Chris Kaiser
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chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Chris Kaiser
@chriskaiserva.bsky.social
760 followers 660 following 370 posts
Policy Director ACLU of Virginia | Fmr: ACLU of Louisiana | Unrepentant Kentuckian | Cincinnati Reds stan | Opinions are mine alone.
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chriskaiserva.bsky.social
October 25, 2025 at 7:45 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
On Thursday, he strongly encouraged news agencies amid a double crisis they are facing, with economic pressures threatening their survival and consumers increasingly unable to distinguish truth from lies. "I urge you: Never sell out your authority!" Leo said. He quoted Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in asserting that the world needs free and objective information. He cited her warning that "the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."
October 12, 2025 at 1:32 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
🤔
(5) the term "domestic terrorism" means activities that— (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended— (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (ill) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States; and
October 11, 2025 at 7:31 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
“The main function of the compact is to replace such provisions of law with “the deal”—that is, a piece of paper, signed by the university, that purports to entitle the Department of Justice, on the basis of its own “finding,” to take away all of these “benefits.””
The effect of the agreement is to hang a sword of Damocles over any compact-signing university that is not there today. The "benefits of this agreement," quoted above, consist almost entirely of things that the administration does not have the power to arbitrarily withdraw under federal law. The government has run into that problem repeatedly in recent weeks as federal trial courts enjoined the administration's efforts to revoke visas on the basis of political speech and its efforts to "suspend" federal scientific research grants on the pretext of enforcing Title VI. The government cannot easily take away a university's "preferential treatment under the tax code" (its 501(c)(3) status) without meeting a heavy burden of proof that clearly cannot be met with regard to any serious university. The government cannot even take away NIH or NSF funds a university has been granted —let alone student loans—without significant due process, unless perhaps it is lucky enough to find a federal court much more compliant than most have been so far.
October 5, 2025 at 5:12 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
In this regard, it is unsurprising that historians, social scientists, and independent journalists-and now even comedians — are high on the list of the Trump administration's declared enemies: they all work to undermine the ruling class's myths by exposing their hypocrisy and incoherence. When a virulent figure like Kirk is canonized as a truth-telling patriot and emblem of democratic virtue while his critics are denounced as violent extremists, we are gaslit on a massive scale; the field of political meaning-making narrows until only submission to an authoritarian order appears reasonable. Counter-myths work to widen that field, calling our attention not to the martyrs of white supremacist empire but to its victims, not to those who uphold an oppressive order but to those who are its targets. Every refusal of the dominant myth, however spectacular or mundane, tells a different story: neither law nor order are necessarily right; violence is not always what the state says it is; and justice is not reducible to the preservation of a false peace. If we want a democracy worth defending, we must insist upon identifying and opposing political violence everywhere it appears. To condemn it only selectively and conveniently is to align oneself with the far greater violence of our time. True peace will not come from denying where the high temperature of our political order is coming from. Nor it will come from specious appeals to civility or rational debate, as if support for fascism is built on reason and respect rather than resentment and rage. It instead requires identifying, confronting, and dismantling the ubiquitous political violence that our present order is designed to conceal. In other words, it will come from naming violence honestly and building the power -and the myths-that make justice imaginable and achievable.
September 27, 2025 at 4:30 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
hm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alessan...
In 1939, he was appointed by Mussolini Minister of Popular Culture, and served until January 1943. Minister of Popular Culture (Minculpop in short) meant in fact Ministry of Propaganda and Pavolini had an iron grip on what the press could or could not publish. The written instructions to the press (including radio broadcasts and "Luce" cinema newsreels) were dubbed veline (tissue paper) by the newsmen and covered an amazing variety of domains (from forbidding to publish photos of boxer Primo Carnera knocked out and lying unconscious to the obligation of publishing flattering propaganda photos of Mussolini on a brand new Fiat tractor or forbidding to publish photos of Naples under the snow, fearing it would damage the tourism industry). Minculpop also tackled the cinema industry (the famous and very creative Cinecitta studios in Rome were created by Mussolini's will to act as a counter against Hollywood productions; the Venice film festival is also a creation of the fascist period).
September 18, 2025 at 1:29 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Great visual in this WHRO report showing the SEVEN MILLION out-of-state queries of Bridgewater, VA’s (pop. 6,600) Flock ALPR system from July 2024 - July 2025.

