There is a third option: “I am not evil; I am strong and I can take hard decisions. They are not good; they are just weak”.
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If is isn’t close enough, it should be. Christ, what an asshole.
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He just said they should have their heads on a pike…
Yet we seem to agree. Trump can’t fire Fauci directly.
Can he have him fired? Sure.
Please, moronic right wing Trump cultists, tell me again how the left are the violent ones…
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If that’s what you meant by ‘not directly true’ fair enough, I misunderstood you.
I’m not sure how the Mercers are getting on with Bannon these days. They cut all visible connections back when they turfed him from Breitbart in January 2018. (Ha! Wikipedia says that he left. It wasn’t voluntary.)
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Dems are always asked to repudiate people they don’t even know - they funded that asshole - they need to be held publicly accountable.
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really if any heads should roll … I’m not going advocate that but would be all in for hiring incompetent, inebriated, amateur magicians to perform at far right gatherings with that guillotine trick.
I also did Nazi that coming
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On a side note I think they should have to invent their own language(s), as well. What would be more collective than language? I certainly didn’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps to reach the point where I’m typing this sentence. But the self-made man* sure would!
Come to think of it, this could backfire where English language standards are bequeathed to some Musk/Thiel-ish entrepreneur’s startup, and we have to pay a royalty whenever we speak or write or press a letter on the keyboard.
*Gender specificity intentional. If Galt’s (or Gilligan’s) Gulch even allows any self-made women then I humbly stand corrected and self-chastised.
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I prolly wasn’t clear. Rough couple days, lol.
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I’ve been chewing on this since you posted it, and I think it might be a bit naive in the digital age.
Let’s look at Trump’s tweet from this summer where he wrote “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” That was after spending days writing nasty things about Gov. Whitmer. I’d like to see the analytics from Twitter, but from the published timeline, the plot to kidnap and Murder Whitmer kicked off within days of that tweet. With social media, EVERYTHING is traceable. If one of the conspirators can be shown to have read that tweet, there is a direct line from Trump’s order to the action of planning the kidnapping.
Advertisers and marketers know the power of social media, and have amazing tools to trace the path from an ad or influencer post to individual consumers and their actions. They can calculate the ROI of an ad or campaign to the penny thanks to that traceability.
If Bannon’s post reached members of RW groups (remember, that is absolutely traceable) they have the means to carry out such actions. If it can be shown that such persons are subscribers to Bannon’s account and he knew it at the time (he did - he’s evil, not an idiot), then there is a direct path between his words and those who can act on them. That’s incitement.
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I follow your reasoning re: the reach of digital media, but I’d make a couple of observations:
First, the kind of framework you’re suggesting would require a very substantial shift in how courts interpret the limits of the first amendment, and essentially toss out Brandenburg. So for the sake of discussion, we’ll agree that we’re talking about what the law should be as opposed to what the law curently is. So, accepting that the digital age has made communication of this type more direct, there would still be the issue imminence to rethink. What you’re suggesting pretty much does away with that requirement and opens up a lot of speech to criminal prosecution.
There have been a lot of cases and a lot of thought about that prong, with a lot of the same kind of reasoning you’re pointing to, in the pre-digital era. That causal link you’re pointing to isn’t really unique to the digital age, I don’t think; courts have looked at printed material (anti-war, etc) that encouraged violent or illegal actions (including where violent or illegal actions did, in fact, take place) and tried to draw the same line you’re pointing to above. It’s discussed pretty eloquently in the Brandenburg decision itself, which is worth reading.
Just so I understand what you’re proposing, how would the principle you’ve outlined above apply in the following hypothetical: Let’s say someone with a million Twitter followers tweets “If Trump won’t concede the election by the end of the week, we should burn every GOP office to the ground.” Now, let’s say that a week later, someone, somewhere, does burn a GOP office to the ground and it can be demonstrated that they saw the tweet in question. Would the author of that tweet also be subject to criminal prosecution?
ETA:
I forgot to add the quote from Holmes included in Brandenburg, which has held up well:
“Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker’s enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us, it had no chance of starting a present conflagration. If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.”
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D.C. lawyers right now:
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Mr. Bannon is in the process of retaining new counsel, and Quinn Emanuel intends to move to withdraw.
Oh, hey, I’ve worked on setting up some of their collateral items. 
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Ah, rats abandonding the sinking ship… no offense to rats.
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