Mamdani Is Right. Israel Not Only Has VERY Deep Ties to the NYPD, But to Hundreds of American Police Departments
This isn’t antisemitism. It's fact. It’s a system connecting New York and hundreds of U.S. departments to Israeli tactics, tech, and doctrine.
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Let me say this plainly so there’s no confusion later: Zohran Mamdani is right. The New York Police Department’s ties to Israeli security aren’t a slogan or a slur. It damn sure isn’t antisemitic to say so. They are real, deep, and documented—and they extend far beyond New York to hundreds of departments across the United States. Anyone who has seriously studied U.S. law enforcement these past two decades knows this. It’s in the itineraries, the budgets, the exchange rosters, the vendor contracts, the fusion-center emails, and, most importantly, in the way everyday people are policed on our streets.
What I’m rebutting is the denial—the move that reduces all of this to “a few training exercises,” as if we’re quibbling about a field trip. That denial is not innocent. It shrinks a two-decade architecture into a photo-op, then calls those of us who point to the receipts “anti-police” or worse. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s public policy. And it’s visible to anyone who cares enough to look.
I’ve been in New York long enough to know what people here already say in private: this relationship is not new. After September 11th, NYPD leaders and their peers from across the country began attending Israeli-run and Israeli-hosted counter-terror seminars—year after year—facilitated by brand-name organizations that never hid their role. The Anti-Defamation League’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar. JINSA’s Law Enforcement Exchange Program. GILEE out of Georgia State University. These weren’t one-offs; they became pipelines. A generation of chiefs, deputy commissioners, and specialized units cycled through the same playbooks, shook the same hands, and brought the same ideas home.
Inside the city, the liaisoning formalized. The NYPD leaned into an international posture, dispatching senior officers abroad—including to Israel—to build standing relationships, share intelligence, and embed “best practices.” That might sound harmless in a press release. But in practice it meant ongoing contact, repeat attendance, and a set of assumptions about safety and threat that travel with the traveler. For a long time the press treated this like global networking, and at a superficial level, sure. But ask Muslim New Yorkers who lived under the Demographics Unit—the “mosque crawlers,” the rakers, the neighborhood mapping—and they’ll tell you those “exercises” came home as programs.
If you want national scale, you don’t have to squint. In October 2023, a New York metro delegation that included NYPD leadership was in Israel for counter-terror and antisemitism training, near the Gaza perimeter, when the war exploded. In September 2025, more than a dozen police officials from New York State flew to Israel for what a sponsoring ministry pitched as a “Birthright for American police chiefs.” That’s just New York. Dozens of cities—Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Miami-Dade, Seattle, Oakland, Austin, Baton Rouge—appear across programs and years. Federal agencies—ICE, DHS, U.S. Marshals—did too. Even campus police showed up on the rosters. This isn’t rumor. It’s itinerary.
Now, if all that happened were seminars in hotel ballrooms, I might write a different piece. But it didn’t stop there. Tactics traveled. The “police as warriors” frame traveled. The idea that protest is a security problem to be suppressedrather than a democratic act to be facilitated traveled. And the technology traveled—the forensic phone-extraction boxes, the video analytics suites, the predictive dashboards, the border-surveillance packages that migrated from the desert to city task forces. I’ll walk you through those receipts in detail, but the point for now is simple: you can’t call this symbolism when it shows up in procurement orders and patrol playbooks and what happens to your body when you exercise your rights.
Does that mean Israel “created” American policing problems? No. American policing is violent on its own terms—born from slave patrols, hardened by the wars on drugs and crime, militarized through 1033 transfers and SWAT normalization. What the Israel connection did after September 11th was accelerate and legitimize a system that treats neighborhoods like insurgencies and neighbors like suspects. It offered a model of policing soaked in counter-insurgency logic—checkpoints, “area dominance,” preemption through surveillance—and sold it as modern professionalism. It offered gearand doctrine and the confidence to say that dissent is a security problem and difference is a risk vector.
