alec karakatsanis

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YouTube video by Civil Rights Corps Alec Karakatsanis | Heising-Simons Sparks of Hope Talk

In the video below, I explained why holding with integrity to basic notions of truth and justice and human connection is so vital. Ironically, Obama was in the audience for them. They appear to have had no effect on him, but I hope they will be useful to others. www.youtube.com/watch?v=trck...

Everything is spin and distortion and mangled jargon from consultants. It affects not just everything they say and do, but it also fundamentally undermines their popularity and connection with all sentient human beings. And it is walking us off a right-wing cliff.

The leading figures in our political and media classes lack basic commitment to factual reality and notions of justice. They lie about shoplifting as the world burns. They destroy the global south and use the materials extracted from oppressed people to build the walls of their own delusion.

From mass incarceration to bank bailouts to Obama's drone wars to the generational consolidation of wealth to Biden's funding of genocide, the mainstream news and leading Democrats have created the conditions in which they are utterly unable to respond to the most grotesque moral crises of our time.

YouTube video by Civil Rights Corps Alec Karakatsanis | Heising-Simons Sparks of Hope Talk

THREAD. As Orwell explained, once you lose the capacity to say 2+2=4, all else is lost.

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The news has entirely failed to grasp the unprecedented scope of the ICE and DHS budgets. Nothing like it in modern history. A galaxy of public/private surveillance and caging institutions for $100,000,000,000s unleashed on a public that will be forever changed. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

Reception at 5:30 and event 6:30-8pm.

Unmasking Copaganda: How Media and Policing Fuel Mass Incarceration | Busboys and Poets Brown, Goldstein & Levy and partner Jacqueline Cadman, head of BGL’s Criminal Defense Section, are honored to host nationally recognized civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis, founder of Civil R...

DC folks: I'm excited to announce a last minute Copaganda event at Busboys and Poets this Thursday! As a special treat, one of the best journalists in the U.S. will be joining us to discuss authoritarianism. I'll let you know who it is later in the week... www.busboysandpoets.com/events/th-ev...

Wonderful! The book expands on and deepens a lot of those essays. So hope it's even more useful!

Wonderful! I hope you like it and will consider having your students read it! Would love to hear what you think!

Precisely.

It is vital to assess the mechanisms and mythologies behind why the news has largely ignored this and why, e.g., the Democrats have supported building much of this infrastructure. I discuss it in depth in Copaganda, with all royalties donated to anti-surveillance charity. bsky.app/profile/equa...

Many journalists are tracking the procurement and deployment of new technologies and tactics, but it's hard to get the entire picture. A generational threat to civil liberties that I suspect future governments will struggle (or refuse) to roll back. Dramatic reform/abolition will be required.

“Labeled as ‘domestic terrorists’ by the administration, these targets include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them — all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president’s agenda.”

ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants The Trump administration is being open about its plans to violate Americans’ First and Fourth Amendment rights.

The news has entirely failed to grasp the unprecedented scope of the ICE and DHS budgets. Nothing like it in modern history. A galaxy of public/private surveillance and caging institutions for $100,000,000,000s unleashed on a public that will be forever changed. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

Yeah. My hope in advance was that someone could see themselves in him and then hear how someone responds to their views. But he was so bad that I’m worried people just won’t identify with it and think he didn’t explain those views well. So, need to find someone else maybe for what I had wanted.

The hope was not to convince him, but to create something that might convince well-meaning people who aren’t well informed but who are more humble and open minded. But he was so weird that I’m not sure if it will be a useful thing for the audience I intended.

I am working on a house repair project, so I subjected myself to this whole 90-minute podcast, notwithstanding that I've had M/tt St0ller blocked since back in the day on Twitter and have plenty of bones to pick with BJG.

Here are the major points I took away from the conversation:

1/n

It was like watching a person who built a section of the Great Wall of China be lectured to by a person who owned a set of toy blocks as a child (that he didn't actually play with).

Just absolute bedrock ignorance about what it takes to create something combined w irrational self-confidence 15/n

The success or failure of an anti-fascist coalition will depend on whether people like this take an honest look at (and make a good faith effort to learn about) the way the repressive bureaucracies of the state--and the large monopolies parasitic on them--actually function.

Instead, he keeps repeating the same fraudulent talking points of figures like like Kamala Harris, the NYT Editorial Board, Lindsey Graham, and Donald Trump. If humility means anything, it is being open to hearing that your perspectives are not informed and adjusting behavior.

The person who debated me here routinely says things about police/prosecutors with *great confidence* to *hundreds of thousands of followers,* and he admits in this debate that he has no idea whether these things he has been saying are true or not. This is typical in punditry.

Reporting like this makes people unreasonably afraid when crime is down, promotes the fraud that more prosecution would make them safer, and more basically, eats away at basic notions of truth and integrity on which a more beautiful world would need to be based.

I have an incredible section in my Copaganda book on the
@sfchronicle.com. There appears to have been absolutely no attempt there to engage in any semblance of learning or accountability for its shameful role in the public’s mass delusion

Sf chronicle casually including clause in sentence about how many in the city blame housing for dysfunction and crime.

There’s no hope of an anti-fascist coalition if journalists do stuff like this without accountability. Crime was *down* under Boudin, who barely changed anything! It’d be like the SF Chronicle saying: “many in the city blame Boudin for city’s children becoming flat-earthers.”

YouTube video by Bad Faith DEBATE: Do People Take "DEFUND" Seriously? (w/ Matt Stoller & Alec Karatkatsanis)

This is why I wrote Copaganda, and why I've been seeking out debate with people who speak about these issues in public in ways that further our society's mass delusions. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZCl...

And, in our own lives, we must open up our hearts and minds however much we are able to people who have been so thoroughly copagandized that discussion with them feels futile at first.

Many pundits are also unable to develop an analogous structural analysis that they are able to marshal in other contexts, let alone have a basic conversation about the punishment bureaucracy. It's important to do much more of this kind of conversation--preferably with people more willing to listen.