October 29 Update: Justice for Robert Brooks; NYC Overdose Deaths Plummet; Silicon Valley's Israeli Collusion; Election Deniers to 'Secure' Elections; Police Oversight Backsliding in Oakland; Homan & Noem at War; SoCal ICE Watching; Datacenter Desiccation
CHICAGO POLS CHARGED
Three days. That's all Congress has left to act before the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (once known as food stamps) runs out of money thanks to the ongoing government shutdown. On November 1, 42 million people will lose their last grip on a key filament of the shredded American safety net. Of course, Congress could vote to authorize the release of emergency funds to prevent this looming catastrophe, but that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson to seat a newly-elected Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona who he's kept out of her rightful seat for a month.
Why is that so dangerous? Because Adelita Grijalva, who won her deceased father's seat in September, has promised to vote to release the Epstein files - which will 100% implicate the pedophile currently ripping the White House to shreds in a manner not seen since the Brits torched it during the War of 1812. Lovely state of affairs - but 25 states are currently suing the feds to force a release of the SNAP funds. Cross your fingers.
Meanwhile, the occupied city of Chicago is still being roiled by federal immigration sweeps in a full-blown counterinsurgency operation (I know a little bit about that sort of thing), where anonymous, fatigue-wearing feds in masks are gassing even the wealthy Northside neighborhood of Wrigleyville and using facial recognition to ascertain the citizenship status of people they (illegally) stop and detain. The U.S. Marine Corps pioneered this biometric ID method during the siege of Fallujah 21 years ago. Now that's Imperial Feedback.
More than 3,000 people have been effectively disappeared by ICE since Operation Midway Blitz started in September, with no record of these folks in federal court systems. Though a federal judge excoriated Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino (pictured above with his stormtrooper escort in town) yesterday for violating her restraining order restricting the use of crowd control and less lethal munitions in Chicago, the Supreme Court's "Kavanaugh Stop" ruling earlier this year means there is no end in sight to these raids in Illinois, California, or anywhere else in the US. The broader national context? An ongoing plan to build several 10,000-capacity detention facilities (read: concentration camps) across the country with $10 billion in repurposed Navy funds and the wanton detention of more than 170 citizens by the Department of Homeland Security.
I know I keep banging on about ICE, CBP, the Border Patrol and DHS, but they are rapidly shaping up into a hideous combination of the Stasi, the Gestapo, and the worst elements of the jump-out boy school of American policing have to offer. When masked, anonymous feds shoot at an unarmed Black man during traffic stops and then get local cops to not document the incident - which all recently happened in the occupied city of Washington D.C. - it is all too clear what trajectory the United States is on.
And if you think state-level authorities will intervene, dream on. When ICE raided Canal Street last week, the NYPD were nowhere to be seen, yet another reminder that the police will not stand up to the feds if they're not openly battering protesters alongside them like Illinois state troopers in Chicago.
It's been a busy few weeks on my end, since October apparently is now the guts of the fourth quarter of the working year when editors get back in swing. There's a new four-part BBC podcast on 764 that I helped out with - it centers on the case of Cameron Finnegan, an English teenager who was convicted last year on terrorism charges in a landmark case.
On a related note, I spoke with Brace and Liz from the excellent TrueAnon podcast about my reporting on 764, the Terrorgram Collective and extreme right wing radicalization over the past several years.
We ran the gamut from the Rise Above Movement, the Atomwaffen Division, the Base, the Order of Nine Angles, Terrorgram, and 764/com. For those new to Bleeding Edge, I've done a decent bit of reporting behind the paywall on those topics, for new subscribers interested in that topic.
Lastly, I've got a longread in The Baffler on the NYPD New York City's next mayor will inherit. Ostensibly. that will be Zohran Mamdani, given recent polling and the vociferous reaction to an 11th-hour flood of Islamophobia from his opponents. Even though Zohran has made positive noises about shifting away from the NYPD's totalitarian post-9/11 policies, his actual campaign platform is thin on policing. Longtime readers of Bleeding Edge will also recognize portions of this article from my writing here about this topic and current Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch from last fall onward.
Jake Hanrahan and I are recording a new episode of BIG TERROR, which should be out in early November. The first two episodes are here and here.
Let's get to it.
BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM
-Robert Brooks was murdered last year by a group of out-of-control New York State prison guards in a horrific incident that was caught on camera. His killing shed light on horrific conditions in NYS correctional facilities that, coinciding with a wildcat strike by the guards union last winter, that served as the peg for an excellent Jennifer Gonnerman feature in David Remnick's increasingly milquetoast New Yorker. In a rare occurrence of justice being properly meted out, former guard David Kingsley was convicted at trial by a jury for Brook's chokehold killing, and faces life in prison. For too long, New Yorkers have treated the state's prisons as far-flung afterthoughts that warehouse 'unwanted' people and provide jobs to the Upstate rustbelt. That has to end.
Reuven Blau
-Another bit of good news in New York, where drug overdoses in the city fell nearly 30 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to city Department of Health data. The 2,192 overdose fatalities are still way too high and almost at the levels of NYC's all-time murder highs in the early 1990s, but they're down from more than 3,000 OD deaths in 2023. This, for perspective, was nearly TEN TIMES NYC's actual murder tally from that same year. Even though the numbers make plain the extent of New York City's problem with lethal narcotics - mostly synthetic opioids - this story is largely ignored by Metro news organizations in favor of episodic, if-it-bleeds-it-leads "crime" coverage that dominates what passes for the public safety discourse.
