Episode 220: The Power of Thought-Terminating Bad Guy Labels
Citations Needed | April 30, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima Shirazi: Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
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Nima: “American Extremists Aiding Radicals Across Border,” trumpeted the Detroit Free Press back in 1919. “707 Illegal Aliens Arrested in Checkpoint Crackdown,” reported the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “87 Bronx gang members responsible for nine years of murders and drug-dealing charged in largest takedown in NYC history,” announced the New York Daily News in 2016“‘Top secret’ Hamas documents show that terrorists intentionally targeted elementary schools and a youth center,” claimed NBC News just a couple years ago, in 2023.
Adam: These headlines all include a label for a certain type of bad guy, what we’re calling on this episode, a Bad Guy label. Whether it’s ‘extremist,’ ‘illegal alien,’ ‘gang member,’ or ‘terrorist,’ these terms, and their cousins, seek to exceptionalize the alleged transgression of their targets, separate them from both law and history, and dehumanize them, all while priming media audiences for crueler laws, harsher policing, longer incarceration, and sometimes even extrajudicial punishment. These terms, of course, don’t have clear, universal, accepted definitions, nor are they supposed to. Their use is often heavily racialized, and by their very nature, subject to the whims and ideologies of the prevailing security state and the media that does its bidding.
Nima: What effects, then, do these Bad Guy labels have on public perception? How do they serve to foreclose critical thinking about who is deemed inside the bounds of due process and humanization, and who is categorically denied these things, deemed to be an other in urgent need of disappearing and punishment?
Adam: On today’s episode, we’ll examine four thought-terminating Bad Guy labels: illegal alien, gang member, extremist and terrorist; analyze their origins, why they rose to prominence; and explain how they are selectively evoked in order to turn off people’s brains and open up space for quick and cruel state violence.
Nima: Later on the show, we’ll be joined by Alec Karakatsanis, a public defender and founder of Civil Rights Corps. He writes the Copaganda newsletter on Substack, and is the author of the books Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, and his latest, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which was released this month by the New Press.
[Begin clip]
Alec Karakatsanis: I think the most important thing about these kinds of labels is to understand that they’re nothing new. They’re a historical tool of people in power that works to strip away an entire vast humanity of someone’s life into one or two characteristics that are very useful for the people in power to focus on.
[End clip]
Adam: Typically, we say what episodes this is a spiritual successor of, but this is kind of too many to count. We’ve touched tangentially on all these words, but given the rise of these in recent years, in recent months, with Trump in office, which we’ll get to, we thought it was worth kind of taking the four big Bad Guy labels our media likes to use in order to essentialize and prime the audience for a group of people who are outside law, outside history, they’re ontologically evil, by not explaining what they do or describing what they do or what they’ve done or the crimes they’ve allegedly committed, but by giving them this essential label that says they are at their core, gang members, illegal aliens, terrorists, extremists, to really kind of turn the brain off, because now it’s like, Okay, well then if there are those things kind of fundamentally, then there’s no concept of due process, there’s no concept of reform, there’s no concept of context.
Nima: These people must be taken out of polite society, they must be punished. They must be vanished from our public view. And however that happens, I guess, is fine, because you’ve already determined that they are enemies of humanity in their essence.
Adam: Yeah, and we’ve wanted to do something like this for a while, but what really kind of instigated us to finally put it all in one episode was recent rhetoric by Vice President JD Vance, where he’s saying, explaining why they’re deporting people without any kind of due process and putting them in a gulag in El Salvador, where they, from all appearances, will never leave. And he says, and has said, some variation of, Democrats want to coddle violent rapist gang members, and they don’t deserve due process because of that. Now the logical brain, again, the concepts of due process goes back thousands of years. There was some form of due process in ancient Sumeria. It’s not like a new concept, right?
Nima: Yeah. It wasn’t invented by the libs in the past six years, right?
Adam: But the general idea is you have to have some process, even if it’s minimal and not fair. But you have to have some process to determine whether or not the label you’ve given someone is actually apropos, whether or not it’s actually an accurate description of what they’ve done or who they are. But there’s this rhetorical device that is becoming increasingly popular among the right of saying such and such illegal aliens, such and such is a terrorist, such and such is an extremist, such and such is a gang member. And again, it’s not new, but it’s becoming more popular as a way of, kind of just saying they therefore need to be disappeared, and then you sort of move on. And Democrats then are put on the defensive, or liberals are put on the defensive to say, Well, wait a second. No, no, we just want, like, a trial to determine the thing you’ve claimed they are.
Nima: And then they’re like, Oh, you baby.
Adam: And it’s very effective. And again, a lot of these totalizing terms aren’t just used by demagogues like JD Vance. They’re used by the media all the time, and despite efforts to push back against that, or to have more of what’s called people-first language, which we’ll get into, they are still used, and they’re still very popular. So we’d like to break down the four most, we think, sinister, most common, most racialized, official totalizing Bad Guy label terms.
Now, when people have pushed back on these labels in the past, what you get is a kind of savvy, Well, what are you saying? Are you denying that anyone can be violent? Are you denying that people coming into the country without documentation are illegal? Are you denying that there are people in gangs? Are you denying gangs exist? No, of course not. Obviously gangs exist. Obviously people can come into a country without documentation. Whether or not that makes them an illegal alien is a different question. The point is not that these don’t speak to some underlying transgression, right? If someone blows up a pizzeria or something, is that terrorism? No, but I don’t think it’s a really good term, because it’s not used consistently, and it’s obviously very racially loaded. But yes, there’s some underlying transgression that occurred in all these instances to some extent. Right?
What the Bad Guy label does, though, is it isn’t interested in interrogating the complexities of that, or talking about the legality of that, or where it fits into a broader, evenly applied system of justice. It’s just this exceptionalizing term meant to sort of remove them from normal processes of adjudication and moral determination, so they’re separate from that.
Nima: Right, because they are then not owed what other people might be owed, assuming and guilt enforcing labels that remove the process from the perception so that you go immediately toward guilt, and when you go right to guilt, your next step is punishment.
Adam: Exactly. And what we try to do in the show is we don’t try to deal with words as they exist in some frictionless vacuum or some abstract concept. We deal with how they exist in the real world in terms of how they manifest in media and media discourse. And these labels are used, as we’ll discuss, highly racialized, highly selective, and very much designed in a lab to appeal to your lizard brain. These are not intellectual terms. These are visceral terms. These are terms of anger and revenge, and we’ll talk about why that’s not a good idea.
Nima: So first up is the term illegal alien. Now the term, quote-unquote, “alien,” referring to immigrants, was first included in US law back in 1798 in the Alien and Sedition Acts. The legislation, enacted in the wake of the French Revolution, authorized the President of the United States to expel, quote-unquote, “aliens,” which were considered, quote, “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States,” end quote, in an effort to stave off radical activity. The term would persist well into the next century, as the United States continued to pass multiple racist laws restricting immigration after encouraging it, initially for purposes of cheap labor. Some of these laws include the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Alien Contract Labor laws of 1885 and 1887.
Now, by the first decade of the 1900s, the term, quote, “illegal alien,” end quote, which shifted the label ‘illegal’ from the action of entering a country to people who entered it. It became a part of the description of the person, not the act. Now this started appearing in news media reports at the turn of the century, and by the 1920s and ’30s, the US began to even more aggressively legislate against immigrants and immigration with, for example, the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 which imposed a, quote, “national origins quota,” end quote, to restrict immigration into the United States in general, especially immigration from East Asia.
So consider this headline from an Associated Press article dated January 25, 1930. The headline reads, quote, “Illegal Alien Influx Called Hard Problem,” end quote, with the subheadline, quote, “House Members Discussing Means of Holding Back Flood of People,” end quote. The article begins this way, datelined from Washington DC, quote,
Stopping of the illegal influx of aliens as a means of relieving unemployment was demanded in the house today, coincident with the introduction of a bill proposing to bring about rigid enforcement of the immigration laws through compulsory registration annually of all aliens.
End quote.
