Some Notes on the City of Angels and the Nature of Violence

I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades – the advance of rights for nature, women, children, indigenous peoples, BIPOC and immigrants/refugees, queer people, trans people, people with disabilities, workers, the right of us all to be free from being poisoned by food, water, air. It's begun in Los Angeles, the city of angels, a city of almost four million people, almost half of them Latino, in a region of almost twelve million that two thousand California National Guards cannot and will not subjugate. All they can do is punish and incite, and I hope that some of the protesters are telling them they're violating their mission and maybe the law. In the nonwhite-majority state of California, which recently advanced to become the fourth largest economy in the world.

We are escalating because they are escalating. But as a smart guy on BlueSky noted, he's "seeing a massive divide online between Angelenos of all political stripes who understand that the protests in LA yesterday were mostly peaceful and any violence was ICE-initiated and East Coast establishment liberals lecturing 'the left' on how riots just amplify right wing talking points." This is familiar ground, the idea that no matter what the right does, however much the systematic violence harms us, however horrible a police murder or another violation of human rights such as ICE's grabbing people off the street, we have the responsibility to remain not just peaceful but peaceful in a way that pleases our enemies. It becomes collective responsibility and collective guilt because even if a few people in a few places torch something or break something it's supposed to indict the whole movement, and has often been used to justify more institutional violence.

Here it's also useful to make a distinction between property damage (which protesters in the USA in our era have done from time to time) and harming living beings (which is largely something done by law enforcement in these demonstrations). Property destruction can be dramatic theater (suffragists in early twentieth-century London broke all the plate glass windows on a stretch of shopping street; no living beings were at risk), can be actual protection (the firefighters taking an axe to the door to rescue the people from the blaze), or acts of intimidation (the husband breaking the furniture to convey to his wife he can break her too). All I've read about so far in L.A. is property damage by protestrs, while we've seen many kinds of violence and intimidation from the heavily armored and armed thugs serving the Trump Administration's war on immigrants.

One thing to remember is that they'll claim we're violent no matter what; the justification for this ongoing attack on immigrants and people who resemble immigrants in being brown is the idea that America is suffering an invasion and in essence only a certain kind of white person belongs here in this place that was never all white, and here in California which was and is first and last indigenous and then inhabited by Mexicans before the US seized this territory hitherto claimed by Mexico through its 1846-48 war of aggression.

During the first Trump term the fact that a few people chose to literally punch Nazis led to the term Antifa, as in anti-fascist, and then a long pretense that Antifa was an organized criminal syndicate--the right even blamed their own January 6, 2021, rampage on Antifa for a while. But Antifa as an organized national whatever was as mythical as unicorns and dragons, and as ever the mainstream media did little to nothing to push back at the fairytales. Also, when did being an anti-fascist become a bad thing? I mean I know it's bad if you're a fascist, but how did the mainstream get on board?

After the very successful mass protests and blockades at the Seattle World Trade Organization ministerial in Seattle in late 1999, that media perpetuated a myth that the activists were violent, repeating specific lies the police told and making charges that were absolutely and utterly factually untrue. In its coverage of the 2004 Republican convention, the New York Times declared on its front page, "“five years ago in Seattle, for example, there was widespread arson.” There wasn't, and the literal dumpster fire there might've been started by a police tear-gas canister (I spent months, kind of as an experiment, trying to get them to publish a retraction and wrote about the process here).

But there was epic police violence against protesters and others just walking down the street in Seattle in 1999, resulting in hospitalizations and payouts by the city of Seattle (I wish that the stingy right would recognize how expensive police brutality is for cities; NYC alone spent more than $200 million in 2024 on this). Remember that in the huge protests over the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, police partially blinded eight people in a single day with their "sublethal" bullets, right-wingers repeatedly drove cars into the crowds, a right-wing teenager shot two protesters with a semi-automatic weapon and was lionized for it, and a member of the Boogaloo Bois murdered a federal guard in Oakland near a Black Lives Matter protest with the intention of "fomenting another civil war."