That’s not speculation. When hacked law-enforcement archives—the so-called BlueLeaks trove—spilled out internal training decks and distribution lists, analysts found IDF-branded briefings, Israeli military studies center slides, and think-tank reports pushed through U.S. fusion centers and HIDTA channels. Not balanced perspectives, but single-source narratives about Palestine and protest, laundered through the stamp of “official use.” Alongside that came the invitations—ADL sessions on screening “Islamic extremists,” counter-terror workshops with Israeli trainers—circulating from agency inbox to agency inbox as if the only communities that mattered were the ones being profiled.
If you lived through New York’s Muslim mapping, you felt this in your bones. If you organized after Ferguson, you smelled it in the air—the familiar sting of tear gas and the sound of armored tires on city streets. If you were a student in 2024 and 2025, you watched kettling tactics and “protest management” evolve in real time to control space, narrative, and camera angles. Denial turns all of that into “a few exercises.” Reality calls it an architecture.
So why the panic when someone says it out loud? Because the safest way to protect a system is to insist it doesn’t exist. To call it a slur. To put a moral alarm on the door marked “oversight.” I am not going to play that game with you. This is normal governance, not a back-room conspiracy. City councils passed travel budgets. Police foundations wrote checks. Non-profits booked the buses and hotels. Federal agencies co-signed the ethos. Vendors installed the boxes. Fusion centers stamped the PDFs. And New Yorkers—Black, Brown, Muslim, immigrant, poor—lived the consequences.
This is a rebuttal, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s a promise that we will name what is happening in plain English and trace how it works—from the seminar to the street, from the liaison desk to the precinct, from the “best practice” to the stop, the search, and the shove. And then we will spell out what accountability looks like, beginning here, in a city that prides itself on being a laboratory of the future. Because if New York is a model for this pipeline, New York can be a model for ending it.
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I’m going to show you the map next: New York first—the liaisons, the trips, the units, the tech—then the national network that proves Mamdani is not just right about the NYPD; he’s right about the scale. And when we get to the end, I want you to ask your city a simple question: if this relationship is so harmless, why does telling the truth about it feel so dangerous?
New York is the perfect place to show why saying “it’s just a few exercises” is a dodge. Here, the connections aren’t abstract—they’re visible in the calendar, the curriculum, the units that were built, the tools on the desk, and the way a protest is handled on a Tuesday night.
Start with what the city admits. After September 11th, the NYPD formalized an International Liaison posture and began sending senior officers abroad—including to Israel—to cultivate ongoing cooperation, share intelligence, and “learn best practices.” At the same time, a steady flow of New York commanders and specialty units cycled through Israeli-led programs in both countries, especially the Anti-Defamation League’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminarand Advanced Training School, and JINSA’s Law Enforcement Exchange Program. These were not one-off junkets. They were repeat touchpoints where the same doctrine—police as domestic counter-insurgents—was reinforced year after year.
When you take ideology home, it turns into policy. Nowhere is that clearer than the NYPD’s Demographics Unit, launched in the 2000s. The unit mapped entire Muslim neighborhoods, deployed “rakers” to gather daily-life detail, and used “mosque crawlers” to monitor sermons and social life. Insiders acknowledged that the approach borrowed from Israeli practices in the occupied territories: map the “human terrain,” preempt through surveillance, and treat identity as a risk vector. If you were a Muslim New Yorker in those years, you didn’t experience “exercises.” You experienced being studied like an insurgency.
The pipeline is not only people and ideas; it is also technology. New York agencies, like many across the country, acquired device-extraction tools such as Cellebrite; adopted video analytics platforms such as Briefcam; and leaned on predictive and data-fusion suites like Palantir. These are not neutral gadgets. In practice they extend the same counter-insurgency logic into everyday life: pull the contents of a phone after a low-level arrest; compress days of footage to isolate a face in a protest crowd; forecast “risk” in a block where what people really need is jobs and housing. When you pair that stack with a protest-suppression playbook—kettling, “area dominance,” high-visibility patrols with lights on—you get a city that talks about community policing at noon and runs checkpoint logic by nightfall.