Adam: Right, so we have, the wealthy crashed the economy with the stock market crash. And then, of course, invariably, then you begin to see, Oh, well, lack of employment is caused by too many immigrants. So we need to start scapegoating the immigrants. And so the word, and the visceral nature of the word, has urgent political utility. It has propaganda utility. Therefore it becomes the way in which you frame this concept of they’re not immigrants like you and me or our father and mother. They’re illegal aliens. They’re kind of a separate thing from the normal flux of human labor flow.
Nima: That’s right. This article was published pretty much exactly three months after the Wall Street crash of 1929, which happened Black Thursday, October 24, 1929. This is from January 25 of the very next year.
Adam: Now, use of the term accelerated in the early years of the Cold War. In the 1940s and ’50s, lawmakers like Democratic Senator Pat McCarran sought to further criminalize immigration in part to prevent potential communist influence. Of course. In 1950, for example, McCarran was largely opposed to efforts to allow more postwar Jewish refugees into the United States who had effectively been prevented from entering via the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. United Press reported in January 1950, quote, “McCarran Urges Patriotic Groups to Battle Efforts to Increase Immigration,” in which it would go on to write, quote,
In a “preliminary report” on his recent investigation of DP problems in Europe, he said a “complete breakdown” in administration of the Displaced Persons Act had permitted an entrance to this country of a flood of aliens “who will become ready recruits in subversive organizations.”
To show the United States already had major problems in enforcing immigration laws, McCarran said that:
1–A former American Consul to the Canadian border, estimates there are 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 aliens illegally in this country.
2–Immigration officials estimate there are 50,000 Cubans living illegally in the Miami, Fla., area and 50,000 illegal aliens in or near Los Angeles.
3–Officials estimate that about 100 stowaways arrive in the United States each month.
End quote of the article. McCarran was a lead sponsor of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, which codified the term ‘alien’ to refer to immigrants, and which media commonly referred to as the Alien Bill. So they’re aliens. They’re not native to the United States.
By the 1970s and ’80s, the use of the term had exploded as officials and media claimed that people who immigrated to the US were stealing jobs, committing crimes, and generally contaminating the US population and overwhelming our resources.
Nima: Here are just some examples of those reports. From the New York Times in October of 1971, the headline reads, quote, “Illegal Aliens Pose Ever-Deepening Crisis,” end quote. Here’s an excerpt from the article. Quote,
There is a spreading underground of illegal aliens in every major city. They can be found in any job, but most gravitate to work requiring few skills. Some still pursue the traditional callings of farm worker or live‐in maid, but most now seek factory or service jobs.
End quote. The article would continue, quote,
Illegal aliens form what amounts to a subculture in American cities. It is likely, for example, that the majority of the West Indian and Haitian residents of Bedford‐Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, and of the Latin Americans in Elmhurst, Queens, are not lawful immigrants. The illegal alien population of Miami is estimated at 100,000, made up mostly of Dominicans and Haitians.
Because of fear of being found out, the aliens cannot participate in many aspects of American life. As a substitute, they have developed a kind of outlaw culture of their own in which information about jobs, immigration regulations, helpful lawyers and travel agents and other matters is exchanged.
End quote. Look at that. Even having helpful lawyers is sinister, right?
Adam: Yeah.
Nima: It’s part of the underground culture that the illegals are engaged in. You can’t trust anything. They have their own subculture. Later in the decade, the Associated Press published a piece in January 1977 with the headline, quote, “Aliens Cut Into Texas Job Market,” end quote. And a couple years later, Scripps-Howard News Service published in January of 1979, quote, “Plan deals with illegal alien influx,” end quote. The next decade, the 1980s, saw headlines like this from the Los Angeles Times in January of 1987, quote, “707 Illegal Aliens Arrested in Checkpoint Crackdown,” end quote.
Adam: Yeah, because, again, you can’t say ‘immigrants.’ Even ‘illegal immigrant’ was kind of too weak. You had to create this different moral tiered system for immigrants who were not like you and your family and your relatives. Because, obviously, the vast majority of the United States is either descended from immigrants or immigrants themselves, by definition, because it’s a settler colony. There has to be people who settle it. And so you just needed a new term. You needed a new boogie-boogie term that seems scary and kind of illegitimate and ‘illegal alien’ is a great way of conveying the concept that these people are not like your relatives and your parents and grandparents. They’re kind of in a different moral tier system.
By the 2000s, many news organizations had effectively abandoned the term, recognizing its doubly dehumanizing effect, both “illegal” and “alien.” A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center reported that use of the term in news media declined starting in 2007. That year, the label ‘illegal alien’ was used 21% of the time when reporting on immigration. By 2013, it was used just 5% of the time. Now, clearly that’s not the case with rightwing media, which is the reason why we did this, because the White House and vice president still use the term. Fox News, Newsmax still used the term quite frequently.
The New York Times, for instance, had used the term in opinion pieces as late as 2014. News organizations like the LA Times and Associated Press stopped using the description ‘illegal immigrant’ in 2013. The New York Times, however, did not and stated it will continue to use the phrasing to describe, quote, “someone who enters and lives in the United States without proper legal authorization,” unquote. In fact, they had a poll just days before Trump took office showing support for his immigration policies. They used the term ‘immigrants who arrived illegally.’ That’s the new way you say it, to make, to sort of create this idea of illegality and criminality, versus someone kind of just looking for a job. I mean, they broke a law technically, but, like, whatever.
Nima: Right. It’s kind of like, uh, the weakest version of people-first language, right? Because you’re still leading with their migration status.
Adam: Yeah. It’s like, illegal Americans. Well, because they moved away from, the New York Times moved away from ‘undocumented people,’ because that sort of humanizes them and says they don’t have documentation. Yeah, there’s, I guess there’s a misdemeanor law that’s been broken, but it’s not like a moral transgression. It’s not like they hurt someone or harmed anyone, necessarily.
Nima: Yeah, crossing the border without documentation is not a felony.
Adam: It’s sort of the definition of a misdemeanor, right? But they moved away from ‘undocumented,’ and I think once Trump won the election, in the lead-up to Trump’s election year, the New York Times began to pivot more towards this, going back to ‘illegal immigrant’ or ‘immigration that was illegal,’ because I think that rightwing groups pressured them, and I think to some extent they’re also kind of rightwing themselves. And obviously Democrats became more rightwing on immigration, so they were like, Well, we have to convey that it’s illegal and spooky, and undocumented immigrant was seen as too liberal, too bleeding heart, and so the New York Times went back to being more hawkish on this term, to again, it serves no other purpose, other than to dehumanize. It is unclear what information is conveyed by ‘illegal immigrant’ that is not conveyed by ‘undocumented person.’
Nima: Right, except for the stigma and xenophobia and the racism, right? So let’s move on to our second favorite term here, ‘gang member.’ This term assigns a medicine quality to who it is allegedly describing without the burden of proof of gang membership or affiliation or really, of any violence committed. You don’t need to explain why you are calling someone a gang member, you can just say ‘gang member,’ and that is terrifying in and of itself.
This usage really dates back to about the 1940s and ’50s, with an increasing formalization of quote-unquote “street gangs” in major cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Since then, news media have published quote-unquote “investigations” or dispatches, exploring “gang life” with an alarmism similar to the aforementioned New York Times reporting on immigrant, quote, “outlaw culture,” end quote, right? These kind of go hand-in-hand. What is the underground culture? What is the underground economy? What are these communication systems that are in place out of polite white public view?
Now one example of this from a syndicated United Press International article on, quote-unquote, “Today’s gangs” is dated May 5, 1955, and it opened with the following, editor’s note, Quote,
What are the boys like who make up today’s vicious gangs of teenagers? How do the gangs operate? Why aren’t the teenagers in school? The strange laws of street gangs are described in the following dispatch based on talks with three members who came into court to see the excitement after a rival gang member was arrested for murder.
End quote. Now this fixation on teenage gangs and how they operate, and the kind of politics within them was showcased not only in news media, but also, of course, pop culture by the late ’50s in Broadway shows like West Side Story. I mean that really kind of brought this idea of teenage gangs into the public consciousness. Granted, of course, probably less dancing and snapping in the actual gang warfare. But this is how this ‘gang member’ rhetoric, this kind of gang member culture, was spread throughout our pop culture and our politics.
