Jan 15 Update: Terrorgram Collective Gets FTOed; The Mediterranean's Nameless Dead; Vance Hems on Pardoning Violent J6ers; Bukelele's Star Moment; Telegram Coughs Up User Data; Sahel Juntas Move for Minerals

Altadena, California late last week, looking like it was carpetbombed rather than incinerated in a firestorm

Happy New Year to you all, and welcome to 2025. Right on the hing of a new administration, and predictably, the Israeli assault on Gaza is coming to a halt just as Netanyahu's close ally is prepared to take the White House, with a ceasefire deal announced earlier today. Remains to be seen how serious it is and what the conditions will be, but as Gazans have a chance to dig out from under the rubble we will get an idea of the true death toll and what it means that cities of 200,000 people like Jabalia were wiped off the map.

On the home front, it's the shoulder season between presidential administrations, which means editors and reporters alike are pulling apart this week's farcical confirmation hearings while trying to sort out coverage lines following next week's inauguration. Los Angeles is burning, just as Mike Davis sadly predicted it would. That horrorshow is going to put the City of Angels and California writ large on its ear, just in time for renewed hostilities with Trump. Up in New York City there's also the ongoing federal and state corruption investigations into Eric Adams' rotten administration, which also includes a police department (the nation's largest) mired in a "polycrisis" of epic proportions. For posterity's sake, here's my rundown of the NYPD's current morass (paywalled, sorry).

The first two weeks of the year have been a mix of downtime and logistics prep for a busy winter and Spring. I'll be in Baltimore the last week of January to cover Brandon Russell's federal trial: the Atomwaffen Division co-founder stands accused of plotting with his girlfriend and a confidential informant to destroy that city's power grid and trigger a race war. The Terrorgram Collective is going to feature even more prominently in my reporting this year. I'll have a piece up here later this week about the State Department's decision on Monday to list Russell's comrades as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, the first such far right group to earn the dubious honorific reserved almost exclusively for jihadis the past two decades. No complaints here: once you start pulling the red thread, gotta follow it until the whole sweater unravels. Worth a reminder that I prefigured that American FTO designation in May, when British authorities formally proscribed Terrorgram as an extremist group. Yet another reason to subscribe...

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Hannah Gais at the Southern Poverty Law Center is a wonderful colleague on the extremism beat and is responsible for breaking some of the major stories about the Terrorgram Collective, including Brandon Russell's involvement in the group. Here's Hannah's solid takeaway on the long-term significance of the State Department's formal FTO designation, which predictably resulted in a bunch of different social media and messaging accounts going dark and switching up.

-Europe's migrant crisis may have faded from the front-page catastrophe that dominated headlines in 2014 and 2015, but the Mediterranean Sea is still very much a graveyard for an untold number of desperate souls seeking a better life in the European Union. Recorded deaths of migrants crossing the wine-dark sea are actually higher per capita than they were a decade ago, when far more people undertook the crossing. That's not counting the boats that simply disappear into the middle of the sea without ever being found. A group of scientists are trying to identify some of the 31,000-odd dead migrants (a wild undercount) and give their relatives a sense of closure. It's a grim reminder of a crisis that far too many people want to push aside.

-Amidst the sound and fury of Trump's wildly unqualified cabinet picks, Vice President J.D. Vance's remarks about not pardoning January 6 participants convicted of violence at the United States Capitol four years ago barely registered. However, Vance's remarks echo recent conversations I've had with current and former federal law enforcement: federal prosecutors took a particular tack to charge and secure guilty pleas involving assault and other violent felonies for the worst J6 offenders, including key members of extremist organizations like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers who were at the forefront of the assault that day. Clearly, Trump's decision will be his own, but it would not be the first time he backtracked on outlandish promises.

-Beaches, Bitcoin and surfing? What's wrong with implementing a little bit of mano duro security measures to secure El Salvador for foreign tourists, investors and residents alike, even if it means locking up 30 percent of all adult males in the country? President Nayib Bukelele is one of the most popular leaders in Latin America for seemingly putting down the country's homicidal MS-13 and 18th Street gangs (both of which started in Los Angeles and spread south during Clinton and Dubya-era deportation blitzes). He's also become a favored figure for American Far Right media figures, who would absolutely love to implement some of his policies in El Norte. This Financial Times deep dive is well worth your time.

-Given the State Department's aforementioned designation of the Terrorgram Collective as an FTO, it's worth pointing out this item from the excellent 404 Media: Telegram is now turning over user data on thousands of users of the little-regulated social media and messaging platform that is a favorite of the Four Horsemen of the Internet (cybercriminals, extremists, child abuses and malicious state actors). It might have something to do with CEO Pavel Durov's ongoing criminal case in France. It might have something to do with similar crackdowns on the service in countries like Brazil for refusing to comply with criminal subpoenas pursuant to law enforcement investigations of the Far Right. Either way, times have changed.

-Trump's quixotic but apparently serious push to annex/invade/take over the Danish Arctic colony (yes, it is) of Greenland brought rare earth minerals and natural resources back to the news cycle. However, there's a way more substantial story on this beat in Africa's Sahel region, where a clutch of military juntas that took power in Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali and Chad over the past three years have been forcefully seizing mining operations run by Western companies. The oft-overlooked region is rapidly becoming a battlefield in a new Great Game over natural resources, as American and French military presence is being supplanted by Russian mercenaries and Chinese contractors who back the insurgent young officer corps who have seized power. Consequently, the region's plentiful gold, uranium and lithium resources are increasingly under control of these military governments, which use the profits from their mineral resources to purchase weapons, buy alliances and pursue bloody wars against internal uprisings.

BOOK - Policing White Supremacy (2025), the terrific new volume from Brennan Center fellow and former FBI agent Mike German, is a succinct, detailed and necessarily blunt account of federal law enforcement's decades-long failure to bring the American extreme right to heel despite decades of escalating violence and a raft of expansive anti-terrorism laws predating even the 2001 Patriot Act.

"FBI management has shown an appalling lack of interest in prioritizing these investigations, however, or even evaluating the scope of the problem," German writes, drawing not only on his experience infiltrating violent Neo-Nazi skinheads during the pre-Oklahoma City era but also adjusting to the misguided priorities federal law enforcement adopted after the September 11 attacks that shunted attention and manpower away from the far right and allowed it to fester into the ultra-violent hydra we are dealing with today. A must-read for anyone interested in law enforcement, police radicalization, and extremism.

FILM - The Lives of Others (2006) left the audience silent when I saw it in theaters back when the film came out. It's a chilling examination of the life of a Stasi surveillance officer in East Berlin who is assigned to monitor the private life of a prominent playwright.

The level of empathy and solidarity developed by the watcher for his target is reminiscent of Coppola's The Conversation (which I've featured here previously), yet with the singular context of the Western World's best-known total surveillance society. That is, before post-9/11 America. But that's a story for another time.

MUSIC - Black on Both Sides, Mos Def (1999). I heard the opening bars to Do It Now in a store on Oakland's Grand Avenue last month and it raised goosebumps on my arm. For New Yorkers of a certain generation, this was a signpost of lyricism, beatmaking and overall atmosphere at the apex of the city's golden years of rap, before major label fuckery, rampant materialism, 9/11 and intertia put the scene into a slow decline (apologies to DipSet, that Purple City Byrd Gang).