THREAD. One of the moments that changed my career was my first day as a public defender in D.C.'s juvenile court. When I walked into the courtroom, which is closed to the public, all the little children were fully shackled in metal chains on their wrists, waists, and feet. I saw 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds, children with intellectual disabilities, children who had suffered profound abuse--all shackled for hours. But what shocked me most: no one had objected in years. The government officials had become desensitized to everyday brutality.

THREAD. Something important is happening in U.S. media that I think is getting insufficient attention, and the controversy around the Los Angeles Times refusing to endorse Kamala Harris amidst her support of an ongoing genocide gets at it. As background, a lot of uproar ensued in mainstream media circles after @nikasoonshiong’s thread stated that she supported the decision of the paper owned by her father to refuse to endorse Harris and adding that, for her, genocide is a red line:

https://x.com/nikasoonshiong/status/1849671541446906235

Thread. Today’s front page in the New York Times is a good lesson in two of the most important tactics in propaganda. First, notice the euphemism “pragmatism.” The idea that people who support enormous injustice and terrible policies are “pragmatic” is one of the most subtly ideological and dangerous characteristics of corporate news. This trope is used for decades.

THREAD. Something very weird is going on at ProPublica. It's hard to tell whether a few well-meaning people are getting lost or whether there is a Copaganda sleeper cell inside the non-profit newsroom. First, ProPublica is a public charity supposedly dedicated to "Investigative Journalism in the Public Interest." But in recent years, its reporters have peddled some of the most nefarious copaganda: fearmongering about not enough spending on prosecution supposedly causing crime.

A problem in our society is that people fail to draw inferences from facts. For example, it requires depravity to do what the Democratic Michigan Attorney General just did—make up a lie for the purpose of deceiving ordinary people on one of the most important topics of our time. But the way the lie is reported and discussed by many people is not a serious effort to grapple with what it means for a person to intentionally try to distort other people’s experience of our world in support of violence and inequality.

THREAD. One persistent form of propaganda is the refusal of corporate media to report critical context about judges when it reports on legal cases. Today's reporting on the TikTok case is a good example. The entire New York Times article on the TikTok case is based on the supposed skepticism of two federal judges to TikTok's arguments, but the paper omits they are two of the most right-wing judges in the appellate judiciary, appointed by Trump and Reagan. nytimes.com/2024/09/16/tec…

THREAD. A brief story about California judges openly refusing to comply with the law tells you a lot of what you need to know about "the rule of law" in the United States. Over the last few years, there have been three (3) major court rulings--two federal courts and a state court--finding the cash bail practices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento unconstitutional. A fourth case, from California Supreme Court, upheld the same principles.

THREAD. "Centrist" parties in Western countries almost always prefer the far right to the moderate left. Given the choice between fascists and a party who wants to provide universal healthcare, housing, and and wealth tax they will pick the former. The importance of this truth cannot be overstated. It explains a great deal of the official behavior of the Democratic Party. And hiding allegiance to core tenets of the far right with a facade of liberal rhetoric is one of the chief goals of neoliberal propaganda.

The events described in this article are the kinds of things people experience under fascism. The Texas Attorney General's conduct reflects a complete breakdown in democratic institutions.





The failure of the Department of Justice and the judiciary to prevent authoritarian abuse like this should be an alarming moment for the legal profession. It's the kind of thing that should be front-page news in every paper and emergency conversations in every law class.

THREAD. The Democratic Party platform presents such a profound crisis if we have any hope of avoiding fascism. Kamala Harris and other Democrats would essentially only need to say that they will condition aid to Israel on compliance with international law (i.e. follow existing U.S. law on weapons). The refusal to say something so simple presents a point of no return, for a few reasons.

THREAD. A few years ago, we were worried about the hidden epidemic of prosecutor misconduct. Why do so many prosecutors break the law? Why does nothing happen to them? Why does it stay secret? So, we tried to do something. What we found was more shocking than we imagined. We worked with a group of the country's leading law professors to file ethics complaints against prosecutors in cases where either judges or their own prosecutor offices had already found them to have broken the law. We filed FIFTY of these complaints in New York alone.