Now, decades later, another version of this appeared in another UPI article from 1977 that ran with this headline. Quote, “Retired officer kills gang member,” end quote. Now in the headline, gang member could easily have been replaced with “teenager” or “youth,” especially as the teen’s gang activity was not related to his death. But this wouldn’t have conjured the same kind of dangerous image, or, of course, done the copaganda work of getting the retired police officer who killed this kid off the hook morally, right? Also, a separate report stated that the cop was suspected to have kidnapped the 18-year-old, a crucial piece of information that was not included in the initial report and certainly not shared in the headline.
Adam: Moving on to the 1980s. This term exploded in our news media as Reagan revamped the War on Drugs and the parallel War on Gangs. But this of course preceded Reagan. In 1980, AP ran a story with the headline quote, “Roving gangs loot stores, pelt police in Orlando violence,” unquote. The story gave little explanation about the reasons for the violence, other than to say that, quote, “Two policemen were injured in violence ignited when white officers arrested a black robbery suspect in a neighborhood bar,” unquote. It made reference to other, quote, “race-related violence,” unquote, in Florida that had happened that year, but it again, offered no context for the uprisings, one of which was in response to the police’s fatal beating of Arthur McDuffie, a Black man who was pulled over for a traffic stop. And then the AP added this line, quote, “At least four people, including two television reporters, received minor injuries when attacked by roving gangs of blacks,” unquote. Good times.
Nima: [Chuckles]
Adam: Since then, news media have continued to make vast assumptions and assertions about so-called gang members with no evidence. Let’s look at a major example from 2016 that I wrote about at the time for FAIR.org. In April of 2016, the NYPD conducted a raid in concert with the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and arrested over 100 people on various charges. New York media published a series of sensationalist reports alleging that the people who were arrested were, quote-unquote, “gang members,” without qualification, without quotes, without any kind of ironic detachment or journalistic objectivity. They were just asserted as gang members.
Nima: Showing all the perp walks and posting mug shots publicly.
Adam: Right. And so New York media, especially the New York Post and the supposedly liberal New York Daily News, did a ride-along with this federal NYPD task force, quote-unquote, “task force,” on these so-called gang raids, and they put in bold 75-point font on the front pages that these people were gang members. The New York Daily News trumpeted this in their article. Quote, “87 Bronx gang members responsible for nine years of murder and drug-dealing charged in largest takedown in NYC history,” unquote. The story referred to those arrested as, quote, “violent hoodlums” and, quote, “gangsters.” It was complete with an interactive map of New York City gangs showing what territory they allegedly controlled in a gallery of photos of more than 60 arrested suspects officially and publicly associating these people with violent crime like murder for the rest of their lives.
The New York Times reported on the raid as well, with the headline, quote, “Sweep in Bronx Tackles Decades of Gang Chaos,” unquote. The Times did refer to the arrested, at least said they were accused, rather than just summarily judging them, like the New York Daily News did. But the paper did not bother to get perspectives from lawyers, representatives, or families of the accused, or any kind of activist critical of the police. All they did was republish what the police said in typical New York Times fashion.
Now, a few years later, in 2019 a study co-authored by academics at CUNY found that more than half of the 120 people indicted after the raid were never even alleged by federal prosecutors to be involved in a gang. Now, of course, even if the 120 had been in a gang, it still doesn’t justify the media charge, trying them, judging them, and convicting them in public, right? By sort of saying they’re gang members without qualification, or even alleged gang members. But over half, the federal government didn’t even claim they were gang members, including dozens of people who had their photos put in online media forever, right? That’s sort of indelibly associating their name and face with gang activity, despite the federal government not even charging them, much less convicting them of gang activity.
Nima: So the ‘gang member’ term remains in use among major US media, even though scholars have been urging its reduction or complete elimination since at least the early 1990s in large part because the term itself is just really vague, undefined, and often is racialized, right? It promotes the kind of racist association of, when you say gang member, of either Black or brown people, usually young people. Now in a 2023 article published by the British Psychological Society, forensic psychologist Jolene Taylor wrote about her work with people convicted of violence and noted this, quote,
Clients expressed the term ‘gang’ conjured up ideas of a sophisticated network of people whose lifestyle centred on offending, glorifying violence, and planning violence to get what they want at all costs. They felt this was far from the reality of how they offended and did not describe the relationship they had with those they offended with. In the context of these discussions, some Black and Asian clients further recalled experiences of being repeatedly stopped and searched when in pairs or threes. They considered this to be because of the perception they were operating as part of a ‘gang’ when they were simply associating with peers of the same ethnicity.
End quote.
The third term on our list is one of our very favorites. It’s ‘extremist.’ Now, of course, there’s not really an agreed-upon definition, nor a political alignment in formal definitions of what ‘extremist’ actually means. It’s always used within the context in which the writer wants to use it. The ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, a dubious source at best, has defined extremism as, quote, “religious, social or political belief systems that exist substantially outside of belief systems more broadly accepted in society,” end quote. But despite the seeming political neutrality of this definition, the term is very often applied to left-leaning individuals and movements to impart an element of danger and menace, often in the absence of any real threat.
Adam: Now, early examples of this framing can be traced back to the 1910s amid World War I and the Russian Revolution, amid growing fears of communist influence in North America, especially with organized labor and other radicals emerging on the scene. A Detroit Free Press article published August 10, 1919, warned of a growing explicitly anti-capitalist labor movement in Canada and the US, known as One Big Union. The article was headlined, quote, “Canadian Labor Seeks Supremacy: American Extremists Aiding Radicals Across Border,” unquote. Here is an excerpt.
Whatever labor troubles America may have, Canada has too and in more virulent form. As the extremists in Canada and the United States are working together, and regard the dominion as a more likely field in which to gather the first harvest of proletarian rule, Americans who watch the struggle coming north of the border will witness what the Reds intend to mete out in the United States later on.
Unquote.
Nima: [Chuckles] That’s a good one.
Adam: Shortly after, in September of 1919, the president of the International Federation of Trade Unions, William A. Appleton–that’s good old-timey name–wrote an op-ed lamenting that, quote, “extremists” were destroying the otherwise moderate labor movement in England. The headline and subheadline of Appleton’s piece read as follows, quote,
Extremists Lead Labor of Britain to Its Ruin: Noted Leader Says National Crisis Has Arrived–Predicts Nationalization of Mines and Railways Would Sound Death-Knell for Organized Labor–Calls It “Pernicious Slavery” — Extremists Have Beclouded the Issues and Have Misled Workers Who Trusted Them.
Unquote. All right, so we got some extremists going on here.
Nima: Now let’s fast forward a decade to the 1930s, in the years immediately preceding the Spanish Civil War. Now the war, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, was a conflict between the rightwing Nationalists, led, of course, by General, and later dictator, Francisco Franco, still dead, and the generally leftwing Republicans. One of the war’s precipitating events was the Revolution of 1934, an uprising against growing far-right authority in Spain’s government. On October 5, 1934, the Associated Press reported on the start of the revolution with this headline, quote, “Radical Revolt Occurs in Spain: Virtual Civil War Breaks Out Today, With 22 deaths and 100 Wounded as Leftists Battle Government. Extremists Capture Eibar.”
End quote. Now, by the 1960s, a cottage industry was starting to develop around targeting so-called extremism. A 1962 edition of the Saturday Evening Post featured a profile of Gordon Hall, a, quote-unquote, “anti-totalitarian researcher” who worked for the FBI. The article which called Hall, quote, “anathema to both sides,” end quote, reported this, quote,
His first onslaughts, coming shortly after World War II, were on the left-wingers, whom he considered an unrecognized threat at the time. In 1950, for example, he became suspicious of an outfit with the jaw-crushing name of the Greater Boston Coordinating Committee to End Police Brutality for Minority Groups. He joined up, attended a few meetings, and satisfied himself that the people behind the movement were local Communists.
