Cognitive Manipulation and Power Narratives: An Analysis of Contemporary Political Discourses

Abstract

This chapter examines Steve Bannon’s political narrative as a discursive architecture of contemporary fascism, centered on algorithmic manipulation and cognitive colonization. Based on a corpus of twenty interviews conducted between 2017 and 2025 (877 minutes), textual mining techniques using IRaMuTeQ were applied, including descending hierarchical classification, similarity analysis, and correspondence factor analysis. The findings reveal a high degree of semantic coherence organized around binary oppositions—people vs. elites, illegal immigrants vs. native workers, Western civilization vs. radical Islam—that structure a discourse both emotionally effective and politically mobilizing.

The study identifies three main narrative axes: the construction of symbolic enemies, the promise of redemption, and the systematic activation of political emotions such as fear, resentment, and indignation. These elements converge in what we define as a predictive discourse matrix, capable of anticipating how specific “trigger events” (migratory crises, social protests, China’s geopolitical rise, progressive elections) activate preconfigured emotional responses within the Bannonist framework.

Beyond description, the chapter advances a strategy of ethical counter-narratives inspired by Paulo Freire, which reframe exclusionary discursive logics into registers of plurality, social justice, and critical consciousness. In this sense, the analysis does not merely expose authoritarian rhetoric but highlights the need to reclaim algorithms and language as tools of cultural and pedagogical resistance.

This work contributes to understanding digital fascism as a mutation of classical authoritarianism and provides a replicable methodological framework for the study of other contemporary populist leaders.