This is Bannon’s tone much of the time: warm, welcoming, protective of his “community,” constantly praising listeners for their kindness, intelligence, and courage. All of it is designed as a rebuke to the harshness, snobbishness, sectarianism, and identity absolutism on parts of the highly educated left. Of course, Bannon has another mode—the one in which he bares his teeth and threatens to put “heads on pikes.” But that mode is reserved exclusively for his enemies.

XREF: This in-group/out-group rhetorical bifurcation is a classic populist and fascist communication pattern, echoing scholarship on authoritarian appeal and the friend/enemy distinction in political theory.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 416