For the pod, Nora and I sit down with @equalityalec.bsky.social to ask what if our ideas about crime and safety are being shaped, not reflected? He unpacks how media and political power construct fear, expand surveillance, and define which truths we see. and which we don’t.
I did this interview with Brian Bean and the fantastic Tempest magazine about ICE, police, and the moment we are in: tempestmag.org/2026/04/ice-...
I'll be in my hometown Pittsburgh to visit my grandma, so we set up an exciting last-minute book event for Copaganda on Monday. Come talk about propaganda with me. Grandma is 94, but she proofread it and claims it's the best book ever written by her favorite grandson. allevents.in/pittsburgh/b...
In my 2019 essay (from my first book Usual Cruelty) on how the bureaucracy of state repression functions--and the grotesque role of liberals in manufacturing consent for it--I explain with hundreds of examples what is going on here and why: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-pu...
One of the great scandals of our time is that professional class liberals and institutions are so poorly educated about and organized around repression that there's been almost no political cost for leading Democrats consistently building authoritarian infrastructure. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJLk...
In my 2019 essay (from my first book Usual Cruelty) on how the bureaucracy of state repression functions--and the grotesque role of liberals in manufacturing consent for it--I explain with hundreds of examples what is going on here and why: yalelawjournal.org/forum/the-pu...
I am excited to announce that I'll be doing some public events in my hometown of Pittsburgh. If you know anyone in the area, please bring them! The biggest even will be June 4 at the Carnegie Library. You can register for a free ticket here: pittsburghlectures.culturaldistrict.org/production/1...
that difference is often what people are trying to convey when using imprecise terms like that. i agree it's somewhat crude.
these are all just shorthand. the main point is that something different is happening (not necessarily better, but in some ways often more sophisticated and certainly directed for a differnt audience) between the mainstream corporate press and the explicitly right-wing misinformation apparatus.
Trump saying today that the pope is “WEAK on crime” is extremely funny, but as with much of what Trump does, he also helps expose how baseless and cynical the liberal establishment has become.
The trope that associates violent profiteering by elites and their henchmen with being “tough on crime” was pushed by both right wing and liberal media organizations for decades. It is one of the great achievements of modern propaganda to associate cruelty and domination and violence with “safety.”
There are different motivations and context for different people within that institution. Some of them are just completely ignorant and propagandized and uncritical. Others are more actively nefarious. In each case, the political economy of the institution produces and reproduces this output.
The trope that associates violent profiteering by elites and their henchmen with being “tough on crime” was pushed by both right wing and liberal media organizations for decades. It is one of the great achievements of modern propaganda to associate cruelty and domination and violence with “safety.”
Given the evidence, suggesting that mass-incarceration advocates are being “tough on crime” when they push for policies that do not make people safer is like praising fossil fuel profiteers for mitigating global warming. It is one of the great achievements of modern copaganda that police, prosecutors, prison guard unions, bail bond companies, private equity firms, surveillance corporations, for-profit prisons, and politicians have convinced news outlets to call the policies that benefit them “tough on crime.” But it gets worse, because “tough on crime” groups are among the biggest proponents of shifting “law enforcement” resources away from investigating and prosecuting millions of much more threatening crimes by powerful people
The major newspapers and tv channels of the United States have been filled with these kinds of unquestioned statements about nearly every evidence-based progressive attempt to reduce inequality and make our society less cruel and more safe. As I explained in Copaganda:
Trump saying today that the pope is “WEAK on crime” is extremely funny, but as with much of what Trump does, he also helps expose how baseless and cynical the liberal establishment has become.
I see, thanks. The idea that ICE is meaningfully different from police and prison bureaucracies is, in my view, not supported by the evidence. But I don’t think one need support goal abolition to agree with basically everything I post. So I was thrown off by the “often” in your post. Appreciate it.
What’s an example where you disagree with me?
God this is so accurate
In this instance, it is egregious to rehabilitate a budding fascist politician as someone genuinely "trying" to end the war (what does such a claim even mean?), and even someone who "opposed" it. Recall: Vance spewed some of the most outrageous pro-war nonsense in recent weeks.
In Chapter 13 of my book Copaganda called The Big Deception, I explained why falsifying intentions of those in power is always key to propaganda. And why subtle claims like this are such effective propaganda, particularly against professional class liberal intellectuals: bsky.app/profile/equa...
21 Hours in Pakistan: How Vance Tried and Failed to End a War He Opposed
THREAD. This single headline in the NYT contains two outrageous claims reported as fact: 1) Vance "tried" to end the war; and 2) he "opposed" it. Neither is supported, but the thing to understand is: why is lying about the *intention* of powerful people so key to propaganda?