End quote. Now, to be fair, Hall also targeted the far Right. It wasn’t just what the article disparagingly cites as a “jaw-crushing name,” which is actually very, very clear, right? It’s like, Coordinating Committee to End Police Brutality for Minority Groups. Pretty clear. This was obviously a threat. [Laughs] But Hall did target groups like the John Birch Society, and also long maintained that the far Right definitely outnumbered the Left in terms of how many, quote-unquote, “hate groups” it had among its ranks. Now this is, of course, a ridiculous label, “hate group” label, for groups that want to end police brutality. But it’s definitely important to note that Hall recognized at least a quantitative asymmetry between the Right and the Left. He estimated in 1962 that there were 1,000 of what he categorized as rightwing hate groups, while the Left really only counted about 150.
Adam: Now still, leftwing radical movements perceived as much, if not more, of Hall’s attention than did violent rightwing currents. In a 1972 interview, when asked which American extremists we ought to be more apprehensive about, Hall replied this,
The danger comes from extremists who argue from the least strength. The ones that have the least going for them are the terrorists. The reason the Panthers are dangerous is because they have no foothold in the black community.
Unquote. Which was not true at all. Now this is the supposed reason given why they were dangerous, not their political agenda, not their ideology, not the fact that they sort of existed outside the liberal kind of NGO complex.
Nima: Right, that the kind of seeming powerlessness granted them an extremism, that they weren’t folded enough into either community or almost like mainstream polite society to be dulled of their extremism, and therefore Hall kind of identified those groups that are more marginalized as being extreme. Now, of course, listing the Panthers as such had its own ideological purpose, but that’s kind of how this extremism rhetoric gets laundered through speech and media.
Adam: Yeah, and it’s typical with this anti-extremist centrist posture. There’s a lot of facile pathologizing. This is pretty common up till today, which we’ve talked about on the show quite a bit, actually, which is that people who have views that are viewed as radical, people who have ideologies that are viewed as somehow overly subversive or revolutionary, that they actually have some kind of brain disease. They have, like a brain worm that needs to be cured through some kind of reeducation.
Nima: Let’s say you’re opposing, say, police brutality against minority groups in, I don’t know, Boston. That is seen as being somehow extreme, right? Like that’s not just like a normal thing to oppose, that is seen as this kind of, you know, having, like a radical current.
Adam: So the interviewer asked Hall the following question, quote,
Do you have any more sympathy for far left extremists than the racists, anti-Semites and paramilitary crazies on the right? After all, leftwing extremists have been responsible for far less violence than rightwing extremists.
Unquote. To which Hall responded, quote,
Leftwing extremists are rapidly catching up on the violent record of their rightwing counterparts. And don’t forget, there are paramilitary extremists on the left too. Leftwing extremists are just as totalitarian as their opposites. To me, an extremist is an extremist and as long as the American system provides the alternatives in the center, I’m not going to have sympathy for anyone who insists there is no chance for reform.
Unquote.
Nima: Ooh! That’s everything. That is literally, like, liberalism summed up in one quote.
Adam: Well, yeah, this kind of fart-sniffing, like, pox-on-both-their-houses centrist posture has obviously been around for decades. Since then, it’s become its own cottage industry, especially since the rise of Trump, where you can raise millions of dollars from big donors, if you say, Yeah, we’re gonna go after Trumpism. But don’t worry, we’re also gonna go after the Left, the sort of radical Left, and indeed, many of the so-called democracy preservation groups that emerged after 2016 spent a great deal of resources attacking Bernie Sanders in 2019 and 2020 when he ran for president, because that was their MO. It’s to sort of go after so-called both sides. Even a kind of milquetoast social democrat like Bernie Sanders is seen as being an extremist worthy of contempt and mockery, because, again, the general idea is the status quo is working. You’re fine. And anyone who deviates from that status quo, whether they be rightwing crazies in their bunker planning antisemitic and racist killings, they’re the same as those who support radical egalitarianism.
Nima: Now, let’s fast forward to more of the present day, 2024, when Ta-Nehisi Coates made an appearance on one of the very few episodes of CBS Sunday Mornings that many people might actually remember. Coates was promoting his newest book, The Message, and was met with overt hostility by co-host Tony Dokoupil for his coverage of Israel and Palestine in the book. Here is a clip.
[Begin clip]
Tony Dokoupil: Ta-Nehisi, I want to dive into the Israel-Palestine section of the book. It’s the largest section of the book. And I have to say, when I when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off the book, the publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.
[End clip]
Adam: Yeah, this one’s great. It has ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremist.’ So there’s these thought-terminating labels, other extremist, backpack of an extremist. Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve read the relevant sections of The Message, but the criticisms that Ta-Nehisi Coates levels are pretty standard. They’re, for anyone who visits Israel and visits Palestine and sees the manifest apartheid regime that exists, the idea that this is extremist, pointing this out, and he goes on to say he left out context, which is what they always say, which is to say you have to do the boogie-boogie terror stuff. And the funny part of, like, countries that want to destroy it is so funny because they’re all run by US-backed flunky regimes that have signed economic and trade deals with Israel. They don’t want to destroy it. They’re all part of the same security architecture.
Nima: That’s the bad neighborhood. Being, like, completely controlled by a US and Israeli security apparatus.
Adam: Yeah, they want to destroy, which, what? Saudi Arabia, Jordan? Which US flunky wants to destroy Israel? Egypt, that helps them subjugate people in the border of Gaza and has been handmaiden to this genocide since the beginning? Just kind of racist barbarian-at-the-gates trope. And this is, again, the word ‘extremist’ here is doing so much work, because he doesn’t have to address the argument, right? He doesn’t have to address the substance of what Ta-Nehisi Coates says. He just says, Oh, wow, these are extremist arguments, which is to say, anytime you take Palestinian motives or grievances, then you remove them from the kind of cheesy reductionist, jihadist, antisemitic just sort of violence for violence sake, kind of glee of sadistic violence, and you give them secular logic, you’ve committed the ultimate sin, because now you’ve provided a secular reason to say, Well, wait a second, yeah, maybe there is apartheid. Maybe Gaza is an open-air prison. Maybe people are suffering.
Obviously, there was a dustup for this question, because it’s very patronizing. It is kind of racist, to be honest. Like, I know you. You used to be one of the good ones who played in the sandbox of liberalism, and suddenly you’re going off and going against Zionism. And there’s like this sort of, he’s been tasked with disciplining this guy who’s gone off program, right? He’s supposed to kind of scold whites and tell you to vote for Hillary Clinton.
Nima: And he basically calls him unserious because it’s, the backpack of an extremist is this kind of infantilizing statement in itself.
Adam: They’re students, they’re anarchists. They have a nose ring.
Nima: They don’t actually understand the real world, or, you know, the full picture of our history. It is so patronizing, and I’m sure many of our listeners have heard that before, but it’s a prime example of how the word ‘extremist’ really does so much heavy lifting to marginalize very, very normal thoughts, very normal ideology, when they are seen as being outside the kind of power-serving mainstream. And what better word to kind of dovetail with this, Adam, but ‘terrorist,’ the final word that we’re going to discuss today?
Now, by most accounts, of course, the term ‘terrorist’ can be traced back to the French Revolution. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, the words ‘terrorism’ and its derivation ‘terrorist’ came into English as translations of French words, used during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794. Now, look, there’s no universal definition for the term terrorist. It’s been the subject of a lot of debate over certainly the past couple decades-plus, when we had the so-called War on Terror.
Now, many government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, which was created during that time, have their own definitions of international and domestic terrorism, but the absence of an agreed-upon definition highlights how subjective the term is. Now, indeed, its general meaning has shifted over time, as the scholar Mats Fridlund has observed for the publication The Conversation. Fridlund has written this, quote,
Modern terrorism, which implies the systematic use of violence against the state, rather than by it, emerged in Europe in the 1870s. The person generally recognised as the first terrorist was the 26-year-old social revolutionary Vera Zasulich, who shot the Governor of St Petersburg in 1878 to protest the Russian state’s repression of domestic political protest.
End quote.
