There's no wrong way to protest fascism

The conversation around the invasion of LA gets it wrong

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President Donald Trump has sent nearly 5,000 Marines and members of the National Guard into Los Angeles to crack down on protestors, who have spent the past several days being baited and assaulted by the ICE and the LAPD.

The Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has requested a waiver to allow federal military forces to arrest protesters during the occupation.

And the political media, instead of rising to meet this perilous moment, with the nation now unquestionably in a totalitarian death spiral, is dedicating significant time to examining the etiquette and accessories of the protesters who assembled to protect their friends, families, and neighbors from illegal raids and indiscriminate arrests conducted by masked federal agents.

The fascists are winning, and not simply because they command a vast propaganda machine that broadcasts their warped and vile talking points to tens of millions of Americans. Perhaps more consequentially, they have also captured much of the supposedly mainstream and objective media, as well as no small percentage of what is ostensibly supposed to be the opposition party.

Trump administration officials, including Noem and chronic constipation sufferer Stephen Miller, have sought to build consent for the increasingly indiscriminate and illegal abduction of children and innocent day laborers by maligning whole ethnicities, nationalities, and communities in Nazi-esque fashion. And as their shock troops stormed the streets of LA, beating and arresting protestors for impeding access to the Home Depot parking lot, conservatives have almost effortlessly shifted the narrative to a referendum on those who are standing up to the iron fist of the police state.

Monday and Tuesday were dominated by agitating debate over the conduct of the Angelenos being trampled on by armed agents of the state. Conservatives and even some Democrats condemned protestors for carrying Mexican flags in support of the immigrant neighborhoods where Hispanic families have been targeted, terrorized, and arrested, baiting anchors on CNN and pundits sitting around Twitter into pointless debates about optics and symbolism. Never mind that they wrap themselves in the Israeli flag whenever they get an opportunity; the longer they continue to repeat the same talking point, the less likely it is that their hypocrisy will ever enter the conversation.

The destruction of a few driverless taxis has received far more attention and condemnation than efforts by plainclothes federal agents to seize children from elementary schools by lying about having parental consent.

Rallies with hot dog carts and Tejano bands are presented as dangers to American sovereignty, described as escalating threats by the sloppy alcoholic secretary of defense, who sits in a DC command center, granted the unearned credulousness that reporters would never dream of giving even a single protestor.

Americans have been drilled into reflexively siding with law enforcement and demanding perfection of the oppressed, so married to the sanctity of individual property rights that preservation of private wealth becomes the litmus test for righteousness, not the underlying cause at the heart of the protest. Similarly, Stephen Miller’s deranged lies about LA’s immigrant population, maligning them them as criminals, are somehow supposed to justify tanks rolling through the streets.

This is why the NY Post can post about a few guys stealing from an Adidas and Apple store in LA and it is implicitly seen as a significant moral strike against tens of thousands of protestors. Imagine siding with the jackbooted thugs who are snatching children from their elementary schools because some guys stole some sneakers.

It’s only a trap if you surrender

The enforced disdain is also why Politico can run anonymous quotes from Republicans convinced that they’ve scored a political victory by unleashing the military on Americans.

“We couldn’t script this any better,” one gleeful person close to the White House tells my Playbook colleague Dasha Burns. “Democrats are again on the ‘20’ side of an 80-20 issue. … It’s the same thing that won [Trump] the election.”

In the eyes of the White House, Trump already had a clear mandate from voters for the mass deportation effort that was driving those ICE raids in LA. And aides believe the chaotic scenes that followed — masked protesters pelting police with rocks, setting fire to cars and waving Mexican flags on abandoned freeways — will only bolster public support for Trump’s hard-line approach. Indeed, every time a Dem speaks out against the president’s actions in LA, the White House is happier still.

Publishing the smug boasts of a fascistic regime celebrating is how insulated outlets like Politico and its journalists are from the peril facing everyday Americans — or at least how insulated they think they are from the application of autocracy.

The gloating Trump officials were at least in part reacting to the first set of poll numbers on the protests, which showed a plurality of the public registering disapproval of the protests. It’s little wonder why — public opinion in cases like this is shaped almost entirely by news coverage — and for reporters used to soulless reactionary political strategy, it amounted to a final judgment on the worthiness of the protests.

And if it didn’t, they wouldn’t say otherwise, considering ABC’s decision to cut Terry Moran loose after the White House objected to his inarguable description of Stephen Miller as a bilious hater.

This is the exact same playbook that conservatives have run over and over again for decades, including in 2020 in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Unable to justify the murder of George Floyd, they shifted the focus to the attacking the demonstrations, using brief spasms of police-induced violence to condemn millions of protestors writ large. Sen. Tom Cotton even wrote a self-referential sequel to his “Send In The Troops” op-ed that was published in the New York Times five years ago.

Instead of calling their bluff, Democrats in many cases have acquiesced to the inevitability that Republicans will win the messaging war once again; more than a few lawmakers, including California’s own Adam Schiff, rushed to preemptively condemn violence that had not yet broken out, providing pretense for Trump to heed Cottons advice. Just a few days ago, 75 Democrats in the House voted yes on a resolution thanking ICE for its hard work sweeping poor migrants from the front of hardware stores and elementary schools.

Sen. John Fetterman, a troll in every sense of the world, explicitly invoked the Black Lives Matter movement when he castigated protestors today, as if an organic nationwide uprising against injustice was a regrettable lapse in judgment.

“We should have learned the lesson back in 2020,” he told CNN. “Absolutely, there was righteous outrage over what happened to George Floyd, but that never means that you can support or, be quiet, if there's destruction or rioting and destroying and looting and those kinds of things."

Except that during the Black Lives Matter protests, Americans did broadly support the protestors, and 60% of them even told pollsters that they did not think it’d be appropriate for Trump to send in the military to put down the demonstrations. Likewise the second day of polling on the military’s invasion of Los Angeles, which saw vast disapproval for Trump’s decision to turn the Marines and National Guard against citizens peacefully assembled. Trump’s handling of deportations is also deeply underwater, and his overall immigration numbers tanked while Democrats were on the offensive over the disappearing of Kilmer Abrego Garcia.

The lesson to take from 2020 — and just about every other national conflagration since Trump was first elected — shouldn’t be to run away from activists for the sake of optics. Democrats have suffered more than anything else for their lack of conviction under fire and unwillingness to stand up for anyone or anything. A nation obsessed with personal freedom is not naturally inclined to support martial law; people must be relentlessly inundated with photos, videos, and messaging that insist that protestors are the other.

That a political opposition might allow fleeting poll numbers to dictate just how much it’s willing to stand up to a dictator is exactly the sort of thing that leads to full-blown fascism, but moral hangups aside, it’s clear that this moment demands a constant political offensive. That doesn’t mean overtly supporting violence, either, because sporadic moments of disorder are distractions from what should be a nonstop focus on the Trump administration’s reign of terror, from the Gestapo-led disappearances and deportations to the military occupation of the country’s second-largest city.

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