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7 days ago
- General
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The Video of Rumeysa Ozturk Being Detained by ICE Was Publicized By a Community Defense Network
Anadolu/Getty Images Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take On March 25, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Rumeysa Ozturk as she walked down the street in the Boston suburb of Somerville. Ozturk is in the United States legally on a student visa and is by most accounts model citizen — a Fulbright scholar, PhD student at Tufts University, and, as argued by her lawyers, guilty of nothing. Her crime, according to the Trump administration, seems to be supporting Palestine. Ozturk's arrest is sensational in the literal sense, and the video is in many ways traumatic to watch. The masked agents appear out of nowhere, encircle the academic, and put her in handcuffs as she asks what's happening. Although it echoes the tactics we're seeing and hearing about ICE arrests all over the country, these stories are usually shared by word of mouth in rumors or whispers among neighbors. But Ozturk's situation stands out because we can watch it. That's because, as her detention was happening, another student called a community watch hotline that had started operating that week. 'He said, 'Someone's being kidnapped, someone's being kidnapped,'' recalled Danny Timpona, the LUCE Hotline operator who took the call. The hotline team dispatched 'verifiers' in Somerville — people trained to verify hotline calls and social media rumors of ICE's presence in a given area — who arrived within five minutes. They met with the caller, who was unsure who had taken Ozturk. The volunteers began knocking on doors and talking to neighbors, trying to find out if anyone might have information on what had happened, and also to calm any panic by giving out information about the hotline. A neighbor turned over the video, reportedly captured by a home security camera, that has now been seen by millions. Those volunteers are some of the more than 750 who have been trained in the last six weeks at 'community hubs' in over a dozen cities across the state, where 50 hotline operators with member groups of the LUCE Immigrant Justice Network of Massachusetts are now answering calls in five languages. ('LUCE' connotes 'shining a light,' in Latin, a language familiar to the region's large Catholic immigrant population.) And they're providing other resources as well. Later in the week, the group gave know-your-rights training to more than 100 Tufts students and community members. Timpona credits a 40-page Google Doc that was published just Donald Trump was inaugurated. LUCE is connecting immigrant community groups, prison abolition organizations, legal services, parent groups, and faith-based organizations. 'Our coalition is rooted in the idea that we refuse to leave anyone behind because of their marginalized identity,' shares Jaya Savita, director of the Asian Pacific Islanders Civic Action Network and a member of the LUCE Network. 'The hotline and ICE Watch resource is one of many ways we are empowering allies and impacted community members. We recognize that in order to build people power, we need to train, empower, and equip our communities and allies.' Most of the group's tactics, from the hotline dispatch system to neighborhood-based rights workshops, are modeled on those our team at Siembra NC used to organize immigrant workers and community members in North Carolina during Trump's first term. And they're not the only ones coming together to create new defense networks. Before his reelection, Trump made clear what he was going to do: demonize Latinos and all immigrants and use the threats of raids and deportation to destroy families and communities, keeping us all scared, demoralized, and hidden. He and his billionaire friends would continue stripping away our rights, gutting public services, and harming working people. We knew the playbook he'd run since 2016, so we wrote our own. Siembra NC's Defend and Recruit playbook outlines the tools we developed during the first Trump presidency and the ways we defended immigrants in our community and built a powerful movement in North Carolina. Since February, over 6,000 people have downloaded it, and hundreds of people around the country have joined in-person and online trainings. Among them were LUCE Hotline's coordination team, who say they spent hours consulting with our organizing coaches before they set up their systems. 'It was harder than we had expected getting people to set a vision and follow through,' Timpona said. 'Even after being trained, volunteers needed a lot of coaching to do things like go up and ask questions of federal agents making arrests.' ICE says they arrested nearly 400 people in Massachusetts in the two weeks the hotline started receiving calls. 'It has been so helpful to get support from other groups just starting.' The Defend & Recruit Network includes groups along the East Coast all the way to Florida, Texas, across Michigan and Wisconsin, and into Washington and California. We're experimenting with new strategies that engage people to defend those targeted, while also building a practice of recruitment into our organizing. We just published a toolkit for students resisting detentions like Ozturk's. Although there are extreme differences in our approaches and risks depending on local factors and our personal and group identities, there's still so much we can strategize about. Building these connections helps the work feel less isolating, less impossible, as some groups in red states like Ohio and Tennessee have shared on peer learning calls. By sharing these resources, we've received dozens more in return. We're collating these community-provided resources alongside our own tools and training. We've also built customizable resources, logos, toolkits, and