Sign in Subscribe

October 21 Update: Elon's Election Ratfucking; American Vets & the Far Right; Can Forests Absorb More Carbon?; 'Weaponized Autism', Extremism & Adolescence; Russia's Journalist Mole

Halloween in Eric's New York - even the pumpkins are driven to drink

In case you haven't heard, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead after a confrontation with regular Israeli ground troops in the Gaza Strip last week. Yet the IDF's assault on not just Gaza, but Lebanon proceeds apace. All pretense of recovering the October 7 hostages is now out the window - you have cabinet members calling for the Jewish "resettlement" and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, the expulsion of Palestinians to neighboring countries, and a plan to permanently occupy southern Lebanon (again). An Imperial Israel is not a new phenomenon: decades ago, Israel's power elite planned to occupy Lebanon up to the Litani River to secure control of the Middle East's most precious commodity: water. Oh and did I mention Israelis are absolutely thirsting for a Trump redux this November?

Widening geopolitical crises aside, it's been a busy week in my world. The online edition of my Vanity Fair feature on young American Neo-Fascists, prison and radicalization went live last week - the layout is one of my favorite things about this feature. Many thanks to my editors at VF and Type Investigations for crafting the prose as well and reining in some of my digressions (but if anyone wants the outtakes, please let me know and I'll do a separate subscribers-only post).

The most episode of Popular Front's Skeleton Key on the Active Club network makes a hat trick of appearances for me on Jake Hanrahan's Neo-Fascism side project (prior episodes dealt with Turkey's Grey Wolves and the 764/com extortion and child abuse network). It's always a fun conversation with Jake, particularly after tracking that particular segment of the extreme right from its first iteration in the Rise Above Movement to the current patched-over skinhead/Patriot Front copycats that are in at least 40 states (see the VF feature for more on this world).

Last but not least, I lent a hand to reporters from the Swedish Public Broadcaster SVT for their investigation (in Swedish, use the translation option on your browser) into at least eight attacks (including three stabbings) committed by a young man affiliated with 764 and 'No Lives Matter', a splinter group intent on committing and live-streaming acts of real-world violence. NLM is connected to at least one other terrorism case: English teenager Cameron Finnegan, who went by 'Acid764' online, is charged with plotting to kill a homeless man and possessing a 'kill guide' allegedly authored by NLM. There will be more on this matter, SVT and I found a number of other 764 affiliates in Sweden.

I know it's a top-heavy update this week, but in this line of work, either you break the news or the news breaks you. Them's the rules, I didn't make em.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-The leading candidate for the biggest shitheel of the year is, of course, the world's richest man. Not just content with buying a massive social media platform to push eugenics, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ and extreme right wing politics, Elon Musk is now using his fortune to sow chaos in the American political sphere not just by offering to pay Pennsylvania voters to sign some bizarre 'pledge' that may find him on the business end of a federal indictment downrange, but also using a political action committee to leverage October 7th and the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza to undercut Kamala Harris' standing amongst Jews and Muslims in Pennsylvania and Michigan. 404 Media mined targeted advertisements on social media platforms like Snapchat to uncover the influence scheme.

-Active duty military personnel make up a disproportionate number of right wing extremists who either commit or plot acts of violence. I've dug into this particular phenomenon multiple times over the years, but the Associated Press did the public service of quantifying the number of current or former servicemen involved in extreme right wing crimes: 480 people with a military background have been charged with ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 January 6th arrestees. An in-depth read, with a gripping video sidebar as well.

-As the COP16 climate action conference meets this week in Colombia and scientists warn that humanity is pushing Earth's natural systems to critical breaking points, a chilling new study out of Finland raises a critical question: are our forests starting to hit the limit of how much carbon they can adsorb? That's the takeaway from a recent study out of the Scandinavian nation, which has one of the most ambitious targets for cutting emissions and achieving carbon neutrality by 2035. I don't know how Guardian's Patrick Greenfield can sleep soundly after tackling this story.

-Something my colleagues and I see over and over in extremism prosecutions is the introduction of evidence, typically by defense attorneys, about a young offender's autism diagnosis. Sam Woodward, Devon Arthurs, disgraced London cop and Neo-Nazi Ben Hannam.... the very term 'weaponized autism' was bandied around by extremist groups as a mocking sobriquet for fellow travelers who resorted to acts of violence. However, there is something to that phrase, per an excellent Financial Times feature on the targeting of autistic young people by extremist propagandists and recruiters. There was considerable evidence of this in the reporting my colleagues and I did on 764, but this feature explores the experience of children funneled into Great Britain's "Prevent" deradicalization program. The sheer prevalence of "on the spectrum" young people amongst referred participants in the scheme is pressing some experts to re-evaluate their preconceptions about radicalization and their approaches to intervening with this high risk population.

-Aside from professionals whose lives are made miserable by guilt of association, who doesn't love a convoluted 'journalist as spy' saga? That appears to be the case with Pablo Gonzalez, a longtime Spanish freelancer who began covering Russia's conflict in Ukraine a decade ago and worked his way into the good graces of Russian opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny. As it turned out, Gonzalez was an agent for the GRU, Russia's military intelligence service, and kept close tabs on the since-murdered Navalny for his clients before ending up in a Polish prison. He was returned to Russia this summer during a massive prisoner swap that resulted in Wall Street Journal Evan Gerskovich returning home to the United States. Shaun Walker's longread is a doozy.

BOOK OF THE WEEK - Some books are flashes in the pan that are written for the moment and read like outdated caricatures when you crack them open years later. Giuseppe Di Lampedusa's The Leopard (1960), an epic about Sicily's sclerotic nobility, is the polar opposite.

Tracing the life of a hedonistic, vapid prince from the 1860s onwards, Di Lampedusa simultaneously tells the story of the Nineteenth century downfall of Italy's landed gentry and the formation of the modern nation through conflicts between Republicans, monarchists, and avaricious foreign powers. A transporting read, brilliantly adapted for film in 1963 by Luchino Visconti.

FILM - October is horror movie month, and even though I'm not a huge fan of the genre, some of its offerings are too good to pass up. Stephen King's novels make for prime B-Movie fodder, and the 1983 feature Christine might be John Carpenter's most unique film outside of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The film is a bit of a send-up of 1950's greaser car culture that middling directors like George Lucas lionized in American Graffiti, featuring a teenager's demon-possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury as the eponymous bloodthirsty car from hell that wreaks havoc. Go to town on the Criterion Channel's Halloween collections - they're priceless.

MUSIC - Growing up in New York City during the 1990s exposed me to a huge array of music - jazz, punk, electronic, classical, folk, metal, soul - but nothing was as ever-present as the city's indigenous sound of hip-hop. Each region used to have its own highly distinctive style, something we've mostly lost with the advent of the internet, the contraction of the music business, and the corporatization of the genre. Thankfully, the old cuts are still lying around in people's record crates and every now and then, some genius decides to spent their evening mixing their collection and throwing it up on YouTube for the rest of the world to enjoy. The mix below is a smooth, well-selected set that pulls from some of New York's '90s underground classics. A diamond in the rough time capsule - for me at least.