Escape from Fear City

Edited by Sam Thielman

TODAY I'M BACK at The Nation. While my column there ended last year, the magazine was kind enough to publish my look at the fear of Zohran Mamdani—which is to say, the fear of the working-class New Yorkers who mobilized to deliver a primary victory to a socialist—among New York's oligarchs. It goes into a brief history of post-9/11 New York to show how an era of extreme law-enforcement and intelligence repression was also an era of skyrocketing gentrification. It's important, I contend, that we see how "the tools of the War on Terror are the tools of class war." 

This convergence is crucial to understanding what is likely to await the city if and when Mamdani becomes mayor: Donald Trump and ICE attempting to conquer it. What they did in Los Angeles may look like a dry run. We have to prepare for that. And I wrote this piece long before Trump's move this week to seize control of security enforcement in Washington, D.C. (Trump's pretext, the alleged attempted carjacking of former DOGE staffer Edward "Big Balls" Coristine by two 15 year olds—so much for this kid's nickname—is a farcical update to a legacy of right-wing power grabs immediately familiar to readers of Vincent Bevins' The Jakarta Method.) Read Radley Balko on that. 

So this is a piece about fear. It's about the fears of immigrant New Yorkers under siege—a siege directly facilitated by a corrupt bargain made by Mayor Eric Adams to save himself from prison. And it's about the fears of the wealthy, who are more than willing to sacrifice immigrants to ICE and the rest of us to unaffordability if it means retaining dominance over New York. But it's primarily about how Zohran and his movement present a way out of the convergence of fears that have shaped New York over the past nearly 25 years. 

For that reason, I adopted more of a tabloid style for this piece, a throwback to a voice I cultivated as a 20-year old at New York Press, where I learned on the fly how to be a reporter (or tried to learn). I wanted to speak to a journalistic legacy of portraying the city as a dangerous creature, but with a different and I believe more truthful perspective on who the predators and who the prey actually are.

And so I headlined the piece Escape from Fear City. If you're not familiar with the reference, read this and especially this. And yes, they gave the online edition a different headline, but that just means you should buy the September print edition of The Nation so you can see the piece with the hed I intended. Many thanks to Chris Lehmann, my editor on this one, who made me feel like I'm back where I'm supposed to be. And by invoking what I'm invoking in the headline, I'm Jadakiss freestyling over "Who Shot Ya." And like Kiss said on The Champ Is Here 3, you have to be in a certain weight class to attempt this.  

Oh, and be sure to read Mamdani's cover-story interview with Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and executive editor John Nichols. Zohran shouts out what FOREVER WARS readers know is one of my favorite contemporary novels, American War by Omar El Akkad. 

ON SUNDAY NIGHT, the state of Israel murdered the al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif, one of the faces of the network in Gaza, and five of his colleagues. Israeli authorities are currently lying about al-Sharif, claiming that he was a member of Hamas in order to excuse his assassination to credulous and cynical people. At only 28 years old, suffering through his own starvation, al-Sharif reported for the world what his people are experiencing during a genocide. He operated in the best traditions of what we in this business are supposed to do. The Israelis murdered al-Sharif not during any act of armed struggle, but in a Gaza City tent used by reporters to work. 

Al-Sharif joins nearly 200 journalists and media workers killed by Israel over the past 22 months. (These numbers are disputed; I'm using the tally kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists.) That astronomical death toll reflects an unambiguously deliberate attempt to destroy the ability of the Palestinian journalists of Gaza to tell their people's story. In understanding it as such, we can see it as an aspect of the genocide. 

Israel seeks not only to kill, disperse and replace Palestinians, but to eradicate them throughout history, something that requires killing those who write that history's first draft. As dishonest as its explanation for murdering al-Sharif is, Israel reveals yet again that its target is not Hamas or any other militant resistance, but the foundations of Palestinian existence itself. They consider Anas a terrorist because that is how a frightening majority of Israeli Jews, following deliberate cues in Israeli media, view every Palestinian. (I think Yossi Melman, a highly respected Israeli journalist, overstates the importance of prior eras of Israeli security-state dissent over Palestine, but he has a point when he writes that "silence dominates the Israeli security elite. Not one general, ambassador, or intelligence chief has stood up to say: Enough.")

