"Concerns rising inside White House over surge in violent crime," CNN tells us. "America's Crime Surge: Why Violence Is Rising, And Solutions To Fix It," proclaims NPR. "Officials worry the rise in violent crime portends a bloody summer," reports The Washington Post.

Over and over this summer we have heard – and will no doubt continue to hear – the scourge of rising crime is the most urgent issue on voters' minds. Setting aside the way media coverage itself shape public opinion, the rising murder rates in urban areas is indeed very real and its victims disproportionately Black and Latino.

In response, like clockwork, Democrats and Democratic Party-aligned media have allied with conservatives and right-wing media are rehashing the same tired responses: more police, longer sentences, and tougher laws. But this time, they assure us it will be different: it won’t be racist and overly punitive. Instead, in addition to the return of 1990s Tough On Crime formula. we will get enough nebulous reforms and anti-bias training that it will somehow be enlightened and consistent with the demands of Black Lives Matter.

But everything we know about the past 50 years tells us this will not be true. Indeed, if more policing and prisons solved crime, the United States would be the safest country on Earth, but, of course, it is not. According to The American Journal of Medicine, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the United States' gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher despite imprisoning people at rates 5-10 times what other rich nations do.

So why do lawmakers and the media always reach for the same so-called "solutions" when it comes to crime? What are the assumptions that inform how we respond to an increase in homicides and other violent crime? How can the wealthiest nation in the world throw billions of dollars, more police, longer sentences, and tougher prosecutors at our high murder rates only to continue to wildly outpacing the rest of the so-called developed world on this, the most urgent of metrics?

On this episode, we explore the origins of "crime," what crimes we consider noteworthy and which are ignored, how property rights and white supremacy informed the crime we center in our media, how the crimes of poverty, environmental destruction, wage theft, and discrimination are relegated to the arena of tort, with its gentle fines and drawn out lawsuits – while petty theft and drug use results in long prison sentences. We’ll study how these bifurcations inform both media accounts of crime and how we respond with more police, and longer sentences the second we are faced with so-called crime waves.

Our guests are Civil Rights Corps' Alec Karakatsanis and sociologist Tamara K. Nopper.

Ep142: The Summer of Anti-BLM Backlash & How Concepts of "Crime" Were Shaped By the Propertied Class

We're back with news from Ghislaine, Jeffrey and the rest of the creep show, plus: We discuss the dark underbelly of the “real” internet and look toward the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Episode 174: Jestermaxx

In June 2020, founders of the ride-request app Lyft announced that they had launched “allyship dialogues“ and were committed to fighting “systemic racism” which they said is “deeply rooted in our society.” The same month, an Uber marketing campaign proudly recommended to “racists” that they should “delete Uber,” as they were unwelcome customers. At the same time, the food delivery service app DoorDash announced a series of initiatives to “support Black-owned restaurants.”

Everywhere we turned, as popular uprisings against police violence and white supremacy filled the streets, Silicon Valley gig app companies that rely on and profit from the labor of predominantly Black and brown workers, insisted they too were committed to fighting racial injustice.

But something curious was unfolding at the same time these multi-billion dollar companies paid lip service and made token donations to bail funds and civil rights groups: they were simultaneously pumping tens of millions more on pushing support for Proposition 22 –– a ballot initiative in California — that would exempt app-based transportation and delivery companies from a state law that required them to classify drivers as employees, permitting those companies to not provide essential benefits like healthcare, paid time off, and unemployment insurance.

With 78% of ride-hail app drivers in San Francisco being people of color and 55% of Uber drivers in California identifying as such, the law would overwhelmingly impact nonwhite, disproportionately immigrant communities.

Knowing this, and compelled by the broader corporate efforts to exploit the George Floyd uprisings as a branding opportunity, companies like DoorDash, Uber, Lyft and other app-based employers rushed to present the diminishment of worker protections not as manifestly anti-Black and anti-brown anti-labor laws, but actually empowering to drivers of colors.

Spending millions on advertising, a patchwork of large donations to community groups planting op-eds in Black and Hispanic press, and focus-grouped language about employee “freedom,” “independence,” “being your own boss,” “flexibility” and general rise-and-grind framing, Super PACs alongside Bay Area and LA-based marketing firms aggressively targeted minority communities to back Prop 22, despite all independent analysis and labor organizations insisting it would be bad for workers of color.

On this Season 5 Premiere of Citations Needed, we detail how this plan played out –– and ultimately won, how corporations buy off organizations and adapt nonprofit speak to harm communities of color, and how the idea of “third worker categories” –– like the ones pushed by Uber and Lyft are suspiciously similar to Jim Crow-era efforts to strip black and immigrant workers of the rights white workers were winning under the then-New Deal.

Our guest is Veena Dubal, Professor of Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

143 - How Silicon Valley Uses Hollow "Anti-Racist" Posturing to Sell Its Exploitative Business Model

TrueAnon is back with updates on Ghislaine Maxwell’s impending trial and the quest to serve Prince Andrew court papers by Virgina Giuffre

Episode 185: Randy Andy Runaway Dandy

Will and Matt talk to Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy, 2312 and last year’s Ministry for the Future. They discuss reckoning with climate change, science fiction literature as an attempt to conceive of our own future’s history, and what kinds of beliefs humans might need to survive that future.

Chapo Trap House

560 - Future Histories feat. Kim Stanley Robinson (9/20/21)

Movies are Back! And we start with a brief discussion of Venom 2: Return of Goop. Then, Felix is joined by WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson to discuss a new report from Yahoo News that details the CIA’s plots to kidnap or kill Julian Assange while he was sheltered in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. They discuss the obsession with revenge on Assange and WikiLeaks under Mike Pompeo, the possibility of real justice for Assange, and some slivers of hope in the future of the WikiLeaks project. Then, to finish up the ep, we have a reading series from Maureen Dowd’s latest column on that kooky, adorkable senator who seems to love everyone’s hate, Kyrsten Sinema.

564 - On Sinema, At The Sinema feat. Kristinn Hrafnsson (10/4/21)

In this recording of a Live Interview for Patrons from 9/22, we speak with The Nation sports editor Dave Zirin about his new book, The Kaepernick Effect, and how a series of protests in youth sports, namely among black youth, set off firestorms and backlash in dozens of small towns throughout the country. And what the "leave politics out of sports" ethos says about the evergreen importance of racial disciplining in sports media.

Live Interview: How The Kaepernick Effect Revealed Reactionary Forces in Youth Sports. w/ Dave Zirin

To hear the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/TrueAnonPod
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In this Experimental Podcast Episode, the trio stalks ducks in a park, remarks upon strangers' looks, and steals the mail from Jeffrey Epstein's townhouse.

Episode 189: Muppets Take Manhattan (teaser)

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567 Teaser - Deadliest Warrior: SpecOps vs. Ninja

Amber welcomes back Rhode Island teamster Matt Maini for some union talk. They discuss union internal politics, rank and file leadership, the value of strikes, and organizing Amazon.

Check out the TDU GoFundMe here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/transforming-the-teamsters-from-the-bottom-up

Bonus: Teamsters Deliver The Goods 2

We discuss cube obsession among silicon valley and finance bros.

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