Thread by @timjacobwise

This will be one of those threads that some people won't like. But having looked in the Mason Jar of Fucks that I keep on my bookshelf, and discovering it to be strangely devoid of content I might willingly relinquish, I'll proceed (1)...

January 6 and the reality of people who wish to overthrow democracy altogether and usher in right-wing, white nationalist authoritarianism is why I cannot ultimately support prison abolition (2)...

The thinkers, scholars & activists behind abolition, for whom I have much respect, devised that vision with very different offenders in mind than these folks (3)...

Abolition and Restorative Justice are devised out of a recognition that our carceral system largely operates to reinforce class inequity and racial injustice, not make people safe--that prisons have merely been about social control for the benefit of the powerful (4)...

It was based on a realization that poor people of all colors and Black and brown folks generally, were being criminalized in ways others were not, solely because of class and/or race (5)...

Also, that most of the people locked up, even for serious crimes, committed offenses that were largely matters of bad impulse control or social conditions that drove them to places of violence (or at least that we know are highly correlated with it) (6)...

...i.e., crimes that could be addressed by better means than incarceration. But those who seek to overthrow democracy by violent insurrection, terrorism, or by abetting that through obstruction of justice, looking to overturn elections via fraud and subterfuge are different (7)..

Those are not matters of oppressive economic conditions, being abused as kids, or anything like that. They are premeditated, unlike most violent crime which tends to be in the heat of the moment—again, about impulsivity (which can be addressed through various interventions) (8)..

These are crimes of fascist sociopathy. They are crimes by people who are not capable of being dealt with via restorative justice because they can never admit their actions injure anyone, or at least if they do, it is only those who deserve (in their mind) injury (9)...

Treating them with RJ is like saying the Nazis were no different than your average German street criminal in 1934. How do we do RJ with Steve Bannon, with Donald Trump? With Mike Flynn? With the Oath Keepers? With the Charlottesville Nazis? (10)...

You can’t. And those who say we can are living in a romantic utopian world that doesn’t exist. Crimes like that are about a deep contempt for large swaths of humanity. By the time people get to that point, nothing but removal from society can protect that society (11)...

Abolition of prisons only works when there are feasible alternatives. I think for most criminal offenders there are such alternatives. Because most offenders are not motivated by terroristic impulses to impose their broad social reality on the rest of us (12)...

But these people are. They aren’t going to be fixed w/a seminar & a sit-down w/their victims. They have to be put away. And you can lecture me about the “cop in my head” all day long. Cute slogan. We're good at those, aren't we? Slap it on a bumper sticker. I don't care (13)...

This is the real world. Not the world of theory classes and pipe dreams. The Proud Boys and III Percent Militia folks and Atomwaffen Nazis and such won’t be kept at bay by your mutual aid committee, RJ circle, or local Food Not Bombs group (14)...

All the “we protect us” rhetoric in the world will not work here. Because in case you haven’t noticed, “we” are not stopping them. At this point, even the state isn’t and that needs to change, but “we” (as in, the people) aren’t stopping them and can’t (15)...

The only way they’ve been slowed since C'ville has been bc of the legal system, the state, being jailed & sued: disrupted by legal intervention. Even when citizen sleuths tracked em down, it was state actors who weakened them, not anti-fascist activists alone (16)..

Yes, activists have exposed them (including tracking them down after 1/6) But to what end? ARREST and legal sanction. Without the reality of legal sanctions, fines, and jail time hanging over them, they wouldn't have been derailed as much as they were (17)...

Only the force of the state can break them. They have the guns and are prepared to use them. We don’t and wouldn’t use them anyway. We’d try and organize our way out of concentration camps. That doesn't work (18)...

Setting fires at a courthouse or spray painting a racist statue isn't the same as stopping fascist mobs. Those fuckers burn people, not Starbucks & police cars. "Autonomous zones" are leftist street theatre, not revolution. Their side does counter-revolution for real (19)...

There are 21 million people who, according to the survey data, believe violence should be used to restore Trump to power. Let that sink in. Although most won’t act on that, make no mistake, at least 1 percent of them are willing to, probably quite a bit more (20)...

If you think those folks shouldn’t be locked up when they try it — and they will — you have a death wish. You’re a religionist, a fundamentalist, and every bit as disconnected from the real world as the ones we normally think of when those words are used (21)...

Remember, ultimately the only thing that stopped the fascists in WWII was force — and not of voluntary underground fighters or in the Warsaw Ghetto (an uprising that ultimately failed), but because the Red Army frankly destroyed them (22)...

Short of literal force like that (and like I said, the left isn’t prepared to fight these people that way nor should we even try) the only alternative is state action against them by the existing apparatus of federal law enforcement (and state/local where applicable) (23)...

Anything else is delaying the inevitable rise to power of those who will make Trump look tame. These people do not respect your right to live. They must be stopped before they get power. If that means prison, fine. Break them. Or else be prepared for them to break you (24)

And I'm speaking of the leaders of this movement. I know there are sheep-like followers who can be de-programmed or neutralized w/o incarceration. But when they take illegal action towards fascist ends, the leaders deserve 3 hots and a cot for as long as it takes (END)...