This illustrates the threat to privacy and civil liberties if these systems are left unchecked.
www.whro.org/virginia-cen...
Map depicting Queries to Bridgewater's Flock data from different jurisdictions These dots represent nearly 7 million queries from more than 4,600 U.S. agencies that accessed Bridgewater's Flock data between June 2024 and June 2025. The Houston Police Department alone queried the data more than 500,000 times. The Bridgewater data may have been included in broad searches that covered multiple agencies in the Flock network. One dot = 500 queries
September 17, 2025 at 7:40 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Happy Labor Day from the Blue Ridge 🍃🍂🥦
September 1, 2025 at 5:04 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
I’d be shocked if these “autonomous patrol vehicles” aren’t also police-operated surveillance systems on wheels.

If so, Va Code requires that the police dept report their use to the state. Will be interesting to see whether these show up in the 2025 report.
law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title...
§ 9.1-116.10. Surveillance technology reporting by state and local law-enforcement agencies and sheriff's departments. A. For purposes of this section, "surveillance technology" means any electronic surveillance device, hardware, or software that is capable of collecting, capturing, recording, retaining, processing, intercepting, analyzing, monitoring, or sharing audio, visual, digital, location, thermal, biometric, behavioral, or similar information or communications specifically associated with, or capable of being associated with, any specific individual, group, or place or any system, device, or vehicle that is equipped with an electronic surveillance device, hardware, or software.
August 18, 2025 at 10:39 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
🕶️
August 15, 2025 at 10:57 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Furthermore, I understand why people are particularly concerned about data sharing with ICE. We need to be. And:

This would be horrendous even if limited to local uses. It means tracking every person’s movements, personal associations, & political activities.
assets.aclu.org/live/uploads...
Government deployment of networked FRT surveillance cameras raises extraordinary privacy, due process, and civil rights concerns. It gives the government a truly unprecedented power to identify and track us as we go about our daily lives. Never has the government been able to engage in this kind of unrestricted automated surveillance of our movements, whether leaving our homes, going to a place of worship, attending a medical appointment, or participating in a political protest. Use of this technology also raises grave concerns about misidentifications, which can lead to wrongful arrests and other harms. Facial recognition technology often makes mistakes, and reputable testing has repeatedly found that face recognition algorithms misidentify Black people, people of color, and women at higher rates.? These factors have ' Douglas MacMillan & Aaron Schaffer, Police Secretly Monitored New Orleans with Facial Recognition Cameras, Wash. Post (May 19, 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/05/19/live-facial-recognition-police-new-orleans/. = See, e.g., Drew Harwell, Federal Study Confirms Racial Bias of Many Facial-Recognition Systems, Casts Doubt on Their Expanding Use, Wash. Post (Dec. 19, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal-study-confirms-racial-bias-many-facial-recognition-systems-casts-doubt-their-expanding-use/; Patrick Grother, U.S. Dep't of Com., Nat'l Inst. for Standards & Tech., Facial Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 8: Summarizing Demographic Differentials 15 (July 2022), https://pages.nist.gov/frvt/reports/demographics/nistir_8429.pdf; see also Aman Bhatta et al., The Gender Gap in Face Recognition Accuracy Is a Hairy Problem, Procs of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (2023), https://perma.cc/2BPB-ASB2; Page 1 of 6 led to multiple wrongful arrests across the country, including of Randal Quran Reid, who was wrongfully arrested based on faulty Louisiana facial recognition technology…
August 15, 2025 at 9:16 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
To be clear, what NOLA Councilmembers are proposing isn’t just facial recognition —they already have that.

They want to run facial rec *on everybody at all times* without warrant or suspicion of a crime.

This is without precedent in the US & and an almost unfathomable assault on the 4th Amendment.
In using this surveillance network, NOPD has gone where virtually no other jurisdiction in this country has been willing to go. Since Tampa, Florida attempted a short-lived and much-criticized failed experiment in FRT surveillance over 20 years ago,+ there has been a strong national consensus that real-time facial recognition surveillance by the government must remain off limits. When the cities of Lakeland, Florida and Houlton, Maine recently installed small networks of FRT-enabled surveillance cameras, they quickly turned them off after coming under intense criticism. More than 20 jurisdictions across the country have banned most or all law enforcement or government use of facial recognition technology. Even in jurisdictions like Detroit and Miami that allow some uses of the technology to attempt to identify images of criminal suspects, binding policies unequivocally ban its use for real-time surveillance.' As a recent authoritative report by the National Academy of Sciences noted, using FRT to "scan[] passersby in public places for outstanding arrest warrants" is currently occurring only "outside the United States" —that is, until NOPD's conduct became public.
August 15, 2025 at 9:11 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Total vindication of the facts.

