July 29 Update: Feds Flail in L.A. Courts; Silicon Valley Dreams of Dictatorship; NYC's Kafkaesque Immigration Courts; Supreme Court Fight Looms Over Warrantless Raids; Israel's Permanent Genocide; Roblox's Diddy Fetish; the Nerd Reich's Footsoldiers

Never look away. Anse de la Fausse Monnaie, Marseille. ©Ali Winston

Well, it's summer. If you couldn't tell by the lingering scent of fireworks - or perhaps that's the latest round of Canadian megafires providing that particular scent and orange cast to the sky - we're halfway through 2025 and well on track for yet another hottest year on record. But you'd never know it from reading the traditional US press, which is too busy cutting business deals with the Trump Administration and chasing Jeffrey Epstein's ghost around Capitol Hill to focus on catastrophic global warming or Israel's ongoing genocide and mass starvation of Gaza's remaining population. The rest of the world sure as hell is waking up, even if the Israelis claim the rending photos of the famine are "fake".

Don't expect for elections to save you, particularly when the Justice Department is weighing criminal investigations or charges for states deemed to insufficiently secure their election databases - another part of the GOP's Big Lie about Trump's 2020 loss and a way to muddy the waters around electoral democracy. Lawfare has been relatively ineffective as well, as the Supreme Court keeps green-lighting illegal budgetary maneuvers and codifying massive expansions of executive power while pursuing a hard-right shadow docket.

As you all noticed, I've been offline for the last few weeks and out of the news cycle. That's by design: I spent much of July digging through French police and colonial archives for Imperial Feedback-related research. That's where the lead photograph of this post comes from: a fantastic cove in Marseille where the water is cool and the limestone is warm. Plenty of incredible material turned up during my time poring through old dossiers, intelligence reports, census rosters and maps, but this one chart from the 10th Parachutist Regiment's Battle of Algiers files takes the cake.

The structure of the National Liberation Front during the Battle of Algiers in 1957, according to the 10th Parachutist Regiment. Names crossed off=people killed. Source: Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer, France

For a quick explanation of what the above document is, take a look at this scene from the Gillo Pontecorvo's film The Battle of Algiers (and then watch the whole thing if you've not yet had the privilege).

At the front end of this month, I put together a post for paid subscribers about Noah (Nikki) Lamb, a native of Vacaville, California and key member of the Terrorgram Collective who federal prosecutors claim was responsible for putting together the Neo-Fascist propaganda collective's 'hit list' of politicians, law enforcement, academics, businessmen and journalists who they believed should be assassinated. There's still a much larger piece on Terrorgram in the works for WIRED, but for those in need of a refresher here's my article from last September about the USDOJ indictments of Matthew Robert Allison and Dallas Erin Humber, who are accused of leading the noxious propaganda group and face terrorism charges. Humber recently filed notice of her intent to plead guilty: Allison is still fighting his case.

For the paid subscribers, I'll have another post this week on the wild shambles that is Eric Adams' NYPD that should illustrate precisely why Zohran Mamdani has to make police accountability a central plank of his campaign for this November's general election in New York City. If Mamdani truly wants to run New York City effectively, he must do what no other mayor has done in more than three decades, and tackle an out-of-control law enforcement agency that has governed itself for too long. But you all have heard that song from me before.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-The current set of blowhards running the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorneys offices throughout the country love to trumpet political arrests with purpose-made sizzle reels and bombastic press conferences. Those cases often looks far weaker when set in front of a judge - or even a grand jury, which only needs to find probable cause that a crime was committed to hand down a felony indictment. The Los Angeles Times found precisely that pattern for several federal arrests of protesters involved in this Spring's chaotic pushback to Immigration & Customs Enforcement raids throughout Southern California: grand juries and judges alike are rejected or dismissing cases brought against demonstrators for assaulting law enforcement, rioting or other sundry charges. The use of Customs & Border Protection agents throughout SoCal for the immigration dragnet and protest suppression is notable: CBP personnel rarely find themselves in the position of testifying in court or having their statements reviewed by a judge. Unsurprisingly, they're lying through their teeth.

-Quite a few of you subscribe to Gil Duran's excellent Nerd Reich newsletter, where he tackles the efforts of Silicon Valley's reactionary elite to reshape American society into an oligarchy in their own vision. Gil is currently working on a book about this topic, but keeps on top of current affairs quite well. Thanks to his years working in politics, he's got a sharper view than most journalists on how drastically moguls like David Sacks, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen diverge from standard democratic discourse. In a recent conversation with Jon Fortt from The Verge, Gil explains how the tech authoritarians used the San Francisco Bay Area as their sandbox for political experimentation in the early part of this decade, and expanded to Washington, D.C. with Trump's return from office. He's also quite sharp on how complicit American journalism has been in facilitating this creeping authoritarian trend.

