Thread by @SethAbramson

(🔒) NEW at PROOF: "Americans Must Understand Just How Badly Steve Bannon Wants to Go to Jail"

So far the insurrectionist Steve Bannon is getting exactly what he wants. It's up to the FBI, DOJ, and federal judges to change that—and they better start soon. sethabramson.substack.com/p/new-american…

1/ A true story, and one any fellow former public defender (or current public defender) will be able to confirm: when you're a public defender doing the job because you believe in it zealously, you *pray* that one day a judge will hold you in contempt of court for doing your job.

2/ I can honestly say that at one or two moments in my legal career when I knew I was doing the right thing and knew it was riling up a judge to the point at which they might hold me in direct contempt, the better part of my psyche relished the prospect of being put in handcuffs.

3/ This is only *one* of several reasons Bannon wants to do a brief jail bid, and probably not the most compelling one. In the article above I explore all the ways in which Bannon being jailed is exactly what he wants—and how the FBI, DOJ and federal judges can do justice anyway.

4/ Yes, Bannon is a radical; yes, he's an ideologue; yes, he sees himself as a "happy heretic" whose lot is to be purer in drive and ambition than anyone else—and therefore to be persecuted by the "globalists"—but he also has very specific ambitions here. And so far he's winning.

5/ Congress and DOJ are beset with binary thinkers and (candidly) rogue agents within the FBI who were never weeded out during the Trump administration. The latter have no interest in investigating rich, powerful, influential GOP politicians or their agents. It's a grave problem.

6/ Meanwhile, Bannon is a dynamic and darkly metamodernistic thinker who's usually several steps ahead of his (entirely righteous) persecutors because, like Roger Stone, he literally spends all day every day thinking about how to ratf*ck America in devilishly innovative new ways.

7/ You can't be a 1950s-era "white hat" lawman like (say) Robert Mueller to bring down Steve Bannon and the rest of Trump's nest of vile insurrectionist leaders. You have to go after them the way Rudy Giuliani—back when he had any honor and even a single clue—went after the mob.

8/ Except even that analogy isn't apt—as the mob has certain strictures, paradigms, and modes of operation that are predictable and in the past have been used against them. Bannon's entire bag is to destroy democracy in ways only innovative digital-age thinkers would ever devise.

9/ So what I'm trying to do, in the essay above, is *start* (and it really is just a start) to think about how we lawfully, peacefully, and honorably *bury* a seditious super-villain like Bannon using levers of government and the legal system which were designed for 1950s lawmen.

10/ The important thing is to not engage in puerile flights of fancy—he'll be in Russia tomorrow morning! Garland has betrayed us and won't follow through on this! etc—but to imagine Bannon as the Man Who Would Destroy the World (which he is) and try to at least keep up with him.

PS/ I hope you won't judge this article unless/until you read it. Please do not assume you know exactly what it says or argues just by reading its title. My articles never—not for six years now—have worked that way, and they won't start working that way now, on this critical day.