If you want the receipts on how the narratives themselves traveled, look at the BlueLeaks trove of hacked law-enforcement files. Analysts found IDF-branded slide decks and Israeli think-tank briefings pushed through U.S. police-intelligence channels—fusion centers, HIDTA pipelines—without balance from Muslim civil-rights groups or independent Middle East specialists. Those “for official use only” PDFs didn’t stay in a vacuum; the same networks promoted ADL law-enforcement seminars framing “evolving Islamic extremists,” which in turn shaped how local officers were taught to “observe” communities. The result is not a neutral understanding of risk but a one-way lens—and New Yorkers felt that lens on their skin.
Proponents of the liaison story line will say, “That’s counter-terrorism. It’s kept the city safe.” But look at where this ethos actually landed. It landed in protests. It landed in student encampments. It landed in subway stops and street cornerswhere stop-and-frisk logic never really disappeared so much as it rebranded. It landed in the tactical decisions that treat dissenters and the poor like a public-order problem to be contained, not a public whose rights must be facilitated.
And it landed in court. You don’t need a law degree to understand the basics. The First Amendment protects speech, religion, and assembly. The Fourth protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The Fourteenth guarantees equal protection of the laws. When a police department designs surveillance that targets a faith, or uses tech to chill speech and association, or applies force that punishes assembly, you don’t need to be “anti-police” to say the line has been crossed. In Hassan v. City of New York, Muslim plaintiffs won the right to challenge discriminatory surveillance precisely because it singled them out by religion; that’s not ideology—that’s constitutional law recognizing harm.
New York’s specific timeline only underscores how normalized all of this became. In October 2023, a New York metro delegation that included NYPD leaders was in Israel for counter-terrorism/antisemitism training near the Gaza perimeter when the war broke out; they were evacuated home. In September 2025, more than a dozen New York State police chiefs went on what Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs proudly dubbed “Birthright for American police chiefs.” In between those milestones were years of seminars, rosters, and repeat attendance—institutionalization, not curiosity.
The lived experience in the boroughs matches the paper trail. Ask students who saw encampments cleared by armored lines while media optics were carefully managed. Ask organizers who watched non-violent marches be boxed and dispersed on a schedule. Ask neighborhood leaders who know exactly which corners draw lights-on patrols at night. None of that is explained by a liaison bullet point. All of it is explained by a doctrine that treats civil life as a set of security problems to be solved by visibility, control, and preemption.
This is why the “it’s a slur” defense is so dangerous. It tries to make the conversation about motives so we stop talking about mechanisms. I am not speculating about a shadowy cabal. I’m describing public programs and public purchases: ADL/JINSA classes your chiefs attended; international postings your city foundation helped fund; surveillance tools your council appropriated; protest tactics that were workshopped in one context and field-tested in the five boroughs. You can disagree with the conclusions, but you cannot pretend the architecture isn’t there.
There’s one more truth New Yorkers will recognize: the same communities carry the weight. Black and Brown neighborhoods still absorb the stops, the searches, and the “high-visibility” blitzes. Muslim New Yorkers still carry the scar of being mapped and monitored because of faith. Immigrants still find that a border toolkit now polices their block. Students and workers still learn, quickly, that assembly is tolerated only within lines drawn by a command post. When leaders say “exercises,” people hear “us.”
I write this as a New Yorker and as someone who has read the receipts. Denying the influence of Israeli security on the NYPD isn’t just wrong; it’s an erasure of 20 years of choices that were made in our name and felt on our streets. Naming that influence is not bigotry; it is accountability. It is the first step in deciding where policing ends and self-government begins.
If you’ve made it this far, you don’t need me to dramatize it. You’ve seen the armored vans at protests, the phones pulled and dumped into extraction boxes, the cameras that know your gait as well as your face. You’ve seen how quickly a “liaison” becomes a line of riot shields. In the next section, I’m going to widen the frame and show that New York is not an outlier—it is a template. The same programs, the same vendors, the same ethos are threaded through hundreds of departments nationwide. Once you see the pattern, the denial stops working. And real oversight becomes the only honest option.
