Tour Updates, Special Offer, Retail Theft Panic Moves to England, and the New York Mayor Race.

The reception on the book tour has been amazing. I have met so many people across the United States thinking about copaganda. As I head to London for the UK launch this week (tour info below!), I also learned that the first printing of the book sold out, so they had to print more books to meet the demand!

Before I get to today’s post, I’d like to make a plea: the goal of the Copaganda book is to get the ideas out to a wider audience at this urgent time of increasing repression and elite propaganda to justify that repression. I don’t make any money, and all the royalties are donated to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. So, please make sure to get a copy. And, now there is a SPECIAL OFFER: If you purchase Copaganda at this link directly from the publisher and use the code TNP30, you can now get it at 30% off. So it would be a great gift. Also, there are several ways you can help get the word out, so please help if you can:

• We are giving thousands of FREE copies of a special paperback edition to anyone in prison, and to any teachers/professors who want their students to read it in high schools, colleges, graduate schools, and other school environments. If you work for a program that sends books to prisons or if you are a teacher/professor who wants to teach the ideas but doesn’t think your students can afford the book, we will send you as many copies as you want for free. Just send me an email or DM on substack. Also, if you’d like to donate to that fund to make free books possible, let me know as well!

• Do you know any people with book clubs? Want to start one with friends or colleagues? I have made an offer to zoom into any bookclub with at least 10-15 members! I just did my first virtual one this week, and it was so fun!

• Spread the word to friends and colleagues. Get them a copy! Go into local bookstores when you're walking by and ask them to carry it. (If you can't afford a copy but are a reader of the newsletter, please let me know, and I will send you one of my author copies for free.)

• Do you know journalists, radio/tv hosts, podcasters, teachers, or people on large text threads with friends? Tell them about the book and see if they are interested in it. I'd be happy to come talk (in person or virtually) at book clubs, schools, conferences, newsrooms, foundations, etc.

• Do you want to organize a book event with at least 75 people in your local area? If so, let me know and we can see if it's possible!

• Do you know either Beyonce or Leonel Messi? If they haven't already read it, I'm sure they'd love to.

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British Panic: As I visit London this week for the UK launch of Copaganda—I must comment on the British media’s comical “retail theft” moral panic in recent months.

This may seem comical to U.S. news consumers who just lived through the fake “retail theft” moral panic, but the British press has worked itself into a frenzy using almost the exact same playbook that recalls Stuart Hall’s writings about the British press of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of it is very funny, but the consequences will be devastating for British society. Look at the BBC earlier this year:

Here are some other recent examples from a smorgasbord of UK copaganda about low-level theft. “Broken Britain.” “Industrial-scale crime.” “Shoplifting crime wave.”

As background, recall that the U.S. retail industry spun up a fake retail theft panic with thousands of news stories at a time when (we later learned) retail theft was *not up* and overall property crime was at historic half-century lows. (See page 32 of Copaganda.)

This moral panic had consequences. Across the U.S., police, prosecutors, and prisons were given hundreds of millions of dollars, and laws were change to dramatically increase human caging for low-level theft, despite overwhelming scientific consensus that harsher punishment does not reduce theft and makes society less safe. So, it’s no surprise to see this barrage of news stories in the UK combined with a government/corporate push to dramatically expand the resources devoted to state surveillance and repression, and to curtail legal rights of accused people and to expand punishment:

So, here you have it. All this fearmongering is going to the government trying to change the law and make massive new investments that private industry is demanding—all of which will crush the poorest and most vulnerable people in British society, as they have done in the U.S. They are even creating “Project Pegasus - an intelligence-sharing partnership between retailers and policing.”

Note that the U.S. incarcerates Black people 6 times the rate of South Africa at the height of Apartheid, and all people 5-10 times the rate of other comparable countries. This is the path where such rhetoric leads.

There’s a lot to say about all this, and I address each one in depth in the book. But first note one major rule of propaganda: the most consequential things to ask yourself when you see any news are: Why is *this* story news? Why *now*? Who benefits from this story being told while other stories are ignored?

Mainstream news’ focus on low-level crimes targeted by state security forces is one of the major ways that unequal, destructive societies distract people from the far greater harms perpetrated by powerful people. They distort who we fear, and they distort how urgently we fear them. Incredibly, in England, this wave of Copaganda is also happening at a time when even the mainstream news media otherwise acknowledges something else is going on:

Also, if you read a lot of the British press, you see something else that I dissect in the book (page 34). A lot of the articles have the *same* corporate and police sources, and they use similar phrases and scary words that are part of a pre-fabricated propaganda campaign.

