January 20 Update: 550 Inmates per Doctor; Ex-SDNY Head Rips NY Political Corruption; As the Golden Gulag Burns, Shock Doctrine Takes Hold; Does LA Rebuild or Retreat; Israeli Spies & Silicon Valley

Welcome to the Nerd Reich

Brace for impact. The Nerd Reich was sworn into office yesterday in front of an audience of tech oligarchs, corrupt cops and mayors, sycophants and far right extremists from near and afar. While it remains to be seen how many of the new Administration's myriad promises will actually come to fruition, there will unmistakably be retrograde action on climate, workers rights, civil rights, financial regulation, and far more. The sight of a South African sieg heiling (twice) while paraphrasing the Fourteen Words at the inaugueration of an American president was hideous and an insult to the hundreds of thousands of United States servicemen who died fighting Fascism in World War II.

If that wasn't enough, get ready for a Stateside Years of Lead, with more than 1,500 January 6th insurrectionists receiving pardons or commutations of their sentence on Day One of the Nerd Reich. That includes the leadership of both the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy and are currency serving time in federal prison. Given how many of these individuals were jail or prison inmates until mere hours ago and the well-documented effects of incarceration on political extremists, it's a sadly opportune moment to revisit my October Vanity Fair feature on prisons and the American Far Right.

Still in long-term reporting mode for several different projects, both written and documentary. On that matter, there was a very significant terrorism conviction in the United Kingdom last week: teenager Cameron Finnegan was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the 764 exploitation network on terrorism charges. Finnegan's case broke after my WIRED investigation last winter, and is notable for the use of high-level terrorism statutes to pursue a diffuse group most commonly associated with random acts of violent, CSAM distribution and violent manipulation. I'll have more on this world in the next few weeks.

Lastly, a little reminder for the brave new world we're returning to - please use Signal for any remotely political communications, and disable location tracking on your smartphones. Even the National Security Agency wants you to.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Brooklyn's hulking Metropolitan Detention Center is home to defendants held over for cases in the Eastern District of New York, which means everyone from Puffy to Angel Almeida is held there. The jail is violent, subject to dangerous heating outages in the middle of New York City's frigid (for now) winters, and apparently has an eye-popping and incredibly dangerous 550/1 inmate to doctor ratio. The New York Daily News picked up that outrageous item during a hearing last week, which should trigger outrage and immediate reform. But in the United States, you're deemed guilty until proven innocent, and incarceration apparently strips inmates of their civil and human rights until enough hue and cry is raised.

-New York State is also riddled with corruption and municipal malfeasance, from Mayor Eric Adams' sticky fingered approach to governance all the way up to Governor Kathy Hochul lining her husband's employers' pockets with half a billion in taxpayer largesse. Damian Williams, a lifelong New Yorker who recently stepped down as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has apparently had enough. Last week, Williams let loose with against the Empire State's rot and complacency in City and State. Is anyone listening? Time will tell.

-Shock doctrine capitalism is alive and well in Southern California, as landlords hike rents up at a staggering pace following the devastating wildfires that displaced tens of thousands of Angelenos. There are a number of items worth reading on this, from Curbed's dive into the gleeful profiteering in the face of countless tragedies to The Nation's grim dispatch from Los Angeles County Housing Court, where proceedings continue uninterrupted (The criminal courts were also still open, by the way). While California Governor Gavin Newsom did extend emergency price gouging protections for rental housing through early March and Attorney General Rob Bonta has issued hundreds of warning letters to landlords, the rapaciousness sweeping across the Southland will require a sustained executive, legal and legislative effort to combat and reverse.

-With so many displaced by the fires that swept down from the wilderness-urban interface into Los Angeles' suburban sprawl, there are long-0verdue discussions taking place about precisely how to rebuild in the largest county in the United States, which was already in the throes of a housing crisis before the infernos touched off. In sharp contrast to Governor Newsom's suspension of environmental laws and building codes to supposedly kick-start redevelopment, many residents are openly questioning if living in paradise is still worth the knife's edge that is Southern California's balance between mankind and nature. Christopher Grimes's Financial Times feature makes for uncomfortable, yet necessary reading.

-The presence of Israeli Defense Force veterans in American tech companies has long been an open secret that news organizations refuse to cover, despite the obvious national security risks and the American intelligence community's own recognition of Israel as a high-level espionage threat (one of the lost revelations of the Snowden cache). Nate Bear's excellent Substack column did the basic work of mining LinkedIn profiles and documenting the heavy presence of Israeli veterans of the IDF's Unit 8200 in critical tech companies from Google to Nvidia to Apple to Microsoft to Meta and everywhere in between. For those not familiar with the aforementioned unit, it is responsible for Israel's signals intelligence operations and far more, particularly the use of artificial intelligence targeting analytics to tech-wash the bombing of civilian targets during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

BOOK - Leonard Peltier is a free man after nearly five decades in state custody for the 1975 double murders of two FBI agents on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation that he almost certainly did not commit. Given the news of one of outgoing President Joe Biden's final acts, I didn't have much of a choice for this week's book. Peter Matthiessen's magisterial In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1992) bears revisiting.

It is the definitive account of the American Indian Movement's running war with the federal government and the Bureau, digging into the Pine Ridge double murder, the investigation and prosecution of Peltier, and the long, bloody history of America's conquest of the First Nations. Both the FBI and South Dakota's government held up publication of Matthiessen's book for eight years with lawsuits that essentially sought prior restraint, in violation of New York Times v. Sullivan. It's a monumental work and a milestone in the annals of press freedom.

FILM - I haven't seen a documentary as good as Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat (2024) in years. This electric retelling of the 1961 overthrow by the United States, Belgium, France and the United Kingdom of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, is a classic Cold War tragedy retold with the additional lens of how African-American music was deployed as a covert influence operation in this Third World liberation struggle.

Brilliantly edited with astonishing archival material (you'll never think of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev the same again) and solid contemporary interviews, Soundtrack accomplishes the daunting task of bridging high-level state conflict and on-the-ground quotidian culture in the midst of epochal upheaval and change. See this one twice.

MUSIC - John Coltrane, Both Directions At Once (2018) is the saxophonist's lost album, discovered by his wife decades after his passing. It's been a great comfort to me in the last few weeks, at a time when so much is in turmoil. Sometimes you need music to cleanse your mind and hit the refresh button. That's always been Trane's place for me.