New book Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws captures Steve Bannon's War Room in all its defiance

It's not every day that you find yourself featured in a photo book in a four-page spread, but that's what I found when I opened up photographer Dan Fleuette's Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws. I'm in some damn fine company, as the table of contents can attest. There's features on major players in the conservative and MAGA movements, from Natalie Winters, James O'Keefe, Jack Posobiec, and Vivek Ramaswamy to Savanah Hernandez, Tim Pool, Robert F. Kenney Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, and of course, Steven K. Bannon himself.

At a party for the book this week at Raheem Kassam's Butterworth's (Kassam is of course also in the book—as I said, everyone is in it), Bannon made an appearance to lavish praise on Fleuette, to mingle with Fleuette's subjects, who he insisted look better in the glossy feature photos than in real life, and to remind us all that culture, as his old friend Andrew Breitbart said, is well upstream from politics. This book, already in its 3rd printing, is a cultural representation of where the nation has gone in the past eight years.

"Look, we're in a fight," Bannon told the well-heeled crowd, "you guys know about that fight, but part of that fight is Andrew Breitbart, my old partner, what he used to say (what was it, lifted off Gramsci, the Italian Marxist) culture is upriver from politics. So we've got to dominate the culture before we dominate politics." He referred to the book as the "photo album for the new cabinet," and he was only half joking. A number of those featured in Fleuette's book have been nominated to the cabinet. Matt Gaetz is in there too, though he withdrew his name from contention for the AG post. Others in the book have been working with the transition team or were seriously impactful in getting Trump back into the White House for a second term, like Scott Presler and Charlie Kirk. Still others are sitting representatives in the People's House.

Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws is "the pictorial history of the War Room," Bannon said. "This book is a cultural phenomenon because it's a snapshot in time of the new revolutionary generation." The photographs of all of us are accompanied by Fleuette's narrative about who we are, who we are in his eyes, and what makes us interesting. He includes all the relevant details, but he gives more than a snapshot into each person, getting the oeuvre of personality. About Kane, the face behind the viral aggregation site Citizen Free Press, he writes "To tell the truth, I began to wonder if Kane was an actual person or in fact some kind of moniker of a secret group." I'm sure that's what many people wondered before glimpsing his face in this book.

He calls Peter Navarro, a former Trump aide who was sentenced to a prison term for Contempt of Congress in refusing to turn over correspondence he had with Trump in the lead-up to and aftermath of J6 (Trump had said it was protected by executive privilege), Fleuette writes "Peter is a perpetual motion machine, a dynamo flying around at 100 mph, like a human Formula One racecar." The book is peppered with iconic quotes from Robert Frost, Iggy Pop, Henry Miller, and Charles Bukowski (that's who graces my pages).

Doctors who bucked the Covid narrative, like Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough are introduced with a reminiscence on how the pandemic and the accompanying guidelines were "trash science from the jump." Fleuette writes that "In the face of all this insanity stood a small but vocal contingent of doctors, scholars, and advocates who risked everything: their reputations, their livelihoods, their voices, their standing in the community, to tell the truth."

That is the essence of what War Room is all about: people showing up and telling the truth no matter what the cost. That's how we all got here, and despite being immortalized in the pages of this beautiful book, that is still a dangerous place to be. To stand unwilling to believe or spew out bullsh*t can be a lonely place, even surrounded by the luminaries Fleuette captured through his lens.

Fleuette spoke about the book, standing on stage at Kassam's Butterworth's, saying that his intention was to "understand each person" as he documented War Room guests and regulars. Kassam asked Fleuette how he knew that he should document the War Room, which began as a bit of a ramshackle collection of a podcast and a radio show. "I'd like to say it was that strategic," Fleuette said, "but it really wasn't. It became something of an exercise for me. I saw everybody coming in. It was some kind of historical happening." Fleuette wasn't commissioned to make this book, but he was compelled by what he was seeing, by a new movement, an emerging zeitgeist, and so he documented it. Rebels, Rogues, and Outlaws is the result.