F**king Mondays: Are L.A Protests Helping Trump? Also: Russia vs Britain, and Greta Thunberg's Oppression Appropriation
Don't give Trump what he wants.
Welcome to another edition of “F**king Mondays!”. In the roundup today:
L.A is on fire, again
Ok, so Los Angeles isn’t literally on fire, but the anti-ICE protests and subsequent Trump administration crackdown is putting the city through another horrendous trauma it really doesn’t need.
The unfolding crisis is the perfect example of America’s current political dynamics. The left has walked yet again straight into a trap set by Trump and his cronies where they are giving him everything he needs to enact authoritarian reforms. Given Trump has framed immigration as an existential threat to the nation, protesters physically blocking ICE operations, setting cars on fire, and throwing molotov cocktails at the police plays directly into his narrative.
Some of the left have tried to downplay the violence, but it is real and it does no one any favors to ignore it. Here’s how CNN reported on it:
The level of violence across Los Angeles following anti-immigration enforcement protests is “disgusting,” LAPD police chief Jim McDonnell said late Sunday.
Twenty-seven people were arrested in the city yesterday. Some of the alleged crimes include throwing a Molotov cocktail at an officer and ramming a motorbike into a police line, McDonnell said in a news conference.
“This violence that I’ve seen is disgusting. It’s escalated now since the beginning of this incident. What we saw the first night was bad. What we’ve seen subsequent to that is getting increasingly worse and more violent. Tonight we had individuals out there shooting commercial grade fireworks at our officers. That can kill you,” he said.
This is why you need peaceful protest, not overreactions that spiral into chaos and destruction. This is something Martin Luther King understood acutely and why the Civil Rights movement was effective. The lesson is simple: don’t give the assholes what they want.
Don’t be under any illusion that Trump isn’t a giant asshole — the president is using the protests to further his authoritarian ambitions and has completely unnecessarily sent in the California National Guard to intimidate the protestors and show them who is boss. And if you had any doubts about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, his message on Truth/Social laid it out in stark, unambiguous terms:
“Invaded”. “Illegal”. “Aliens”. “Criminals”. “Migrant riots”. “Set free”.
This is not the language of a normal democratic leader, or the words of a president looking to deescalate an extremely volatile situation. These are the words of a wannabe despot gleeful that he has the perfect opportunity to flex his authoritarian muscles.
Trump’s immigration “reforms” have been deeply troubling so there is a real need for nationwide protests. Trump’s Executive Order 14159 vastly expanded the administration’s enforcement tools — it enables un-constitutional expedited removal without court hearings, the end of birthright citizenship, visa restrictions and travel bans, the use of Guantánamo Bay for migrant detention etc, etc. The ICE raids have been terrifying for communities around the nation, and by design.
This all needs to be challenged via peaceful protest and political coordination. But when you start chucking chunks of concrete at federal agents, burning American flags, and blocking freeways (a cardinal sin in Los Angeles) you lose the moral high ground.
So now Trump has exactly what he wants — a giant crisis he can use to play the tough guy.
This is, incidentally, exactly how Trump will try to extend his term in 2028. ICE raids will provoke mass protests, a small faction of idiots will take it too far, and then Trump will claim only he can fix it — but only if he stays. If you want to understand how fascists consolidate power, this is a perfect example.
Most of the protestors are peaceful, and their fears and objections are well founded. But the only way to defeat authoritarianism is with discipline, strategy, and above all else, maintaining the moral high ground.
Russia is at war with the UK?
There’s a fascinating and extremely unnerving piece in the Guardian on the UK finally waking up to the existential threat Russia poses not just to Ukraine, but to Britain itself. In an interview with former White House Russia adviser and current Labour new defense adviser, Fiona Hill argues that Russia is actually at war with the UK:
“Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” Hill said, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as a starting point to Moscow becoming “a dominant military power in all of Europe”.
As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already “menacing the UK in various different ways,” she said, citing “the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they’re putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.”