If you widen your lens just a little, you see the New York story repeating itself, city after city, agency after agency, under different logos but with the same logic: exchanges, liaisons, vendors, doctrine. The infrastructure is national.
Start with what the programs themselves brag about. By their own accounting, thousands of U.S. law-enforcement officials have cycled through Israeli-run or Israeli-hosted trainings since September 11th. The Anti-Defamation League’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar (and its Advanced Training School in Washington) has sent cohorts of executives every year since 2004; JINSA’s Law Enforcement Exchange Program dates to the early 2000s; GILEE, at Georgia State University, starts even earlier in the 1990s and boasts tens of thousands of participants in workshops, conferences, and events. These aren’t pop-up moments. They are conveyor belts.
You can see it in Los Angeles. The LAPD’s relationship with Israeli security goes back decades, then accelerates after September 11th. In 2002, a JINSA-sponsored delegation visited police and military outposts, studying border operations in the Galilee and the occupied West Bank. Bomb-squad exchanges followed, with part of the cost covered by the Los Angeles Police Foundation. Over time, delegations in both directions normalized. When a local paper photographed five officers from the UAE graduating alongside LAPD recruits in March 2023, it shocked some people that foreign officers were inside the basic academy at all. But for those paying attention, it didn’t. It was simply another sign that overseas policing pipelines—Israel included—had become routine.
You see it in Atlanta through GILEE. For more than 30 years, the program has moved American officials—police chiefs, sheriffs, federal leads, corporate security—through Israeli briefings on “counter-terrorism,” border control, emergency management, and “community policing.” Open records pried loose partial agendas: border, urban, and “community” modules on paper; a counter-insurgency ethos in practice. Georgia organizers have watched the results locally—the escalation of militarized responses to protest, the quiet normalization of surveillance—and concluded that this is not an abstract exchange. It is a model that travels.
You see it in Baton Rouge, where police leadership visited Tel Aviv in 2014 in part to learn Cellebrite device-extraction workflows; in New Orleans, where advocates tracked the spread of Israeli video analytics; in Chicago, Seattle, Oakland, Austin, Miami-Dade, Boston, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, and beyond. You see it when U.S. Marshals, ICE, and DHS attend these seminars and then carry the security mindset into task forces and border regions. You see it when the Department of Homeland Security signs contracts with Elbit Systems for towers along the Arizona line, and the same surveillance sensibilities migrate from the desert to American cities through joint operations. The connective tissue is strong because it’s institutional—memos, budgets, grant streams, and procurement orders that don’t need a headline to move forward.
If you want the receipts for how knowledge moves, not just people, look again at the BlueLeaks archive of hacked police documents. Analysts found Israeli military briefings—IDF Strategic Division slides, Dado Center retrospectives, Meir Amit think-tank products—pushed through U.S. fusion centers and HIDTA programs to American officers who would never have touched an IDF deck otherwise. They found agency inboxes promoting ADL trainings on “observational techniques” and the “evolving nature of Islamic extremists,” reinforcing a one-way curriculum about who to watch and how. As Mike German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center, put it, we built an intelligence-sharing network “that basically takes disinformation straight from the right-wing social media fever swamps and puts it out under the imprimatur of law enforcement.” He wasn’t speaking about Israel alone; he was describing a structural vulnerability. But when Israeli security is granted near-exclusive classroom access on Palestine, protest, and “extremism,” that vulnerability becomes an orthodoxy.
Just as important as who teaches is what gets taught. On paper: leadership in crisis, mass-casualty management, “balancing crime and terror.” In practice: riot suppression, counter-insurgency, preemption through surveillance—all overwhelmingly misfit for municipal policing. At the ADL seminars, delegations meet Shin Bet, Israeli Police riot units like Yasam, checkpoint duty officers, and prison officials. They travel to sites—Hebron, crossings, detention centers—where the daily grammar is occupation, not civil law. You cannot spend a week learning how to manage an occupied population and then pretend that week has no effect on how you imagine a protest line in Staten Island or South Central.