produced how-to videos and other materials so you can do this work in your community. It is more important than ever: ICE is escalating its raids and targeting more people — immigration activists, Palestine supporters, parents, workers, and students. Many in our communities are looking for ways to defend our rights, even if it feels like those rights are eroding in real time. Defend & Recruit organizers have talked to people all over the country who are leading this work. Some are brand new, wanting to step up and do something in today's political chaos to support neighbors and families, while others have decades of wisdom to share from their lifetime in the fight. When we asked at a recent online training how many new local groups were forming solely because of immigration defense, dozens of people put their hands up. We've created spaces to troubleshoot common problems and share what we've learned, alongside receiving individual support. Groups in St. Louis; Ulster, New York; and Austin, Texas have met together and with our organizing coaches to build their own hotlines and ICE Watch programs. In North Carolina, we're building new ways for allies to join our fight and defend communities. After hearing from employers who wanted to respond to federal agents' warrantless arrests, we're now inviting them to become Fourth Amendment Workplaces that stand up for the Constitution. We know that the far right thrives when we are scared and alone. And we know that none of us are experts in exactly what will work in today's political landscape as Trump continues to shift his tactics. The administration is employing raids at workplaces, enabling abusive employers to exploit their workers further, and targeting immigrants at schools and places of worship. They're going after green card holders and temporary visa holders, and even using an 18th-century law to deport people to an El Salvadoran prison. Their actions are unprecedented, so the way we defend our people must change, too. We have legal rights in these situations and ways we can respond — if we're ready. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want more Teen Vogue immigration coverage? The School Shooting That History Forgot I Was Kidnapped After Coming to the U.S. Seeking Asylum Ronald Reagan Sucked, Actually The White Supremacist 'Great Replacement Theory' Has Deep Roots
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
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The Impact Instagram Account Was Started By Gen Z, for Gen Z. Here's How It Became a Crucial Source for News.
Photos by Marissa Alper; collage by Liz Coulbourn Teen Vogue' Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take In 2013, the summer after eighth grade, Tim Chau told Michelle Andrews they wanted to open an Instagram account. Something content-focused, something fun to work on while the cousins, who grew up close together in the Bay Area, were out of school. Thrown into the fits of tweenage boredom together, Andrews had only one recommendation. 'She told me to make a One Direction account,' Chau, now 25, tells Teen Vogue. And so they did. It quickly grew to 30,000 followers. This story is a familiar one for anyone Gen Z. Chau and Andrews, like most of our generation, have spent much of their lives online: Andrews mainlining the depths of Tumblr, Instagram, YouTube, falling down the rabbit hole of One Direction videos; Chau starting and running an increasingly complex network of Instagram accounts focused on different subjects that mattered to them — science, astrology, memes, growing each to millions of followers. But it wasn't until five years later, in 2018, when they decided to merge their internet prowess and focus on running an account together that covered social issues. Instagram activism was still in its nascent stages, thanks to the invention of the 10-image carousel with users creating pastel-tinged graphics to advocate for causes they believed in. This first account grew quickly to 400,000 followers. And in 2020, in the throes of the first COVID-19 lockdown, mass Black Lives Matter protests, and extreme climate disasters, Chau and Andrews collaborated on a new account, to share even more news and background information about topics they cared deeply about — an account called Impact, which now boasts 2.5 million followers on Instagram and has evolved into a media property in its own right with a team of 12 working on brand partnerships, IRL event appearances, and video, editorial, and social content. 'Impact was really born out of, for me personally, looking at the media landscape and then looking at myself,' Chau says. 'I am a queer person, I'm Asian, my parents are refugees and immigrants. And my stories, and not just my stories, but the way I view the world and the way media companies are reaching me, isn't connecting or resonating with me or my peers. Because of that, we wanted to create a media company that actually reflected the generation that we live in.' It was important for both Chau and Andrews, who now helm Impact's team as chief executive officer and chief content officer, respectively, to form a space where they could talk about current events in a way that felt true to how they consumed media, that is, online, unpretentious, and well-designed in a way that entices users to hit that repost button. 'I knew that there were people out there like me who wanted to be a part of these conversations in a way that felt accessible to them,' says 24-year-old Andrews. 