(Background: By logic & justice, La should have 5 or 6 more majority-Black House seats & 3 or 4 in the Senate.

For example, in NW Louisiana, the GOP majority opted to *concede a whole seat* to SE Louisiana rather than redraw one to be majority-Black.)
The Seventh Senate Factor, which Gingles instructs us is of particular importance, is "the extent to which members of the minority group have been elected to public office in the jurisdiction." 478 U.S. at 37. This Senate Factor unequivocally supports Plaintiffs. No Black candidates have been elected Governor or Lieutenant Governor since Reconstruction, Louisiana has never elected a Black senator, and Black legislators held only 26 of 105 total State House seats in 2023 (and only 10 of 39 total State Senate seats). Furthermore, only one Associate Justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court is Black Justice Piper D. Griffin, who is but the third Black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court in its 210-year-history). Appellants' argument that the district court clearly erred by equating Senate Factor Seven to a strict proportionality requirement is not based on the district court's ruling, which simply noted how many Black legislators currently hold seats in the State House and the State Senate. There was no proportionality standard imbued into this recitation of statistics. Because Appellants do not otherwise meaningfully engage with the district court's analysis of this factor or raise any challenge to the district court cited statistics, we reject Appellants' argument. Senate Factor One, "the history of voting-related discrimination in the State or political subdivision," Gingles, 478 U.S. at 44, weighs heavily in favor of Plaintiffs. There is no meaningful dispute that Louisiana has a history of voting-related discrimination. Appellants' argument that Plaintiffs presented no contemporary evidence of state-sponsored discrimination belies the record, which is replete with evidence of the state "closing polling places, restricting access to early voting, polling places, and limiting mail-in-voting," historically and contemporarily. Appellants' other argument-that Black voters exert effective control over the Democratic party, so they clearly have an equal opportunity to participate and elect candidates —misses the mark. Influence within a political party does not always correlate to an ability to elect candidates of your choice. Miss. NAACP v. State Bd. of Election Comm's, 739 F. Supp. 3d 383, 461 (S.D. Miss. 2024) ("In recent elections, the Democratic Party has had some black nominees for statewide office, including for the United States Senate and Governor, but all have been defeated."). A review of the record makes clear there is sufficient evidence to support the district court's conclusion that this factor weighed heavily in favor of Plaintiffs.
August 15, 2025 at 12:36 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
I don’t think he’s on here, but Rep. Cedric Glover deserves recognition for the state legislative redistricting victory in Louisiana. 3 1/2 years ago, he was the only one to speak the truth about attacks on Black representation today & their roots in the Lost Cause.
lailluminator.com/2025/08/14/l...
August 15, 2025 at 12:28 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Under Virginia law, this is now a crime, which I hope Va prosecutors would pursue seriously in addition to the cop losing their job.

Also, interestingly, it seems that if this happened in Virginia, both the local officer and the fed could face criminal charges.
law.lis.virginia.gov/vacodeupdate...
N. Any person who willfully and intentionally queries, accesses, or uses a system for a purpose other than set forth in subsection D, or who willfully and intentionally sells, shares, or disseminates system data or audit trail data in violation of subsection F, is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor.
August 11, 2025 at 10:42 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
The VRA was enacted 60 years ago today, but its meaning & legacy are inseparable from the longer, 160-year arc since the Reconstruction Acts.

From the time of federal withdrawal until the VRA, Black representation was virtually non-existent.

