Former contractor Christopher Wylie described Cambridge Analytica as "Bannon's arsenal of weaponry to wage a culture war on America using military strategies."
Bannon wanted to use the sorts of aggressive messaging tactics usually reserved for geopolitical conflicts to move the US electorate further to the right, Wylie said. He had already directed a series of anti-establishment, conservative documentary films and presided over the far-right website Breitbart News, but Cambridge Analytica would mark another step in his overall ambitions to transform the nation.
With financial backing from hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer, Bannon co-founded Cambridge Analytica in 2013 as the US-branch of Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) Group, a British company that advertises how it has conducted "behavioral change" programs in more than 60 countries.
Wylie described Cambridge Analytica as "Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer using a foreign, military contractor ... to use some of the same techniques that the military uses ... on the American electorate."...
Wylie also said the company used focus groups and messaging trials in 2014 to test some of the concepts that became core themes of the Trump campaign, such as "drain the swamp" and imagery of walls.
"A lot of the narratives of the Trump campaign were what we were testing in 2014," Wylie said.
He added that Bannon directly presided over much of the company's initial research.
"Everything that we were doing ultimately had to be passed up to Bannon for approval," said Wylie, who left the company in late 2014.
Wylie said Bannon would fly to London about once a month for company meetings, and during that time he came to understand Bannon's ideology.
"He really liked the idea of using a military-style approach to changing people's perceptions," Wylie said.
How Steve Bannon used Cambridge Analytica to further his alt-right vision for America - CNNPolitics
