alec karakatsanis

It cant be said enough: Copaganda by @equalityalec.bsky.social is an absolute must-read, for anyone interested in crime and how police and the punishment industrial complex, in no way, do anything whatsoever, to address the root causes of crime

I think there’s only the one on audible.

There are important things we need to do in our daily lives and organizing with others in our circles and communities to combat the relentless propaganda targeting our minds. Chapter 16 of the book!

By the way, if you look at the other kinds of stuff that only 9% of the population believes, you enter some scary territory! This is the state to which the mainstream news has corrupted our brains. And liberals must understand they are just as susceptible to the tactics I cover.

All of this is why I wrote the book Copaganda and tried to tell hard truths in it (with humor). And, as detailed here, you can get the book for 30% off now and we will always have free copies for teachers, students, and people in prison. bsky.app/profile/equa...

The manufactured level of ignorance about crime--and about the role of institutions like police, prosecutors, prisons, the surveillance industry--is a clear and present danger to the possibility of a democratic society where all of us can thrive.

Every single day, through choices of what news to cover, what news to ignore, what volume of coverage, what sources to include, what words to use, what context to provide, what framing to use, etc. the news concocts this delusion. bsky.app/profile/equa...

As a result, 86% of Democrats didn't know the correct answer.

This is just simple "flat-earther" stuff. But it continues the broader fear-based delusion that has been gripping the population for years across a range of crime issues. For several years, I have been posting about crime decreasing while the news lies about it.

Only 9% of respondents correctly answered that murder rates in the U.S. have decreased a lot since 1990. today.yougov.com/topics/polit...

THREAD. A recent poll shows that people in the United States suffer from mass delusion about crime. The results are alarming for Democrats. It should be a massive scandal for mainstream news, and it's a pillar of the authoritarian zeitgeist.

Chris, I just wrote a book about this. We should discuss! It’s funny because Asher (who features prominently in my book) has me blocked so I can’t read his posts—he’s one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation and copaganda. Very funny to see his outrage at the levels of public ignorance.

It’s funny because Asher (who features prominently in my book) has me blocked so I can’t read his posts—he’s one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation and copaganda. Very funny to see his outrage at the levels of public ignorance.

It’s funny because Asher (who features prominently in my book) has me blocked so I can’t read his posts—he’s one of the biggest spreaders of misinformation and copaganda. Very funny to see his outrage at the levels of public ignorance.

The event in New Jersey last week was one of my favorite book events yet, and it's so cool that Black Liberation Media has now put the video online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6ZA...

This is, of course, a microcosm for why people do not have faith in many elite institutions and politicians. They fail to center their hearts on the most vulnerable and their minds on core truths and act always with integrity in service of them. It’s pretty simple.

He took a smiling one with Gallant. Just the two of them in the office.

I am seeing people wondering why Cory Booker's interventions--his fight with Dem senators over police funding or his effort to block Trump's judges--are not resonating. One reason is he did things like take smiling photos with someone wanted by the ICC for war crimes. 2+2=4.

This is extremely important. What is described in this thread would constitute massive corruption of the U.S. legal system, aided and abetted by a public university. Journalists must immediately examine the facts here, and so should California legislators and regulators. Shocking.

UCLA to pay $6.45 million to settle suit by Jewish students over pro-Palestinian protests UCLA agreed to settle a lawsuit by Jewish students who alleged the university aided a 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment, which the lawsuit alleged illegally discriminated against Jewish people.

1/ I represent 5 anti-zionist students and faculty challenging the outrageous claim that the Palestine Solidarity Encampment was a "Jew exclusion zone". UCLA refused to defend. Today they agreed to pay millions instead. I can't overstate how dangerous this is. 🧵

www.latimes.com/california/s...

This is a crucial thing to understand in discussions about Zohran Mamdani. I wrote a bit about it here: bsky.app/profile/equa...

Understanding this dynamic is a crucial first step to understanding the kinds of social movements needed to create policies that actually benefit the people, animals, and plants of this earth.

And one of the goals of the neoliberal "free trade" era is to enshrine (3) a system in which global capital can override whatever national policies it doesn't like.

(1) when local governments do things that capital doesn't like, state governments usually override it; (2) when state governments do something capital doesn't like, the federal government usually overrides it.

THREAD. One of the key principles to understand about our society--which is not taught in law schools, or any other school--is this:

There must never be any corner of the world in which we forget who is responsible for the live-streamed genocide we are watching.

Someone asked me why Democrats are now coming out vaguely against starvation. People who celebrated and funded this inevitable result every step of the way are issuing statements now in a futile attempt to distort how history judges their unforgivable crimes against humanity.

Will be going live on zoom in a few minutes!

This event is happening tonight. Join us if you’re in the NYC/NJ area. And if you’re not, you can join on zoom!

Shortly before finishing this book, I was talking with one of the children in Flint, Michigan, whom I am representing in the civil rights case that I mentioned in the introduction. The case is against the sheriff and the private-equity owned telecommunications industry, alleging a conspiracy to profit from banning family visits in jail. We were discussing why so few people in Flint and across the country knew that many jails had banned hundreds of thousands of people in jail and their loved ones from hugging, holding hands, or looking into each other’s eyes. She then said something I will never forget. She explained that working on

the case was exciting for her not just because it meant that people cared about what was happening to her family, but also because it meant there were “adults who care about something.” She told me that she dreams of a career in early childhood education, even though she says she doesn’t personally like little kids. But, she explained, it’s a big problem for our society that adults don’t listen to children. What I think she identified in us adults is a dulling of our senses and our spirits. She saw something like what Jacques Ellul saw decades earlier: being an adult in a heavily propagandized society often means becoming addicted to the substance that is killing your brain and losing your resolve to care. Copaganda is part of a deeper project of preserving the way things are and making us all okay with it. It turns things about our society that should shock us to the core into things we do not even notice, into things we meet with a million isolated shrugs and a sense of helplessness, or, perhaps in the end, into things we celebrate and crave like fiends. The final nail in the copaganda coffin is that we view this process as becoming “informed.”

This passage from near the end of my Copaganda book captures my thoughts about so much of the propaganda that is propelling our society to more and more grotesque levels of violence and predation. This is especially true of the propaganda directed at--and shaping the consciousness of--liberals: