Artificial Intelligence, Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Economics, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights
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Communities Nationwide Unite Against Data Center Resource Grab
Across the nation, communities are becoming ground zero in a growing fight over data centers. The explosive growth of AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency has triggered a massive boom in their construction. These sprawling facilities often cover hundreds of acres and consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. Residents from Virginia to Pennsylvania, Georgia to Arizona, are asking a simple question: who benefits, and who pays the price?
The answer has sparked one of the fastest-growing grassroots movements in the nation. In the past year, local campaigns have blocked or delayed dozens of proposed centers worth billions of dollars. Citizens are challenging developers over rising electricity costs, water consumption, noise pollution, loss of farmland, and the construction of new fossil-fuel infrastructure designed to power these facilities. Nationally, more than 230 organizations have joined calls for stronger regulation and even a moratorium on new large-scale data centers until environmental and community protections are in place.
Guest – Jim Walsh, Policy Director at Food & Water Watch in Washington, DC. It’s one of the leading organizations helping coordinate community resistance to the rapid expansion of data centers. Since joining Food & Water Watch in 2009, Jim has focused on energy, climate, and public water policy. He is a prominent advocate for policies prioritizing environmental protection and community control, from campaigns to ban fracking and challenges to carbon capture projects. Jim worked has also worked with New Jersey Citizen Action and the Progressive Action Network.
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The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State
Here at Law and Disorder we’ve been exposing how efforts that claim to be combating antisemitism have been weaponized in a concerted effort to silence criticism of Israel and demonize support for the Palestinians. One organization that is playing a leading role in these efforts is the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League.
Many people, including many Jews, may think of the ADL as a long-established civil rights organization that is known for opposing racism in general, and antisemitism, in particular. But as we’ll learn from our guest today, there’s a lot more we need to know about the ADL.
Guest – Emmaia Gelman is the author of the new book The Anti-Defamation League and the Racial State, and co-editor of The Anti-Defamation League: A Critical Reader. She also co-hosts the podcast Unpacking Zionism. Emmaia is co-chair of the American Studies Association Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, and is the founding director of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, which examines the political and ideological work of Zionist institutions in Palestine and transnational contexts. She has taught social and cultural analysis at NYU and social sciences at Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing appears in Jewish Currents, Boston Review, The Forward, and elsewhere.
CriticalZionistStudies.org
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Cuba, Economics, Human Rights, Racist Police Violence, Torture
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The Future of Cuba
When the Cuban revolution succeeded on January 1, 1959, it drove the American supported Batista dictator out of their country. One of the first things that the revolution government did was to create a law – which is very popular because a lot of people would have fought on the side of the revolution and benefited directly from it – to initiate a comprehensive land reform.
Previously, large tracks of land had been owned by American corporations. The average peasant worked part-time, seasonally, was not literate, and lived from hand to mouth. The revolutionary government nationalized the big properties – which was their right under international law.
Not only did it nationalize the large lands but the government told the former owners that they would be compensated for their losses. They said to the American owners “we will pay you exactly the amount you said the land was worth when you listed it for tax purposes.” The Cuban government was turned down.
In retaliation the United States, which was refining all Cuba oil in American owned oil refineries, stopped refining oil and Cuba was cut off from gasoline. What did the Cubans do? They nationalized the oil refineries, then the bus company was nationalized, the phone company was nationalized, the nickel mines were nationalized, the top levels of the economy were nationalized.
Instead of having production for profit, which is really irrational and anarchical, they had a planned economy – which is called a socialist revolution. That’s what happened very quickly to America’s surprise in Cuba. Getting that property back has been the aim of American foreign policy ever since.
Cuba has great respect and support internationally because of the example it set. It has free education, universal healthcare, inexpensive housing, wonderful art, and music and dance. The United States has aimed to overturn Cuba’s accomplishments and example. Its economic, political, and diplomatic aggression against Cuba has been relentless for 67 years. But under Trump, it’s never been worse. US-CubaNormalization.org
Guest – Ike Nahem, a founder and leader of the New York -New Jersey Cuba Si Coalition. He has organized labor and educational tours of Cuba.Mr. Nahem is a retired Amtrak locomotive engineer.
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The Conviction Machine: Prosecutors, Politicians and Police Violence in Chicago
The comedian Lenny Bruce used to joke that Chicago was so corrupt. It was thrilling. He had no idea. Bruce was referring to run of the mill bribery of a traffic cop or a police officer taking your floor mats in lieu of a ticket or a pay off from a local bar owner. The corruption in Chicago ran much deeper. It went from the prosecutors who were actually in the police station, listening to the screams of men being tortured, before they went and took a signed confession from them.
