May 5 Update: 'Less-Lethal Force' Under the Microscope; Campus Protests Are Not January 6th; Fossil Fuel Shenanigans; San Diego Jury Convicts 2 in 'Antifa' Related Conspiracy Trial; British SAS Accused of Extrajudicial Afghan Murders
Last week was marked by turmoil and violence on American campuses by police and in the case of the University of California Los Angeles, pro-Israel vigilantes, as administrators ordered crackdowns on pro-Palestine encampments at Columbia University, the University of Southern California, the University of Virginia, Fordham University, New York University and elsewhere, as Netanyahu's Kahanist government stands in the way of a ceasefire deal.
In New York City, the NYPD's command staff of teenage boys has spent much of the last few days trying to convince the world that there is some mysterious outside hand guiding the demonstrations, presenting a standard Kryptonite bike lock and a commonplace introductory book on Terrorism as 'evidence.' Just imagine what they do in actual criminal cases.
On my end, started the week by getting back in the harness with Darwin BondGraham and peeling back yet another layer of the onion on Oakland PD's emerging command staff scandal over an Internal Affairs Division cover-up of a homicide sergeant's alleged bribery of murder witnesses. Turns out several commanders were implicated in the scandal and disciplined, with potentially more names still at issue. Were the top ranks of OPD nvolved in this matter? We know former chief LeRonne Armstrong's wife, Deputy Chief Drennon Lindsay, is at the heart of the storm. Stay tuned, more of this coverage will be over at The Oaklandside in the coming days and week.
Bleeding Edge subscribers were also treated to another slice of courtroom drama from Neo-Nazi leader Robert Rundo's never-ending legal saga, as U.S. District Court Cormac J. Carney tried (and failed) yet again to cut Rundo loose. At an ultimately meaningless bail hearing this week, Rundo's defense attorneys put two SoCal Fascists, Grady Mayfield and Robert Wheldon, on the witness stand as purported character witnesses. Federal prosecutors, meanwhile, allege both men had plotted to help Rundo flee the country across the U.S.-Mexico border during his brief 48 hours of freedom in February. The Ninth Circuit rejected the bail grant by the lower court this Saturday. Subscribe to read more about this latest episode.
That's all for a preamble. Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-Following up on their excellent written series on "less-lethal" uses of force by American law enforcement, the Associated Press and PBS Frontline released a full-length documentary film about the project, which has tallied more than one thousand deaths from such measures over the past decade. Particularly relevant right now, as tear gas, beanbag rounds, rubber bullets and other such measures and being deployed with casual regularity across university campuses - in the absence of any real threat other than First Amendment-protected free speech, mind you.
-Hannah Gais, a colleague and dogged researcher over at the Southern Poverty Law Center, recently started her own Ghost.io site. Her very first entry is a timely and ominous essay on the facile and dangerous comparisons many conservatives - including the four-times-indicted former president - have drawn between the (nonviolent) campus protests over a genocidal war funded by the American taxpayer, and the seditious January 6th insurrection that sought to block the lawful election of President Joe Biden in 2020. The sheer amount of revisionism and memory-holing of the January 6th near-catastrophe in the intervening three years is alarming, intentional, and foreboding. Hannah's essay gets down to brass tacks eloquently and concisely. Subscribe to her site if you want more.
-An aspect of the current American administrations policy platform that gets overlooked by most mainstream outlets is the current regulatory push towards clean energy and away from fossil fuels. While many (correctly) argue that is insufficient given the pace and ferocity of climate change, there is no doubt that new regulations such as the new emissions restrictions on coal-fired power plants are game changers. Again, no surprise that the dirtiest industries are banking on Trump's return to save their profits and business model. Full credit to the Guardian for keeping environmental policy front and center in their coverage of the United States.
Oliver Milman
-A hard bit of digging by the Sunday Times of London uncovered a sprawling coverup by former Prime Minister David Cameron's administration of British war crimes, with Special Air Services members accused of killing Afghans for sport and planting weapons on their victims to conceal their misdeeds (unpaywalled version here). These outrages are sad, infuriating, but familiar feature of the Forever Wars, with similar episodes involving American and Australian soldiers emerging since the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan following Al Qaeda's attacks on the United States that fall. More than two decades later, and we're still feeling the reverberations. Bin Laden really got what he wanted, in the end.
Insight | Jonathan Calvert, George Arbuthnott, David Collins
-Two Los Angeles residents were found guilty of conspiracy-related charges in San Diego, with prosecutors successfully arguing that both men were culpable for violence committed by other Anti-Fascist counter-protesters who clashed with Trump supporters in that city back in January 2021. This is the first use of felony conspiracy to charge and convict purported members of "Antifa" in the same manner that prosecutors routinely go after street gangs and organized crime. Though the trial received considerably less attention that the ongoing Cop City case in Atlanta, Georiga, the ramifications are certain to be felt far and wide.
Alex Riggins
-Lastly, but not least, The Guardian's interview with Spanish environmental minister Teresa Ribera delves into the European Union's resurgent far right, which have taken power in Italy and Sweden, and are charging hard for dominance in Germany and France. The threat here, Ribera told the British newspaper, has to do with the normalization of Fascism and the rehabilitation of people and political positions once seen as anathema on the Old Continent following the Second World War.
However, if you read the American press, there is far less clarity about the stakes at hand in this fall's election. The hard right in Europe has "moderated and prepared itself to govern," says the Sulzberger paper. Jordan Bardella, the slick 28-year-0ld head of the Len Pen family's Front National/Rassemblement National Neo-Fascist party that is riding a wave of populist anger against President Emmanuel Macro, was described by Paris Bureau chief Roger Cohen as "no demagogue." Any mention of the rising street violence and militancy of Far Right youth groups that serve as the Front Nationale/Rassemblement Nationale's shock troops is completely absent from the Gray Lady's account (see this Mediapart investigation for extensive documenation of Fascist student groups harassing, surveilling and assaulting their left-wing teachers and classmates in France). To be expected, since their senior reporters seldom hit the pavement any longer.
Sam Jones
BOOK OF THE WEEK - The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020) is an indispensable book for understanding the current conflict in the Middle East. History Professor Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Chair at Columbia University, is retiring from the New York City institution this year (happily so, given the school's authoritarian stance towards pro-Palestinian student and faculty activists), but his latest book is enjoying a moment in the sun.
Interweaving the Khalidi family's long history in Occupied Palestine with the broader historical arc, this is a very different work from the distinguished historian's past works like The Iron Cage, which very much hew to a macro lens in explaining the vagaries of Western Imperial power in shaping the contemporary Middle East and its bloody partition, struggle and power dynamics.
FILM - Along with many generations of students from the University of California-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, I had the honor of learning from Lowell Bergman, the founder of that school's Investigative Reporting Program and a titan in our field.
His magazine and broadcasting journalism over the past five decades is among the most consequential in our field, but he is best remembered in American popular culture as the protagonist of Michael Mann's 1999 classic The Insider, which features peak Al Pacino and Russell Crowe as Bergman and Jeffrey Wigand, a scientist who blows the whistle on Big Tobacco's scheme to addict Americans to their product and avoid legal consequences. I hold The Insider in my pantheon of journalism films, alongside All The President's Men, The Paper, Circle of Deceit and Kill The Messenger.
MUSIC - Hectic weeks like this take it out of me, and there's not much left in the tank by the end when it comes to picking out decent music. I prefer sounds that let me zone out and re-center for the next seven days of madness. Studio One compilations are tried and trusted companions in this endeavor, and that's what I'll leave you all with.