American journalism will never live down the infamy of abandoning our Palestinian colleagues. We deserve the stain that spreads across our reputations. The only way we can begin to regain the right to demand the freedom of the press starts with finally standing up for the cohort of our fellow reporters who are in the greatest danger. To my colleagues: do not treat statements from the IDF or the Israeli government as truthful. You have seen—you have no excuse for not having seen—how frequently and easily they lie, as they have lied about who the rejectionists are at each stage of a potential or actual ceasefire. After the Black Lives Matter protests, many of us learned not to present as default-truthful the statements police give after slaying someone. It is well past time to apply that lesson to the Israeli genocidaires (to say nothing of the U.S. military). Those of us who have interviewed people whom the West considers terrorists should recognize that what they say about Anas today is what they will say about us tomorrow.

FORT BLISS will become a migrant concentration camp, with capacity intended to inter 5,000 people, thanks to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. This is a 21th-century Manzanar. Here's some 2018 reporting Jim LaPorta and I did when Trump tried to do that, on a smaller scale, during his first term.

Meanwhile, Status Coup obtained audio from inside Alligator Alcatraz: "They’re going to kill us here little by little, no one pays attention to us. I’ve been here for 30 days seeing injustice and mistreatment, it doesn’t stop. They abuse us in every way—with the food, in the bathroom, everything, everything." It was impossible to hear this and not recall the experiences of so many inside Guantanamo Bay, which the Trumpists also seek to use for migrant detention. By "mistreatment…in the bathroom," the caged migrant is talking about sexual assault by ICE. It is hardly the first time.

SINCE MY NATION PIECE goes into the iniquity of Eric Adams, don't miss this excellent New York Focus investigation into how the expansion of broadband in public housing is a means to turn already-overwhelmingly-surveilled housing projects into a police panopticon. Now the NYPD can "feed CCTV footage directly into its citywide surveillance software systems, stream it remotely in real time, and review footage beginning 30 days prior to an incident — all without having to ask NYCHA for permission," reports Focus' Zachary Groz. Groz further reports that 20 housing projects' CCTV systems will connect by the end of the year to the Domain Awareness System, "the department’s controversial counterterrorism and anti-crime platform that, without warrants, collects CCTV footage from thousands of cameras across the city." It's worth mentioning that one of the architects of the Domain Awareness System is the current NYPD commissioner, billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch. Remember what I was saying above about the tools of the War on Terror are the tools of class war? 

YOU CAN'T MISS TOXIC CRUSADERS #1 and TOXIC AVENGER COMICS #3 by Matt Bors and Tristan Wright. Holy shit, Tristan's pages. They're like Geof Darrow meets Ben Clarkson. CRUSADERS #1 is out on September 10 and TOXIE #3 is out September 17. Matt writes in his newsletter that CRUSADERS is "our mutant treatise on ecological action and body horror" while the main TOXIE book's third issue features a clash with "the diabolical synthoid SENTIAC, a new villain with its own idea for saving humanity fit for the Science Fiction issue." These are some of the comics I'm anticipating the most this fall, so tell your local comic store to reserve your copies! 

FOREVER WARS FRIEND KIM KELLY interviews longtime FOREVER WARS friend Brian from Catharsis about Catharsis' new record, Hope Against Hope, some 25 years after their classic second LP Passion. I have not heard Hope Against Hope yet, since Catharsis are so important to me that I'm waiting on the vinyl to get delivered. If not for Brian, one of hardcore's greatest lyricists and an excellent writer as well as a singer and performer, I might never have gone into this field. Not only did he give me crucial encouragement for my teenage scribblings, he published some of them in Inside Front. (It's some of the worst writing in that excellent fanzine, so, you know, don't go scouring the internet for it.) Attentive readers of IRON MAN will notice references to Catharsis and another of Brian's bands, From The Depths, in the titles of the seventh issue and the entire second story arc. 

SPEAKING OF IRON MAN, I did something of an exit interview on the series with Tad Eggleston's 22 Panels podcast. Thanks to Tad for giving me the space and the opportunity to go into the themes of my run. I hope people over the years who've never read the run will hear the episode and pick up the collected editions. 

Finally, this is going to be the only edition of FOREVER WARS we're doing this week, since I'm at my mother-in-law's and the limited time I'll have to work will center on my book manuscript. See you all next week.