It took eight hours to be precise. From Dominic Green writing at Spectator:
Who’s afraid of Steve Bannon?
The New Yorker’s cancellation of Steve Bannon’s appearance at the New Yorker Ideas Festival shows that the New Yorker has no idea what it is doing. Not because it invited Bannon to be interviewed on stage by New Yorker editor David Remnick, but because Remnick reneged on the invitation only eight hours later, and because the reneging was so hasty that it cannot be presented as a thoughtful statement of journalistic principle. It looks more like the result of panic and fear, the emotions that Steve Bannon, by his own admission, exploited so successfully in 2016.
Dominic covers what some of the other participants thought about Bannon's invite and then writes about what we missed by dis-inviting him:
We don’t yet know whether Bannon was only the man for an hour that came and went, or whether his ideas and strategies have lasting purchase on American politics. Getting him on stage in New York might have helped to answer that question. David Remnick is not a stuffed shirt like Anderson Cooper. He’s a proper journalist of the old school. Bannon clearly isn’t stupid, either. He was crucial to outplaying the Clinton machine, perhaps the most successful operation in modern American politics.
Remnick would have given Bannon a serious intellectual testing. Bannon would have worked on Remnick’s blind spots, too. It would have been fascinating, in the way of Ali v. Frazier or Frost v. Nixon or Vidal v. Mailer. If all those bouts seem like ancient history, it is because they are. There isn’t enough serious, open engagement in American politics, and this had the potential to become a classic.After the cancellation, much tweeting was made about how the New Yorker, by inviting Bannon to its Ideas Festival, was ‘normalising’ or ‘mainstreaming’ various forms of extremism. This suggests that many on the left have yet to understand the nature of the shifts taking place around them. The mainstream is not the New Yorker (circulation in 2017: 1.23 million). The mainstream is the massive and raging torrent of social media (circulation frenzied and constant).
So true - this would have been a fascinating thing to watch. So sad that the left stomp out any narrative that doesn't agree with theirs. I welcome new ideas and if I find hard truths that disagree with my narrative, I verify from multiple sources and change my narrative. 9/11 was a big volte-face for me - used to be very liberal and am now very libertarian.
To quote Andrew Wilkow: Liberalism: Ideas so good they have to be mandatory.
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