Adam: Yeah. So, I mean, from its beginning, the advent of the term was about the oppressed becoming the oppressor. The Terror in France, that’s where the term was used most commonly, the idea that the rabble will sort of rise from the bottom and create a regime of terror that was fundamentally the fear of all conservatives. In the case of France, it happened to be true to some extent. But then any kind of populist or revolutionary movements were viewed as being inherently terroristic or based on terror, because, again, it’s about the feelings of those in charge. A lot of slave rebellions were referred to as terror or terrorism, because if you had slaves, you had 200 slaves, you’re on a plantation in Jamaica, and things were sort of good, you lived in a sense of terror that they would rise up and kill you. That isn’t to say all modern iterations that are labeled terrorism have similar populist or revolutionary potential or value, but that is where the sort of origin of the term comes from. It’s to create terror in the hearts of those who matter, the constituents who matter.
By the 1960s, the term became increasingly associated with the notion of Arabs or Muslims, and of course, greatly accelerated during the so-called War on Terror after 9/11. So let’s jump ahead to more recent years in which we’ve seen a somewhat renewed embrace of the word, particularly with respect to Palestine and anti-genocide activism. Now the word ‘terrorist’ as a label fell out of favor with straight news organizations like the BBC and Associated Press, who dropped it all together about 20 years ago, the height of the War on Terror. It was determined that it was, based on their own analysis, was selectively used and racially charged. The New York Times really stopped using it in the mid-2010s, or they reduced the usage of it, especially outside of quotes. So they would not refer to groups as ‘terrorist groups’ or ‘terrorist attacks,’ but they would say Netanyahu says terror, or if they’re speaking about an historical fact, they would say terror, and often they would say with ISIS.
But there’s no examples of them using it with respect to Hamas from 2015 to October 6, 2023, and then after October 7, for the first year, the New York Times used the term to describe Hamas 360 different times. So they would say the ‘terror group,’ or the ‘terrorist group,’ or the ‘terror attack’ on October 7, which was not a term, again, that was used because the argument against it is that Israel has committed an incalculable amount of war crimes, dropping 2,000-pound bombs on apartment complexes, sniping children, shooting children in the head, as the New York Times itself is documented, has bombed over 150 medical facilities, targeted doctors, targeted aid workers, buried aid workers in shallow graves. We could go on and on now. Why is none of that defined as terror or terrorism? The New York Times does not have an internal definition of terror, but it is not something that can ever be applied to Israel by definition, because it is a racialized, colonial term. It is not a term that is applied evenly or consistently.
Now, in the wake of October 7, because there was an urgent need to index October 7 as a kind of 9/11 event, which is to say the work of mindless jihadists without any secular grievances, there was an effort to ISIS-ify, if you will, Hamas, and October 7 into this kind of other moral category separate from Israeli violence of the past. But I think more importantly, the subsequent Israeli genocidal campaign that by October 9, October 10, had been clearly laid out by Israeli officials who said they remember the defense minister of Israel said, We’re going to cut off water, food aid, nothing’s going to get in. We’re dealing with human animals. We could go on and on and on. So then the term kind of came raging back. CNN, ABC News, NBC News all maintained the term and really began to use it as a Bad Guy label as a way of reducing anything that Palestinians did to mindless, sadistically, and anything Israel did was reluctant with a heavy heart, because they sort of had no choice.
So here’s a headline from CNN from October 10, 2023: “Woman abducted by terrorists recounts harrowing experience.” “CNN’s Anderson Cooper speaks to Avital Alajem, who was abducted by Hamas terrorists and forced to walk to Gaza with the children of her missing neighbor.” NBC News, October 13: “‘Top secret’ Hamas documents show that terrorists intentionally targeted elementary schools and a youth center,” unquote. Needless to say, that story ended up being total fabrication. ABC News, October 13: “Grandson recounts seeing graphic video of beloved grandmother killed by Hamas terrorists.”
The Intercept in April of 2024 obtained a New York Times memo, an internal memo discussing editorial standards that said, quote,
It is accurate to use ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist’ in describing the attacks of Oct. 7, which included the deliberate targeting of civilians in killings and kidnappings. We should not shy away from that description of the events or the attackers, particularly when we provide context and explanation.
The Times cautioned against using the word exclusively with the implication that it would only be used to refer to Hamas fighters. The paper wrote, “In addition to ‘terrorists,’ we can vary the terms used to describe the Hamas members who carried out the assault: attackers, assailants, gunmen.” So in the interest of not wanting to be stale in one’s writing, you can use other terms, but otherwise use ‘terrorists.’ As Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, the reporters who got the leaked memo, noted, the Times never uses the word ‘terrorism’ to refer to Israel’s attacks even when it’s well documented that they targeted civilians. Now, more recently, when Trump took office, when he began abducting pro-Palestine or anti-genocide protesters, the administration immediately just labeled them terrorists. When they abducted former Columbia grad student and green-card holder Mahmoud Khalil, they claimed that he was, quote, “supporting Hamas,” which they said was, quote, a “designated terrorist organization.” Therefore he was a terrorist.
Nima: Guilty speech by association, the association being opposing genocide.
Adam: The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal cheered this on in March of 2025, writing after Khalil’s abduction, quote,
A green card comes with legal obligations, including the disavowal of terrorism. Under 8 USC 1182, an alien is “inadmissable” if he or she “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity” or is “a representative of . . . a political, social, or other group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity.
Unquote. So here we have this label, ‘terrorist,’ can now be used for anyone protesting Israel. Of course, Mahmoud Khalil never said anything pro-Hamas, whatever that means, and even if he has, Is that a useful framework to just throw the terror label? Because, again, the IDF can never be a terrorist organization, by definition, no matter what it does, no matter how many civilians it killed. That, by definition, can never be terrorist because the intent is assumed to be reluctant. You know, again, no matter how many fucking war crimes are posted on Telegram and TikTok, it’s not like they’re hiding this thing. No matter how many openly genocidal statements top level government officials, including Netanyahu, make about destroying Amalek, etc., it doesn’t matter. It can never be terrorism.
Nima: And with the explicit purpose of terrorizing the Gaza population so that Hamas does not have backing, right? It is so clear. I mean, explicitly clear, not tangentially clear, not that we’ve done this sort of analysis and here’s, you know, reading between the lines. It is explicitly clear by Israeli military and political officials that the idea of this genocidal campaign is to destroy and dispirit the Palestinian population in Gaza so that they do not support Hamas. That is part of this. I mean, in addition to just wanting to destroy an entire people, but that is the explicit goal, which is a terror campaign to influence the feelings and emotions, the perceptions, the support for certain groups by committing extreme acts of violence against that population as punishment and as warning. That is definitely a definition of terrorism that would make sense, and yet, of course, it has never applied. Now the Wall Street Journal, in the editorial that you quoted from just a couple minutes ago, Adam, also includes this, quote,
Mr. Khalil seems to have violated that obligation.
The obligation being to disavow quote-unquote “terrorist activity.” It continues, quote,
He belongs to Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) and was a lead negotiator during last spring’s anti-Israel encampment on the campus. Those protests glorified Hamas.
End quote.
Adam: Right, so you just put this thought-terminating Bad Guy label of ‘terrorists’ on a group of people, and you don’t have to do any more thinking. You don’t have to think about the context. You don’t have to think about the colonial history. You don’t think about anything other than, ah, terrorists. Now let’s move on. And there’s a reason why all these labels that we’ve talked about are very, very popular with the Trump regime. And increasingly, it’s sort of all they have to do. And again, it’s not like they invented these labels, but they’ve been cooking in the oven for a lot of these for 20, 30, some 100 years.
But it’s sort of this great rhetoric device where you say, if you appeal to this, if you say, Well, the word ‘terrorist’ is being used selectively. The word ‘gang member’ is just a pejorative label before someone’s had a trial. ‘Extremist’ is a way of dismissing alternative ideologies to beyond that, which is at the Davos conference. ‘Illegal alien’ is a racially-loaded pejorative meant to dehumanize someone who’s crossed the United States from a different country. They say, Oh, well, you’re sort of defending these criminals. You’re defending these bad guys. Are you suspect? What are you into? Are you an extremist? Even some liberals kind of get on the defensive. You’re like, Well, no, I mean, such and such didn’t have a criminal record, and you started doing all these kind of negotiations. And it’s an effective kind of bully, fascist bully tactic, because you can this is kind of its final form, right? All these labels we’re talking about have been stewing for years.