The ideology travels with the itinerary. A former Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, coined the term “crimiterrorists” and told a U.S. convention, “Crime and terror are two sides of the same coin.” That conflation shows up later in the way officials talk about dissent, drugs, gangs, immigrants—how quickly the language of enemy slides into neighbor. It shows up in the way “police as warriors” becomes the assumed posture, and in the way “high-visibility presence” turns into kettling, “area dominance,” and mass arrests. And it shows up in the technologies marketed as neutral progress: a Cellebrite box on a detective’s desk; a Briefcam license on the city’s video wall; a predictive pane inside a CompStat briefing; a droneoverhead that started life in a defense catalog and ended up over a block party.
What defenders call “best practices” are frequently the worst practices when applied to civil life. The NYPD Demographics Unit—“rakers,” “mosque crawlers,” maps of where Muslims ate and prayed—wasn’t an aberration. It was a municipal echo of a security logic that treats identity as a proxy for threat. The weaponization of “crowd-control” munitions on American streets—tear gas, “skunk,” flash-bang grenades—wasn’t a one-time overreaction. It was training doctrine finding legs in Ferguson, Minneapolis, Portland, Los Angeles, New York. And the quiet creep of stop-and-search revival under new names wasn’t an accident. Israel itself passed a “stop-and-frisk” law in 2016 modeled on the American approach. The traffic moves both ways, reinforcing the same patterns of profiling and force.
If you need a recent, local snapshot: in October 2023, New York’s delegation to Israel was so close to the Gaza perimeter when the war broke out that evacuation became the training’s final module. In September 2025, the Ministry for Diaspora Affairs pitched “Birthright for American police chiefs,” and 13 New York-area officials went. In between: a stream of rostered trips, ribbon-cuttings, and bilateral “security conferences” (JINSA hosted a U.S.–Israel one in December 2024) designed to normalize the pipeline. To pretend these are isolated “exercises” is to ignore how institutions work. Repeat attendance becomes policy. Familiar faces become phone numbers. Phone numbers become channels. Channels become habits.
I know some people reading this work inside departments and feel defensive right now. You’ll say: “We learn from lots of places.” I don’t doubt that. But look at the asymmetry—who gets the microphone, who gets called “expert,” whose slides circulate with government stamps, whose tools become “standard issue,” whose definitions of threat shape your watch list. When Israeli security has outsized access to your training pipeline year after year, you are not collecting “a global perspective.” You are adopting a frame.
And the frame shows up in who pays the price. Black and Brown communities carry the stops, the searches, and the stacked charges. Muslims shoulder the surveillance, then the stigma when they push back. Immigrants meet a border toolkit at a neighborhood traffic stop. Students discover that “time, place, and manner” restrictions stretch to erase the manner entirely. Journalists and legal observers feel the weight of a public-order machine that was disassembled in one era and quietly rebuilt in another.
If this is useful to you—if you want the map drawn cleanly, with receipts and plain language so you can use it in your city—join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. Your membership keeps this work free for the world and lets me keep digging, connecting the public documents and the lived experience so nobody can gaslight you with “it’s just exercises.”
In the final section, I’m going to talk about what accountability looks like—in New York first, and then everywhere these pipelines run. Because this isn’t about catching one agency in a gotcha; it’s about changing rules so the most invasive parts of this exchange can’t be smuggled into civil life under the banner of “best practices.” There’s a path to do that. It starts with daylight. It ends with guardrails. And it runs through us.
Let’s talk about what it would actually take to fix this—in New York first, and then everywhere the pipeline runs.
The first truth to name is simple: this isn’t a shadow world. It’s governance. City councils voted on travel. Police foundations underwrote flights, hotels, and gadgets. Agencies signed MOUs. Vendors inked contracts. Fusion centers forwarded slide decks. If it was built in public, it can be changed in public. That’s the point of writing this in plain English. We don’t need a secret key; we need daylight and rules.
Daylight means specific things. A city that truly wants to keep people safe will publish the full roster of every overseas exchange since September 11th—who went, who hosted, who paid, what the agenda covered, and what “best practices” were brought home. It will publish every MOU tied to international liaisoning and set term limits on those assignments so they don’t become permanent shadow posts. It will tell the public which vendors power device extraction, video analytics, and predictive tools in their city; when those contracts expire; and what guardrails exist on their use.
