Protests against ICE's military-garbed street snatches continue to grow in Los Angeles. Now that we know that ICE's focus on corralling day laborers in front of Home Depots and hunting for undocumented children inside elementary schools comes directly from White House tumor Stephen Miller, there's little argument to be had against the theory that the cruelty we've been seeing is very much the point.
The White House wants to see children in zip ties. They want to see stories of child cancer patients being booted out of treatment centers, and of men and women whose parents brought them here before they could talk suddenly being snatched up and disappeared.
Who knows? If Stephen Miller's equally poisonous wife hadn't run off with (hurk) Elon Musk, maybe Miller wouldn't be demanding ICE bring him the souls of small children. But he probably would be, because from what we've seen of Miller, he is someone who has long dreamed of being a serial killer once-removed. This is his fetish. The man cannot achieve orgasm unless someone brings him a list of child cancer patients being deported.
It's clear that Miller, Trump, and the rest of the rotten fascist Republican Party are absolutely thrilled that they've managed to provoke blue-state street protests. The whole of the fascist project depends on goading such protests, followed by a declaration that opposition to Dear Convicted Felon Leader amounts to an "insurrection," upon which the military is to be called in to meet Trump's detractors with lethal force, upon which new announcements will be made that due to the national emergency caused by street protestors telling Trump to suck rocks, the whole of the Constitution and perhaps elections themselves are now irrelevant until such time as Dear Leader says so.
This is not speculative. It was the plan and purpose of Trump's Jan. 6, 2021 assembly of violent militia figures, and the insurrectionists Trump pardoned immediately after winning reelection in 2024 had stockpiled weapons in the expectation that they would be called up as Trump's personal stormtroopers. Rig the election results in the House, with the help of eager Republican allies. Declare victory; await mass protests; shoot the protesters; use the violence as pretext for martial law.
That is what Miller, and the Heritage Foundation, and the Claremont Institute have been trying to foment. And if anyone not allied with fascists knows how to stop it from happening, they ought to pipe up; keep in mind, however, that the thoughts that "decent" members of the House and Senate will yank Trump back from the brink are pathetic pipe dreams. There are no decent Republican lawmakers; if there were, they would have left the party rather than be complicit in the orgy of public destruction and straight-up crookedness that Trump has decorated his office with.
We have no way of knowing how the protests in Los Angeles, and now in San Francisco and elsewhere will unfold, and anyone who says otherwise is lying. It's possible that the protests fade without consequence. It's possible that they grow, Trump's federal enablers back down, and somebody in the White House convinces Trump that he's not going to get his dreamed-of spot on Mount Rushmore if Stephen Miller keeps fking up everything he touches.
The California National Guard, now allegedly federalized by Donald the seditionist in yet another illegal supposed act, is not likely to be a significant player here. California National Guard troops are from California. They don't want to shoot up their own cities. Their commanders aren't likely to give them ammunition to do so. The National Guard presence is likely to be almost entirely performative, a force meant to shield federal properties from the cruel taunting of protestors.
Trump's threat to use the active duty military to do some actual violence has similar complications. It is by nature an illegal order. It risks Trump and Miller's worst nightmare: open military defiance. There is a very small but not entirely negligible chance that it ends with a military aircraft "accidentally" dropping a live bomb on the Oval Office, at which point everyone involved apologizes deeply and we all move on with our lives.
But the real chaos agent in all of this is the Los Angeles Police Department. The LAPD has been a brute-force smash-em-up beat-anything-that-moves instigator of public riots for our entire adult lives. Department leadership has never found an occasion of civil unrest they aren't eager to make worse, and none of it has been made better by decades of police militarization.
I have a great deal of confidence that protests against ICE will remain peaceful, because the people protesting ICE know what they're protesting and know the concessions they expect from ICE. I have no confidence whatsoever that demonstrations will remain peaceful with LAPD mounted units clubbing demonstrators in the head, intentionally shooting at journalists, and littering public streets with tear gas and rubber bullets.
If you use violence against people who are protesting peacefully, they are going to stop protesting peacefully. This is not some shocking discovery; it has been true for millennia. There is only a tiny fraction of people who do not know this; unfortunately, nearly all of them work in law enforcement.