But now that the Trump regime is disappearing people, and we saw this so that when he was in the White House recently when Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, used the term ‘gang member’ and ‘terrorist’ several times. He said, when asked about the release of an unlawfully deported man who was put into this permanent gulag for the rest of his life, he responded, quote, “The question is preposterous: How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Again, not been found guilty of terrorism. Has not been provided evidence of terrorism.
By the power of this language, these Bad Guy labels, they become these totalizing terms where now you’re saying, the response to that is to defend the worst of the worst, a terrorist. You can’t defend a terrorist. So even at its most absurd fascistic links with Trump, these remain very powerful tools, and because they are just warped ontologies, they’re not about interrogating motivations, they’re not about putting anything in historical context. They’re not about understanding. They’re not really about due process or, like, actually showing what someone did. The idea that they’re just these totalizing terms meant to remove people from society, and that has taken its most extreme form with Trump, who is literally just removing people from society based on labels and labels only, and sending them to a permanent prison where you don’t leave. That’s the thing. People don’t leave this Salvadoran prison he’s sending him to. They’re not supposed to leave. They don’t have contact with the outside world. They cease having legal counsel, their contact with their family. They just remove from society. And ultimately, that is the platonic endpoint of these terms. They are there to remove people from society and to shut down people’s empathetic and intellectual capacities.
Nima: To discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Alec Karakatsanis, a public defender and founder of Civil Rights Corps. He writes the Copaganda newsletter on Substack and is the author of the books Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, and his latest, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, both of which are published by the New Press. Copaganda hit bookstores this month.
Alec will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
[Music]
Nima: We are joined now by Alec Karakatsanis. Alec, so great to have you back on Citations Needed.
Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you so much for having me back.
Adam: So I want to jump in by talking about your books, about a ton of things, but for the purposes of this discussion, we are focusing on what we call spooky labels, which is these sort of pejorative labels, these Homerian epithets meant to end the conversation and kind of orient the audience to hate whatever discussion follows from that. So from ‘violent criminal’ to ‘gang member’ to ‘terrorist,’ it’s both very effective, and it carries with its own kind of defense, which I’m sure you’ve seen a lot, which is that to contest the spooky labels, to be seen as suspect in league with said spooky label, or to be guilty of spooky label oneself, when Democrats pushed back, for example, on the White House disappearing migrants without so much as a judge hearing their case, Vice President JD Vance tweeted out, quote,
There were violent criminals and rapists in our country. Democrats fought to keep them here. President Trump deported them.
Unquote. But of course, in theory, the determination of who’s a violent criminal and a rapist is supposed to be made by an independent body, not just the say-so of the White House and the Department of Homeland Security. But Vance’s rhetoric is popular because in many ways, the media has been priming the pump to believe that anyone who’s sort of vaguely Hispanic and maybe has any kind of indication of the whiff of gang activity is sort of seen as unhuman and unworthy of rights and should be disappeared into foreign gulags without any kind of due process, and the label kind of helps do a lot of this work.
So I want to begin by discussing the ways in which these spooky labels, which, again, I know you’ve come across in your work, obviously, because they’re a key part of copaganda, kind of turn off the public’s empathetic faculties and brains and serve as a kind of tautology to justify cruel state crackdowns.
Alec Karakatsanis: I think the most important thing about these kinds of labels is to understand that they’re nothing new. They’re a historical tool of people in power that works to strip away an entire vast humanity of someone’s life into one or two characteristics that are very useful for the people in power to focus on. It’s the same thing we see with the criminal punishment bureaucracy all the time. You know, calling people an ‘offender’ or a ‘felon.’ There’s an entire history of the use of those terms to dehumanize people. It prepares the population. It tills the soil for mass exclusion and isolation and even extermination, if you look throughout history at how terms like this are used.
Toni Morrison in her famous Nobel Prize acceptance speech, calls stuff like this “the language that drinks blood.” It’s extremely dangerous, and you can see that, you know, one could essentialize JD Vance. You could say he’s a bloodthirsty hypocrite; or a smug, rich Yale lawyer; or you could say he’s a father or a husband or an aspiring prison guard; or any number of labels you could give him that would give very different senses if you just strip away everything else about his life.
And so the project of labeling, categorizing people and giving these sort of very particular labels is only useful to those who want to chop off an entire range of what makes somebody a human being, what makes somebody a member of a community, and what makes someone filled with hopes and dreams and good things and bad things and weird things and normal things, and that is only useful to the extent you want to get a group of people ignoring all of those other characteristics that make someone human to enable them to treat someone as subhuman. And I think that’s the whole point of language like this.
Nima: How do you think the kind of wresting back control over language can be done within a system that I think is so entrenched, and I say so also thinking about, you know, people with criminal records, people who have been incarcerated and maybe are returning citizens, but sort of seek to reclaim or kind of own the, quote-unquote “felon” label. Do you see that as part of how we reclaim language, part of how we shift power away from these systems, whether it’s political, whether it’s media, whether it’s even in pop culture, how we understand people who have had encounters with quote-unquote “law enforcement?” How does that work? From the kind of, Oh, let’s shift the way that newsrooms or editorial standards operate, and then link that up with folks on the ground, folks living their real lives, who are trying to reclaim that language and using it rather than moving away from it.
Alec Karakatsanis: Well, first of all, the evidence is very powerful. There’s been lots of studies about this that show if you just expose people to a term like ‘offender’ or ‘felon,’ or in the immigration context, ‘illegal alien’ or from the Obama years and the so-called War on Terror, ‘terrorist’ or ‘enemy combatant.’ If you expose people to these terms, it dramatically affects the policy preference they immediately express afterward. So there’s been a lot of studies of the mainstream news and people’s opinions about punishment and mass incarceration and sentence length and things like that. And immediately after using terms like that, people are much harsher. They support much, much more punishment, whereas, if you use a term like ‘person with a felony conviction’ or something like that, just that one little tweak to put the ‘person’ language first actually changes the way people leave the news story more punitively or less punitively. And that’s fascinating.
And so obviously it gets much harder to study in a controlled environment all the other kinds of language choices. But even that right there led to a movement of people throughout the criminal punishment reform groups to get journalists to stop using that language and to use instead people-first language. And that was enormously successful. Many major media outlets looked at the data, saw the presentations, understood the very real consequences of what they were doing and how easy it would be to not describe people in those kinds of terms, and started changing their official practices. What we need now is something much more profound and much more broad in terms of the kinds of changes we make to the propaganda apparatus in the mainstream media, because these kinds of essentializing terms are much more widespread than just the terms they were using to describe people accused of and convicted of crimes in the United States.
Adam: And of course, it’s not like it’s one weird trick. Obviously, it’s part of a broader regime of humanization, and it’s one intervention among many, but it is one you can do fairly easily, and like you said, it is empirically supported. It makes sense to a lot of fence-sitting liberals. You say, Okay, well, you know, here’s this kind of totalizing, dehumanizing term. Maybe try this instead. It seems like an easy intervention with a high rate of return. Some people listening would say, Ah, it’s a bunch of bleeding-heart, George Soros-funded, they don’t understand the reality of crime. They’re kind of minimizing crime, minimizing terrorism, and that they think that they can sort of humanize people who don’t really deserve to be humanized, that there’s this kind of, again, that we’re sort of seeing a suspect as being unserious about the problem at hand. This is a common sort of criticism that’s leveled, I’m sure against you, I would imagine, certainly against us. What do you say to people who say that this is ignoring, this is kind of a form of denialism, that you’re denying that there are like, quote-unquote “bad people” out there? There are people who are violent, people who rape and murder and sort of run drug rackets, and that this kind of squishy, bleeding-heart intervention makes stopping those people more difficult?
