September 14 Update: Feds Close in on Eric & the NYPD; Inside La Eme; Chiapas Narco-wars; Oligarchs Bankroll Climate Revanchism; Federal Firefighters Flee Labor Disputes; Turkey's African Bonanza

That's the life for me (©/Ali Winston)

There you have it: the days are rapidly getting shorter, the leaves are changing, and if you're in the Eastern half of the United States or Western Europe, the barometer is (finally) dropping after the hottest summer on record. Apologies if you're in Central Europe and experiencing those torrential rains and early-season snows. As the header photograph should make clear, I've been...elsewhere for the previous few weeks, but working on and off nonetheless. There's nothing quite like changing your frame of reference, particularly when that old American navel-gazing hits fever pitch every four years.

However, the news cycle never rests, and I've done anything but down tools. Yesterday, serial Neo-Nazi gang leader Robert Rundo entered a guilty plea six years after the feds charged him for conspiracy to riot with his Rise Above Movement comrades across California in 2017 - longtime readers of Bleeding Edge will be well familiar with his saga, replete with four arrests, two extraditions and three appellate court reversals. I've documented his trajectory for years, and will have more in a forthcoming feature this fall for Vanity Fair (yes, that's what I've had cooking in the background).

Other reporting from this past Spring delivered some tangible real-world impact last month: federal court oversight for the Oakland Police Department was extended yet again, entirely due to the command staff's decision to short-circuit an internal affairs investigation into a homicide sergeant who allegedly bribed a witness and committed perjury to win wrongful convictions.

Subsequent stories in the Oaklandside with Darwin BondGraham laid out this episode in full and implicated the top ranks of OPD in this affair, including disgraced former Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who is now running for City Council and backed by the right-wing tech/real estate alliance seeking to seize control of Oakland's governing apparatus. The status report from last month's hearing makes clear precisely how critical our journalism was to holding OPD to account - and is yet another opportunity for me to thank subscribers for underwriting this line of research.

Last but not least, this past Monday the Department of Justice unveiled a 15-count indictment against the two main protagonists of the Neo-Nazi Terrorgram Collective propaganda operation, which seeks to radicalize young people around the world and inspire mass shootings, attacks on power infrastructure, and general societal mayhem. The indictment charges both Dallas Humber of Sacramento, CA and Matthew Allison of Boise, ID with material support for terrorism, a designation made possible in no small part by the British government's decision to classify the Terrorgram Collective as a banned terrorist organization, which I flagged in an article here this May. It ain't called Bleeding Edge for nothing.

My editor at WIRED was kind enough to let me write up the significance of this week's indictment, where I pore through the court filings to date and make clear just how different an approach American law enforcement are taking to extreme right-wing organizing compared to their flailing, handicapped efforts prior to the Christchurch Massacre of 2019 (the aforementioned magazine feature will explain why 2019 was such an inflection point, but interested folks can also reference this old piece I did with Adam Goldman right before leaving the New York Times).

But enough about me. Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-It's been an, uh...eventful summer for New York City's very own Frank Rizzo, with at least FOUR federal investigations into the administration of Cop Mayor Eric Adams, including his chancellor of schools, his police commissioner, himself, his 2021 election campaign, his unofficial police commissioner, and various advisors. NYPD is now run by a former FBI agent for the first time in its history following the resignation of NYPD Commissioner Eddie Caban this week - its not like he had much of a choice after his phone was seized by the feds pursuant to a warrant. Nonprofit outlet The City had the best analysis of what ails Eric & co: graft and nepotism. Gotta say, they're working overtime to revive proud Tammany Hall traditions....

-For those of you who enjoy deep dives into organized crime and prison politics, I cannot recommend Los Angeles Times reporter Matt Ormseth's three-part series on the Mexican Mafia enough. La Eme are a longtime presence both on California's streets and in the Golden State's prisons, though their influence is on the wane from both law enforcement pressure, demographic shifts and the ever-shifting sands of underworld alliances.

-On that note, Patrick McDonnell's thorough investigation into the intensifying drug wars in Mexico's drop-dead gorgeous state of Chiapas in the country's south makes for sobering reading - competition between cartels for control over narcotics and human trafficking routes has now spilled over into open low-intensity warfare, with entire villages fleeing into Guatemala for safety. I've spent time in this region and came to love it deeply.

-You'd think the past few decades of spiraling temperatures, worsening natural disasters, global warming-induced migration and deteriorating weather patterns would have settled any sort of debate over the need for climate action. Leonard Leo and Koch Industries think otherwise, and want to do anything possible to protect not only their profits but make certain the windmills don't kill more whales or force people to eat pets or some other crazy shit. Last month's Guardian investigation made clear the extent to which these ultraconservative plutocrats are bankrolling legal efforts by Republican attorneys general to obstruct and undermine state and federal laws that seek to turn the tide and move the United States off fossil fuels (not fast enough for me, but that's another matter).

-Fire season is ripping through the West right now, with major blazes throughout Idaho and Southern California after conflagrations earlier this summer in Oregon far Northern California, which made life miserable as far east as Wyoming. Fire crews are, unsurprisingly, taxed to the limit right now, with reports of fire camps burning over and zero spare capacity for additional deployments. All that makes the outflow of firefighters from the US Forest Service - thanks to needless labor disputes - even more alarming. Perhaps spending money on this rather than throwing it into Israel's genocide/apartheid would be a better use of taxpayer funds? Just a thought.

-A ton of hay gets made about China's economic and military activities in Africa, but that's an outdated story. Turkish companies, particularly construction firms and weapons manufacturers, are doing massive business throughout the continent, offering know-how, lower pricing than European firms, better terms than Chinese companies, and no compunctions about human rights violations when it comes to selling weapons. Par for course with Erdogan's regime, and an essential lifeline to a country still struggling with years of calamitous economic mismanagement and deteriorating relations with the European Union.

BOOKS

One of the better volumes to help make sense of the global far right political swing that started in the middle of the last decade is Francois Cusset's 2016's How the World Swung to the Right: Fifty Years of Counterrevoltuions. There's a well-worn adage about how the French are far more skeptical of 'Angl0-American' free market doctrine, and there's some truth to it.

While nowhere near as lengthy or dense as comparable research by economist Thomas Piketty (I'm still slogging through his latest 1,200 page brick), Cusset deftly explores academic, political, and cultural tendencies to elucidate the unholy marriage of hardcore cultural conservatism, anti-democratic oligarchy, and technocrats (ahem, Macron, ahem) who are at the heart of this tendency.

FILM

Germany marked a grim post-war milestone last month, as the xenophobic, NSDAP-revival party Alternatif Fur Deutschland won an absolute majority in the Eastern state of Thuringia's legislature, and ran a close second in neighboring Saxony. PBS Frontline screened a very timely documentary about AfD's rise this summer, which bears watching along with the companion film about rising extreme right wing violence in that country from a couple years back.

MUSIC

This is a cop-out, but honestly I've just been streaming the Henry Rollins Show from KCRW for the past week while working away. I trust his taste, which runs from punk to bizarre electronic compilations to reggae to Japanese folk. It may be many things, and it may not be your cup of tea - but his broadcasts are NEVER boring.