It was the commander of a whole section of police who learned how to torture people from a tour of duty in Vietnam. He brought back an electric machine that they had actually used in Vietnam Vietnamese. This machine was used on Black people in Chicago. Three hundred people were convicted on the basis of tortured confessions. The corruption ran all the way up to the mayor’s office. Mayor Richard J Daily knew about it and said nothing.
It was only the work of a few attorneys like Flint Taylor and the community, the Black Panther party, and activists and progressive politicians who exposed it. Their victory included reparations, The torture of people in police stations on the west side and southside of Chicago is now taught to eighth grade and 10th graders in the public schools.
“In the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls“ said H. Rap Brown, the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Guest – Flint Taylor, a founding member of Chicago’s Peoples Law Office. He represented the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. He continues to represent many survivors of police torture and wrongful convictions. Attorney Taylor is co-counsel in the Malcolm X assassination case and is the award-winning author of the historical memoir “The Torture Machine“. Flint’s book is a captivating account of the most corrupt and blood soaked chapter In Chicago law-enforcement history.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, Targeting Muslims, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
For more than two years, the world has witnessed not only a devastating war in Gaza, but also a fierce battle over how that war has been covered in the media. We’ve seen headlines repeated before facts were verified. We’ve seen civilian deaths described in passive language that obscures responsibility. We’ve watched journalists, students, doctors, and even U.N. officials dismissed or marginalized when their accounts challenged official narratives – sometimes costing their lives.
All the while, independent reporting and social media footage taken by individuals on the ground show a different reality than the Israeli and US government narratives that dominate corporate media coverage. So what happens when the press stops acting as a watchdog and instead becomes an amplifier for state power? How can the public make informed moral decisions when reporting is shaped by concentrated political and corporate interests? And what obligations do journalists have when governments are pushing narratives in times of war?
Guest – Robin Andersen is a professor, media critic, and longtime scholar of war propaganda and political communication. Her new book, The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, examines how major U.S. media institutions covered the war after October 7th, 2023 and how corporate journalism helped manufacture public consent for catastrophic violence while, at the same time, narrowing the scope of speech and debate.
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The Future Of Cash Bail Reform
The principle of “innocent until proven guilty” has stood at the center of the criminal legal system in the United States for centuries. But in the real world, enjoying freedom before a trial has often depended less on guilt or innocence — and more on money. According to the Prison Policy Initiatives, among other sources, at least 400,000 people are in jail awaiting trial. In other words, they are legally innocent and have not been convicted of a crime, but remain behind bars. Many are there because they cannot afford to pay bail.
Supporters of the cash bail system claim it ensures people return to court for their trial, and therefore protects public safety. Critics, including our next guest, point to the unfairness of cash bail: it punishes poverty, pressures people into guilty pleas, tears apart families, and deepens racial and economic inequality. Out of this evolving debate, the bail reform movement was born. And on April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court gave the bail reform movement the fortification it needed.
In the closely watched case In re Kowalczyk, the California Supreme Court unanimously affirmed constitutional limits on pretrial detention and expanded on earlier rulings that challenged wealth-based incarceration. The decision is already being viewed as one of the most significant state court rulings on bail and pretrial liberty in recent years — with possible implications far beyond California.
Guest – Carson White is a supervising attorney at Civil Rights Corps, where she raises systemic challenges to the criminalization of poverty. She currently leads CRC’s California Writ Project, which trains public defenders statewide and has litigated hundreds of pretrial habeas petitions raising the issues ultimately decided by In re Kowalczyk. Carson is a graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of Texas at Austin.
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Civil Liberties, Civil Rights, Freedom Of Speech, Gaza, genocide, Human Rights, NSA Spying, Right To Dissent, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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Guilty of Genocide
For decades, activists in the United States have argued that racial violence, political repression, and systemic inequality are not simply domestic issues. They’re also violations of international human rights law. A new collection, Guilty of Genocide, revisits that argument through the lens of the 2021 International Tribunal on U.S. Human Rights Abuses Against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples. The book gathers testimony, legal analysis, poetry, artwork, and organizing documents from a landmark people’s tribunal convened by the Spirit of Mandela Coalition.
After hearing testimony on policing, incarceration, political prisoners, environmental racism, and colonialism, an international panel of jurists delivered a sweeping verdict finding the United States guilty of multiple human rights abuses.
Guest – Matt Meyer an internationally recognized peace educator, author, and activist. He was nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize alongside the International Peace Research Association in recognition of his lifelong commitment to nonviolence and global peace education. Author of more than a dozen books, including Guns and Gandhi in Africa, Matt has played a major role in building international peace studies and justice networks across Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America.