Rules mean more than “we’ll do better.” Rules mean you cannot import occupation logic into civil life. Rules mean recognizing that a campus encampment is not a frontier outpost; that a march across a bridge is not a threat axis; that a family walking home after Maghrib is not a “pattern of life” to be mapped for later. Rules mean drawing boundariesaround the kinds of training and gear that may never belong in a municipal department.
If you’re wondering what that looks like on paper, here is a short list New York can pass now, and other cities can adapt line by line:
Publish everything: A living, searchable ledger of all overseas exchanges since September 11th, with rosters, agendas, funders, travel costs, and any deliverables. Put every MOU and liaison posting in the open; renewals require a public vote.
Moratorium on military-style training: Prohibit participation in programs that teach riot suppression, counter-insurgency, or occupation-era protest control; bar “scenario days” in prisons, checkpoints, and settlements; require content parity with civil-rights organizations for any remaining seminars.
Procurement guardrails: Ban protest-policing tools and tactics developed or field-tested on occupied populations; require end-user monitoring and public audits for device-extraction, video analytics, and predictive suites; mandate bias impact assessments before purchase.
Fusion-center accountability: Independent audits of intel feeds; publish training providers; require source diversity (including Muslim civil-rights groups and independent ME scholars) and de-list providers that repeatedly fail basic accuracy tests.
Community oversight with teeth: Empower a civilian board to approve or deny any foreign training or surveillance purchase; give it subpoena power and budgetary veto on out-of-scope items; tie violations to personal accountability for sign-offs.
Budget rebalancing: Reinvest savings from canceled exchanges and shelved toys into housing, youth jobs, mental-health crisis response, and community-led safety. Safety is not a press conference—it’s whether the rent is paid and the lights stay on.
Due-process standards: Codify bright-line bans on religious profiling, dragnet social-media surveillance, and pretextual phone searches; align policy with the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments so officers aren’t asked to violate rights by design.
None of this requires anti-police posturing. It requires honesty. If a department believes a particular exchange teaches something uniquely life-saving, make the case publicly, show the agenda, demonstrate the downstream policy change, and build civilian guardrails around it. That’s how self-government works. If a vendor claims their tool is neutral, prove it—with access for independent auditors, meaningful opt-outs, and hard stop clauses when misuse is documented.
You’ll hear the same two objections on loop. First: “We need these ties to keep people safe.” The response is: safety without rights isn’t safety—it’s control. If a program truly makes people safer, it should survive sunlight and civilian oversight. Second: “Everybody trains everywhere; why single out Israel?” Because this pipeline is outsized, long-running, and distinctive in the way it carries occupation-era tactics into civil life. That doesn’t excuse abusive training with any other country. It means you fix this pipeline and then apply the same rules to all of them.
The law is not your enemy here. The law is your leverage. The First Amendment says protesters are not an insurgency to be managed; they are a public to be facilitated. The Fourth says your phone isn’t a fishing pond because a patrol car smelled power. The Fourteenth says mapping a mosque like a threat grid is not “observational policing”; it’s discrimination. When city policy violates those basics, the courts are not a nuisance—they are a compass reminding officials where the line is.
I know there are officers reading this who will say privately, “We didn’t sign up to play soldier against our neighbors.” I hear you. It is easier to train for control than to build legitimacy; easier to buy a box and call it modern than to do the slow work of trust. But long after the conference lanyard is lost, you still have to stand on a block with the people who live there. And they will remember whether you showed up as a guardian or an occupier.
New York can lead here because New York helped build the thing. Publish the rosters. Release the MOUs. Audit the feeds. Freeze the worst training. Guard the purchases. If the city does that work, other mayors and councils will have cover to do the same. We’ll move the conversation from “is this real?” to “how do we govern it?”—where it belonged all along.
