October 27 update: Israel Hits UN Troops w/White Phosphorus; Sheriff Extremists & Election Interference; Deportation Machine Go Brrrr; Chauncey Bailey Factcheck; Israel's West Bank Landgrab
Hope everyone enjoyed last night's shitshow for the ages at Madison Square Garden, which Knicks owner and candidate along with Eric Adams for Most Hated New Yorker decided to make available to a certain disgraced former president to re-enact the 1939 German-American Bund's Hitler worship pageant. Every ethnicity and racial group aside from white folks was denigrated every which way to next Sunday by the sundry Fascists on the undercard - including leading up to Jamaica Estates' own native son taking the stage, kitted out in Proud Boy colors. I'd say the message is clear.
If you can, vote in person. There have been a series of mail thefts and drop box arsons around the country, which not only drive home how deeply 2020 election denialism has taken hold around the US, but also the extent to which some folks will go to ensure an American Reich. And that's 1000% on the cards this time. Don't fool yourself otherwise. The feds were warning earlier this month of lunatics bombing drop boxes - Make certain your ballot makes it to the election board for certain.
As students of Twentieth Century history will/should know, classic Fascism is an alliance between an authoritarian party and capitalism. While there were major fissures within the early iterations of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism (see Strasserism), both Mussolini and Hitler rose to power with the backing of their domestic business elite. We've got a similar (but not identical) dynamic playing out in the United States, as the cryptocurrency industry and Silicon Valley oligarchs either drench Trump's campaign in cash or forbid the news organizations they own (for vanity or influence, take your pick) from making presidential endorsements. As Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer put it, they're cowards.
It's not just the national level: Silicon Valley is working overtime to buy local elections, most notably in San Francisco and Oakland. Building on my February investigation into the 'gray money' network that bankrolled successful recalls of SFUSD board members and progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, the Guardian ran two items of mine exploring how the SF network and its newly-created Oakland cousin are influencing the municipal races in both cities, which will determine the composition of each city's government. Worth your time, and if this kind of shenanigan hasn't reached your neck of the woods, it almost certainly will in time.
I've kinda let go of all the rounds in the magazine in the run-up to next week's election. There'll be one Terrorgram Collective-related post for paid subscribers this week (wee bit of news never hurt anyone), but I'm not a campaign reporter and am not planning on changing that this time out. If you've got one (and you're lucky to have it), use your vote wisely.
That's all from me. Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-Even with the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah dead, Israel continues to hammer both Gaza and Lebanon with airstrikes. Even the presence of United Nations Peacekeeping troops hasn't deterred their offensive. Last week, the Financial Times documented a dozen assaults on UN positions in Southern Lebanon by Israel, including the use of white phosphorus munitions on the Blue Helmets. White phosphorus burns through to the bone, and the use of it on human targets (as opposed to generate a smoke screen or provide nighttime illumination) is a war crime. Add it to Netanyahu's tab.
Raya Jalabi
-It's no secret many, many American cops and sheriffs deputies harbor conservative, reactionary politics. The breadth and depth of that sentiment, however, has been fueled and proselytized by far-right thinktanks and progagandists in sheriffs' offices across the United States, imbuing "constitutional sheriff" ideology in these offices with the intent of fueling rebellion against centralized government and meddling in election outcomes. That's absolutely on the cards this year. David Gilbert, a colleague of mine at WIRED, dove deep into internal communications between radicalized lawmen, outlining just how they plan to prevent Donald Trump from losing his re-election bid next month. Essential reading.
-Mass deportations are the one-size-fits-all answer that the Republicans have proposed for all sorts of ills: low wages, housing shortages, infectious disease outbreaks...name your race science/crackpot economics theory, you'll probably find a connection in the GOP's campaign literature. That plan would cost billions of dollars to implement, as 60 Minutes detailed in their most recent episode, without a tangible return on public safety. That's not to mention the tremendous societal trauma that would ensue, with at least 4 million American citizens living in country with undocumented parents at the moment. But the cruelty is the point, isn't it?
Cecilia Vega
-There's been a lot of shitty disinformation circulating this election cycle, but Trump's attempt to pin the blame for Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey's murder in 2007 by members of a criminal Black Muslim cult that once sold (very delicious) beanpies at the Oakland Coliseum and airport was beyond low. A consortium of Bay Area journalists worked for years to bring Bailey's murderers to justice, and my colleague Tom Peele wrote an excellent book about the saga (that I contributed research to as a graduate student at Cal). Peele ran a thorough, heartfelt walkthrough of this venal lie in Mother Jones which bears close attention.
Thomas Peele
-While the world's eyes have been (rightfully) fixated on Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank, the larger, more peaceful territory governed by Fatah, have experienced a huge upsurge in violence by extremist Israeli settlers and the military. The Financial Times took a long, hard look at the pogroms, territorial seizures and unpunished violence carried out by Jewish zealots, who now have been deputized as agents of the Israeli state and are working to seize yet more land for the half-million Israelis who live illegally in settlements erected on Palestinian land, in violation of international law.
BOOK OF THE WEEK - With all the handwringing about disaffected working-class voters that accompanies every single profile of JD Vance, and the Dems' refusal to piss off their Wall Street donors by leaning into popular pro-worker policies, I felt it was high time to dust off a book that pre-empted today's class politics by decades. French theorist Andre Gorz recognized the neoliberal revolution, the gutting of the Twentieth Century welfare state and the securitization of everyday life long before pop philosophers and political scientists glommed onto the concept in the late 1990s.
In 1980, he published Farewell to the Working Class, which ran against then-standard Marxist conceptions of the material conditions of production by pointing out that capital was strategically figuring out how to winnow out phrases of labor, maximize profit, minimize pay, and break the political influence of the working class through unions, collective bargaining and the like. He also predicted the rise of 'creative capital,' which in a contemporary setting goes a long way towards explaining modern info/entertainment and the nascent influencer economy. Today, such an understanding may seem revolutionary. In 1980, when unionization rates were at historic highs in the Western world and offshoring had not started apace, Gorz's writing was light-years ahead of its time.
FILM - I don't like Long Island. Sure the beaches are nice, but it's flat, filled for 80 percent of its landmass with soul-crushing suburbs, and home to a double-digit percentage of the NYPD's sworn officers. To boot, the Sandbar town of Yaphunk was home to Camp Siegfried, one of the German-American Bund's Nazi summer camps run by American fellow travelers of the Third Reich. There were many similar camps throughout the US in the 1930s, and while they were shuttered along with their parent organization following the Pearl Harbor attacks of December 1941, the memory remains. This PBS documentary is one of the few films I've seen that unearths this history. An eye-opening watch.
(Yes LI beaches are nice. The fish is good too).
MUSIC - As the header photo should tell you, I was at Bike Kill this week. What is Bike Kill? It cannot be described: but it's a hell of a party with a sick soundtrack. Video can't really capture what it's like, but whoever recorded the 2019 edition did the best job getting a sense of the full experience. Into a third decade!