Steve Bannon Dodges Prison For A World Where Steve Bannon Is Obsolete
Elon Musk's singularity is no country for certain old men.
Welp, old three-shirts-and-a-barn-coat has dodged prison time, pleading guilty in Manhattan to a single count of defrauding the dumb hicks who donated money to his WeBuildTheWall Inc. fake charity that turned out to be a “pay Steve Bannon to lounge on a Chinese billionaire’s yacht” charity instead. He got a three-year conditional discharge, which means no prison for him unless he commits some other crime.
Lucky break! Nobama Gin Laden’s co-defendants were not as fortunate: Timothy Shea, Brian Kolfage, and Andrew Badolato got 63, 51, and 36 months in prison, respectively, plus fines. And the Chinese-expatriate billionaire whose yacht Bannon was on, Miles Guo, was convicted for a cryptocurrency scam and is still awaiting sentencing.
It awfully sure seemed like Guo was working to help the Chinese government, what with how he scammed the Chinese-American citizens who opposed it, then used their fleeced cash to finance Bannon’s media company and other right-wing ventures, though the details of his Chinese-government ties remain inscrutable. Nevertheless, it worked out at least temporarily to a 赢三次 (triple win)!
Thus ends the triple-plus years of court in-and-out for Bannon, unless you count all of his sucker lawyers who have been trying to get paid. He served time in Danbury prison for that subpoena-middle-fingering, where he was tortured by not being able to watch the MyPillow Guy’s Rudy Show. But at last the prospect of prison isn’t hanging directly over his head like a dry-aging Peking duck!
But is there room at the trough for Bannon in the MAGA-verse any more? Does Trump still need him to whup up a base with conspiracy theories, now that he’s got a blank check from the Supreme Court to do what-fucking-ever, and Elon Musk is steering him with a firm, virile hand? Trump himself now just seems to be a shit-talking figurehead of a meat puppet whose job is to apply his Sharpie to whatever democracy-destroying executive orders Elon Musk and the Project 2025 creeps stick in front of him.
Elon Musk’s vision for the future is not the same as Bannon’s vision, though he and Musk are both accelerationists who want to hurry up and get the collapse of democracy and civilization as we know it over with so they can tush-push in. They both like old-timey Roman things! Roman salutes and talking about “rough Roman justice”! Somebody Ouija my great-grandma that the Italians are officially white now.
And Musk and Bannon both agree that the future involves a self-identified white man being ruler of all he surveys, mounting a vertical power hierarchy with a strict gender binary and everybody else smushed down below into a fascist parfait. But they disagree about exactly where this future ought to be accelerating to, after all the violent human suffering they wank about is eventually over with.
Bannon wants a future that’s a retconned version of the past as pictured by Nazi propaganda — buxom trad-fraüs serving Liebfraumilch to apple-cheeked blonde children at picnic lunches — and Musk’s perfect future is what techbros call “the singularity,” where humanity has merged with a machine and gotten consumed by that machine, Neuralink implants humming in everyone’s brain being conducted by robots running his racist and sexist AI algorithms, while he’s on Mars with his progeny. It’s like Blade Runner but with more racism and sexism, because the robots reflect the tastes of their master. Doing shit-tons of drugs, who, him? But the AI is so infant that it can’t even tell you if Encanto 2 is happening, so in the meantime he’ll just delete stuff.
Ironically, neither Musk nor Bannon would exist in public life without the government inventing the internet they use, and installing all those lines it zips through. And Musk’s companies have received tens of billions in government subsidies, if anybody was actually looking for waste. Neither of them is big on self-awareness.
Bannon’s been fuming that Musk is “an evil person,” and ranted a week before Trump’s inauguration: “I will get Elon Musk kicked out by the time he’s inaugurated. He won’t have a blue pass with full access to the White House. He’ll be like everyone else.” Turns out he was only right about the first part!
Yesterday after Musk changed his “X” handle to Harry Bōlz (yes, for real), he stood in the middle of the Oval Office in his dark-MAGA getup and forced Trump to sit minding one of his dozen kids while Trump announced another executive order to give DOGE even more power.
He’s also into doxxing the families of any judges who cross him; he re-posted a Tweet from Laura Loomer with the name, photo, bio and snippet of a public financial disclosure report of the daughter of the Rhode Island judge who ordered DOGE to unfreeze federal grants. It only counts as doxxing when it is the names of his special boys! (BTW ProPublica is keeping a handy tracker of his rogue DOGEs as they get exposed, thanks for the tip, Craig Nixon!)
Here, have a guy with a middle-school South African education about American government explaining American democracy to all of us while Trump impotently babysits his child.
A LIMESTONE MINE? How dare the government store important records somewhere weather-proof?! Remember how people said it was awkward when Jimmy Carter wore a mustard-colored cardigan? Hey, just like Jared, he flaps his hands like a mother duck when he knows he’s fudging. And here he is blithely admitting he was making things up again (Arnold) about $50 million in condoms to Gaza, but he doesn’t care if people get HIV in Mozambique. But a lie’s still a lie…
It’s a disorienting world when between two of the most cartoon-level-evil conscience-less people, Steve Bannon — the guy who said Trump was like Hitler and meant it in a good way — is arguably the lesser evil for wanting a future universe that at least has some humans in it besides himself, androids and select test-tube babies inhabiting Mars. Steve Bannon’s day, that was the gute alte Zeiten!
But here we are!
Time to find more Nice Times! Brain break!
[Denny Carter, The Worst Person You Know Is Making Good Points About Elon Musk/ New York Times archive link: “Bannon Pleads Guilty to Fraud in Border Wall Case but Will Serve No Time”/ New York Times archive link: “Elon Musk Is an ‘Evil Person,’ Steve Bannon Says”/NBC]
Well, Three Shirts didn't heed the President Klan Robe maxim: Ask not whom the bus drives over; it drives over you.
That said, Three Shirts is going to be fine, because the American people gave (unless tampering is substantiated) the unreconstructed party unitary power. And the people wanted it to have their bigotries validated.
"He got a three-year conditional discharge"
[Don't make a prostate joke, don't make a prostate joke, don't make a prostate joke]