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A Look Back At The Inception Of New York City’s Panopticon
When Law and Disorder first interviewed privacy activist Bill Brown in 2005, the landscape of surveillance in New York City — and across the United States — was already alarming. Bill was warning us about hundreds of NYPD cameras going up in Brooklyn, federal Homeland Security dollars flooding into local surveillance infrastructure, and the proposed “ring of steel” around lower Manhattan modeled on London’s vast camera network. What seemed like a dire warning then looks almost quaint today.
In the years since, mass surveillance has expanded in ways that would have been difficult to imagine. Amazon’s RING doorbell cameras, now installed on tens of millions of private homes, have become a vast, crowd-sourced surveillance network — with police departments across the country routinely requesting footage from residents, sometimes without a warrant. Meanwhile, a newer and perhaps even more insidious technology has taken hold: FLOCK Safety cameras, license plate readers now deployed in thousands of communities, logging the movements of ordinary Americans going about their daily lives and making that data available to law enforcement across jurisdictions. Add to this the explosion of facial recognition technology, social media monitoring, and AI-driven predictive policing tools, and the surveillance state Bill Brown cautioned us about has arrived in full force.
But Americans are pushing back. Civil liberties organizations including the ACLU have won outright bans on government use of facial recognition in cities including San Francisco, Boston, and Portland. Community organizers have successfully blocked FLOCK camera contracts in several cities after exposing how the data is shared and retained. And a growing movement of digital rights advocates, tenant organizations, and privacy activists continues to fight surveillance expansion at the local, state, and federal level — carrying on exactly the kind of work Bill Brown was urging listeners to take up all those years ago.
Since 2006, New York City’s surveillance infrastructure has evolved from a fragmented network of video cameras. It’s now an integrated, intelligence-driven system powered by the Domain Awareness System (DAS) and advanced biometric tools. The NYPD’s intelligence and counterterrorism budget quadrupled from $83 million in 2006 to $349 million in 2021, enabling the deployment of technologies originally designed for counterterrorism to monitor routine street crime and protests. These include facial recognition software, license plate readers, and mobile X-ray vans.
The scale of physical surveillance has expanded dramatically. By 2021, Amnesty International estimated more than 15,000 police cameras in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn alone, up from roughly 2,400 visible cameras in Manhattan in 1998. This network is further augmented by cellphone surveillance tools like Stingray trackers and cell tower dumps. Those allow police to identify individuals at protests or public gatherings without warrants.
This evolution has created a surveillance state that disproportionately impacts communities of color. There’s a well-documented correlation between surveillance density and higher rates of stop-and-frisk incidents in minority neighborhoods. Police maintain that these tools are essential for solving crimes and preventing attacks — but the lack of public oversight and the use of data scraped from social media have intensified debates over privacy rights and racial bias in policing.
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genocide, Human Rights
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This year, U.S.-Armenian relations made headlines in a revealing way. In February 2026, Vice President JD Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to visit Armenia. His office posted”then swiftly deleted”a message saying he was at the Armenian Genocide Memorial to “honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide.” The White House called it a staff error. A replacement post went up with all mention of the word “genocide” stripped out. When pressed, Vance called the massacre “a very terrible thing that happened a little over 100 years ago””and left it there.
The visit wasn’t only about remembrance. Vance and Prime Minister Pashinyan signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement worth up to $5 billion in initial U.S. exports” part of a broader push to pull Armenia out of Russia’s orbit. Vance then traveled to Azerbaijan, advancing plans for a U.S.-backed trade and transit corridor aimed at bypassing both Russia and Iran. It’s a familiar pattern: Armenia is valuable enough to court as a geopolitical piece on Washington DC’s chessboard, but not important enough to have its genocide named out loud because that may upset Turkey, the NATO ally whose cooperation is needed more.
It Was Genocide: Armenian Survivor Stories
Around the world, April 24 marks the observance of the Armenian Genocide. On that day in 1915 the Interior Minister of the Ottoman Empire ordered the arrest and hangings of Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. It was the beginning of a systematic and well-documented plan to eliminate the Armenians, who were Christian, and who had been under Ottoman rule and treated as second class citizens since the 15th century.
The unspeakable and gruesome nature of the killings—beheadings of groups of babies, dismemberments, mass burnings, mass drownings, use of toxic gas, lethal injections of morphine or injections with the blood of typhoid fever patients—render oral histories particularly difficult for survivors of the victims.
Why did this happen? Despite being deemed inferior to Turkish Muslims, the Armenian community had attained a prestigious position in the Ottoman Empire and the central authorities there grew apprehensive of their power and longing for a homeland. The concerted plan of deportation and extermination was effected, in large part, because World War I demanded the involvement and concern of potential allied countries. As the writer Grigoris Balakian wrote, the war provided the Turkish government “their sole opportunity, one unprecedented” to exploit the chaos of war in order to carry out their extermination plan.