I’ve spent a lot of words on receipts because I want to leave you with no room for gaslighting. Denial turns a twenty-year system into “a few exercises.” Reality calls it an architecture. If you’re ready to help me keep putting the plans on the table—in New York and then everywhere else—become a member today. If you can, join as a monthly, annual, or founding member. Your support keeps this work free for the world, funds the time to surface documents and build toolkits, and makes it possible to turn plain-language truth into policy change.
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We can do more than win an argument about whether this pipeline exists. We can close its most dangerous valves and open up a different future—one where safety isn’t imported from a battlefield, but built with the people who call this city home.
I’ve gotta run. Sorry this was so long but I wanted to take my time to really break it down.
Love and appreciate each of you!
Shaun
Rubia Garcia II
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⚠ In short, 24 headlines from JUST the LAST 24 HOURS… [... DEEP breath IN; exhale]
1. Black boxes recovered in UPS plane crash in Louisville as death toll rises to 12 🕊️
2. Masked, armed ICE agents arrest US citizen in L.A. Home Depot parking lot, then drive off in his car w/ his toddler (also US citizen) in the backseat
3. Heritage Foundation Pres offers to quit, walks back defense of Tucker Carlson interview w/ white supremacist Nick Fuentes
4. Steven Bannon to DJT: Send DoJ to file suit against CA for Prop 50 and challenge Mamdani’s citizenship
5. ICE to open "National Call Center" in TN to help track migrant children for removal
6. FAA: Starting Friday, capacity to be reduced by 10% at 40 major airports due to shutdown; meaning, thousands of flights cancelled per day
7. DJT confuses South America and South Africa during speech at business conference in Miami
8. ‘Obviously unconstitutional’: Judge slams ICE for ‘disgusting,’ ‘inhumane’ conditions; orders 15 fixes at Chicago detention facility
9. FBI says 3 MI teens have been charged with conspiring to support ISIS in alleged Halloween terror attack
10. NYC Fire Commissioner Robert Tucker announces resignation < 24 hours after Mamdani’s election; Mamdani to choose replacement
11. DJT says choice is between 'communism or common sense' after Tues elections; hints at attacking NYC election results
12. Videos show ICE agents dragging female out of Chicago daycare; slamming her face against glass doors at drop-off time
13. Putin orders plans to resume nuclear tests in response to DJT’s directive for the U.S. to restart testing after 30 years
14. Maine Rep. Jared Golden(D) won’t seek reelection in competitive US House district; citing threats against him and family
15. After a failed special session vote to redraw states map to favor GOP, Kansas GOP now plan Jan redistricting effort
16. Judge hears evidence on ICE use of force in Chicago; attorney repeatedly quoted CBP Bovino saying, “You don’t want to get tear gassed, then don’t protest"
17. Jury deadlocked on whether “DC Sandwich Guy” committed a federal crime; deliberations resume at 9a today
18. WH adviser Stephen Miller posts captionless, implicit threat about immigrant households after Mamdani mayoral win
19. Capitol Police step in as Democrat Rep disrupts news presser for Speaker Johnson as ‘lies to the American people!'
20. Judge accuses prosecutors in Comey case of taking an ‘indict first, investigate later’ approach; orders all grand jury materials by 5p today
21. Starbucks' union workers plan strike next week unless company agrees to labor contract to increase wages
22. Chief Justice Roberts calls DJT tariffs an 'imposition of taxes' during arguments; other Justices also express push back on presidents power
23. PA man arrested on Capitol Hill threatening to murder Rep Robert Garcia (D-CA); told officers: "You can defend yourself in a war, including to shoot to kill"
24. GOP Senate leader Thune says ending filibuster is 'not happening' despite DJT’s demands
Again, that was just in the last 24 hours and there are about 50 more lined up right behind them I intend to share throughout the day.
But we expected this after Tuesday, did we not?
So.. if you’ve read this far, it matters;
your unwilingness to turn away — your endurance… is what will make the difference here.
It means you haven’t stopped caring yet.
Thank you for that.
Thank you to everyone who keeps sharing these #24in24’s; you should know that presence inspires more than you realize.
All I ask is you don’t get comfortable in the wins.
