American Psychos
The White House wages a vicious terror campaign against Los Angeles
Wow, it’s been a week.
As ICE and DHS agents continue to storm through the greater LA area, puppy killer Kristi Noem, surrounded by her ICE goons, held a “press conference” yesterday in which Senator Alex Padilla was roughed up, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for the crime of asking a valid question.
The video speaks for itself. Despite Noem’s lies Senator Padilla clearly announced who he was before being tackled to the ground.
The beatings WILL continue until morale improves. Instilling fear is the goal. And during Noem’s speech she gave the game away:
“We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership that this Governor Newsom and this mayor placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city,''
Burdensome leadership? Socialist? WTAF is she talking about? So, what, DHS is going to “liberate” a major American city from our own elected government? How will that work, exactly? Will ICE storm the Mayor and Governor’s offices and replace them with a junta of their own choosing?
The message is clear: Trump and Noem have decided that California and Los Angeles are the test cases for exercising their raw power. And if you do not bend the knee and kowtow to their aggressive ICE raids, you WILL see soldiers in YOUR city and YOUR elected representatives might be replaced as well.
Senator Padilla is the son of Mexican immigrants, Santos and Lupe Padilla. He went into politics in 1995 because of the anti-immigrant Proposition 187, the California measure that knocked all undocumented people off of many public services, including schools. He’s been a champion of immigrant communities ever since.
Governor Gavin Newsom had his own take:
I never thought I would see the day when our own Federal Government would openly and blatantly terrorize a major city like this. And then aggressively handcuffing a sitting US Senator for simply asking valid questions during a press conference is just the icing on the cake.
The Authoritarian Playbook
Meanwhile the Right Wing Propaganda Machine continues to pour gasoline, thermite, napalm, dirty rags, and whatever flammable materials they can find on this raging fire. They are literally using AI-generated images to rile up the rubes and make them hate LA and California even more than they do. They continue to run the same videos of burning Waymo cars from last weekend to insist that LA is burning to the ground in the same way they did during the BLM riots of yesteryear. They continue to foment rage against Democrats who are pushing back against Trump’s authoritarian tactics. They continue to tear apart this nation with their lies and anti-immigrant propaganda that pushes this nation closer and closer to an actual civil war.
Let me tell you this: LA is NOT burning to the ground. Protests have actually been largely peaceful save for the same typical agents provocateurs who come crawling out of the woodwork at night to commit havoc around the same parts of downtown LA. From The Guardian:
But for many Angelenos life goes on as normal, with people carrying out their lives far from the smoke-filled scenes and skirmishes that are confined to just a few blocks.
“When I walk around downtown Los Angeles – where I live – it’s a quiet, sunny day with light traffic, people walking dogs, meeting friends for lunch, or getting coffee,” Tom Mott, 58, said. “All the rhetoric about the city being ‘on fire’ or Mayor Bass and Governor Newsom being on the side of ‘criminals’ is puffed up nonsense.”
And this is exactly the same playbook that has been used by authoritarians in the past:
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
TOTALITARIANISM The Origins of Totalitarianism Chapter Eleven: The Totalitarian Movement II: Totalitarian Organization — Hannah Arendt
Soldiers in the streets
National Guard troops who are tasked with protecting ONE Federal building in downtown LA are not happy with being used as props for Trump and Noem’s political games.
From The Guardian:
“The sentiment across the board right now is that deploying military force against our own communities isn’t the kind of national security we signed up for,” said Sarah Streyder of the Secure Families Initiative, which represents the interests of military spouses, children and veterans.
“Families are scared not just for their loved ones’ safety, although that’s a big concern, but also for what their service is being used to justify.”
However Federal Judge Charles Breyer (brother of SCOTUS Justice Stephen Breyer) just ruled yesterday that Trump broke the law by commandeering those soldiers and must return command back to Governor Newsom.
“It’s not that a leader can simply say something and then it becomes it. It’s a question of is a leader, a president or the governor, following the law as set forth in both the Constitution and statutes,” he continued. “That’s what a president, a governor or any leader must act under. Otherwise, they become something other than a constitutional officer.”
The ruling, California Attorney General Rob Bonta told reporters, is “a critical early indication that upon quick review of the facts of our case, the court sees the merits of our argument.”
“We aren’t in the throes of a rebellion,” Bonta said. “We are not under threat of an invasion. Nothing is preventing the federal government from enforcing federal law. The situation in Los Angeles last weekend didn’t warrant the deployment of military troops, and their arrival only inflamed the situation.”
