Welcome To The Third World

When War on Terror proponents ignored laws to target Muslim terror suspects, American liberalism rightly objected. Once Donald Trump became the target, critics joined the mob

BACK TO THE FUTURE: Steve Bannon’s jailing will be of a type not seen since the days of the Red Scare and the “Hollywood Ten”

Last Thursday, a federal court ordered former chief strategist for Donald Trump, podcaster, and symbol of All Things Evil Steve Bannon jailed for defiance of a Congressional subpoena. Convicted in 2022 for refusing to appear before a House Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riot, Bannon on July 1st will join former Trump aide Peter Navarro in a select group of Americans jailed for contempt of Congress since the meat-grinder days of McCarthy and the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC).

Detractors cheered the timely benching of the host of War Room, which generates millions of downloads as the most influential pro-Trump media program. “Steve Bannon being off the air… is actually very good for the pro-democracy movement,” chortled political strategist Rick Wilson, noting that while Bannon was going away for four months, they’re “four vital months.” A former aide to Dick Cheney, Wilson in his Republican days was best known for an ad questioning whether Max Cleland, who lost three limbs,* had the “courage to lead.” He added: “Steve, when you’re in prison, you’re going to want to show dominance on the first day.”

Welcome to the Third World, America. We crossed a big line in the last two weeks, first with the conviction of a presidential frontrunner on comic-book charges, now the revival of a contempt of Congress maneuver we haven’t seen since the Hollywood Ten. Nobody’s been sent to a logging camp or car-bombed or given a hot lead cure in a doorway, but as any current or former resident of authoritarian countries will tell you, the jailing of political opponents is a sure sign we’re on that road.

I returned to America a year after 9/11, following a decade in the burgeoning Russian autocracy of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin. That experience allowed me to see how quickly even limited freedoms of speech or assembly can be vaporized. People blinded by dislike of Trump or Bannon should imagine trying to summon sympathy for people like Vladimir Gusinsky and Misha Khodorkovsky, oligarchs who got rich in very dubious privatization schemes but were early targets of political prosecutions in the Putin years (Gusinsky was raided by armed agents four months after Putin’s inauguration). For those protesting that Bannon is only headed inside because he’s scum who broke the law, political prosecutions always involve a legal violation, often even a real one. Americans just don’t know what that looks like.

Half the country has been conned into looking at the recent lawfare craze in isolation, not as the last stages of a long-developing drift toward autocracy started decades ago by Wilson’s former boss. The twist that sent the Dick Cheney revolution to new heights was a rebrand. When we switched post-9/11 focus from Islamic terror to Trump and “Domestic Violent Extremism,” left-liberal America suddenly embraced every form of overreach it once opposed. Now, chickens are coming home to roost. Once we started ignoring laws to pursue terror suspects in the early 2000s, it became inevitable the reflex would return to infect domestic politics. Trump accelerated that process, and if the cackling of someone like Wilson doesn’t remind you of how this authoritarian slide started, nothing will. It’s a straight line from there to here: