June 3 Update: NYPD Skates on Summer 2020 Cop Riots; Stephen Miller's Anti-ICE turn; Patel & Bongino's War with the FBI; Trump's Total Information Awarness project; Thielverse's Perversions of Tolkien

San Diegans take exception to an ICE raid on a popular restaurant last month. Looks like Iraq circa 2005, eh?

Summer's coming up fast, and with college campuses emptying out amidst craven administrators cracking down on students speaking up against Israel's ongoing genocide layered on top of growing outrage at militarized immigration raids across the country (see San Diego last weekend, where a bunch of ICE agents were so terrified by a crowd of pissed off residents that they resorted to flash-bang grenades), we're looking at a fractious warm season in the United States.

For the past two months, I've had my head down in the archives poring through secondary and primary material for Imperial Feedback - ergo the radio silence. It's been invigorating to say the least, and I've been working on a post summing up some of the more astonishing research findings to date, as a way of letting you all in on a little bit of my process. And, frankly, to keep myself honest.

All the while, I've been reporting away to keep the lights on. Bleeding Edge subscribers got to see my analysis on the FBI's arrest and indictment of 764's 'leadership' cell, insofar as a nihilistic ideological tendency can have leaders.

For the Guardian, my colleague Jason Wilson and I worked back on some of the Bay Area's worst reactionaries (ahem Seneca Scott ahem) behind recent cash-soaked right wing campaigns in Oakland and San Francisco all the way to a Wyoming resort deeply intertwined with the intellectual wing of the Neo-Fascist movement known as the 'New Right.' Our reporting also flagged up the, uh, uncomfortable proximity of another journalist who's covered this world for the mainstream media without divulging his ties to the movement, something Gil Duran over at the Nerd Reich explored in detail.

On the other side of the Atlantic, I've been keeping tabs on the rapidly-growing Active Club movement that convicted felon, serial gang founder, and would-be Blackshirt Robert Rundo co-founded while on the lam in Europe. For WIRED, I traced the evolution of Sweden's burgeoning Neo-Nazi fight clubs, their travels throughout Europe (including to an annual Fascist rally in Paris) and their close proximity to the Nordic Resistance Movement, which the Biden Administration listed as a terrorist entity last year. Should Trump ever leave power or his DOJ ever show interest in pursuing far right violence (haha) that could land the American Active Clubs in some hot water, since a member of the SoCal AC traveled to Sweden and palled around with these listed terrorists at a combat sports tournament last September.

In the next few weeks, I'll return to 764 for a careful look at how American authorities built their case against the nihilist cult of young ultra-sadists, as well as that look into my research to date.

That's more than enough, and there's a lot to catch up on. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Five years after an internationally-televised cop riot seized New York City after protests broke out on May 30th following the televised killing of George Floyd, only five NYPD officers received any form of lasting discipline, according to reporting by The City. More than a thousand complaints were filed against NYPD officers that summer for protest-related violence, Human Rights Watch issued a scathing report, tens of millions of dollars were paid out (by taxpayers of course, not the cops) in settlements, and the NYPD entered into a series of legal agreements that were supposed to fundamentally alter how it policed protests. On the latter, see my 2022 New York feature. Even more egregious here is how often the NYPD's commissioners reversed actual discipline despite an administrative trial judge finding them at fault.

-Given President Trump's adversarial history with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it's no surprise that the Kindergarten Kop duo of Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are doing their utmost to dismantle what they view as a hostile institution and rebuild it in their image. It's a sharp departure for America's political police (yes, that's what they've been from jump). Senior FBI agents seen as potentially disloyal to Trump are being resigned, frozen out of key roles or transferred to field offices across the country. Adam Goldman explored some of the Bureau's troubles, in a piece that reads like it was severely chopped down for length. Which is inexplicable, given what I've heard from some of my sources in and around the FBI about the ways in which their work is being driven by authoritarian impulses and channeled away from actual criminal investigations towards immigration roundups.

-First up, the Washington Examiner is an absolute pile of shit, a newspaper of the same order as the New York Post. If you wanted to conceive of an American Der Stürmer, the Examiner would slot in well to that role. However, by dint of its proximity both Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as the craziest people in the Trump Administration, the rag did manage to get hold of a very telling story about White House aide Stephen Miller's encounter with senior immigration officials. He apparently doesn't want them going after "criminals," but trawling Home Depot and 7-Eleven for people to deport.

-There are myriad reasons why Americans should be freaked out by FLOCK, a license plate reader company that deploys vehicle-tracking cameras throughout the country and collates the resulting data in a massive database from more than 5,000 communities large and small across the United States. For instance, the firm is underwritten by Silicon Valley egghead and would-be oligarch Marc Andreesen. Aside from that, the data are now being used to track people for overtly political purposes, including a Texan woman who got an abortion in violation of that state's retrograde law. 404 Media got an exclusive on that and another item that revealed local police are searching Flock's data to track down potentially undocumented people for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

-Staying on the data privacy front, WIRED's Dhruv Mehrotra pulled yet another rabbit out of the hat and dug up evidence that American customs officials are uploading genetic information of migrants, including children, into a massive FBI database for criminal offenders. Even though immigration violations are administrative in nature, Customs and Border Protection are apparently plowing ahead with this initiative, potentially in violation of federal health and privacy laws.

-Privacy, you said? Kiss goodbye to this if the Total Information Awareness system AKA Palantir ever gets their huge merged database of information purloined by the DOGE team up and running. It's abundantly clear that this firm, which was founded with money from both the Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm and Peter Thiel, has repurposed a Dubya-era mass surveillance program that the Trump folks have dusted back off. And they're using Israel as a model and an R&D sandbox, of course. For more on this company's stateside work, here's my 2018 investigation unveiling their crime forecasting skunkworks project with the New Orleans Police Department

-Flattery is the sincerest form of imitation, but ya gotta set a limit when it crosses the line into elision and revisionism. The San Francisco Chroncle's article last weekend on gang policing and immigration amused me to no end. Sure, the topic is deadly serious. But it's not new. Computerized gang data has been retained by California cops since the 1980s and every presidential administration since has deported immigrants for gang status violations, particularly since the turn of the millennium and the Dubya-era Operation Community Shield that made MS-13 a deportation priority and created sprawling federal task forces.

Even worse is the claim the Chronically Wrong reporter makes that ICE's own Gang database was first uncovered in 2024 by UC Irvine researchers. That's funny - since I wrote on that data management system first in August 2016 as part of an ongoing research project into California's gang policing model and pioneering database, which first established connectivity to ICE systems in 2006. Here's the original. You'll see how relevant it is in today's context. Accept no substitutes.

-Lastly, here's a hilarious essay from Current Affairs about all the ways in which the Peter Thiel-adjacent crowd misinterprets J.R. Tolkien's masterful body of work. Well worth your time, especially for anyone who's wanted to stave in Palmer Luckey or Blake Masters' faces.

BOOK OF THE WEEK - Mac Muir and Greg Finch spent decades investigating violent and abusive cops for New York City's independent watchdog agency, the Civilian Complaint Review board.

Their work was sandbagged by the NYPD at every twist and turn, from individual intransigence to command-level obstruction. Their newly-released book, Cop Cop:Breaking the Fixed System of American Policing (Zando, 2025), is staggering, infuriating and essential reading for anyone interested in law enforcement, accountability, and good government.

FILM - My colleague and good friend Jake Hanrahan has a problem with sitting still. If you've ever spent time with this madman, you can't help but notice how Jake constantly scans the room, fidgets and talks through myriad subjects with deep knowledge and an alarming speed of thought. All these attributes - plus his obsession with subcultures - are precisely why he is such a terrific documentarian and make Jake's new Away Days series a must-watch.

MUSIC - There are certain musicians who improve with age, or simply never slack off. Totemic bassist Ron Carter is one of those people and still going strong in concert, as evidence by a recent sold-out stand at the Village's Blue Note earlier this year. I could listen to him for hours on end, but the 2001 live album 'Telepathy' with guitarist Jim Hall tops my list.