Celebrate, rest; but again; we don’t unpack here — not when chaos wants to make itself at home here.
No.
We keep it moving until the mission and the moment — are met. And we have midterms 1️⃣ year away.
Now, more than ever — do NOT surrender; do NOT retreat.
Whatever stirs within you — curiosity, frustration, disgust, joy — let it flow THROUGH you; be aware, but do NOT absorb.
Change comes in quiet moments and in wild upheavals. Be prepared to stand in them all.
Thank you for leaning into what others avoid; thank you for holding space when it would be easier to look away; and thank you for showing up, fully, even when it’s uncomfortable.
JUST.. THANK YOU! 🙌
Reading your comments, even your corrections and criticisms, continues to give me hope.
It tells me, you still care.
Bc people who didn’t; wouldn’t even bother.
And caring isn’t an easy task these days;
not when all this noise is meant to numb you.
So thank you one last time for feeling, for enduring, for sharing in this tension with me — bc that’s how we outlast the noise.
History favors NOT the loudest, but those who held firm the LONGEST.
DEEP breath IN… hold… release… — 2 more times…
#NoSurrender #NoRetreat ✊😔
As always; sources/links 📌’d in comments.
Under Trump, surveillance just went to a whole new level. In the aftermath of the Gaza siege, a California-based company called Skydio quietly sent over a hundred AI-powered reconnaissance drones to assist Israel’s military operations. Autonomous and equipped with advanced imaging and tracking technology, these drones were designed to navigate complex urban environments, identify targets, and relay massive amounts of data back to command centers.
But now, what began as a wartime experiment didn’t stay confined to Gaza. These same drone models began appearing in American skies - not in combat zones, but over U.S. cities.
According to a new investigation by The Grayzone, police departments in New York, Detroit, and other cities, as well as U.S. Customs and Border Protection, are now using these AI surveillance drones to monitor protests and gather data on civilians.
Each drone can operate without GPS, scan streets with thermal cameras, and upload thousands of images directly into centralized evidence databases. Gaza was simply the testing ground where cutting-edge surveillance tools were refined before being redeployed for domestic policing.
As we see with so many other things, what was once marketed as a tool for counterterrorism abroad is now watching over American streets under the guise of "your own good."
Here at CE we see this as yet another chance for us to realize the pattern that's playing out. The deceit from leaders, the increase in authoritanism no matter which government is in power, and the fact that what is being done isn't serving humanity but seeking to control them. It's time to awake from the illusion with yet another example right about our heads.
- lost the source
Occupy Democrats
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BREAKING: Outrage erupts after convicted white teen rapist gets NO JAIL TIME after strangling a victim so hard doctors said she was “lucky to be alive!”
18-year-old Jesse Mack Butler was initially charged with 10 felony counts, including rape, attempted rape, sexual battery and assault, and pleaded not guilty to all charges. He was facing 78 years in prison.
Then, thanks to Oklahoma’s Youthful Offender Act, he then changed his plea to no contest after a judge signed off on a plea deal and sentenced him to only a year of rehab and community service.
Butler recorded himself strangling and raping two high school girls, one of whom was so severely choked that doctors said she was lucky to be alive.
Oklahoma Watch reports that “Butler’s court case began in March and was led by Assistant District Attorney Debra Vincent, who, according to the families of both victims, planned to prosecute Butler to the fullest extent of the law and would not deal with him unless he pleaded guilty. Neither family understood why Vincent eventually began pushing for Butler to be designated as a youthful offender.”
The fact that Butler’s father was a former football director at Oklahoma State University has many wondering if he’s getting special treatment because of it.
Bodycam footage of Butler’s arrest shows him nearly in tears, and his mother complaining about how unfair this was to her son. “Awful experience for a child,” said the mother, who promised to get her son out quickly. “ We’re coming to get you, OK? Stay strong, OK? Say your prayers. Later, Jess, see you in a bit.”
For all the incessant bitching and moaning from the right-wing about how unfair it is to be a white man in this country (eye roll), it is truly shocking to see the leniency that young white men can receive when they commit truly heinous sexual crimes against women.