'Through short-form, bite-sized content on the various topics, we found ways to connect with people and educate them in ways that are different from what we traditionally were taught.' Impact's coverage is broad, but the content is presented with a cohesive visual identity: bright colors, sans serif text, collaged images, and a moody grain. The account, recognizable for its kaleidoscope of news explainers and commentary-focused coverage, reigns supreme in the media diet for many Gen Zers. Chau says they've begun to think of it as a magazine for the people who never got the chance to enjoy the heyday of print media. With Impact, readers get culture, current events, and commentary all in one tightly designed package, like one would in a teen magazine, just adjusted for the Instagram-bred reader. 'I think a lot of it is informed by the platforms that we were on. Everything had that feeling and visual tied to it, and I think our generation just grew up with that being something ingrained in them,' Andrews says. 'The fact that [our account] grew so quickly really highlighted that this was a type of audience that people weren't reaching, and that's why we were able to grow so fast.' In the way that outlets like Vice Media and BuzzFeed allowed millennials to share millennial cultural and political coverage in a format that felt true to their generation, Impact is trying to do the same thing for the next age of internet users by letting Gen Zers talk about Gen Z culture. 'I think everyone at Impact is a big 'stan' and I think it's what makes us successful, because we get internet culture,' Chau says. Most of their team, primarily BIPOC women under the age of 30, came up online as Directioner forum personalities, Barbz account moderators, and K-pop alt account followers. This shared history gives the brand an intrinsic metronome to what feels best for their audience, what's cool, what's cringe, what feels more like a repost, infographic, editorial, video, or nothing at all. Medium is everything, of course. Both founders talk about 'meeting people where they're at,' the North Star of many media brands, who are trying to figure out how to communicate with young readers who are consuming their news on social media feeds. 'I think what differentiates us on social media is that shareability aspect,' Chau says. 'People on social want to perceive others and want to be portrayed in a certain way. We want to control the way that we are viewed, and through certain stories, certain aesthetics, your beliefs, sharing that on your platform that you have control over is how you can shape that.' For many, this is the code that needs to be hacked: how to approach young readers and their thirst for coolness without an air of, How do you do, fellow kids? But for people who spent their formative years hashtagging #follow4follow #shoutout4shoutout #f4f #s4s on their images of Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles, it's a native language. 'Our generation has grown up on very external digital, social-facing platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, Vine, TikTok,' Chau says. 'A part of how you express yourself is through what you share and repost..… And it's the smallest things, right? One word can make or break the corniness level of the piece.' So right now, Impact is moving with their audience in whatever way feels best for their internal digital compass. Part of that is about bringing in more long-form pieces, simply because Andrews says they are trying to grow up with their audience. 'We now want to help them think more about their everyday interactions and consumption in a different light, rather than solely focusing on helping them understand certain concepts or certain issues,' she explains. 'That's the kind of information that we want to center.' The other part is that as fatigue over short-form prompts the reentry of long-form content once more (longer TikToks, the rise of Substack), there's also a desire for more nuance, especially as people who have been online for a long time grow up and demand more thoughtful conversations. 'They were first in high school or college, and now they've graduated college,' Chau adds. 'They're a couple of years into their career. They are growing in terms of how they view the world. It's not as cut and dry anymore. There's a lot more nuance to these larger decisions around life, around finances, around the entertainment they consume. And we want to be that launchpad for them to dig deeper into the things they talk about, things they care about, the things they're conversing with their friends about.' But their core DNA, which is focused on bringing clear, digestible, aesthetic coverage to Gen Z, by Gen Z, remains strongly intact. In a world where subcultures are crackling and shifting by the nanosecond, aesthetics are splintering into fraying threads, and old guard media companies are struggling to define their identity in the internet era, Impact seems to know exactly what voice it wants to have: 'Audiences are evolving, media consumption is always evolving, trends are always evolving, everything is always changing,' Andrews says. 'It's never always the same, and I think that's something that's really fulfilling.' Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue More great activism coverage from Teen Vogue: 'Young Activist' Label Can Be a Burden for Youth Organizers Economic Disobedience: What Is It and How Does It Work? The Jewish Teens Who Fought Back Against Hitler The 13 Best Protest Songs Of All Time
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- General
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College Students With Disabilities Are Being Abandoned by the Trump Administration
