February 10 Update: Rationalism's Homicidal Offshoot; The Order of Nine Angles' Main US Nexio;DHS Gins Up Immigration Raid Panic; Jeffrey Epstein & the Mossad; Technofascism & the Reagan Era; Law & Order's Bygone NYC

Winter used to look like this a LOT more often (© Ali Winston)

Enjoying the Broligarchy yet? Is life under the Nerd Reich (thanks Gil Duran) everything you thought it would be? Doesn't it feel great to have your government dismantled by a posse of barely-legal incels and cybercriminals led by an unaccountable South African billionaire who longs for apartheid? All while the nearly-senile commander in chief pardons more than 1,500 J6 insurrectionists, a number of whom will almost certainly form up whatever sort of Sturmabteilung he's concocting?

It's that ancient Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

Since the last Bleeding Edge missive in late January, I attended the federal trial of Atomwaffen Division founder and Terrorgram Collective member Brandon Russell, who was convicted a week ago for conspiring to attack power substations around Baltimore, cause a blackout, and trigger violent racial conflict. Here's my curtain-raiser for WIRED, and an analysis of the trial for the Guardian that picks apart some of the more interesting aspects of the proceedings. I'll have more on Terrorgram for WIRED in the weeks to come.

One last thing - there are a lot of new subscribers to Bleeding Edge as of the past few weeks. I'm grateful for your interest, and by all means the more the merrier. However, Ghost is not free, and I'm over the subscriber limit for my current tier. If just a few of the 150+ of you who signed up in the past month switch over to paid, that would be enough. I do publish a good deal of reporting behind the paywall here, including pieces on the NYPD's corrupt command staff, coverups for dirty homicide detectives in Northern California, FBI informants run amok and more analyses of the transnational extreme right than you.

Enough of the tin-cup rattling. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-West Coast and Prestige Media outlets have been in a lather over the Zizians, a homicidal cult that spun off from the AI-centered, eugenics-friendly, crypto-stealing 'rationalist' movement which wields considerable influence in Silicon Valley and is now clustered in what once was the People's Republic of Berkeley, California. Their rapid rise to notoriety came after the mid-January killing of a Border Patrol Agent in Vermont in a shootout with some of the cult members. IT turns out there are half a dozen killings linked to the group, with other murders taking place in Northern California and Pennsylvania. There will be scads written about these folks, but so far, Max Read has the best 30,000-foot view of the Zizians.

-Left Coast Right Watch is a go-to publication for deep reporting on extremism, and their recent investigation into the Tempel Ov Blood, the main American Order of Nine Angles nexion co-founded by longtime FBI informant Joshua Caleb Sutter (a familiar face to longtime Bleeding Edge readers) is well worth your time. Not only does it unpack the histories of ToB's cadre beyond Sutter and his (ex?) wife Jillian Hoy, but the article also makes clear that group's extensive influence not just in the most transgressive circles of the online far right (Neo-Nazism, 764), but also within the rationalist circles that spawned the Zizians.

-Judging by the frantic news coverage and social media bombast coming from the Department of Homeland Security, you'd think the Trump Administration are rounding up tens of thousands of undocumented migrants and packing them off to Guantanamo Bay en masse. That's apparently a mirage - the Guardian's Dara Kerr delved into DHS' recent 'surge' and found the agency is artificially inflating perceptions of its immigration enforcement actions by paying to move old press releases about raids by Immigration Customs and Enforcement up in search rankings, and similarly flooding social media. Yet more evidence that perception is not reality.

-Jeffrey Epstein's "suicide" at a federal jail in Manhattan several years back while in custody on sex trafficking charges was a cultural phenomenon unto itself. The erstwhile financier and pimp to the powerful provided wealthy American and European men with a steady stream of young women (often underage) at his various properties in New York City, the Caribbean, New Mexico and elsewhere. Epstein's alleged client list included former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, Kevin Spacey, Ehud Barak and more. There have long been rumors that Epstein was tied in with intelligence services, in particular Israel's Mossad. Jake Hanrahan interviewed longtime Beltway reporter Ken Silverstein on this topic for Popular Front, and their conversation bears close listening.