The conclusion, Hill said, was that “Russia is at war with us”. The foreign policy expert, a longtime Russia watcher, said she had first made a similar warning in 2015, in a revised version of a book she wrote about the Russian president with Clifford Gaddy, reflecting on the invasion and annexation of Crimea.
“We said Putin had declared war on the west,” she said. At the time, other experts disagreed, but Hill said events since had demonstrated “he obviously had, and we haven’t been paying attention to it”. The Russian leader, she argues, sees the fight in Ukraine as “part of a proxy war with the United States; that’s how he has persuaded China, North Korea and Iran to join in”.
Hill is a long time observer of Putin and has said from the outset of the war that he will not stop at Ukraine unless he is forced to by a coordinated, sustained effort. Now that the Trump administration is effectively siding with Russia, Hill argues that it is now down to Europe to fund Ukraine’s war efforts and face the reality that the U.S. is no longer a reliable ally.
Hill believes Britain needs to militarize rapidly if it is to counter Russian aggression, because if Putin isn’t confronted directly, he’ll continue to take more.
Greta Thunberg “kidnapped”
I’m all for highlighting the plight of Gazans caught up in the merciless war being waged on them, but I also find the spectacle of hugely privileged liberals like Greta Thunberg coopting their suffering spectacularly distasteful.
In a stunt designed to draw maximum attention to herself, Thunberg chartered a small sailboat in an attempt to bring humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. The flotilla she was part of was predictably intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval forces and escorted to Ashdod port. All passengers were detained, fed, and medically checked.
But Thunberg is now claiming she has been “kidnapped” by the Israeli “occupational forces” and asked her supporters to “put pressure on the Swedish government” to “release me”:
In reality, Thunberg was warned well in advance not to try and enter Gaza, and she most certainly wasn’t “kidnapped”. Thunberg will be deported along with the other members of the flotilla back to their respective countries.
Thunberg’s framing of events is similar to the Columbia protestors’ claim that they were being “starved” during their campus occupation — a wildly exaggerated narrative that casts privileged activists as if they are political prisoners. In both cases, the protestors voluntarily placed themselves in confrontational situations and then adopted the language of oppression when they faced predictable consequences.
This isn’t solidarity. It’s self-indulgent performance coopting the narrative of the oppressed. It is also worth pointing out that if Thunberg had tried to aid Israel’s war effort and was intercepted by Hamas fighters, she wouldn’t be going back to Sweden any time soon.
It is increasingly difficult to have sensible conversations about the Israel/Gaza conflict, and that is mostly because hardened activists on both sides of the spectrum are more interested in moral posturing and confirming their own ideological biases than in seeking meaningful solutions.
Have a great week!
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I agree that the anti-ICE protests must be peaceful, and they overwhelmingly are. But these protests take place on public streets and other public locations. No matter how "disciplined" or "strategic" the protesters are, they can't control who shows up in these public places. Demanding 100% peaceful protest to maintain the "moral high ground" is yet another double standard imposed on the left, while violence or threat of violence from the right is baked in to the coverage and barely mentioned, or the victims are blamed.
Building off what Florence said, the Left is deathly afraid of poor optics, while the Right could care less and is immune to criticism, hypocrisy or scandal. I have a feeling MAGA agitators are embedded in these crowds much like they were at the George Floyd protests. Masked and personally adding violence into the mix, while whipping the crowd into a frenzy to do the same. And yet, the Left won't even consider this is happening because that was the defense MAGA used when defending January 6 (it was Antifa!). And so we just reluctantly assume some of our own got carried away. I find it hard to believe Trump would stage the National Guard and Marines without orchestrating the televised theater he needs to declare Martial Law nationwide and cancel the Midterms. And yet, our side is so afraid of optics, we just let it happen, and as you say, walk into the trap. Leading full circle back to Florence's point -- why must we NOT get angry, when we're protesting months and months (upon generations) of violence inflicted upon us?