Courtney Hale Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take Right now hundreds of thousands of high school seniors are locking in their final decision about which college they plan to attend this fall. On top of the usual considerations when searching for a good match, disabled students often have to take campus accessibility and accommodations into account, including ramps, elevators, and amplification equipment. Securing appropriate accommodations can already be more complicated in higher education than in primary or secondary school, and it's likely going to become more difficult as universities and colleges reduce their diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) practices under the threat of losing federal funding from the Trump administration. Like many students, when I was applying to schools I was thinking about academic offerings and student activities. I was a wheelchair track Paralympic hopeful and wanted to train with some of the best, which slimmed down my options to a handful of universities with a wheelchair track and road racing team. I chose the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which is believed to have the oldest disability services office in the country and boasts a robust athletic program, including one of the longest-running wheelchair track programs in US higher education. At the time I attended, in the early 2000s, the school's Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) building was home to an office for disability services that were more expansive than most. Even though the university offered disability accommodation services, I still experienced significant difficulty in learning the ropes of asking for the same accommodations I'd had in high school. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) mandates that the preschool-to- grade-12 public education system coordinate disability services and accommodations by evaluating the student, then creating and implementing an educational approach, usually in the form of individualized education plans, or IEPs. IDEA requires that states and local educational agencies provide disabled students with a free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive setting, which means integrating a disabled student into classes with their nondisabled peers as much as possible, and can involve providing support services and school aides. It offers states and local educational agencies federal funding to help identify, evaluate, and provide special education and related services to disabled children from birth to age 21 or the end of high school, whichever comes first. It also requires that institutions provide transition services to help disabled students achieve their postsecondary goals, such as attending college or obtaining employment. Another federal law that offers academic support for disabled students is Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. This is a broader federal civil rights law that prohibits any organization, business, agency, or government program in receipt of federal funding from discriminating against someone with a disability. Section 504 covers more students than IDEA and requires that preschool-to-grade-12 public education systems create accommodation plans. But states and school districts receive no specific federal funding for evaluations or services, which tends to disincentivize these schools from performing evaluations. Colleges, universities, and other postsecondary education programs also must abide by Section 504; however, institutions are not required to help identify disabilities or accommodation needs, meaning students must advocate for themselves. As I settled in at the University of Illinois, the first thing I discovered was that IDEA no longer applied to me; when it came to academic accommodations, I was protected by Section 504 and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Many of my grade and secondary school evaluations couldn't be used to secure the accommodations I needed to attend college classes because the university viewed them as out-of-date. Obtaining services also required a more proactive approach on my part than it used to. I had to email my professors to request accommodations, and it was often left up to a professor's discretion on whether to allow it. I was fairly lucky because DRES services were well-known on my campus, thanks to the visibility of our disabled athletes. Many of my teachers were amenable to providing accommodations, and when they were less inclined, DRES counselors helped me negotiate. But countless other disabled postsecondary students aren't so lucky, and they often have to fight tooth and nail just to get basic accommodations like note-taking help, extended time on tests, or sign language interpreters. It's no wonder the graduation rates for disabled students are so abysmal. A 2017 longitudinal study found that 47% of disabled students who started postsecondary education in the 2011-12 school year left without a degree, compared with 30% of nondisabled students, according to a report from the US Government Accountability Office. The US Department of Education is currently responsible for regulating the definitions of school-based discrimination and how to avoid it for preschool-through-grade-12 and postsecondary education. The department investigates submitted complaints and helps secure resolutions, such as by negotiating settlement agreements and consent decrees. Unfortunately, for years now, the department has struggled to keep up with the volume of discrimination complaints it receives from disabled students, with a number of student cases lagging for years. Alarmingly, this has forced some students to suspend their education or drop out entirely. The Trump administration has made the situation even worse by eliminating some of the tools disabled students rely on to ensure we can transition successfully into college and graduate. Nearly half of the Department of Education's staff have been laid off, including many who worked within the Office for Civil Rights, where discrimination complaints are investigated and resolved. This is happening as we're also seeing an increased number of disabled college students. Experts, including current and former agency employees, say that, essentially, the department no longer has the staffing capacity to process student complaints, negotiate settlement agreements, or enforce consent decrees. More — not less — needs to be done to help disabled students transition from high school to secondary education. Students need access to more resources to help them understand their rights, receive help applying for disability services, and, in some cases, secure financial assistance to get the evaluations required for approved accommodations. As a self-advocate turned policy director, I can thank my college education for helping me succeed in a career and integrate into my community. It's up to all of us to support policies that improve the access of disabled people to higher education and fight back against anti-DEIA policies that divide and isolate vulnerable communities. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Check out more Teen Vogue education coverage: Affirmative Action Benefits White Women Most How Our Obsession With Trauma Took Over College Essays So Many People With Student Debt Never Graduated College The Modern American University Is a Right-Wing Institution
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
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Constitutional Carry Law Promoted by Donald Trump Would Allow People to Carry Guns Everywhere Without Permits
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take On January 21, the website for the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention went dark. Established by President Biden in 2023 as part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the office represented the first federal effort to protect Americans from gun-related death and injury in the past 30 years. It made an impact: reducing the loopholes by which firearms can be distributed without background checks; providing support for communities and victims of gun violence; and educating the public on gun violence-prevention measures, like safe storage and emergency risk-protection orders. In 2024, firearm-related deaths and injuries dropped for the third year in a row. Despite these accomplishments, gun violence recently surpassed auto accidents as the number one killer of American children, reminding us that we still have a long way to go. But as soon as President Trump took office this year, he effectively eliminated the Office of Gun Violence Prevention by an executive order entitled 'Protecting Second Amendment Rights,' exalting "a right to keep and bear arms' as the most important right held by Americans. Among his priorities is 'national reciprocity,' a policy that would require every state to respect the concealed carry eligibility standards of others, effectively allowing a person authorized to carry a concealed firearm in one state to carry legally in any other state. Supporters of national reciprocity say that it will ensure consistency among state-based regulations. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), one of the bill's cosponsors, has said it 'ensures that law-abiding citizens can exercise their constitutional right to carry concealed firearms across state lines while respecting the laws of each state.' Currently, there is significant state-to-state variation governing whether and how a person may carry a firearm into public space. For example, some states, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, require people to complete a background check and a safety-training course before being authorized to carry a concealed gun in public. On the other end of the regulatory spectrum are 29 states that have done away with any licensing or training requirements by implementing what is popularly known as 'Constitutional,' or permitless, carry. The regulatory differences among states correspond to vast differences in rates of firearm homicide, suicide, and injury. Perhaps not surprisingly, states with regulations and safety-training requirements experience significantly lower rates of firearm violence. Massachusetts and New Jersey have among the lowest rates of firearm-related death, with 3.7 and 4.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, respectively. But Mississippi, which implemented permitless open carry in 2013 and permitless concealed carry in 2016, experiences 29.4 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, according to CDC data published by the Pew Research Center. Researchers studying the impact of permitless carry have demonstrated that the removal of gun regulations has an immediate, devastating effect on public safety. Permitless carry states, like West Virginia and Missouri, experienced a steep increase in firearm deaths after eliminating their licensing and training requirements. West Virginia passed permitless carry in 2016, after which gun homicides increased 48% and suicides increased 22% by 2020. After Missouri repealed its firearm permit regulations in 2007, firearm homicides increased by 23% over the next four years. Missouri — which used to boast relatively low rates of gun violence — currently ranks among the top 10 states for firearm suicide and has the eighth highest rate of firearm violence in the nation. In spite of the overwhelming data showing the deadly consequences of permitless carry, there is a bill making its way through the North Carolina legislature that, if adopted, would make NC the 30th state to eliminate gun permit regulations. The state's existing laws are relatively permissive, allowing people over age 21 to apply for a permit to carry a concealed firearm after passing a gun-safety course. Currently, North Carolina's gun-suicide rate is lower than the national average, but its gun-homicide rate is higher. In an interview with local media, Rebecca Ceartas, executive director of North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, warned that the new law will cost lives as 'people as young as 18 years old, with no training and no background check, could carry a hidden loaded weapon in public.' Regardless of the outcome in North Carolina, national reciprocity would require that every state honor