Caroline Lewis
-Genocide? Absolutely. War crimes? You bet. Impunity? Contractually mandated. That's the rub from a combined Guardian/+972/Local Call investigation into Project Nimbus, or the Israeli government's massive defense and intelligence contract with Google and Amazon. Both Silicon Valley, per the reporting, agreed to tip off Israel to any requests for sensitive data from foreign law enforcement - presumably including the International Criminal Court and national-level police investigating allegations of war crimes like those documented by the Hind Rajab Foundation. 'Don't Be Evil' is a looong way in the past.
Harry Davies
-Not content with assigning podcasters to key law enforcement posts and placing white nationalists in charge of the State Department's refugee resettlement and public diplomacy posts, the Clown Reich has placed hardcore election deniers in key positions within DHS, per the New York Times. People who refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election for half a decade are now in charge of ensuring the integrity of forthcoming races. It's part of a broader national effort to undermine the democratic process and shore up autocratic minority rule for the foreseeable future - which makes sense if you consider late Twentieth Century South Africa as the model for the Trump Administration.
-Less than a month after Oakland's latest police chief resigned under a cloud, the city council dealt a blow to civilian oversight of the troubled police department by rejecting the reappointment of two civilian police commissioners, including the head of that independent oversight body. This unprecedented step resulted from reactionary groups claiming that ex-OPD Chief Floyd Mitchell quit because the commission interfered too much with his daily operations: a bit odd considering he presumably did his homework before signing on to run a department that has answered to the mayor, the police commission and a federally appointed compliance director for the better part of a decade. If you're unfamiliar with Oakland's 20+ year long fight to reform one of the country's most brutal police departments, or why I pay such close attention to that West Coast city, take a gander at the book I co-authored on OPD.
Roselyn Romero
-Stephen Miller, the White House's own resident Himmler, is not satisfied with the nationwide immigration sweeps conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agency is falling far short of the 3,000/day arrest quota Miller demanded during a meeting with agency heads last Fall. In response, ICE is cashiering a dozen field office heads in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Diego and elsewhere to replace them with commanders from the Border Patrol and Customs & Border Protection, whose personnel are seen as more gung-ho. This is all part of an ongoing turf war between DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and ICE chief Tom Homan, with Homan of all people appearing to be more concerned with going after undocumented folks with serious criminal histories instead of just collaring anyone who appears to be Black or Brown, like Noem. Stranger than fiction
Julia Ainsley
-Since last Spring's immigration blitz in Southern California began, community volunteers have responded by setting up dense rapid response networks to track federal law enforcement and alert communities from Los Angeles to San Diego about incoming raids. Slate's Alex Sammon rode along with some of the volunteers taking in part of these ad-hoc task forces, who run the risk of arrest, criminal charge and, if some fed decides to get trigger-happy, serious bodily harm. Compelling writing to boot.
Alexander Sammon
-For some lighter reading, dive into this Los Angeles Times feature about the most remote lighthouse in the Continental United States: the St. George Reef Lighthouse off the coast of Crescent City in California's northernmost county. Come for the tales of Coast Guardsmen cringing as waves crashed over the entire edifice and threatened to wipe them into the Pacific, and stay for their recollections of watching migrating whales just yards away. You also might be tempted to print out and frame some of the accompanying photographs....
Follow
-Should you need yet another reason to divest from BezosCorp aside from his complete corruption of the Washington Post, Amazon's rampant union-busting efforts or its wrecking-ball effect on mom-and-pop businesses, consider Amazon Web Services' data centers. These behemoths, which are popping up around the world, have ruinous environmental consequences and are causing huge spikes in electricity usage and ratepayer bills as tech firms lean on private utilities to make taxpayers like you and me pay their tab. The Guardian unearthed documents about the corporate leviathan's plans to conceal the unfathomable amounts of water consumed by its data centers. Worth keeping in mind, since data centers accounted for nearly all growth in the U.S. gross domestic product in the first half of 2025.
Luke Barratt
FILM - One Battle After Another (2025) is without a doubt, the best film of 2025. Yes, I am an inveterate Thomas Pynchon Lover. Yes, this movie is based on Vineland (1990), which is my pick of his body of work. Even if this weren't based on a literary masterpiece, One Battle After Another is the sort of film that simply does not get made anymore, from its brisk pacing, winking historical references, first-rate location scouting across the length and breadth of California, and deep character development.
There are also legendary performances from Chase Infiniti, Leonardo Di Caprio, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn. I'm champing at the bit to see this a second time on the big screen, and I'm sure you will as well.
BOOKS - I've been consuming a book on average every two weeks this year or so while researching my forthcoming work on the interplay between counterinsurgency warfare and police militarization.While much of 2025 was spent on Algeria's war of independence and France's concurrent military and police campaigns against the FLN, I've also begun delving into the United Kingdom's own pioneering COIN tactics. Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture (2012) is a terrific title exploring the development and institutionalization of torture by British military and intelligence officials over the Twentieth Century, from World War II interrogations of captured Nazis to the secret prisons of Basra during the Iraq Occupation 20 years ago.
It is a brisk, chilling account that stems in large part from Cobain's investigations while covering the Iraq Occupation two decades or so ago. Not to mention the Granta edition's cover design is one of the best on my shelves.
MUSIC - In fitting with late October's requisite funereal atmosphere, I'll leave you with Leonard Cohen's 2012 album Old Ideas. Not quite at the bleak levels Len reached in the records released right before his death, this collection features his typically excellent arrangements, an understated sense of rhythm and that singular wordplay one expects from the past master.