You can read my study of 10 years of liberal body camera propaganda--The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams--here: campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-...
05.03.2026 16:07
👍 55
🔁 19
💬 0
📌 1
You can read my study of 10 years of liberal body camera propaganda--The Body Camera: The Language of Our Dreams--here: campuspress.yale.edu/yjll/volume-...
This is also one of the consequences of the unhinged, fabricated "retail theft" epidemic of the last five years that I analyze in Copaganda. All done by "Very Serious" mainstream journalists, all debunked, and all at a time of historic lows in low-level property crime.
The Democratic Party's apparent plan is to have every worker in the U.S. forced to wear a surveillance camera. One of the many consequences of the celebration and funding of this nonsense in elite liberal circles. As with any policy, ask yourself: what kind of society does this reflect and create?
Apparently some of the dates got messed up in the leak. This contract was apparently from 2021 according to the reporter who got it.
Yeah, that was one of the old contract docs that got leaked. LA Taco recently reported that the tech was used against legal observers by ICE in recent deployments.
Image above is contract doc and post from a reporter: "Part of the DHS contracts leak: this long-term contract showing a partnership with Cybernet, a company that makes a remote vehicle disabler. LA Taco recently reported ICE using a "kill switch" to remotely disable the vehicles of legal observers"
On top of the concentration camps, kidnapping, and murders, the news now reports ICE is buying microwave tech to kill the car engines of first amendment legal observers. And Democrats are still not even asking to claw back the 2025 budget increases.
Event details from the text of the flyer: ustpaul.ca/en/event/the...
I'll be speaking in Ottawa next Tuesday, March 10. Spread the word! I'll be talking about our groundbreaking quest to establish a constitutional right for children to hug their parents, and what it means for fights against power, profit, and propaganda in increasingly fascist times.
You can read the flyer and register at this link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
I'll be speaking in Montreal at McGill on March 13. Please join us. I'll be talking about our groundbreaking quest to establish a constitutional right for children to hug their parents, and what it means for fights against power, profit, and propaganda in authoritarian times.
We are opening up our amazing Artist in Residence fellowship again. If you know any formerly incarcerated artists or artists otherwise directly impacted by state repression, please share. It's an incredible opportunity with a wonderful organization. civilrightscorps.org/artist-in-re...
Yep it was done by two journalists at Bloomberg. I have the charts they made in my book. Fola Akinnibi was the author.
THREAD. I want to describe a new propaganda trend. As I explained in Copaganda, we are starting to see a lot of Card Carrying Elites (economists, Atlantic writers, Harvard professors, philanthropists) feign intellectual edginess by claiming prisons are bad and even obsolete.
Spending on policing (even excluding immigration policing) rose by over $58 billion (which is over 40%!) from just 2017 to 2025 during Trump's first term and Biden's term. People are not appreciating the incredible scope of these budget increases or what it is being spent on.
Yesterday I highlighted one example of this from a prominent economist who works in neoliberal philanthropy. And the chapter in my book about the two "progressive" Harvard professors is in large part about this propaganda trend: x.com/equalityAlec...
One of the common themes is that domestic surveillance is being promoted as the primary investment among these elites in large part **because of its capacity to crush resistance to the violence that they know the imperial core intends for the global south.**
There will be a lot more to say about this, especially as militarization of borders, climate migration/disaster, and new imperial violence creates chaos that will need to be managed by elites who control nation-states like the U.S. through violence, exclusion, and human caging.
One big goal is getting key constituents of ordinary well-meaning people to support the investments needed in various forms of social control.
But the forces behind this don't need to convince everyone with the same arguments. And different strategies work better with different groups. And building investment in mass surveillance and policing can be achieved even if the ostensible corollary of reducing imprisonment doesn't occur.
And it's obviously occurring at the same time as many neoliberal elites are helping fascists build the largest concentration camp infrastructure--ostensibly at first for immigrants--in modern history. The 2025 ICE detention budget was exploded to 62% greater than the entire federal prison system.
This is not a uniform strategy even among neoliberals. There are still big constituencies in favor of clumsier and harder-to-sell-to-liberals mass criminalization and incarceration.
Crucially, they think that well-meaning liberals can be brought along to this policing/surveillance project by framing its intellectual architects as well-meaning progressives who abhor human caging (nevermind this same cohort was decades-long cheerleader of mass incarceration.)
This is desirable b/c prisons are so grotesque and overt brutality at such a scale--U.S. cages 5-10x rate of other countries and Black people 6x South Africa in Apartheid--is hard to propaganda over. Total life expectancy is 2 years lower than if U.S. had kept its prior rate before 1980!
In some elite neoliberal circles, there is a developing view that grotesque levels of inequality/injustice can be controlled/managed more effectively with various forms of mass surveillance, policing, and social control through other systems (e.g. education, social media, tech).
What's going on here? Among many other factors I discuss, I want to highlight one here: we are seeing a deeper shift in liberal elite circles away from the mass incarceration era as a preferred means of enforcing big inequalities. They have other plans.
THREAD. I want to describe a new propaganda trend. As I explained in Copaganda, we are starting to see a lot of Card Carrying Elites (economists, Atlantic writers, Harvard professors, philanthropists) feign intellectual edginess by claiming prisons are bad and even obsolete.
One thing that is often overlooked is how many amazing people there are doing the most difficult, selfless work in our society every day. The Texas Jail Project always inspires me. Their hard work uncovers stuff we would never know, and save people’s lives. www.instagram.com/p/DVJ5HFQjnM...
One of the most bone chilling and outrageous stories you’ll see about the authoritarian nature of our institutions. And extremely important to think about the fact that it was done by a liberal DA in a city governed by Democrats. jacobin.com/2026/02/wilk...
THREAD. There are profound parallels in how the news is covering violent repression by ICE and how the news covered violent repression by local police in 2020.