This is what SCOTUS & the Right seek to roll back today.
US National Archives chart depicting 1000% increase in Black representation in the US House of Representatives immediately after the 15th Amendment's ratification, followed by near full elimination of Black ballot access until the VRA's enactment in 1965.
August 6, 2025 at 2:23 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
It is Him. 🫡🇺🇸🦅
“Joe Rocco, front, was suspended one game for flipping his bat after hitting a home run during a little league tournament, but his father, Joseph "Joe" Rocco, back, a lawyer, went to court and got the suspension overturned.”
July 26, 2025 at 2:38 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Identity, negation, and violence. Edward Said, 1988.
Terrorism and the Islamic World But the issue that chiefly concerns me here is terrorism as it engages public awareness of the Middle East and of the Arab–Islamic world in particular. The presence of this region and its people in discussions of terrorism is, I believe, quite unique. To my knowledge, of no other country, no religion, culture or ethnic group except Islam and its societies, has it been said that terrorism is, after a fashion, endemic. This is argued by several of the Orientalists who contribute to perhaps the most visible and influential of the popular anti-terrorist manuals, the collection edited by Benjamin Netanyahu, Terrorism: How the West Can Win. By the nature of the argument, evidence is problematic, but it is bandied about anyway, with curious results. All sorts of strange objects appear—for example, the Islamic mind, ancient feuds, remark- able but unnameable proclivities to wanton violence—all of them attesting to essential traits that supposedly have been there eternally and are susceptible neither to historical change nor to any sort of amelioration. Since ‘terrorism’ is indefinable and entirely negative, these arguments for its connection with Islam and/or Palestinians have rarely been opposed. The point is that there is hardly any way, there are few enunciative opportunities, to oppose such arguments about terrorism without also seeming to be for it. Unanimity is intimidating, particularly on this scale, but during the full-scale terrorist alert—for example, during the 1986 bombing of Libya or the 1985 TWA hijacking you could not deny the Islamic ingredient, you could not present super- vening arguments, you could not prevent the guilty associations from spreading, without also appearing in some way to explain, hence condone, the outrage. The framework was entirely hostile to anyone who did not accept the perfect equivalence between the State which seemed to be attacked, and injured innocence; indeed, very little inhibits the framework from expanding to include, on the part of the United States, the Western heritage, morality and outraged virtue. Perhaps the most sensible intervention in the verbal dust-storm has been Eqbal Ahmad’s, which appeared in the May–June 1986 issue of MERIP Reports. Ahmad’s premise is that terrorism—‘acts of intimida- ting and injuring unarmed, presumably innocent civilians’, acts for which there are five sources, ‘state, religion, protest/revolution, crime and pathology’, of which ‘only the first three have political motiva- tion’—does exist and is a source of genuine concern, but needs analysis and discrimination if we wish to do ‘justice to its victims, or to understanding’ on both sides of ‘the ideological boundary’. Ahmad offers a set of half-a-dozen guidelines for analysis. These are: terrorism is connected to ‘the need to be heard’, since it ‘is a violent way of expressing long-felt, collective grievances. When legal and political means fail over a long period a minority of the aggrieved community elicits the sympathy of the majority with violent acts.’ Moreover, Ahmad continues, ‘anger and helplessness produce compulsions towards retributive violence’—a factor that explains the violence not only of the helpless but also of the powerful: ‘I have pounded a few walls myself when I am alone’, said President Reagan in 1985. Then we should acknowledge the sad truth that ‘the experience of violence at the hands of a stronger party has historically turned victims into terrorists.’ Similarly, ‘when identifiable targets become available, violence is externa- lized’—that is, people pass from the stage of pounding walls to shooting what stands before them. No less strange was the common agreement in expert literature and rhetoric that no real definition of terrorism was actually possible. It is true, of course, that writers like Clare Sterling and Benjamin Netanyahu felt no compunction about defining terrorism as whatever seemed inimical to the West, Israel, the Judeo–Christian tradition and Goodness, but it would be wrong and misleading to accuse all writers on terrorism of such robust self-confidence. Many are like Walter Laqueur, one of the most respectable academic specialists who began work on the subject well before the recent vogue. Laqueur frankly admits that ‘no definition of terrorism can possibly cover all the varieties of terrorism that have appeared throughout history; peasant wars and labour disputes and brigandage have been accompanied by systematic terror, and the same is true with regard to general wars, wars of national liberation and resistance movements against foreign occupiers.’ Later he tries somehow to rescue his topic from this welter of ubiquity, valiantly suggesting that even though terrorism resists definition it can be discussed in the context of movements that have used ‘systematic terrorism as their main weapon’. But when he asserts that that practice begins in the second half of the nineteenth century (Terrorism, New York 1977, p. 11) we will, I think, have lost faith not only in his philosophical acuity for trying to describe something that he says cannot adequately be described, but also in his historical sense for studiously ignoring the revolutionary Terror of France some seventy-five years earlier.
July 11, 2025 at 12:09 AM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
This massive injection of cash into the surveillance-detention-deportation machine will also increase surveillance of all Americans – likely Black Americans most of all, considering the reality of how aggressively local and state law enforcement already target Black communities. The bill provides $6.2 billion for border technology and screening, which includes the deployment of biometric technology. Information derived from facial recognition, iris scans, and DNA will be collected and fed into DHS’ centralized biometric repository, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). IDENT is accessed not only by ICE, but also the Department of Justice (DOJ) and state and local law enforcement. This data will be used for tracking, profiling, and policing, despite an abundance of documentation of the ways in which this technology does not work; it infamously misidentifies people, especially people of color, leading to wrongful arrests and detentions.
July 4, 2025 at 12:35 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Bullshit, Frankfurt wrote, was defined by the bullshitter's indifference to truth: The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides...is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor to conceal it. .... The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
July 3, 2025 at 2:56 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Other articles lean heavily on selective European reviews used to justify restricting transgender healthcare, ignoring that several countries— France, Germany, Sweden, and Austria-have recently reaffirmed the importance of such care in newer guidelines. A Republican-commissioned review in Utah similarly found the care to be critical for transgender youth, yet goes unmentioned. One piece frames the Supreme Court decision as a backlash to a movement "consumed by theories of sex and gender that most voters didn't grasp or support," subtly legitimizing a rollback of rights as a reasonable voter reaction. In all, at least half a dozen articles have been published by the Times in the 24 hours following the ruling-ink still drying-spreading misinformation, shaming transgender people, and giving prominent space to voices that seek to strip us of our rights.
June 19, 2025 at 8:15 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Today would be an excellent time to read and reflect on this crucial discussion about mass mobilization, what it’s for, and the limits of awareness-raising.
truthout.org/audio/awaren...
I think one of the things that, obviously, veteran organizers well know, but maybe people who are newer to organizing, newer to protest culture, might reflect on is why protests work. I think we’ve been often given this very tidy story about past political movements, especially the civil rights movement, where there was a march and there was expression of disagreement, there was awareness spread about social injustices of various kinds. Then question mark, question mark, then change happened, and a lot of details go unremarked on, unreflected on in those question marks that we skip past. It was because they were able to command not just attention, not just cause awareness of political issues, but they could meaningfully mess things up for the powerful as a result of being able to organize people at scale, whether it was the bus boycotts, whether it was strike actions, whether it was withholding rent. And I think we need to think about that kind of leverage if we believe our own criticisms of the people in power. But I think trying to recreate that energy through mass marches repeatedly, whether the marches are permitted or not, is a losing proposition because you’re not really amassing power. You’re not, as you’re saying, establishing leverage, and you’re not affecting material outcomes. And over time, people get tired of doing the same thing and not seeing any results. So numbers dwindle, which feels disempowering to the people who do keep showing up. And I have seen this kind of errant approach of continuously trying to replicate moments that feel empowering or inspiring across a number of movements. And we really don’t have time to get stuck in this cycle this time around. So, obviously, the more people are involved, the better, and there’s a reason to keep track of how many people are involved, but we really need to focus in on what we’re getting people involved to do. And it’s got to be something better, deeper, and more compelling than just telling people to express displeasure with how things are going.
June 15, 2025 at 6:33 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
This is not about distinguishing between violent & nonviolent immigrants. There is no violent crime wave, much less one driven by immigrants. Crime has been falling steadily for years.

