June 18 update: Florida AG at War with Federal Courts; UAVs & Military Weaknesses; Crypto Buys off SFPD; Waymo Spies on You; Iowa Farming & Cancer; CA Cops Illegally Share ALPR Data with ICE; Bolsonaro's Spying ring; France Targets Anti-Fascists

Some photos are worth a thousand words

Hate it when I'm right, but the last two weeks proved a prediction I made here when the first round of protests against ICE's dragnet raids kicked off in San Diego. Americans do not like seeing their neighbors dragged away by squads of masked, rifle-toting plainclothes thugs and Los Angeles County decided to stand up in a big way. The suburb of Paramount and downtown LA saw pitched clashes between protesters and federal law enforcement, the LA Sheriff's Department and the LAPD that made international news.

Alongside the ongoing ICE kidnappings that are an overt sign of Stephen Miller's control of DHS and his desire to hit a daily quota of 3,000 detentions, there are signs that Trump's people are intent on targeting their political opponents. David Huerta, the president of the massive SEIU California union, was arrested, injured, and charged with felony conspiracy last Friday for his role in the demonstrations. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, California Senator Alex Padilla, and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander have all been arrested while protesting ICE's actions.

Read this Gustavo Arellano column for a nuanced view of the naked provocation that last week's immigration raids in SoCal were designed to be - and this column about Padilla's arrest, which is a stark portent of how Trump will deal with rising political dissent as popular support for his administration crumbles.

And while the far right media ecosystem works itself into a lather about a Southern California "insurrection" and wrings its hands about unarmed civilians confronting law enforcement and U.S. Marines kitted out for a second siege of Falluja, the actual lethal violence is coming from the places that it tends to. Yep, the extreme right and particularly that Christian Nationalist universe that loves to bomb abortion clinics and kill doctors.

Private security contractor and evangelist minister Vance Boelter killed a Minnesota politician and her husband this past weekend, shot and wounded another elected official and his wife, and attempted two other assassinations before being apprehended by law enforcement in a massive manhunt. Authorities found a manifesto and hit list purportedly written by Boelter which tallied 50 to seventy other politicians, prominent public figures, and Planned Parenthood as potential targets. I'll be on Jake Hanrahan's Popular Front to discuss that story in the days to come.

Please do not look away from Gaza even as Israel tries to drag the United States and Europe into an insane war with Iran. The IDF and private security contractors have been massacring dozens of civilians a day for more than a week as they desperately gather for food aid. 59 Palestinians were killed in just the past 24 hours after being shelled by IDF tanks.

On other fronts, research for Imperial Feedback has been occupying a large portion of my waking hours. I did manage to squeeze in some reporting for the Guardian on a proposed law that will roll back transparency for California police misconduct records related to 'undercover' officers - a category that conveniently remains undefined.

Helen Warrell from the excellent Financial Times wrote a devastating, comprehensive account of a young British girl who killed herself after being groomed and radicalized by Neo-Nazis and then caught in the machinery of the British criminal justice system. My BBC colleague Daniel De Simone and I first broke Rhianan's saga in January 2023.

Let's get to it - and if you're in New York City, vote Mamdani. If only to spite Palantir CEO Alex Karp.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-A federal judge held Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier in civil contempt this week for continuing to enforce a state law criminalizing the presence of undocumented migrants in arguably the worst corner of the Eastern Seaboard. The judge initially blocked state authorities from engaging in immigration enforcement this past April, but Uthmeier has openly flaunted Florida's noncompliance with the federal courts. This is yet another indication of the American Right's refusal to abide by the rule of law - or that is, laws they don't agree with. No surprise it's happening South of the Mason-Dixon line either...

-Earlier this month, the Russian air force was devastated by a Ukrainian drone attack that left a major chunk of their military aviation capacity destroyed or crippled. Like the recent Israeli strike against Iran, Ukraine successfully infiltrated explosives-laden drones through Russia's vast land borders and used them to target several airfields across the country's massive Eurasian landmass. The advent of small-scale drone clusters as an offensive military tactic is turning military doctrine on its head worldwide and bears watching because, as we all know, these technologies soon filter back into domestic law enforcement. Here's the FT's deep dive into the Ukrainian operation.

-Speaking of drones, cryptocurrency mogul Chris Larsen's ongoing campaign to buy off the San Francisco Police Department is proceeding apace. Earlier this month, Larsen donated $9.4 million to SFPD to purchase UAVs and continue blanketing the city with networked surveillance cameras. Larsen previously lavished money on a 2024 ballot measure campaign to expand SFPD's surveillance capabilities and bypass a 2019 law restricting the agency's use of technology deemed invasive to privacy. Mission Local is the last SF institution standing that doesn't openly ascribe to either neoliberal (Chron, KQED) or network state (SF Standard) ideology, and like any good publication, they follow the money.