the reckless standards of permitless carry. Trump has urged Congress to send such a bill to his desk, telling the audience at a 2024 campaign rally with the National Rifle Association that doing so would help Americans protect themselves against 'barbaric' criminals and keep their families safe. Beyond ignoring the data that show how gun regulations save lives, national reciprocity also amounts to a breathtaking breach of 'states' rights,' since it would force states with evidence-based regulations designed to preserve life to adopt the looser (or nonexistent) regulations of permitless carry states. This federal overreach is in stark contradiction to Republicans' stated insistence on 'states' rights' for reproductive rights and voter protections. Since about the mid 1970s, though, the Republican party has increasingly fallen in line with an extremist 'gun rights' lobby that interprets any firearm regulation as a betrayal of the Second Amendment. The well-funded gun rights machine has launched a relentless disinformation campaign to convince Americans that civilian-owned guns are the best way to fight crime and that, in the now canonical words of former NRA frontman Wayne LaPierre, 'the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.' But the overwhelming accumulation of empirical evidence shows otherwise. Public health experts and criminologists have shown that deregulating guns leads to more crime, more death, and more injury. National reciprocity means more firearms in public circulation — and in the hands of people who have not been vetted or trained. Instead of a common-sense way to normalize gun regulation across the states, national reciprocity is a race to the bottom, forcing all of us into a deadly 'guns everywhere' dystopia. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want more U.S. government coverage? The Current Supreme Court Is Illegitimate What It's Like to Live In a State Run By Politicians You Can't Stand Mass Incarceration Is Cruel, Expensive, and Ineffective The True Story of a White Supremacist Insurrection in the U.S.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
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How to Sniff Out ‘Copaganda': When the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News
Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take I wrote the book Copaganda based on my years of being a civil rights lawyer and public defender representing the most vulnerable people in our society. I watched as the police and the news media distorted how we think about our collective safety. Copaganda makes us afraid of the most powerless people, helps us ignore far greater harms committed by people with money and power, and always pushes on us the idea that our fears can be solved by more money for police, prosecution, and prisons. Based on the evidence, this idea of more investment in the punishment bureaucracy making us safer is like climate science denial. This excerpt is adapted from an important part of the book on how by selectively choosing which stories to tell, and then telling those stories in high volume, the news can induce people into fear-based panics that have no connection to what is happening in the world. It's how public polling can show people thinking crime is up when it is down year after year, and how so many well-meaning people are led to falsely believe that marginalized people themselves want more money on surveillance and punishment as the primary solutions to make their lives better. All royalties from the book are donated to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which works with unhoused people against police violence. Free books are also available for anyone in prison and for any teachers who want to get copies for their students to discuss the book in class. By manipulating the volume of stories at particular times, the news media creates a society-wide frenzy concerning particular kinds of behavior by particular groups of people. Scholars call them 'moral panics.' When a moral panic is created, it almost always leads to the expansion of government repression. That's what happened during the 'crime waves' reported by the press in Victorian England, and in more recent U.S. moral panics like the 1980s panic about 'crack babies,' the 1990s panic about 'super predators,' the 2021–23 panic about 'retail theft,' and the ongoing multiyear panic about 'fare evasion' by poor people on public transit. Moral panics can also be acute creations of a particular news moment, such as the fabricated 'Summer of Violence' in Denver, in which violent crime went down but increase in media stories about juvenile crime in 1993 led to expansion in the incarceration of children; the viral 'train theft' story; the scientifically debunked panic about police officers overdosing on fentanyl by touching or being near it; and the 2023 panic about 'carjacking' in Washington, DC. In each case, there were almost immediate policy responses that increased the budgets of punishment bureaucrats, passed more punitive laws, and diverted the system's resources from other priorities. For example, the shoplifting panic led California state lawmakers to furnish $300 million more to police and prosecutors so they could punish retail theft more aggressively. A few months later, the California governor announced yet another measure, the 'largest-ever single investment to combat organized retail theft,' adding another $267 million to fifty-five police agencies. Justifying the move, the governor said: 'When shameless criminals walk out of stores with stolen goods, they'll walk straight into jail cells.' So, how do moral panics happen? During the 1960s and 1970s in England and the U.S., the news focused on Black people, poor people, and immigrants as the source of uncontrollable 'crime waves.' Their stories were nearly identical to what we see today: media panic about 