I do think the online focus on what protesters should "do" and criticism of how protests are unfolding is, at best, nothing but a parlor game. There is angst over some members of the crowds waving Mexican flags, but the crowd is literally protesting about ICE's mistreatment of foreign citizens, and doing so in a city proud of its long multicultural heritage. It's named Los Angeles, not Angel City. It's San Francisco, not St. Francis. Let us all reflect upon the reasons for that.
But most to the point, protesters are not in charge of who shows up to a protest. You can chastise protesters all you want for holding the wrong flags, or the wrong signs, or for blocking a street or putting up a barricade of furniture, but the notion that unorganized street protests against a sudden-onset injustice have any sort of leadership in place to prevent whatever it is you're opposing is ... not realistic.
These are people who decided that overt fascist rule was too much, and stepped out of their homes to say so. There are people demanding their government act with integrity; there are people who have seen so many government injustices that they do not believe redemption is possible. They are your neighbors, but they are not your servants. They are the ones who showed up.
The other iron rule of large-scale street protests (or celebrations) is that any such crowd inevitably attracts, for lack of a better term, loner weirdos who are there solely to commit criminal acts. I promise you the crowds on the street do not need to be told that lighting a Waymo on fire is a bad "look" on television. You can point it out as much as you like, but the people lighting Waymos on fire are likely to be people who are on the street because they want to light something on fire, not because they want to be part of any greater movement than that.
Look at the number of city sports championships that are met with burning cars and broken ship windows—mass property damage inflicted during celebratory events. That's the baseline here. Nobody's lighting those cars on fire to "make a point."
So yes, by all means, we can all agree that protesters against ICE's campaign of rendition and public endangerment should not commit arson. But let's not pretend the people doing the arson are sifting through pundit commentaries to see that advice. Some percentage of human beings are, always and forever, not going to listen.
And yet the protests must continue, whether those fringe figures listen or don't.
The response to a fascist dismantling of our rights and our laws will never, ever, be pure. It is impossible, and would be impossible even if our would-be authoritarians were not eagerly goading violence for the sake of instigating more of it. If you want mass opposition to Trump's corruption, Miller's psychopathy, and Vought's desired criminalization of non-conservative thought, this is what it will look like. It will involve blocking access to federal buildings. It will look like unnamed civilians kicking tear gas canisters away from the crowd and back towards whoever fired them. It will, if protesters meet with even the smallest preview of success, see standoffs between heavily armed militias deputizing themselves in the hopes of committing violence on Dear Leader's behalf.
All the while, Trump himself will mutter and spin his wheels inside his now-gilded office, an incompetent man who knows less and less about what his advisers are doing but who will believe that any pushback amounts to a conspiracy against his dementia-addled self.
I still have some optimism that America will reject the Republican push to authoritarian lawlessness, not because I believe the nation is so decent a place as to reject it on the merits but because the current ownership of America is in the hands of very wealthy people who don't give a shit about things but who will be brought closer and closer to ruin as the corresponding economic collapse sets in. Deporting cancer patients meets no opposition among our Chosen Elites; burning Wall Street wealth to ash, though, now that's the stuff of Cocktail Riots.
I do not have optimism that this rejection happens before the nation descends into violence. I wish I did; I know of no historic case in which fascism was defeated through non-violent means once it got to the point of domestic military deployments and trumped-up arrests of regime opponents, but perhaps someone does.
What I do know is that Trump is a very stupid man, he has surrounded himself with a small army of people even stupider than that, and all of their actions so far have been premised on the theory that they will engage in whatever violence or corruption or criminality they want but miraculously be able to dodge every disaster their actions unleash.
They presume the military will start killing people on behalf of a man who put a drunken television host in their Pentagon. They presume the National Guard will impose martial law and that the nation will simply obey. They presume that bullets will fly in every direction but theirs, and then a miracle occurs, and then the Heritage Foundation gets to rule government forever.
Given the havoc they have created everywhere in government due to their incompetence, from the bond markets to world trade to firing enormous chunks of the core federal workforce before discovering that, oops, we really cannot do without nuclear safety experts and the like, you might think that Miller and Trump's other advisers might be reconsidering their confidence on this one. You might think that Republican lawmakers might begin to wonder whether their precious careers will truly be saved by going along with all of it.
But nope. Their confidence remains rock-steady, it seems. Surely, nothing will go wrong if we order the military to patrol American streets so that we can more efficiently rendition or imprison millions for the sake of Stephen Miller's ability to orgasm.
We'll see.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.