Above: Laura Murphy-Oates looks at how responsible Facebook is for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Donald Trump’s former right hand man Steve Bannon has kept a relatively low profile since “leaving” the White House following the 2017 Charlottesville riots.
The former executive of Breitbart News is one of the main - and the only named - financial backers of the new ‘Academy for the Judeo-Christian West’ at Trisulti Charterhouse in Collepardo, Italy.
It’s a school for the next generation of alt-right leaders.
The monastery will be "the spiritual home of Bannonite thought," according to Benjamin Harnwell, school administrator and leader of the Institute for Human Dignity (DHI) - the NGO behind the operation.
The Institute for Human Dignity
The DHI has been around since 2008, primarily campaigning governments for the furthering of “Judeo-Christian western values”.
- They are extremely pro-life e.g. no abortion and no euthanasia.
- Modern society and evolving civil rights are taking humanity further away from the ‘light’.
- The government is too involved in everything.
- They exist because of ‘intolerance to Christians’.
Harnwell has previously expressed his own views on homosexuality.
During the 2011 Irish presidential election - in which two candidates had ties to the DHI - he wrote an op-ed, blaming the upcoming fall of western society to ‘moral decadence’ (aka, homosexuals).
Bannon’s been publicly connected to the group since 2014, when he was invited to speak on the issue of poverty - praising European far-right groups in the process.
Locals not happy
The school’s new site - a 13th Century monastery - had been state run up until 2018.
Last year, the DHI won a government tender to rent the location for 19-years for 100,000 euros ($A158,702) a year.
Some 300 locals gathered in December to protest.
“We cannot even begin to consider allowing Steve Bannon to come to our town and settle here,” local Councillor Daniela Bianchi told Al-jazeera.
“Just so he can do whatever he likes and attack the European Union.”
Harnwell already resides in the mostly-abandoned monastery and if everything goes to plan, he will round up recruits in Rome, where the DHI offices are currently, before moving them to Trisulti in 2020.
The battle over ‘fake news’
Bannon’s educational endeavours come at a time when others are actively trying to stamp out a wave of alt-right ‘fake news’.
As the co-founder of Cambridge-Analytica, Bannon is largely credited with weaponizing fake news to help Trump’s Presidential win.
Bannon also used his then-power over alt-right publication Breitbart News to push his personal, extreme right wing ideas - which range from a strong denial of climate change to equating the work of Planned Parenthood to the Holocaust.
The impact was undeniable. A 2018 Forbes survey found 31% of Americans felt they were exposed to fake news in a given week. A 2017 study also found 31% of US teenagers had unknowingly shared a piece of fake news.
Projects have now been established to tackle the problem.
The News Literacy Project provides teachers with the tools and information they need to teach high school students how to discern real news from fabricated news.
Last year the project was given a $1 million grant from Facebook to further their work - interesting, given the social media platform was the centre of the Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal.
Closer to home, Melbourne University have launched ‘Fighting Fake News’ a project researching aimed at understanding how people come to believe fake news sources.
Researchers hope they’ll eventually be able to predict what type of ‘interventions’ would stop this belief, as well and when and how to introduce them.
