Links for Copaganda Tour + Media Coverage of "Deportations"

Hi everyone,

As promised, I am providing the latest info on the Copaganda tour and some links to register below. I would be SO grateful if you came to these events, bring your books to sign, and bring some friends. All the royalties are going to an AMAZING cause, and there is so much for us to discuss together in community with each other in this time of rising authoritarianism. Also, I’ll be coming to dozens more cities later in the year.

The first few events on the book tour have been absolutely incredible. It’s been so inspiring to meet so many people interested in engaging with these ideas. A lot of people have been emailing me about book tour updates, so before I say a few words about some recent copaganda around Trump’s kidnappings and human trafficking being discussed as “deportations” in the New York Times, I wanted to provide a list of events with links to register where required:

• April 25: San Francisco

• April 26: Oakland

• April 27-28: (Private events in Bay Area to raise money for free copies of the book for students and people in prison. Let me know if you might be interested in coming, and I can check if still room).

• April 29: Los Angeles (Village Well books)

• April 30: Los Angeles, 6pm Loyola Marymount University, Political Science Village

• May 1: Los Angeles, 7pm, Occidental College, Fowler Hall, Rm 112, 1600 Campus Rd

• May 3: Troy, NY. 4pm. Paper Moon bookstore.

• May 7: Atlanta

• May 15: Seattle

• May 18: Portland Powell Books (Sunday afternoon, check Powell website in May for time)

• May 21: Chicago. 4pm University of Chicago Social Science Research Building, 7pm Pilsen Community Books.

• May 30: Little Rock, Arkansas (Details TBD)

Now, on to some very important propaganda that has the effect of minimizing the urgency of the constitutional and moral crisis happening in our society. Yesterday, the New York Times had a very strange article:

This is one of the more remarkable stories I have seen in my time studying state violence and working in law. But it's also an exercise in propaganda because the framing of issues can distort the level of urgency that news consumers feel about an issue.

For background, this article follows up on U.S. kidnapping people, rushing them onto planes as courts tried to stop it, trafficking them for money to another country, and then defying court orders (including one to return someone the U.S. admitted even on its own terms was mistakenly kidnapped), with White House taunting courts and elected officials about how the person they agree was wrongly trafficked will never be coming back:

The kidnapping people off the street and then sending them to a prison (for life?) in a foreign country with no due process and without any law permitting indefinite detention--and then defying court orders--would be enough to end the U.S. legal system as we know it.

Then, yesterday, the NYT reported that El Salvador is now offering to trade the people illegally trafficked for cash and sent to its torture chamber to Venezuela if that country releases people on lists created by the far right. There is no conceivable reading of U.S. or international law that gives it the ability to grant (i.e. to sell) El Salvador the right to detain these people indefinitely, perhaps for life, and/or to trade them to other countries. It's completely and utterly lawless.

But the New York Times, like much of the rest of U.S. media, continues to talk about this as "deportation." But that's not what this is. It didn't follow relevant settled U.S. law on deportation (or anything else), but more importantly, U.S. trafficked people not to freedom outside its borders, but to indefinite lawless detention in another country. I cannot express the urgency of this: if this can be done, there are no limits, no rules, no possibility for functioning civil society. It is incredibly consequential that this is described merely as “deportation.”

Moreover, nowhere in this NYT article--or pretty much anywhere in mainstream news--is there any indication of on what authority El Salvador claims to be detaining these people. They are just hostages. The article ignores that there is no lawful basis for their ongoing detention—creating the sense that this question is somehow not the most urgent question in this moment.

The initial news stories suggested all of these “deportations” were pursuant to a contract and payment by U.S., that would simply involve paying to detain them on the same legal terms as they would be detained in federal or for-profit facilities in the U.S. But this bizarre development gives up that game.

Instead of highlighting that the entire premise had been a lie and reporting that, incredibly, the NYT uses the situation--in which the U.S. has trafficked people to a foreign torture chamber where they are being confined completely outside any conceivable law--as an opportunity to take jabs at the government of Venezuela using right-wing talking points. This is all the more remarkable because U.S. government is actively attempting to do this to more people (another late-night Supreme Court order just blocked more planes) and openly musing about trafficking its own citizens for money in the future, to a place where they can be detained pursuant to no recognized legal principles or sold/traded.

As I discuss in my Copaganda book, one of the key tactics of modern propaganda is how stories are framed, and what information is included versus what is left out. Here, it is framed as “deportations,” ostensibly (but falsely) of “convicted criminals,” and critique comes only from authoritarian Venezuealan officials. None of the background context that would enable readers to understand the illegality, lies, defiance, and gravity of the situation is included. The decision to exclude from the article any discussion of the defiance of court orders, presidential taunting, or the lack of any offered (or conceivable) legal justification changes the nature of the story and prevents people from appreciating just how consequential this is.

Instead, in the world of the New York Times, it is a story about the authoritarian government in Venezuela and a maverick El Salvadoran leader and his feud with Venezuelan officials. Who’s right in this war of words among cartoonish foreign leaders that the U.S. plays only a limited role in? We report, you decide.

What does it say that it is impossible to learn from a news article in *The New York Times* the supposed legal basis of the governments of U.S. or El Salvador in carrying out one of the most consequential actions in modern history. Do you understand how wild it is that the NYT just proceeds as if El Salvador has the ability to do this, that the U.S. is helpless to stop it? And that the law is irrelevant--so irrelevant as to not merit a single mention, source, or quote?

This failure is part of how so many ordinary people in civil society now can be failing to grasp the implications of what this might mean for their lives, and for any hope of a collective life free from arbitrary and targeted violence at any moment. Think about the urgency of the news coverage compared, say, to the wall-to-wall coverage of “retail theft” from a few years ago. The news plays a huge role in which things we feel fear and dread about and which things we barely register.