As Armenians escaped to several countries, including the United States, a number came to New Britain, Connecticut in 1892 to work in the factories of what was then known as the hardware capital of the world. By 1940 nearly 3,000 Armenians lived there in a tight-knit community.
Pope Frances calls it a duty not to forget “the senseless slaughter” of an estimated one and a half million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1923. “Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the Pope said just two weeks before the 100th anniversary of the systematic implementation of a plan to exterminate the Armenian race.
Special thanks to Jennie Garabedian, Arthur Sheverdian, Ruth Swisher, Harry Mazadoorian, and Roxie Maljanian. Produced and written by Heidi Boghosian and Geoff Brady.
Censorship, Civil Liberties, Freedom Of Speech, Human Rights, Iran, U.S. Militarism, Violations of U.S. and International Law, War Resister
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With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary and an Evangelical Christian, has explicitly framed the Iran war through the lens of his religious faith, weaving scripture into his remarks, praying for “overwhelming violence” against his enemies and insisting that God stands with the U.S. against Iran, a Muslim-majority nation of some 90 million people. The ex-Fox News host has long worn his faith on his sleeve — and on his flesh. He has a large Jerusalem cross tattooed on his chest and the words “Deus Vult,” a rallying cry used by the Crusaders, which means “God wills it,” are inked on his arm. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth rejected the principle of separation of church and called it “leftist folklore.” At a prayer breakfast on Feb. 6, he said that the U.S. “remains a Christian nation in our DNA, if we can keep it.”
Hegseth told CBS News on March 6: “The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops.” When asked if he views the conflict in a religious context, Hegseth responded: “I’m a man of faith, who encourages our troops to lean into their faith.” During a press briefing on the war four days later, he quoted Psalm 144, stating, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.” Last week, while hosting a Pentagon prayer service, Hegseth implored God to: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation” and asked that “wicked souls be delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.”
Guest – Mikey Weinstein has been described by Harper’s magazine as “the constitutional conscience of the U.S. military, a man determined to force accountability.” Mikey’s family has a long and distinguished U.S. military history spanning three consecutive generations of military academy graduates and over 130 years of combined active duty military service. Mikey is a lawyer and a 1977 Honor Graduate of the United States Air Force Academy.
A registered Republican, Mikey spent over three years working for the Reagan Administration as legal counsel in the White House. In 2006, he founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) to battle the influence of far-right militant radical evangelical religious fundamentalists in the US military.He’s the author of two books “With God On Our Side: One Man’s War Against an Evangelical Coup in America’s Military” and “No Snowflake in an Avalanche: The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, its Battle to Defend the Constitution, and One Family’s Courageous War Against Religious Extremism in High Places.”
In 2011, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State presented Mikey with AU’s first ever Person of the Year Award, calling him “the leading voice protecting church-state separation in the military.” In December 2012, Defense News named Mikey one of the 100 Most Influential People in U.S. Defense. He was also named one of the 50 most influential Jews in America by the Forward, one of the nation’s preeminent Jewish publications. Not unexpectedly, Mikey has been reviled by the radical fundamentalist Christian far-right, which has called him “Satan”, “Satan’s lawyer”, “the Antichrist”, “That Godless, Secular Leftist”, “Antagonizer of All Christians”, “Most Dangerous Man in America” and “Field General of the Godless Armies of Satan.”
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We Need More ‘Muckrakers and Fewer Buck-Takers
There was a time when journalism didn’t just report the news—it changed the country. It broke monopolies, exposed corruption, and forced presidents to act. Today, with public trust in media at historic lows, that kind of reporting can feel like a relic. But what if the real story isn’t that it’s gone—but that we’ve stopped supporting it? Media scholar and activist Mickey Huff has just written a provocative call to action titled We Need More ‘Muckrakers and Fewer Buck-Takers. It’s a phrase rooted in the legacy of Carl Jensen, who believed journalism should serve the public—not profits—and who spent decades exposing the stories corporate media ignored.
At a moment when misinformation spreads faster than truth and corporate consolidation shapes what we see and don’t see, this conversation asks something deeper: What kind of media system does democracy require—and what role do we play in rebuilding it?
Guest – Mickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation, where he has co-edited its annual Censored book series since 2009. In 2024, he joined Ithaca College as a Professor of Journalism and the Distinguished Director of the Park Center for Independent Media. Through these roles, he leads efforts in critical media literacy, independent journalism, and the production of the weekly syndicated Project Censored Show. Park Center For Independent Media
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