-For journalists, immigration court is unlike any other judicial setting. Defendants do not have the right to a court-appointed attorney, and the daily churn of cases in each courtroom is head-spinning. Furthermore, the courts do not welcome outside scrutiny and even before the current deportation blitz, made life extremely hard for independent observers, including members of the press. There is also a notable "fog of war" that surrounds immigration proceedings even during non-extremist presidential administrations, with wild claims about the dangerousness of potential deportees that don't check out against the overwhelmingly lawful behavior of those in process for removal. The City examined goings-on at the Varick Street immigration court in New York City and found a Kafka-esque state of affairs. Judges are routinely ordering people released from custody for scant evidence of threats to the general public; however, ICE has sent them to far-flung detention facilities elsewhere in the United States and refuses to release them from custody. It's a snapshot, albeit a significant one, of the lawlessness that characterizes Stephen Miller's immigration crackdown. Which, by the way, he's profiteering from.

-The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to uphold a California federal judge's decision barring ICE's 'roving patrols' that touched off mass protests and civil disturbance in Southern California this Spring, setting the stage for an ominous Supreme Court showdown that will not only shape the contours of Stephen Miller's erstwhile Gestapo, but could also prove consequential for American policing writ large. The lower court ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong earlier this month held that blanket stops by masked, unidentified law enforcement (often ICE, DEA, FBI and CBP) violated the Fourth Amendment's clause against unwarranted searches and seizures.

-The situation in Gaza is growing more and more desperate, as mass starvation sets in and even the risible 'official' death toll that hovered around 40,000 Palestinians killed for about a year is now over 60,000. Israeli military operations have not ceased, and if anything, the IDF appears locked in to a war without end where they are ordered by officers to fire indiscriminately on civilians seeking humanitarian aid. The FT took a step back and examined Israel's permanent genocide (my terms) about a week ago, in what should put an end to any debate over why this conflict is still dragging on. It's a campaign of extermination, pure and simple - even if France and the United Kingdom do go forward with recognizing Palestine as an independent state, there's going to be very little of it left in a few months at the current rate.

-If you have children and you happen to let them play the online game Roblox, PLEASE log them out of that cesspool immediately. The wildly popular game, played by somewhere in the order of 85 million young people every single day, has long been a hunting ground for pedophiles and, as I reported in Spring 2024, is one of the platforms where the child abuse cult 764 and its offshoots search for victims. There are myriad other problems with the ability of Roblox users to create their own sub-worlds and themed games centered around torture and sexual abuse, including, per 404 Media's report last week, a group themed around convicted entertainment mogul Diddy's lurid sex trafficking. Get your kids offline and outside.

-Lastly, scads has been written about the so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency, the tip of the spear in the American right's assault on the 'administrative state', which is their term of art for functional, democratic institutions that made the United States a semi-functioning society for the better part of a century. Bloomberg news just released a deep profile of Luke Farritor, one of the DOGE kids who took part in Elon Musk's highly questionable enterprise. The article reveals not only Farritor's path of radicalization through now-familiar routes (Thiel Fellowships, ahem ahem?) but also provides striking insight into the mentality of the young footsoldiers of Silicon Valley's emergent Nerd Reich.

BOOK - As a distraction from the mountain of counterinsurgency and policing-related reading I've been poring through for Imperial Feedback, I went looking for a substantial, engrossing novel with the sort of setting that would transport me to an entirely different time and place. So nothing associated with France, Ireland, the U.S., Vietnam, Algeria, or the post-9/11 GWOT. Despite the huge exclusionary category, I managed to land on Ben Fountain's excellent The Devil Makes Three (2024), which centers on the turbulent Haiti of the early 1990s. Switching back and forth between American expats, local elites, brutal militia members and everyday Haitians trying to survive the crushing U.S. embargo, Fountain's narrative also uses deep-sea treasure hunting as a vehicle to explore the island's labyrinthine history (for more on that, see C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins). Fountain's prior books, Brief Travels with Che Guevara (2007) and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012) are also notable for their delicate and caring treatment of Latin America's political history and the human cost of the post 9/11 Forever Wars.

FILM - For those of you who like summer thrillers, I will not be recommending Purple Noon, La Piscine, or any of the other stock numbers that make the reperatory theater marquees in July and August. To quote the eternal Leonard Cohen, "you want it darker." And it seldom gets darker than Michael Haneke. Known for bone-rending classics like the Piano Teacher (1997), Caché (2005) and the White Ribbon (2009), Haneke's 1997 feature Funny Games centers on a bourgeois couple held hostage in their own home and tortured by a pair of white-gloved sadists.

It's a remarkable film that bears close echoes to David Lynch's contemporaneous Lost Highway (1997) and even 2001's incredible Mulholland Drive. Go for the 1997 original, even if Haneke did cast and direct the 2007 English-language remake with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts.

MUSIC - The 2019 Christchurch Massacre in New Zealand ranks up there with the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing and Anders Breivik's summer 2011 massacre in Norway as one of the lodestones in contemporary Neo-Nazi militancy. Even thought Christchurch did have the effect of jarring the first Trump Administration into action against the Extreme Right, prompting sprawling investigations and proseuctions of the Atomwaffen Division and the Base, there was a surprising lack of curiosity about why and how Brenton Tarrant radicalized. Australian journalist Joey Watson spent years digging into his countryman's background and retracing the mass murderer's path through the Antipodes and across Europe. His resulting podcast is intelligent, thorough, and chilling.