alec karakatsanis

I just received the first copy of Copaganda! It will be sold anywhere books are sold. I try to explain the role of the media, the police, and academia in how we got to this authoritarian moment.

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.

Today’s Executive Order creating a *nationwide* military “quick reaction force” and setting up an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers is one of the scariest things I’ve seen in U.S. politics in my adult life. Why is it not getting more attention?

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

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.

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.

Join us in Paris tonight:

A common mistake is that the most nefarious propaganda must look like Fox News. In fact, huge resources are put into propaganda like the post below—which uses baseless assertions and innuendo couched as reasonable progressive-feeling analysis—to push uncritical consumers of info to the right.

Some shameful moments from Seattle Mayor here that reflect either dishonesty or stunning lack of familiarity with surveillance. And a cameo from the dangerous NYU Policing Project whose job is to sell horrible stuff to low-information libs. Basically all happening exactly as I said in my book.

I'm excited to announce the publication in France of my book on police body cameras--one of the great achievements of liberal Copaganda in modern history. I'll be in Marseille on March 29 and Paris on March 30 for events. Please join us!

THREAD. The sanctions on various ICC judges and UN officials is one of the gravest possible threats to any conception of the rule of law and protecting humanity from unrestrained extermination of anyone without power to resist. But there is a completely ignored component in U.S. media.

I’ve been studying the punishment bureaucracy and suing judges, prosecutors, and police across the U.S. for more than 15 years. One defining feature of our legal system is that there is rarely any accountability for massive corruption and criminality by those with power.

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.**

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.