-A cottage industry of Silicon Valley Understanders has cropped up in the past few years as the tech industry branched out from accumulating historically unprecedented levels of wealth into seizing the levers of power in the United States. One trope almost all these writers routinely explore is the seeming conundrum of how an ostensibly 'liberal' sector that avidly backed the Neoliberal Presidency of Barack Obama (zero percent interest rates certainly didn't hurt) could shift so profoundly to the right. Historians with a deeper understanding of Silicon Valley's history and ideologues know far better, particularly Becca Lewis. Her essay for the Guardian last week cuts to the core of tech's hard right ideology, beyond the familiar personages of Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil, and excavates a through line of Reaganite capitalism, social darwinism and paleoconservatism that definesd Valley culture in the 1980s and 1990s.

-Though it's (rightfully) criticized as 'copaganda' these days, "Law & Order" is a staple of American television and an essential part of New York City's fabric. For anyone who grew up or lived/lives in the Five Boroughs, walking by an L&O shoot on the street or in your building is a fact of life. The show's episodes are ripped straight from the headlines, and up until a point, its ethos and narrative dovetailed very closely with NYC's quotidian life. Rolling Stone had a lovely essay about the show's relationship with the city during its first two decades that focuses on its role in crafting the city's narrative and dramatic culture (virtually every working theater actor in NYC had an L&O credit in their bio).

BOOK OF THE WEEK - We all need some distraction right now. I recently turned back to a classic where the film adaptation (Bogart, Bacall, directed by Howard Hughes, screenplay by William Faulkner) is arguably as good as the book: Raymond Chandler's 1939 masterpiece, The Big Sleep.

Approaching a century after his heyday, Chandler's writing is still sharp as a knife, his descriptions minutely detailed, and his dialogue crisp. Delving into the underbelly of pre-WWIII Los Angeles, a blackmail case involving the daughters of a millionaire takes private eye Philip Marlowe into a cobweb of kidnapping, pornography, and murder. Plot aside, Chandler's novels are remarkable for their insight into Los Angeles before the freeways, where streetcars were common, smog was nonexistent and the wartime boom began transforming the city into the behemoth we know today.

FILM - As part of a long-term research project, I've been spending a lot of time digging into the Algerian War of Independence and its repercussions for French society. So imagine my delight when this half-hour excerpt from Patrick Rotman's 2002 documentary 'L'Ennemi Intime' cropped up on the Criterion Channel's home page. Featuring interviews with key ministers and veterans of the parachute regiments that waged France's pioneering counterinsurgency campaign against the Front de Liberation National during the 'Battle of Algiers', Rotman's documentary pulls no punches in dealing with the rampant torture, summary executions and overall depravity of France's failed attempt to put down Algeria's independence movement.

MUSIC - I will never forget seeing Canadian outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor play at a grubby Irish pub on Chicago's far Northwest Side back in college. It was the height of Dubya's War On Terror, and the dark, brooding post-rock outfit from Montreal had been detained by Customs and Border Protection while driving to the U.S. for their tour. It wasn't a shock, given the band's hard-left politics, openly anarchist leanings and the incipient McCarthyism of that era. The next time I saw them live was at a huge venue on Market Street in San Francisco, which seemed completely incongruous with their anti-capitalist, DIY aesthetic. Their albums normally come with ideological missives, such as this one from their 2021 release that called for 'taxing the rich until they're impoverished' and 'take the power from the police and give it to the neighborhoods that they terrorize'.

Their latest release from last year, "NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD" (2024), should be quite explanatory. That figure was the official body count from Israel's genocide in the Gaza Strip as of a year ago, a number that is likely orders of magnitude greater now. It's a typically sprawling, engrossing record that is perfectly suited for mid-winter.