast on the right-wing network Real America’s Voice, as his co-host Gina Loudon was celebrating Kirk’s “throwback ideas,” such as “young marriage” and having “lots of children.”
When Loudon noted that the late right-wing activist’s old-school ideas “are not popular on college campuses right now,” Bannon pushed back with a startling statement.
“Well, I actually think they are popular,” Bannon, 71, said, “but it’s not the way those kids—look, from kindergarten all the way up, they are essentially, you know, a third of the teachers are terrorists that are trying to form them.”
“That’s right,” Loudon chimed in.
Bannon, a father of three adult children, claimed young people are seeking out Kirk’s ideals even though “the way they’re formed” is “radical.”
“Particularly young men who have been told, ‘You’re bad, you’re everything evil, you’ve gotta change, we have to change you, we have to give you drugs’—that’s what I think underneath about the family, about marrying early, about having lots of kids, and about being a good dad, I think that that is right below the surface,” he said.
In the wake of Kirk’s murder at a Utah college campus, MAGA figures have increasingly spoken of a “terrorist” threat coming from “the left.”
Bannon declared, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country,” shortly after the assassination.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said the Trump administration would use “every resource” to “destroy” what he called left-wing “terrorist networks,” a pledge echoed by Vice President JD Vance.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump announced he was designating “Antifa,” the decentralized political movement he has railed against since his first term in office, as a terrorist organization.
Critics have accused the Trump administration of using Kirk’s killing and pretense of terrorism to go after political opponents and weaken democratic norms, with Calfornia Governor Gavin Newsom pointing out that Miller recently labeled the Democratic Party a “domestic extremist organization.”