I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents, not least because nothing ever will and they'll lie and distort no matter what. The very idea that we should endeavor to please them and meet their ever-shifting rules of engagement--well I wrote the "She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything" here a while back: "In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

This is a moment when solidarity is essential, and we weaken our cause with internal squabbling about tactics, the necessity or inadequacy of nonviolent strategies, and the rest. Keep your eyes on the enemy and the big picture. I also believe that those of us who are older, whiter, safer from the threats of state violence do not have the moral ground to lecture the younger, browner and blacker, more directly impacted on what they should and should not do. As Martin Luther King, Jr., our great prophet of nonviolence, said: "In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?” They'll hear it now, if they listen to the people directly, or pick media sources that are not corrupted by deference to police and Trumpist versions when those versions are lies. Because lies are also a kind of violence, violence against the truth, against the compact we have that words describe realities, and we live in a shared reality. Lies are also thefts of our right to know what the speaker knows, sabotage of that shared reality, of meaning itself.

And there are so many other kinds of violence at work in this country, old and new. This nation was founded on two epic forms of violence, the enslavement of Black people and their kidnapping from Africa for this purpose, and the genocide against Native Americans to seize their lands and destroy their cultures and sovereignty, and a third should always be included: the normalized denial of almost all rights to any and all women, including economic, social, educational, and political equality and participation, the rights to bodily autonomy, to dignity, and to protection under the law from male violence.

The Trump Administration is a huge surge of almost every kind of violence: Trump is an adjudicated rapist who put a man in charge of the military who himself paid a settlement to a woman who charged him, credibly, with rape; Trump has pardoned the ultra-violent January 6th rioters (if you want to call anything a riot or an attack on police, start there), has routinely threatened violence against his rivals, his enemies, and the press, has turned the federal government into his own personal vendetta machine, and arguably is making his second term a revenge tour against America for rejecting him in 2020.

The violence against the environment being wrought with direct attacks on climate legislation and action, including fuel efficiency standards, protection of nature, national parks, public lands, forests, clean water, food safety standards, and public health will have a profound impact. The ongoing right-wing attack against reproductive rights is resulting in terror, oppression, criminalization, lack of access to appropriate medical care, and too many near-deaths and actual deaths of pregnant women. The dismantling of USAID has already, by one count, led to a third of a million deaths overseas, 103 per hour. It's shocking how little attention that's getting.

It is also an attack on the Constitution, the rule of law, the separation of powers, the judiciary branch, and the functionality of the federal government as well as the benefits due to veterans, collectors of social security. It's another kind of attack on truth, fact, history, and science, which authoritarians tend to see (correctly) as rival systems of power, and which are democratic in their essence. For example, measles is a dangerous highly contagious disease that vaccination can largely prevent, and that's true whether you're an epidemiologist or a crank; that fact does not yield to agendas. Immigrants are not just a net benefit to this nation's economy but an absolute necessity to the function of many parts of it, and that too is a demonstrable fact. The Trump Administration is waging war against First Amendment guarantees of a free press, freedom of speech (with the imprisonment of immigrant students for voicing their opinions, shakedowns of networks, and pursuit of journalists who voiced their opinions), and freedom of assembly. It's a war against you, me, us, what this country is supposed to be as established in the Constitution, and against nature.

As Heather Cox Richardson put it in her latest newsletter, "Flatbed train cars carrying thousands of tanks rolled into Washington, D.C., yesterday in preparation for the military parade planned for June 14. On the other side of the country, protesters near Los Angeles filmed officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) throwing flash-bang grenades into a crowd of protesters. The two images make a disturbing portrait of the United States of America under the Donald J. Trump regime as Trump tries to use the issue of immigration to establish a police state." It is up to us to defeat that agenda, and up to all of us who are not those under attack by this administration to stand with them and for them. At its heart the Trump Administration is violently divisive, isolationist, and segregationist, and solidarity is our first duty and most profound rejection of that agenda.