Alec Karakatsanis: I think there are two levels of response. First and most narrowly and most obviously, there is an entire legal process that is required, not just a legal process, but a moral process that is required to actually make the determination if somebody is committing the type of conduct that you’re accusing them of. So that, for example, is one of the reasons, you know, when the Obama administration started using widespread language like ‘enemy combatant,’ it was so troubling for many people in the human rights and civil rights communities because it emerged that not only was there no significant process for determining who an enemy combatant was, but they were actually classifying any so-called ‘military-aged male’ in any geographic location as a, quote-unquote, ‘enemy combatant.’
And the more you learn historically about what basis authorities use to categorize people like this, from the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, we now have a lot of the unclassified documents from the US military and the CIA. We know that a lot of the determinations were completely baseless and in fact, the source of enormous corruption and little personal and private and corporate vendettas and things like that. So it’s very important as a really narrow matter to understand that declaring something like this about someone, which could be a death sentence for that person, and is, in many respects, every single day for thousands of people, a sentence of pre-adjudication, incarceration, and isolation and family separation and torture and sexual assault and deprivation of medical care. It violates the very concept that we should actually have evidence and present evidence and consider evidence before making determinations about someone that are so consequential.
That’s just the narrow point, though. I think that the deeper level, the thing that makes this so profoundly problematic and dangerous, is that it creates this idea that there are good people and bad people, that people are this binary, that there are dangerous predators and that there are normal, loving human beings. And this rejects the true reality, which is that people are very complex and people are capable of enormous harm and violence and evil and pain, but they’re also capable of love and community and camaraderie and solidarity.
One of the most core differences between conservative and progressive, I hate these kind of labels, but, you know, we all have to use these labels. But one of the differences between this ideological difference, conservatives sort of want to believe in this world where individuals are either good or bad, dangerous or loving, and progressives, I think, are much more likely to think that the kinds of social conditions that we create shape the environment and the atmosphere that create different kinds of people and different kinds of social arrangements. And so at the very core, by defining people in such a narrow and definitive way, it cuts off and ignores all of our collective responsibility to create institutions in a world that puts people in the position to flourish together as a loving, and a community where things like kindness and solidarity and liberty and freedom can survive. And that, I think, is the deeper problem with this, and this is what makes it so problematic when liberals like Obama and Eric Holder kind of adopt things like this, because it’s validating a conservative, really reactionary, rightwing worldview is, it’s the language that drinks blood, it enables mass exclusion and even extermination.
Nima: So actually thinking about the totalizing effect of these labels and the purpose of doing so, you know, I think what your work has done so effectively, Alec, is focusing not only on copaganda, and what that means in our criminal legal system for the way that police propaganda operates throughout our culture, but also connecting that to American global militarism, and seeing how these labels cut across and how they’re used not only to essentialize and define entire communities here in the United States, but also how they are then labels put on people elsewhere to justify violence against them. We see this, of course, with the word ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’ when even people talking about a genocide in Gaza, if you kind of throw the terrorist label out there, Oh, then well, you know, I guess you’re just supporting Hamas. You know, we’ve seen this across college campuses everywhere. In your work, and especially as you were writing your new book, Copaganda, what maybe was revealed to you in terms of how these things shift from a domestic to an international level, and was there anything that kind of surprised you?
Alec Karakatsanis: I was so surprised on so many occasions throughout the process of researching the book by how similar these phenomena are across historical periods and across different types of propaganda societies. So if you think about looking at Soviet propaganda, Chinese propaganda, 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s capitalist propaganda. Jacques Ellul, in his study of propaganda from the 1960s, in his study of various communist and capitalist propaganda, is able to identify a number of very similar trends.
And then, I think, probably the best book I’ve ever read on this topic, Stuart Hall and his collaborators in the 1970s, in their book Policing the Crisis, which is actually a study of a period very similar to our own, the mugging epidemic in the United Kingdom, which was a term that they created out of whole cloth, like ‘gang bangers’ today or ‘illegal aliens’ or ‘enemy combatants’ or ‘terrorists.’ And they converted street crimes that had always been occurring in London, but they converted it to this new category of mugging, and then the mugger became the sort of new, what they call folk devil in British society, and it paved the way for push to the far right, which culminated eventually in a series of complex processes that they tried to describe in the election of Margaret Thatcher and the sort of push to the far right in England, this sense that the order and decency of society was under relentless attack by muggers. And of course, muggers were portrayed as Black immigrant youth in England. And this was a way of capturing all of the different connotations that the British right wing wanted to evoke in the British public about young Black immigrants, you know, from Jamaica and other countries in the Caribbean, to sort of capture in one term all the fear that the right wing was able to create.
And I think in the modern context, one thing that has really animated the book that I researched and wrote is a lot of these tactics across the mainstream media are what I call attempts to distract us from the material conditions of our world. They’re attempts to avoid having discussions like, Well, what are the US policies that have affected Latin America? Why are people coming across the border? What has the United States done over the last 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 years across the world? What has the Western global capitalist community done to create the conditions in every corner of the Earth that are making the world more and more chaotic, more and more dangerous, more and more violent, less habitable. And I think this is absolutely vital to understand, because as the climate warms and as areas of the Earth become increasingly hostile to human and animal and plant life, there’s going to be shifting and profound effects in migration patterns. And the West, including America, is going to need, really, new narratives to demonize a whole new swaths of people in order to justify their mass exclusion and mass extermination.
And I think that’s part of what we’re seeing now. That’s part of what we saw in the Trump first term’s obsession with the caravans of people from Latin America. It’s part of what we see now in terms of the demonization of this sort of almost seemingly plucked-at-random Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration is trying to deport without any process whatsoever. It’s all part of a process of distracting people from the real discussions about, what are the policies that we’re all implicated in that are actually creating the conditions of precarity and scarceness and suffering that are leading to these migration patterns, which the right wing is going to try to portray as an invasion?
Adam: I want to talk about that, because I think that’s really the key issue here, which is the issue of empiricism. And I know that people who are involved in criminal-justice reform for years, both before Covid began, and there was an uptick in murders, and then it kind of receded, and now we’re kind of back to pre-Covid, if not lower, crime rates, as you discuss a lot. So there was kind of a lot of public sympathy for reform. Then there was a huge backlash, and you had careerist hacks like Eric Levitz being like, The Left does not take crime seriously. And the argument the pro-reform crowd has always made is that, actually we’re the ones who do take crime seriously. Because, as you note, it’s how you define crime, and also it’s how you sort of think of solutions in non-reactionary ways, right?
And the analogy we use is that it would be like in the 17th century, if I was skeptical of leeches to cure the plague and fever. And someone said, Oh, you don’t take the plague seriously because you don’t believe in leeches. And I’d say, Well, no, that’s just the conventional wisdom around it but it’s not actually that scientific. And people try to make these scientific arguments. Obviously, tons of researchers have put in a lot of effort to make the argument that, again, the US is the most carceral state on Earth, and it’s not even close, but yet still has proportionally speaking, or relatively speaking, very high crime rates compared to other countries that have don’t have these policies, even limiting the scope of crime to street crime, not going into environmental crime or white-collar crime or wage theft or anything else that you sort of try to complicate.
And it’s frustrating because you’re always behind the 8 ball in these arguments, because there’s these embedded assumptions about what it means to be tough on crime. And the term ‘tough on crime’ is used without scare quotes. It’s used unironically by the New York Times. Eric Adams is going to be tough on crime. Well, is he? Is he really, or are there other forces outside of his control that invariably, we’re going to reduce crime that have no bearing on whether, and again, studies show this, whether you have a, quote-unquote, “tough on crime” prosecutor or a reform prosecutor, the actual crime rates don’t really matter in key ways, because there are broader macro trends that inform these issues. So talk, if you could, about your frustration with this kind of faux-savvy, faux-empiricist posture that you get from a lot of these kind of Matt Yglesias-knockoff pundits who sort of ventriloquize the oppressed poor, who, ostensibly, they speak on behalf of, whereas everyone else is this kind of pie-in-the-sky, bleeding-heart, not practical, not science-driven, far leftist.
