“[Bannon] sees cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics,” Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower from SCL, told the Senate on Wednesday (via Reuters). “It was for this reason Mr. Bannon engaged SCL, a foreign military contractor, to build an arsenal of informational weapons he could deploy on the American population.”

“Steve Bannon is a follower of something called the ‘Breitbart doctrine,’ which posits that politics is downstream from culture. So if you want any lasting or enduring changes in politics you have to focus on the culture,” Wylie added, according to CBS News. “When Steve Bannon uses the term ‘culture war,’ he uses that term pointedly and they were seeking out companies that could build an arsenal of informational weapons to fight that war.”