Osama bin Laden’s niece, Noor bin Laden, voiced her support for the so-called “ultra MAGA movement” in the US while appearing on Steve Bannon’s podcast this week.
Ms bin Laden, 35, was a guest contributor on the far-right instigator’s podcast, The War Room, on Monday and shared her views with her host from her home of Switzerland about the global “elite” she said were descending on the Swiss Alps village of Davos this week for the annual World Economic Forum.
“Do you think they’re fearful of this uprising or do you think they feel we’ve got this and we just have to power through?” Mr Bannon asked his guest about whether the corporate executives, government officials and other VIPs attending the conference should feel about former US president Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.
“They have no choice but to power through, they’re like a bulldozer,” she said of the international organisations who will be represented at the annual conference, comparing institutions like the United Nations and the WEF at one point to “vehicles” for a “mass-surveillance state”.
“This is why president Trump was such a huge thorn and is such a thorn and the entire ultra MAGA movement is such a huge thorn to them.”
Ms bin Laden is no stranger to rooting for the one-time commander-in-chief, who famously said during an interview ahead of the 20-year anniversary of 9/11 that her uncle wasn’t a “monster” and only “had one hit”.
Bin Laden created Al Qadea, a group listed as a terrorist organisation by the US and is responsible for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre that killed at least 2,996 people on US soil.
The outspoken Trump supporter went on during her interview with Mr Bannon to pull another page from the MAGA classics, launching into an attack of the so-called “globalist” elites attending the conference in-person after a two-year hiatus as being responsible for the “steal of the 2020 election”.
“I think judging by the intensification of the attacks and the blatant blatant farcical steal of the 2020 election and all the different efforts,” they are afraid of the ultra MAGA movement, she said.
Before closing her segment with the conspiracy-wielding podcast host, Ms bin Laden spoke of how the MAGA movement is no longer considered a small, quiet minority, but quoted Mr Bannon’s frequent tagline, calling them “the silent majority”.
“You say we are the silent majority,” Ms bin Laden said. “We have reached a critical mass where enough of us are completely awake to what they are trying to do and we are enough that we will not let this happen and I think they are worried.”
This was Ms bin Laden’s second appearance on Mr Bannon’s podcast in the past few weeks, with her previous interview with the former Trump adviser garnering similar attention for controversial remarks.
During a 6 April segment of Mr Bannon’s show, Ms bin Laden defended the 6 January Capitol riot attendees as “patriots” and their subsequent criminal proceedings for breaking the law as proof of them being “political prisoners”.
She then went on to praise far-right Republican lawmakers who have avowed their support for the Capitol rioters.
“We can be really grateful for representatives—you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Gaetz and Ron Johnson amongst the handful who are defending and standing up and speaking about these political prisoners," Ms bin Laden said.
Ms bin Laden has frequently strived to court favour with Mr Trump. In her first-ever interview with American press in 2020, she told the New York Post that the country should re-elect the former US president to become a two-term leader as, she believed, only he could prevent another 9/11.
And then last summer, the 35-year-old trolled US president Joe Biden ahead of a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Geneva by standing on a boat in the Swiss country waving a flag emblazoned with the words “Trump Won”.
Davos is playing host to the glitzy World Economic Forum for the next week, resuming the in-person conference for the first time after a two-year hiatus because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which also delayed this year’s meeting from its usual winter slot because of uncertainty over the omicron variant.