“One thing I have learned is the most effective strategy at all times…is centering your heart with the most vulnerable people…and then relentlessly telling the truth about what you see.” #amreading Alec Karakatsanis’ excellent COPAGANDA. #booksky @thenewpress.bsky.social @equalityalec.bsky.social
The President of the United States just said “A whole civilization will die tonight.” Any politician or person within the chain of command who does not speak up and do everything in their power to stop this will be complicit in the gravest crime against humanity, and there’s no return from that.
absolutely shameful
You can check out the full English version of the Puerto Rico study here. It is fantastic work by the organization Kilómetro Cero: static1.squarespace.com/static/5af19...
Here these lies not only helped evade real transformation of police in Puerto Rico, but siphoned off over $3 million last year alone for the federal court monitor alone to write useless reports about a system that is not changing and about $20 million annually on "reform."
In my book Copaganda and in my writing on body camera propaganda, I have explained how dangerous liberal "police reform" propaganda is, in large part because it lies to people about the primary functions of police and pushes so-called solutions that increase the size, power, and budget of police.
When necessary, such as with the LAPD after the Rampart scandal or Ferguson after the 2014 uprisings, police themselves will support this narrative that entire departments are in need of “reform.”266 After the 2020 uprisings, many liberal politicians pointed to Camden, New Jersey as a model because the town had “disbanded” its police force after repeated police violence. (What is often left out of this story is that the city simply rehired far more officers on lower salaries, expanded lucrative surveillance contracts, and made even more arrests of almost exclusively poor people in the subsequent years for low-level crimes.)267 Similarly, it is common for powerful local or state officials to ask the Department of Justice to investigate an entire troubled police force in their area.268 Dozens of mayors, governors, and even police chiefs have done this in recent years, not out of a belief that federal intervention will make their police force behave differently in fundamental ways, but to distract from local attempts at more radical solutions. Cooptation like this routinely happens through federal intervention because of the well-understood, well-trodden periods of delay, expert consulting, rationalization of more resources which often becomes court- ordered additional spending, and pacification of liberal residents who are only passively interested in knowing that something is being done. In this political and narrative act, the
This kind of scapegoating of particular police forces is often welcomed by police, not just because it tends to mean more investment in more resources for those “bad” officers, squads, precincts, and departments for “training” and technology, but because it also distracts people from asking too many fundamental questions about the enterprise of mass processing of punishment as a way to make our society less violent. This framing discourages people from asking the core, unorthodox question: “is there something about this bureaucracy, and the social and economic arrangements it protects, that simply is not amenable to reform (because its primary function is not to promote holistic human equality and flourishing)?” What might it suggest that each local police bureaucracy in each of thousands of cities and counties has similar policies, technology, demographic disparities, statistics on their activity and arrest patterns, infiltration by right-wing groups, and recurring scandals of illegal corruption and violence? A national conversation flares up every few years about how U.S. police are violent and unaccountable, but the public discourse does not connect it to the prior conversations that society just had several years before.270 What might it suggest that every generation of people in the United States for 125 years has had the same conversation on newspaper editorial pages about pervasive police corruption, violence against marginalized people, and surveillance of progressive social movements?
This was a hallmark of Obama-era Democratic party and elite professor-led "consent decrees." I discussed them a bit in my work on the massive fraud liberal politicians and certain academics/nonprofits perpetrated on body cameras: campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-...
Failure to de-escalate the use of force. A statistical trend analysis demonstrates that the most severe level of use of force has remained stable while other levels of use of force have increased. Clearly, there is no evidence of de-esca- lation in the use of force. The Police Reform Agreement, prompt- ed by the USDOJ’s (2011) documentation of unreasonable use of force, was unable to curb the frequency with which officers use force. Moreover, an official PRPD report acknowledges that the annual trend of use of force has increased. 2. Failure to eliminate racial bias in use of force. Statistical evidence demonstrates that the PRPD disproportion- ately directs use of force against racialized communities. The department’s failure to track racial data creates a blind spot that precludes it from identifying its own bias. Using census racial data, an area-based statistical analysis confirms that nonfatal police shootings occur more frequently in neighborhoods with higher concentrations of Black and low-income households. 3. Failure to identify and correct deficiencies in the use of force. There is a systematic practice of under-registration, under-re- porting, and under-counting of police use of force. Under the notion “no data, no problem,” the PRPD uses ignorance as a strategy to avoid or obstruct the production and dissemination of the necessary information that makes police violence visible, measurable, and accountable. The PRPD has failed to identify the excessive use of electronic control devices among its officers and deceived the public by under-counting the number of ECD-associ- ated deaths
Here are some of the key findings. First, note the key finding: All of this "reform" to reduce police violence didn't reduce police violence:
THREAD. An important report was just released, putting another nail in the coffin of Obama-era "police reform" copaganda. After a study of 13 years of "police reform" in Puerto Rico, police violence *got worse.* The "reform" itself has a budget of $20 million per year.