I’m not sure I’ve seen anything more depraved and dishonest in my tracking of the New York Times. In its article about Netanyahu’s speech, it not only fails to report that Netanyahu flagrantly lied, but it repeats the lie with no acknowledgment Israeli media has proven it false.

You can read more about some of the most astonishing lies, and the grotesque applause for them here. But how is the reaction of a *newspaper* simply repeat the lie. It's some of the most shameful complicity in genocide imaginable, and yet normal.

https://x.com/zei_squirrel/status/1816216474303746385

In a landmark federal court victory yesterday, we won our 1st Amendment lawsuit against New York judges and officials concerning secretive ethics proceedings against prosecutors. In most cases no one knows why the state does nothing when DAs break the law. Much more to come... This work--to shed light on how officials in the punishment bureaucracy, from police to prison guards to prosecutors to probation officers to judges, evade accountability at every level--is more and more vital in times of rising authoritarianism.

THREAD. One of the things I explore in my new study of the propaganda surrounding police body cameras in the U.S. media and by Democratic politicians are its similarities to both international development propaganda and colonial counterinsurgency strategy. As James Ferguson has shown in one of the seminal studies of the issue, decades of discourse about “reforming” the bureaucracy of international development follows a similar pattern.

THREAD. If we have any hope in these times of rising authoritarianism, the liberals in media, academia, and non-profits who played a role in putting a credible, smiling face on mass surveillance, mass incarceration, and mass family separation need to have accountability. While there are many grifters in "criminal justice reform," there are also many well-meaning people who did a lot of harm by not having sufficiently clear, critical analysis and relentless integrity in the face of powerful professional incentives to go along with bad stuff.

THREAD. I didn't fully know what to expect when I started digging into over a decade of records, statements, financial data, and other information about police body cameras. I suspected it to be troubling, but what I found shocked even me. I also examined hundreds of news articles about police body cameras. The result? The public campaign to sell police body cameras as a liberal "reform" is one of the great frauds of modern domestic U.S. propaganda. It carries profound lessons for anyone who cares about democracy.

Many of the political elite I interact with have not come to grips with what it means that people like Elizabeth Warren and most Democrats knew that the most serious crimes against humanity were being committed and decided to join in their commission rather than stopping them.

https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1810375977702404531

These people know that the Israeli right is genocidal. They talk about it. They talk about mass starvation of children, torture, ethnic cleansing, etc. They have conversations about whether campaign cash would dry up if they said it publicly. And they cannot summon the courage…

There are no more words for this. Leading Democrats privately knew for a long time that the death toll from the genocide was far higher than reported. Not only did they keep funding the genocide, but they've done profound damage to basic notions of truth that democracy requires.

https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1810042398132551998

People can see the images for themselves, and they can listen to what Israeli settlers, soldiers, and far-right government are saying. And yet, leading U.S. and European politicians deny it, change the subject, ignore it, and even justify it with grotesque lies.

THREAD. Since a lot of people are talking about immunity after yesterday, I wanted to share a few practical thoughts. First, many people don't realize this, but decades ago the Supreme Court concocted, entirely out of thin air, absolute immunity from civil liability for judges and prosecutors, as well as qualified immunity for police.

Yesterday's New York Times story on how fascism may be the only way to stop antisemitism looks like it was conceived by Rupert Murdoch, written by the person who wrote the Willie Horton campaign ad, edited by a neo-Nazi Seinfeld fan, and sponsored as a full-page ad for AIPAC.

More on the article itself here. Yikes.

https://x.com/equalityAlec/status/1803920808974389541

THREAD. Over the last four years, I have published a lot of critiques of the New York Times. I have never read anything more depraved than today's morning newsletter about why aid is not getting to Gaza. The premise of the article is it's an objective news "explainer" for liberal readers about why aid is not arriving in Gaza. NYT needs to say something to those who might have been hearing about mass child starvation, amputations without anesthetics, and other horrors of genocide.