This level of pugnacity is not necessarily how Fanone might have envisioned his legacy back in that shining moment when America seemed (mostly) united in its acceptance of the fact that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a shitshow of the highest order and that those who participated in or fomented it should be held accountable. When that moment passed, there was a moment when Fanone thought his eyewitness account and the violence captured in his body-worn camera footage could shame it back into existence and convince people of “the sickness that’s taken over this country and that we’re Americans and kumbaya and all that shit.” Then there was the moment when it became clear that reality didn’t actually fucking matter to Trump’s apologists and acolytes, and that “waging a one-man war against Donald Trump and the fucking people that refuse to accept reality” would have to be what Fanone did to face himself in the mirror, even if it meant alienating his colleagues, giving up his career and his pension, becoming a pariah and a punching bag on the right and a CNN talking head and an unwitting celebrity on the left, and managing his complex feelings about all of this by also becoming the type of guy who sets up secret Twitter accounts to troll certain highly trollable members of the United States Congress. If he’s putting out a memoir now, it’s to continue scratching the itch to draw attention to Jan. 6, sure, but it’s also because, as he tells me, “Mike Fanone is broke. I’m pretty sure that’s why people do things like this. I said the things that I said for free and fucking destroyed my career, made my job untenable, and then tried to make hard lemonade out of lemons.”
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