-Google's autonomous taxi service Waymo was hit hard during protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco this month, as demonstrators summoned the cars to either block traffic or just torch them writ large. While you have the occasional 'won't somebody think of the Waymos!' handwringing from familiar faces in the vendido press, WIRED's Caroline Haskins spelt out precisely why some people might want to attack such machines. Aside from representing the elimination of yet more jobs (taxis, couriers, etc), the self-driving cars are rolling surveillance cameras that freely share footage with the cops, no warrant necessary.

-Cancer clusters are everywhere in Iowa, one of only two American states where cancer rates are on the rise. New studies are pointing the finger at the state's massive farming sector, and the rampant use of pesticides and nitrates that have already caused an enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (that's right), which is the drainage for the entire Mississippi River basin that runs Canada to Louisiana and the Rockies east to the Appalachians. 31 million acres of Iowa's 35.7 million total acres are given over to agriculture, and American regulations on pesticides are...substandard, and getting worse by the week.

-Immigration and Customs Enforcement find people via datamining. I reported on their wide variety of tools back in 2017, which depend on local agencies feeding the feds with information from criminal justice databases and collection platforms. Which, of course, include license plate readers, a near-ubiquitous surveillance tool that was initially developed by the British to track IRA-linked vehicles and then migrated over into quotidian police work (there's a little bit of Imperial Feedback's research for you all). As part of California's push to regulate police surveillance practices a decade ago, the state legislature banned local police agencies from sharing license plate reader information with federal or out-of-state agencies. Turns out the LAPD, LASD, Riverside County Sheriff, and several other SoCal law enforcement entities violated that law repeatedly and turned over vehicle tracking datasets to ICE, per information obtained by the activist group Oakland Privacy.

-Brazil's former president and would-be golpista Jair Bolsonaro is in a situation that Americans might envy: he's facing the business end of a criminal prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2022 election that removed him from office. He's now potentially staring down the barrel of a new set of charges related to an illegal spying ring Bolsonaro and his allies allegedly ran during his presidency, which targeted supreme court justices, political opponents, environmentalists, journalists and activists. Setting up a parallel intelligence agency to undercut Bolsonaro's opposition shouldn't come as surprising - the Reagan Administration's National Security Council was essentially running off-book wars during the 1980s. Were/are there similar operations in the United States under Trump? That's a question that bears exploring.

-As French President Emmanuel Macron continues to tack right in a vain effort to siphon voters away from the Le Pen family's resurgent Rassemblement National, his Interior Ministry ordered the formal dissolution of the Lyon chapter of the anti-fascist Jeune Garde in the middle of June. This is the second anti-Fascist group dissolved in two years by French authorities, who have also targeted hard-right street militants with such bans. However, this stands in sharp contrast to the government's decision last month to let a massive Neo-Nazi march proceed through the streets of Paris despite the presence of Fascist criminals from across Western Europe. Mediapart covers the street politics of France's struggle against Neo-Fascism well, and if you don't read French there's always the gift of browser-enabled translations.

BOOK OF THE WEEK - In the spirit of this month's protests and the summer ahead, I think it's only right to revisit one of the American classics about street politics, Norman Mailer's seminal Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). Written during the most fractious period in this country's Twentieth Century political history, Mailer documents the 1968 Republican and Democratic Party conventions that gave us both Richard Nixon and the Chicago Police Department's brutal crackdown on Students for a Democratic Society-led demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the Johnson Administration.

I always thought of this book as a corollary to the documentary Medium Cool in terms of encapsulating the social ferment of the era when the Black Panther Party was still whole, and SDS has not yet splintered into the factions that would spin off the Weather Underground. It's an important reminder that our current tumult is not unique nor inescapable. But the past does shape the present, and in many ways we are still living in the echoes of Summer '68.

FILM - Ukraine's Azov Movement has been tremendously influential for the global far right, providing an organizing template for European and American Neo-Fascists and also a proving ground for extremists seeking real-world combat experience in their volunteer corps. Some years back, the Ukrainian Army folded Azov's combat units into the regular military with the intention of diluting their noxious public image. Le Monde's Sebastian Bourdon published a terrific video investigation this week found hundreds of soldiers in the rebranded Third Assault Brigade covered in Neo-Nazi tattoos. There's no questioning the evidence Seb found: it comes from the brigade's own social media accounts and propaganda output. And the West is complicit too: these soldiers have been trained by their Spanish, British, Canadian and French counterparts.

MUSIC - The saga of tech entrepreneur turned Russian spy Jan Marsalek is truly stranger than fiction. The Austrian national who rose to wealth and fame at the head of German payment service Wirecard turned out to be running a sham company that came apart when the FT began digging in back in 2018. His real business, as it turns out, was running an espionage ring for Russia's military intelligence service, the GRU. While much of the FT's Wirecard reporting bears reading in its own right, the organization has built an entire season of its excellent Hot Money podcast around the Marsalek saga. Beats 99.9% of the thriller films out there.