Italian court green lights Bannon-linked 'gladiator school' for right-wing politicians

Allies of former Donald Trump are looking to set up a “gladiator school” in the mountains of central Italy for aspiring right-wing politicians.

Former British Conservative European Parliament staffer Benjamin Harnwell — and associate for former Trump advisor Steve Bannon — rented out a 700-year-old monastery in 2017 for the “Academy for the Judeo-Christian West” that he founded with Bannon. After years of legal wrangling over the property, a magistrate in a northern Roman courthouse ruled that the property was rightfully his, Harnwell declared to Politico.

“Steve Bannon’s Academy for the Judeo-Christian West — the ‘gladiator school’ — lives to fight another day," he told the news site.

Harnwell told Politico five years of grueling lawsuits about the property that went through civil and criminal courts were “politically driven."

The ruling potentially will likely allow for Harnwell to reclaim the monastery after he was pre-emptively evicted in 2021 after activists from a nearby town demonstrated against its occupation by individuals linked to the far right.

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"Funded by Bannon and a coterie of unnamed associates in right-wing circles, Harnwell had been the sole applicant to lease the monastery when the government was seeking new buyers in 2016 after the friars who had occupied it for seven centuries began to dwindle and could no longer manage the upkeep," Politico's report stated.

“They destroyed my reputation with accusations they knew weren’t true even at the time they were making them," he said.

The proposed academy's curriculum is a mix of libertarianism and conservative Catholicism and is funded by Bannon and "a coterie of unnamed associates in right-wing circles," Politico reported.

After being vindicated from accusations by Italy’s top state prosecutor alleging that he had fraudulently obtained the lease for the monastery, Harnwell said that anyone "who had followed this case from the beginning and had followed it closely knows that no crime had been committed."