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Mamdani’s Panopticon Burden: To Inherit the Hardened and Databased Political Epistemology of the Security State(s)?

By Jeremy Rothe-Kushel Host/Producer, Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls

New York City is a paradox disguised as a metropolis. Above, the glass-and-steel canyons of Midtown reflect the accumulated wealth of empire—the real estate dynasties, the hedge funds, the global insurers. But beneath the asphalt, pulsing through fiber-optic cables and radiating from the microwave dishes atop One Police Plaza, lies a second, silent city: a digital autocracy. The invisible city does not vote. It watches, and targets. It is a “Ring of Steel” that has metastasized from a temporary post-9/11 shield into a permanent, self-governing intelligence agency.

On this broadcast of Understanding Israel Palestine: Beyond The Walls, we descend into the friction point where local governance meets global counter-insurgency. We are joined by Ali Winston, an award-winning investigative journalist whose forensic reporting - including for WIRED, The Guardian, ProPublica, and The Baffler, among many others - regularly exposes police corruption, right-wing extremism, and surveillance.

Our point of departure is Winston’s incendiary new reporting: “Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State.” It documents a profound collision: Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, whose platform was built on the promise of Palestinian rights and systemic reform, now holds the keys to a machine built to repress those very ideals.

It is a machine currently operated by Commissioner Jessica Tisch—a scion of the very financial and real estate interests that fought Mamdani’s rise...

--Full article is here: https://open.substack.com/pub/beyondthewalls/p/mamdanis-panopticon-burden

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Ali Winston is an independent investigative journalist and co-author of The Riders Come Out at Night. His new podcast with Popular Front is Big Terror.

https://bleeding-edge.ghost.io/about/

https://www.wired.com/story/welcome-to-mamdanis-surveillance-state/

Listen to the full interview to hear a decoding of the signals of the surveillance state and what it means when the ‘War on Poverty,’ ‘War on Terror’ & ‘War’ on Gaza all come to roost as a permanent counter-political and epistemological insurgency state.