Alec Karakatsanis: I think it’s important to say up front that these people like Yglesias and Levitz and German Lopez and David Leonhardt of the New York Times and so many of the people that essentially make up the group of people who write for the Atlantic or the New York Times, they’re not serious. These are not people who are seriously attempting to grapple with these issues. I’m going to address them seriously for a moment, but I don’t think it’s possible to capture the level of disdain that I have for the project that they’re engaged in. I’ve read all the stuff that they’ve written. The book, you know, is, in some respects, an attempt at an elaborate and kind of funny takedown of these people and their worldview, and also the sort of academic cabal of pro-police professors that they rely on in this sort of endless echo chamber. I mean, it’s not serious thinking, and in many respects it deserves none of our time, but because it’s so influential, I think it’s important to address it.
At the very, very basic level, even on their own terms, this stuff makes no sense. At the time, these people were all talking about the shoplifting epidemic and rampant crime and all this stuff. And I document this in the book, and I try to be funny about it in the book, because it’s so upsetting otherwise. At the time these people were talking about this, the United States had the lowest reported crime rates in its modern history. You know, the crime rate in 2024, crime was this huge topic in the election, but the crime rate in 2024, according to the police and the FBI, I mean, I’m not just picking random progressive organizations, right? According to the police and the FBI themselves, it was the lowest level of crime since the early 1960s and it’s been a pretty steady decline over decades in the types of crime that the police and the FBI report. So at the time these people are making all of this noise about that, the crime is at historic lows.
You know, there was a tiny little uptick in a few different kinds of crime for small, little periods over the last few years. And at each time, these people made this sort of society-wide panic, and it was really comical to watch in real time, because those of us who actually study these issues were looking at the sort of long-term crime trends, and we understand something very, very important. The kinds of policy tweaks that these savvy liberal media personalities focus on, whether it’s progressive prosecutors or bail reform or misdemeanor charging practices or mandatory minimum sentences or the number of police officers in a particular police force going up or down by 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 200, those things have absolutely no significant effect on crime whatsoever.
It’s like climate science denial. The things that determine levels of crime in our society, and again, as I explain in the book, I mean, the focus on a few index crimes as a proxy for harm is really problematic in and of itself. What we should care about actually is overall levels of violence and harm and death and suffering, not the five to seven crimes that the FBI and the police track in their crime indexes. But even if you were to focus on that, I’m giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Even focusing on those things, the evidence is clear that those things are much more affected by things like access to medical care. So the studies show that Medicaid expansion has a far greater effect on levels of social harm and violence than anything you could possibly do in the prison system or the police or the legal system. Early childhood education, the same way. Housing, just inequality generally.
And then there’s all kinds of other evidence about things like environmental toxins. So the extent to which young people are exposed to lead in their soil and drinking water. The access to community-based programming like art, music, theater for children. We actually know, as a matter of scientific evidence, what things affect crime, and there was this society-wide gaslighting. And I want to make an important point. It wasn’t just these pundits, who are very silly. You know, these are not serious people. They’re pontificating about stuff they don’t understand, and it’s somewhat amusing. But it’s the news articles, not the opinion pieces. It’s the news articles that are constantly juxtaposing little tweaks in punishment policy with big trends in crime, and that itself is what I call the big deception. It’s this suggestion that these two things are related, so that whenever somebody tries a little progressive tweak which is aimed at making our society less regressive and less repressive and less punishment-focused, the idea that that is actually increasing crime and so therefore shouldn’t be done is one of the most profoundly dangerous assumptions that fills liberal and mainstream news.
Nima: In the earlier episodes of Citations Needed now, many, many years ago, I used to quote Jacques Ellul a lot. His book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes is an incredibly important book. You know, he says the quote,
To the extent that propaganda is based on current news, it cannot permit time for thought or reflection. A man caught up in the news must remain on the surface of the event; he is carried along in the current, and can at no time take a respite to judge and appreciate; he can never stop to reflect.
And I think that’s such an important point that you make again, and so importantly at this time, in your new book, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which again, comes out April 15. I encourage everyone to go out and get it.
Alec Karakatsanis: Can I just actually note one more thing?
Nima: Yes, please.
Alec Karakatsanis: All of the royalties for Copaganda are donated to charity. They’re donated to an amazing organization called the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes unhoused people in Skid Row in Los Angeles to fight against government and police repression and surveillance. And, also, we have free copies of both Usual Cruelty and Copaganda for anybody in the country who’s a teacher who has students who might want to read the book, for anybody who is in prison, if you are running a Books to Prison program, or if you have family members incarcerated, the book is always free for students and people in prison, and you can reach out to me and to the publisher, The New Press. The New Press can be contacted at newpress@newpress.com. And we can get you free copies, because we don’t want cost to be a barrier for anyone experiencing, you know, the important ideas in the book.
Nima: We have been speaking with Alec Karakatsanis, public defender and founder of Civil Rights Corps. He writes the Copaganda newsletter on Substack, and is the author of the books Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, and, as I have said, the new book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, both of which are published by The New Press. Go get Copaganda. And thank you so much again, Alec, for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Alec Karakatsanis: Thank you all so much for having me.
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Adam: The push towards more people-first language has had some moderate successes around the margins. You know, of course, the rise of Trump and obviously, since October 7, we’ve seen a regression. We’ve seen people go back to ‘terror,’ ‘terrorism,’ ‘terrorists.’ We’ve seen people go back to ‘illegal immigrants.’ Yes, there was a movement to say, you know, an ‘undocumented person,’ or ‘person who came in without documentation.’ So those efforts have been thwarted somewhat, but it is a worthy goal, because I think some people think, Oh, you know these squishy liberals and leftist and woke scolds, they want to change our language. And it’s like, well, yeah, because the language is not a natural phenomenon. It’s not something that’s ordained by God. These terms have inorganic origins. They are used by people in power. They’re pushed by people in power. They’re created by governments, militaries, then the media adopts them. Because, though that’s the official term we’re supposed to use, that’s the legal term. These are constructs. Then that which is a construct can be deconstructed. It can be repurposed.
And so I do think people-first language is a useful kind of intervention if you’re in a newsroom. It’s kind of one of these minor little things you can do to think about, Are we totalizing this person’s existence, or is this something that they did? Is this a transgression that they did or allegedly did that doesn’t define them as human beings? Because the second you start putting these labels, you do create a kind of proto-dehumanization campaign, of incarceration, of disappearance, of punishment, of violence. And that is empirically true. And Alec’s book and research has done a good job showing this, that there is a direct line between how you talk about people and the end result. And we’re seeing, again, we’re seeing this in its most cruel and fascistic manifestation, with the way Trump is disappearing people off to foreign prisons forever. And I think that it does matter how you talk about people.
And I think so many people are scared about seeming overly precious or too bleeding-heart. That’s kind of the I think we’re in a moment of great reaction right now, where there’s a fear of sort of being capital-U Unserious about the sort of threats we face. And so we’re going to get firmer in our language. There’s a kind of post-George Floyd backlash to that. And what I would argue is that, to the extent to which one thinks they’re being savvy by doing that, all they’re doing is helping this fascistic regime of disappearing people, because that is the end point for a lot of these terms, again, as we’ve seen. And I think if you’re going to use these totalizing terms, at least use them consistently. And the whole point is, they’re not used consistently. They’re only used against powerless people or people on the fringes of society. They’re never used for governments. They’re never used for the US, never used for Israel, never used for allies. They’re only used for sub-state actors in baddie countries.
Nima: Yeah, exactly as Kwame Ture, who was born Stokely Carmichael and was the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), has written, quote,
The first need of a free people is to be able to define their own terms and have those terms recognized by their oppressors. It is also the first need that all oppressors must suppress.
And he would go on to write,
The power to define is the most important power that we have.
End quote.
And I think that this really speaks to this idea of the power of language, the power of labels, and how labels have this defining effect, these kind of epithets that you just put up, ‘extremist,’ ‘alien,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘gang member.’ These do all the work to classify individuals and entire communities, entire people sometimes, to be defined by a single thing and therefore have their humanity contingent on that definition.
So that will do it for this episode of Citations Needed. Thank you all again for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded.
I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed episode was released on Wednesday, April 30, 2025.