Don’t concede the false, *racist* trope that we’re awash in immigrant crime & must respond harshly. They’re lying.
June 13, 2025 at 11:58 PM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
Now that we know ICE is targeting workers at Home Depot as a matter of strategy, it’s important to note that the stores are blanketed in ALPR surveillance, and per their privacy policy, they’ll store and hand over vehicle data to ICE.

We specific warned about this at the Virginia lege this year.
June 12, 2025 at 12:15 AM
chriskaiserva.bsky.social
www.aclu.org/press-releas...
RICHMOND, Va. – In response to Virginia Governor Youngkin’s comments and Virginia Attorney General Miyares’ signature on a letter supporting President Trump’s unlawful actions in Los Angeles, ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Mary Bauer released the following statement: “It is shameful that Virginia’s governor would make comments – and Virginia’s attorney general would sign on to a letter – extoling the president’s unlawful deployment of the National Guard and Marines in Los Angeles. With more than one million immigrants and the second-highest number of active-duty personnel in the country, Virginians know better than most what an abuse of power it is to weaponize the military against people standing in solidarity with immigrants. “President Trump’s despotic actions in Los Angeles are a clear and present threat to the civil liberties, democratic norms, and freedom and safety of every person in this country, and Virginia’s leaders are wrong to support his attempt to violently crush dissent.”
June 11, 2025 at 4:36 PM