Trump immediately appealed to the 9th Circuit which predictably ruled last night that he can retain command through the weekend. In a late-night order Thursday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused a court order that would have required President Trump to return control of the thousands of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles to Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Detainee mistreatment
Meanwhile disturbing reports of ICE detainees being held in basement offices without food or water are emerging. From The Guardian:
One family with three children were held inside a Los Angeles-area administrative building for 48 hours after being arrested on Thursday immediately after an immigration court hearing, according to lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), which is providing non-profit legal services in the region.
The children, the youngest of whom is three years old, were provided a bag of chips, a box of animal crackers and a mini carton of milk as their sole rations for a day. Agents told the family they did not have any water to provide during the family’s first day in detention; on the second day, all five were given a single bottle to share. The one fan in the room was pointed directly towards a guard, rather than towards the families in confinement, they told lawyers.
These are the “hardened criminals” that Trump promised to deport. Detainees are being picked up at work, held in deplorable conditions, then either immediately deported or shipped off to the high desert in California and Texas. Detainees are denied access to their families, their lawyers, or immigration court and are instead tricked into signing documents that guarantee their expulsion from the country. Most have no criminal records and many were in the process of obtaining citizenship themselves.
Things are happening so fast right now that it’s almost impossible to keep up. But it’s beyond obvious right now that Trump’s goal is complete and total domination, terror, and dictatorial control. However Americans are finally waking up to that reality just in time for tomorrow’s massive “No Kings” protests during Trump’s birthday Russian-style military parade in DC. It will be interesting to see what happens in Los Angeles tomorrow as previous protests had no police presence.
The push back
It’s up to We The People to push back against this rising fascism before it’s too late. Our democracy isn’t just hanging by a thread right now. Our democracy is battered, bruised, and broken by Trump and the psychotic goons that surround him. His raw brutality is an indication of weakness, not strength, and he clearly believes that anyone who disagrees with his pogrom against immigrants needs to feel the boot against their necks. Trump has transformed the Department of Homeland Security into his own personal Gestapo and made Kristi Noem into his own tool of repression. We all knew something like this would be possible when George W. Bush created the agency in the aftermath of 9/11.
But We The People ARE pushing back on social media. Videos of ICE arrests are percolating throughout the internet and a counter narrative is forming against Trump’s anti-immigrant propaganda. From The New York Times:
A recent CBS News survey found that most Americans believe the president’s crackdown is prioritizing “dangerous criminals.” But videos out of Los Angeles and across the country paint a different picture. They show ICE arresting mothers, fathers, co-workers and friends of U.S. citizens. Not hardened criminals, but valued community members. The videos show ICE snatching workers outside of a Home Depot, at a local carwash, on the street. They show parents on lockdown at a school graduation because ICE was nearby. These videos, which are going viral, have the power to destabilize Mr. Trump’s narrative that his immigration operations are about law and order.
As The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, the highly visible raids in Los Angeles resulted from a directive from Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, who urged agents to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” including at 7-Elevens and Home Depots. It was never going to be possible for Mr. Trump to keep his campaign promise of mass deportations without rounding up innocent people, because the world he and Mr. Miller created in which millions of undocumented gang members are running wild doesn’t exist. Mr. Miller’s insatiability means that arrests that once happened mostly in the shadows are now happening in broad daylight, and that people are capturing evidence.
These videos are particularly dangerous to Mr. Trump because they expose something his politics can’t touch: the fierce humanity of people willing to risk everything for one another. They don’t just document resistance — they ignite it. They move people not just to care, but to act, to intervene, to put their own bodies on the line.
It is a well known fact that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than citizens. In fact even the US House said the very same thing and published this data last year. The reason why we’re even in this place today is because Stephen Miller insisted immigrant arrests increase from 1000 people to 3000 people PER DAY. So obviously ICE decided to go after the low hanging fruit and raid immigrants at their workplaces, court hearings, and Home Depots.
In fact Trump’s heavy-handed tactics are turning off Americans as his approval ratings continue to drop. He was booed at his appearance to watch Les Misérables (ironically) at the Kennedy Center this week. Trump claims that Les Mis is his favorite production but he clearly misses the entire point of the story.
If you are planning to hit the streets tomorrow please stay safe. And support independent media because you are not getting the real story from the national Legacy Media who are pushing Trump’s agenda. MAGAs all over the country are pushing the narrative that ICE is only arresting hardened criminals and it’s important to push back against this narrative because We The People have far more power than Trump and his goons. Never forget that there are more of us than there are of them.