There has been an alarming development in our legal system. Judges are starting to contract with a private corporation started by an ex-Palantir employee--whose bio says he is also a former speechwriter for Israel's UN ambassador--to have **secretive proprietary AI help decide cases for them.** The pressure to be "efficient" and to process more and more cases in assembly-line fashion is one of the great legal crises of our time. More and more, the legal system is eviscerating the capacity for even the tiniest level of critical thinking; any semblance of justice amidst the extraordinary pressure to rubber stamp; time for reflection; accountability; transparency; and the hope of some balancing of integrity, moral courage, intellectual rigor, etc.

THREAD. I have to say that I am very disappointed with John Oliver. I finally watched his segment on police body cameras, and it was abysmal. Missed the whole point, and in the process bought into some of the worst copaganda about them. The show correctly (but not strongly enough) points out that police body cameras don't "work"--meaning they are a total failure if one assumes their goal is to make police less violent and more accountable. They do not do that. They do not do the thing most liberals have been told is their purpose. The research is overwhelming on this point. The mainstream news has numerous articles on the evidence. Oliver reports this with some decent jokes, but he largely makes the cardinal error that I identified in my study of a decade of body camera propaganda: **Oliver assumes that the marketing of body cameras to well-meaning liberals accurately reflects their true purposes and functions.** As a result, he follows a long ling of liberal propaganda in obscuring the reasons that police, the surveillance industry, prosecutors, and politicians keep pushing them. Isn't he the slightest bit curious why both Hakeem Jeffries, every prosecutor in the U.S., and Kristi Noem/Tom Homan are celebrating them?

All people of good will must know the history of body cameras. Why did Democrats, consultant, and pundits push them as "police reform"? The truth is quite dark. I set out the shameful history of Democratic Party propaganda about body cameras in my 2024 study called The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams. campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-4/…

THREAD. This can be a big educational moment for progressive people who don't work in or study the punishment bureaucracy. Having spent 20 years in it--and just publishing a book on exactly this topic--I can say that reality works in the opposite way that Jamelle assumes: Rhetoric about stuff like "training" has, time and again, in dozens of contexts I studied, had the opposite effect on the approach of liberals to addressing the violence, lawlessness, and ineffectiveness of the punishment bureaucracy.

THREAD. Every year, I tell the story of Ezell Gilbert. It's the story of one of the most remarkable cases in U.S. history, and you’ve probably never heard of it. The story of what the U.S. government did to him is vital for understanding the current moment we are in. In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh.

THREAD. Did you know that at about 1/3 of all stranger homicides in the U.S. are perpetrated by police? But there's something hidden here that is important to understand in this authoritarian moment. First the basics: The vast bulk of physical and sexual violence in our society is *not* perpetrated by strangers, but by people who know each other. Obscuring this fact is a critical feature of copaganda in the news. People are shocked to hear it. Why?

THREAD. In Trump's speech to an unprecedented gathering of generals, he announced he was preparing to order them to use U.S. "cities as training grounds for our military." I want to highlight a few other bone chilling statements and put them into context that media obscures. First, although it didn't get as much coverage, Trump also said the U.S. is facing "a war from within" against "the enemy from within." This essentially declared to military leaders--who Hegseth had just essentially told he would be purging of disloyalty--a new civil war.

THREAD. I happened to be in Portland yesterday to give a university lecture as Trump called it “war ravaged Portland” while illegally ordering the deployment of the U.S. military to use “full force.”
This kind of outrageous misinformation would not be possible without the culture of fear spread for years by the mainstream media. He is playing on the prodigious ignorance and irrational fear cultivated by the way the news media distorts our sense of safety.

THREAD. PBS recently aired a dangerous news segment, full of misinformation. The incident is not only embarrassing for PBS and Democrats, but it portends dark days for the future of our society that it was published. People at PBS should be doing some deep soul searching. First, the article is a mind-boggling interview with the Democratic New Mexico governor. She validates and increases hysteria about street crime at the same moment such crime (which was and is down) is the precise (and false) pretense of national authoritarian takeover.

THREAD. I don't know what there is left to say about the New York Times and Democrats, but documenting their support for fascism still feels important. If there's any chance to walk back from the fascist cliff, we must see why things like today's article are so dangerous. The article today is premised on the idea that--while some Dems are uncomfortable with Trump deploying military to cities without consent--they want more federal resources (even military) to flood their cities for surveillance, police, prosecution, and prison.

THREAD. For over a decade, I've been working across the country to challenge unconstitutional cash bail. So, why is Trump trying to entrench it? The for-profit cash bail industry exists only in U.S. and Philippines. Even though you're presumed innocent, you're stuck in a jail cell while you wait for your day in court if your family doesn't have cash to pay a private company to secure your release.

THREAD. Today's article by New York Times reporter Devlin Barrett is a good example of how bad journalism can normalize authoritarianism. Let's look at a particularly egregious example. These two paragraphs tell you a lot about the failures of contemporary journalism. Among many problems here, and with the article generally, I will highlight two huge ones for now.

THREAD. A subtle but pervasive propaganda technique is when the news adopts as the *actual* motive the *stated* motive of people in power. Nobody with any knowledge or experience thinks Trump is in good faith taking over the DC police and mobilizing the military to “fight crime.” Indeed crime is at historic lows and “violent crime” is down 26% in DC from last year. So, why is the New York Times doing this?

THREAD. Today's orders by Trump federalizing D.C. police and deploying National Guard in D.C. in response to "out of control" crime are authoritarian. But I want to comment on something subtle lurking beneath the surface. As with most media/politician talk about "crime," it is completely divorced from reality. D.C. crime is at historic lows. What police call "violent crime" is down 26% since last year. More broadly, it's been at multi-decade, historic lows for years.

THREAD. A recent poll shows that people in the United States suffer from mass delusion about crime. The results are alarming for Democrats. It should be a massive scandal for mainstream news, and it's a pillar of the authoritarian zeitgeist. Only 9% of respondents correctly answered that murder rates in the U.S. have decreased a lot since 1990. today.yougov.com/topics/politic…

The level of ignorance among liberal pundits about surveillance technology, police violence, and authoritarianism is astonishing. Just no effort to understand important issues before commenting on them.

https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1945549188692889689

https://x.com/equalityAlec/status/1945593628870521099

THREAD. This week, the New York Times published a hagiography of a ruthless drug war prosecutor. I want to make a few important points about the most important kinds of misinformation that regularly appear in the New York Times and other mainstream news outlets. First, something subtle. The below quote is a microcosm of the full article: it contains an assertion, reported as fact, that this prosecutor "was trying to make safer” one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York through mass human caging for drugs.

THREAD. Something must be said about the New York Times. We are in the midst of a full-blown fascist takeover, and the NYT let one of its most dishonest reporters publish an article today full of misinformation arguing for massive new investments in police and surveillance. The thesis of the article is that because American cops are so terrible at solving murder (and getting much much worse than they used to be), "experts" believe the U.S. must spend massively more money on hiring police and surveillance.

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:

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:

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.