Following yesterday’s Michigan primary, former Trump strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon warned his audience about a “red-green alliance” between Democratic voters and “radical Islamists.” 

Bannon was responding to results of the February 27 Michigan presidential primary in which over 100,000 voters cast an “uncommitted” ballot on the Democratic side. The “uncommitted” campaign was organized in recent weeks as a protest against President Joe Biden’s continued support for Israel amid a worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

During the February 28 edition of his show, Bannon hosted anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney to falsely equate support for a ceasefire in Gaza with support for terrorist groups. (A permanent ceasefire is actually popular among a wide swath of American voters.) 

“The mainstream media really does not want to talk about this,” Bannon declared. He added that Gaffney and others “have warned for years about this red-green alliance, and we saw it last night in Michigan. I actually had some very prominent people call me this morning and say, ‘Oh, all we have to do is start doing more ads and pushing more ads, you know, tell the rural community that these radical Islamists want to throw gay people off buildings and that they’re not feminist.’ I said no, you’ve missed the point. That is not going to work at all. People have tried that, it’s had no impact.” 

Bannon then asked his guest to explain how this “red-green alliance” was behind the primary results in Michigan, citing voters in the liberal college town of Ann Arbor and the majority Arab city of Dearborn, home to the country’s largest Muslim population per capita. (Dearborn was singled out as a “captured city” by right-wing radio host Charlie Kirk in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.)

Gaffney baselessly claimed that last night’s protest votes for “uncommitted” were a “project, unmistakably, of the Muslim Brotherhood and other — well, I call them Shariah supremacists.”

“By the way, it was over 100,000 votes,” Bannon replied, after Gaffney was seemingly disconnected for technical problems. “This was lack of enthusiasm for Biden, a lot of that driven by this red-green — what we call the axis.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Gaffney “routinely warns of a ‘red-green’ alliance between liberals and violent Islamist terrorists” as far back as 2012. Several other right-wing outlets have recently fearmongered about a “red-green” alliance to attack humanitarian protests and movements during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and to falsely imply that an extremist, subversive political agenda is popular among the Democratic base. 

Given Bannon’s prominence in the MAGA media universe, his show sometimes functions as a platform for message testing on issues that Trump-aligned figures hope to capitalize on ahead of the 2024 election.