'crime waves' and quotes from police, prosecutors, and judges about the need to roll back so-called reforms framed as too lenient. The rhetoric of current punishment bureaucrats and pundits echoes almost verbatim the opinions voiced by conservative white business and police groups of the 1970s, although now there is more of an effort, as I'll discuss later, to portray such views as 'progressive' and demanded by marginalized people themselves. In each case, minor tweaks in bureaucratic policy or marginal reforms that could not, as a matter of empirical reality, have a significant impact on society-wide violence are vehemently debated. The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored. And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue. The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda. Imagine two scenarios. A city had ten thousand shoplifting incidents in 2023, down from fifteen thousand shoplifting incidents in 2022. But in 2023, a local news outlet ran a story every day about a different shoplifting incident, while in 2022, the news ran only fifteen stories all year on shoplifting incidents. In which city do you think the public is more likely to believe shoplifting is a greater problem, even a crisis? In the city with more shoplifting, or the city with twenty-five times more stories about shoplifting? By cherry-picking anecdotes—indeed, even by using isolated individual pieces of data as misleading anecdotes—news reports can distort our interpretation of the world. Using a similar process, they can also distort our understanding of what other people—particularly people with whom we don't interact—think about the world. Because one can find anyone to say essentially anything, reporters have leeway to select which 'true' views of 'ordinary people' to share and which to ignore. One of my favorite examples comes from Copaganda Hall of Famer Martin Kaste, who for some reason National Public Radio still permits to cover the police. (I awarded Kaste this honor in absentia during a private ceremony attended by two cats and my research assistants in my basement.) In 2022, Kaste published an article and widely disseminated radio piece about a rise in shootings and murders during the pandemic. Murders were down nationally in 2022 when he published the stories but they had increased in 2020 and 2021. As with much of Kaste's police reporting, the article is a buffet for the copaganda gourmand. Under the bolded heading 'Less Risk of Getting Caught,' Kaste asserts that there is now 'less risk of getting caught' for shooting someone in the United States. The support for that assertion was an ordinary person in Seattle: Anthony Branch, 26, got into trouble for carrying a gun when he was a teen. Watching the gun culture in his neighborhood, he thinks more minors and felons are carrying guns illegally now for one simple reason: 'Defund the police,' as he puts it. Kaste reports as national news—without context or skepticism—a single person blaming 'defund the police' for more shootings. Without presenting any contrary views, NPR delivers Branch's views, accurately conveyed though they may be, as implicitly representative of other people who've been prosecuted and incarcerated and who live in poor neighborhoods. In fact, police budgets were (and are) at all-time highs nationally. And a review of hundreds of police budgets showed that they received the same share of overall city budgets in 2021 as in 2019. So, the police were not defunded after the 2020 George Floyd protests. Their budgets have increased overall each year, including the year George Floyd was murdered. Thus, reduced police budgets could not have led to it being easier to get away with shooting someone in 2021 than 2019. The article's thesis is impossible. Knowing this national causal connection is unsupported, Kaste nonetheless boosts the claim by immediately noting that Seattle has 'lost hundreds of officers after the protests that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd.' But even in Seattle, which was an outlier in slightly reducing its police budget by about 10 percent, the reduction didn't affect relevant police operations, and police executives themselves in internal memos identified non-essential duties that armed officers could cut without affecting enforcement of violent crime (such as parking meter ticketing). Indeed, as the local NPR station reported, debunking the 'myth' that Seattle police were defunded, 'not a single sworn officer has lost their job or pay due to budget constraints.' Even if we ignore that the NPR piece purported to draw national lessons and if we focus only on Seattle, there is no evidence that the kind of small reduction to unrelated categories in Seattle's police budget in 2021 could have led to widespread changes in murder. Most damning to Kaste's thesis, though, is that murders decreased in Seattle in 2021 even though the police budget decreased, which undermines the article's thesis. Indeed, the police budget was larger in 2020 when murder increased the most. No person with a contrary view is quoted, nor is anyone included to explain the actual empirical evidence. I do not doubt that the source gave these quotes to the reporter, but by selectively choosing which people's views to represent and which people's views to exclude, the news can distort our perceptions. This is one of the pernicious functions of NPR here: to give liberal news consumers intellectual permission to support more funding for more police because, although it is baselessly connected to less murder, even marginalized people targeted by police supposedly want it. This is how the curation of true anecdotes leads to false interpretations of the world. Copyright © 2025 by Alec Karakatsanis. This excerpt originally appeared in Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission. 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