Here are the sources in the BBC news shoplifting piece above. Notice anything? The almost comical, but surgical erasure of any critical thinking person who could call into question the claims, place them in historic context, or problematize the “solutions” these sources call for:

• “an industry body”

• British Retail Consortium (BRC)

• Spokesperson for BRC

• Metropolitan police

• Chief Executive of BRC

• CEO of British Independent Retailers Association

• Store Owner

• Local police department

• For-profit security firm

• Survey of “10 major retailers”

• Home Office Minister

• CEO (again)

• Security firm (again)

As in the U.S., and as I detail with evidence in the book, it’s vital for people to know that, even if you believe the claims about increased shoplifting coming from the industry and police, there is a scientific consensus that harsher punishment and more cash for police *does not decrease theft.* This has been studied.

If you know anyone in England, please tell them to come to any of my free public events: June 24 in London, June 25 in London, and June 27 in Liverpool.

New York Mayor Race:

The New York Mayor race has generated a “copaganda wave” from fanatical elite pundits. Last week’s New York Times editorial on the race was shameful. A lot of people have criticized its cowardice for refusing to endorse, but I want to highlight something deeper and more disturbing.

One main theme of faux-intellectual neoliberal propaganda in recent years is that we tried progressive policies, and those policies failed. As I discuss in my Copaganda book with lots of funny/disturbing examples, this NYT lie is one of the most pernicious lies in modern news:

The story goes: lefty policies to make society more equal, free, and ecologically sustainable are naive. Now that we've tried them with terrible results, we have no choice but to boost repression to manage inequality we cannot solve and to help oligarchs make society less equal.

This is not true. Nowhere was anything close to a robust version of the lefty policy agenda on healthcare, guaranteed income, climate, transportation, lead abatement, affordable housing, early-childhood educ., funding for libraries/arts, alternatives to police, etc implemented. We have lacked the power to do anything close.

One of the silliest, most pervasive versions of this propaganda tactic is the assertion that police were defunded, and that this policy failed. I say a lot of subtle things about this in the book and a few mindblowing ones, but for now: POLICE WERE NEVER DEFUNDED. Every single year U.S. police budgets increased.

As I explain in the book, reducing the size of the punishment bureaucracy is the only policy consistent with the empirical evidence about safety. It's like a modern "flat-earther" movement to say otherwise. And yet, NYT criticizes such policy as "dubious" without a citation:

The NYT is so opposed to Zohran Mamdani and other progressives that it is left to boost some of the most grotesque, violent, discredited, corrupt politicians in modern history as "pragmatic." Rahm Emanuel—the one who covered up the cold-blooded police murder of Laquan McDonald—is now the model to be uplifted!

Second, there is one other big thing the NYT hides. Because of the profoundly undemocratic nature of U.S. constitutional structure, local governments are simply incapable of solving the big problems of our world on their own. They are subject to undemocratic rural state legislative override on anything major. Similarly, states that want more ambitious lefty policy are subject to override by federal government, whose undemocratic structure grants extraordinary power to less populous, more conservative states. (A similar version of this plays out around the world with global capital.) But the issues of what the structural economic and political obstacles are to a much better worldy are deliberately obfuscated in the press, with progressives pushing obvious, evidence-based and popular policies framed as uncaring, naive, unable to appreciate the reality of governing, etc:

I discuss this kind of propaganda in the Big Deception chapter Copaganda, and there's a great 4-part episode of The Dig podcast with Daniel Denvir and the great scholar Aziz Rana that I could not recommend more highly. It’s not that these policies are complex or unworkable, it’s that we currently lack sufficient power—and many people are confused as to the importance of building that power and where that power should be directed—to implement obvious and popular solutions in the face of entrenched domination of U.S. politics by people who own things.

I wrote about similar garbage last week in the Atlantic’s hit piece on Zohran, where the writer Annie Lowrey mocked Zohran’s popular egalitarian policies on childcare, transportation, groceries, and rent as “impractical” (with no explanation of the actual impediments to such policies) but praised Andrew Cuomo’s lies about defunded police and his promise to cleanse the subways of “every homeless person” within “30 days” as “sensible” (with no mention of this having been tried and being incoherent and substantively unworkable for numerous legal, technical, bureaucratic and financial reasons.)

Nonsense like this from the NYT and Atlantic not only gets people supporting the wrong local politicians, but it profoundly confuses people about how our society works, and it sets up local politicians for failure and renders us unable to determine who/what institutions are really to blame.

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