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https://mobile.twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1465326906442719234

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1466452106139906058

@DustinABC7

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

Jun 20

THREAD. As I visit London next week for the UK launch of my book Copaganda, I have to say publicly how outrageous the mainstream British media’s crime coverage is. It’s like they’ve studied the worst aspects of U.S. news culture while taking performance-enhancing drugs.

This may seem comical to U.S. news consumers who lived through the fake “retail theft” panic, but British press has worked itself into a frenzy in 2025 using the same playbook. Some of it is funny, but the effects will be devastating for British society. Look at BBC:

Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft: “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave."

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

Jun 18

THREAD. The New York Times editorial on the New York City Mayor race is shameful. A lot of people have criticized its cowardice for refusing to endorse, but I want to highlight something deeper and more disturbing.

One main theme of faux-intellectual neoliberal propaganda in recent years is that we tried progressive policies, and those policies failed. As I discuss in my Copaganda book with lots of funny/disturbing examples, this NYT lie is one of the most pernicious lies in modern media:

The story goes: lefty policies to make society more equal, free, and ecologically sustainable are naive. Now that we've tried them with terrible results, we have no choice but to boost repression to manage inequality we cannot solve and to help oligarchs make society less equal.

Read 11 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

Jun 15

THREAD: The assassinations in Minnesota highlight a dirty secret hardly ever mentioned in the news: U.S. has 1.1 million private police officers. There is an unprecedented footprint of privately organized violence that is doing all sorts of things most people have no idea about.

Many journalists and "experts" quoted in the news go out of their way in new stories to conceal the reach of the private security/policing industries, what interests are behind it, and what it means for the possibility of a democratic life.

In my Copaganda book, I tell the story of how pro-police scholars and journalists have worked to conceal from the public estimates of private police--from forces at universities like Harvard, to much of downtown Detroit, to DC metro, to smaller stuff like this shooter.

Read 5 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

Jun 1

Few stories better capture modern policing than this one about a conspiracy of private corporate interests paying off-duty state troopers as part of a "shadow force" to cleanse downtown Nashville of homeless people using metal chains, cages, and violence.

It's great to see local news covering issues like this by reporter @JFinleyreports because it helps to expose the vast bulk of what police do: only 4% of their time is spent on "violent" crime, and much of it is done to make people money: wsmv.com/2025/05/29/sha…

But it's vital to understand this is not some egregious "bad apple" conspiracy particular to Tennessee or Nashville. It's important to understand that local policing looks like this in every large U.S. city, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in control.

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Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

May 24

THREAD. A lot of attention is rightly going to Medicaid cuts and other very bad things in Trump's bill passed in the House, but there's something that isn't getting attention, that is difficult to find in any news coverage, but that will fundamentally alter life for all of us.

The bill provides $160 billion in border/immigration funding in next 4.5 years. It's hard to describe the unprecedented scope of this, but I'll try: tens of thousands of armed agents in every corner of society are going to be nearly immune from state prosecution or civil suits.

This article describes it more, but I want to focus on a few things. First, when you build infrastructure like this and create new jobs/pensions for right-wing unions, it's hard to ever remove them. A new gestapo could become a permanent feature of life. wola.org/analysis/160-b…

Read 15 tweets

Alec Karakatsanis

@equalityAlec

May 12

See if you can spot the difference between the New York Times headline and the article's own description of what actually happened, which will be read by far fewer people.

One of the standard media tropes is the "clash," which leaves casual news consumers with the vague sense that opposing sides were each violent, even though what's often happening is that an unaccountable violent repressive force is brutalizing people complaining about injustice.

It's also worth noting the shameful conduct of university administrators. If you think about what they mean by the word "safety" here the implications are dark and Orwellian for our society.

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