What is happening in Los Angeles is what it looks like when the fascists are winning. This needs to be said, and everyone needs to hear it.
During Trump’s 2024 election campaign, he said that he would use the National Guard to enforce his immigration decrees. And here he is, doing exactly that. The protests in Los Angeles were relatively small, disorganized, and certainly had less violence than, say, the January 6th riots in Washington, where Trump didn’t bother to call in the military, but Trump leapt on the protests as an excuse to do what he told everyone he was going to do: use the military to occupy US cities. This is straight from the fascism playbook, as are many of the moves he’s taken to get here.
Trump waited until after he had purged the Pentagon, FBI, and Justice Department of opposition. At the Pentagon, Trump canned Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. without explanation, while Hegseth fired five other top officers, including Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti (the first woman to lead the Navy and serve on the Joint Chiefs), Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife, and the top military lawyers for the Army, Navy and Air Force.
At the FBI, the purge included six of the most senior execs and a bunch of field offices from all across the country. Some key figures include Robert Wells (national security branch), Ryan Young (intelligence branch), Robert Nordwall (counterintelligence and cyber), and David Sundberg (assistant director of the Washington field office). The Washington field office was particularly targeted due to its central role in the January 6th investigations and Jack Smith’s inquiries into Trump! It hasn’t been subtle.
At the Justice Department, well, it’s been a particularly bloodbath. At the Civil Rights Division, 70% of the division’s lawyers left due to Trump. More than two dozen Justice Department lawyers who worked on Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump were fired after Trump’s inauguration. Longtime officials were removed from leadership positions, including Bruce Swartz in the office of international affairs, George Toscas, deputy assistant attorney general in the national security division, and others. But in February, there was the “Thursday Night Massacre,” where seven prosecutors quit in protest after being ordered to dismiss federal corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams.
Not to mention, holy shit, ICE is just the fucking worst. It’s a criminal racket, not a law enforcement agency. It has been repeatedly found guilty of systematic violations of the Constitution, such as Gonzalez v. ICE, where they “unlawfully detained thousands of suspected immigrants,” and in Garcia Ramirez v. ICE, where the court ruled ICE was “violating the law in the manner in which it detains 18 year-olds.” ICE has also been found guilty of operating facilities because, this is a quotation, “negligent medical care, unsafe and filthy conditions, racist abuse of detainees, inappropriate pepper-spraying of mentally ill detainees and other problems that, in some cases, contributed to detainee deaths.” I could go on, but I think that demonstrates that ICE shouldn’t be in charge of a hot dog stand, much less enforcing the law. They aren’t protecting us from criminals. They are the criminals.
Seriously, the more you dig into this, the worse it gets! ICE, like all federal agencies, operates with prosecutorial immunity that protects the agency from criminal liability. Which is why it feels free to ignore court rulings. What can the courts do? Literally nothing. At the same time, ICE agents are protected by qualified immunity, which protects agents from civil lawsuits unless they violate “clearly established” constitutional rights, which are interpreted by the Justice Department and courts so narrowly that unless the cases are “virtually identical” to precedent cases that nothing happens, which is a catch-22! Unless abuses are already covered by existing precedent cases, strictly speaking, there is no effective way to get more precedent cases! Not to mention that the Justice Department works with ICE to make causes but is also their legal oversight organization, which creates organizational immunity!
That’s a lot to get to Trump calling in the National Guard in Los Angeles, but it is the required backstory to set the stage. I understand that all of this is complex and difficult to manage, particularly since keeping track of Trump’s bullshit is a full-time job. Every day, there’s a new, batshit insane story – like the flame war between Elon Musk and Trump, which felt important, even though it was not – but Trump is doing things with powerful and systematic effects. It’s a lot, but where we are in terms of the military, ICE, the FBI, and the Justice Department matters because Trump is bringing all of this together in one place at the same time. In almost any other administration, even one of the purges would have set off so many warning bells that you could hear them from orbit, but the Trump administration is getting away with murder by exhausting all of us. That’s one of the ways that fascism wins. It exhausts us.
In Los Angeles, though, we’re seeing some of the last guardrails come off. No one in the National Guard is standing down. The cops are loving this. ICE can do as it pleases. They are, through their silence, signaling that they’re okay with being used this way. I know that military organizations rarely have the nerve to confront right-wing tyrants – they generally loves them some right-wing tyranny! – and the military has been purged. But Trump is getting away with it. He’s even using the word “insurrection” because, mark my words, the endgame is to use the Insurrection Act to use the military as a police department under his absolute control.
I have two calls to action. The first is, dear liberals, buy a gun and learn to use it. Fascists don’t back down until they’re scared.
Second, it’s time to demand that our politicians and press start to call Trump a fascist, both in the US and abroad. They all need to start acknowledging that this is a fascist authoritarian takeover of the US government. The weight of the word “fascist” is still heavy, and it demands action. Domestically, it cuts through the obfuscatory bullshit of the courts and Republicans. Let them try to rationalize how engineering a crisis to send troops into a US city isn’t fascist! How purging the FBI, Pentagon, science agencies, and universities isn’t fascist! It is a word that demands action! Even rebellion. Even armed revolution.
Abroad, if our allies started to call Trump a fascist, it would likewise demand action. They would have to cut military, political, and economic ties with the US. It would break alliances, require boycotts, and possibly mean war.
Fascism causes all of those things anyway. You use the word not because you want rebellion and war but because you don’t. You want to stop it now while it can be stopped without extreme measures. But to stop it, you must call it what it is and demand the same of our politicians and press. Trump is a fascist. MAGA is a fascist movement, and we need to treat them like fascists. Make everyone choose: side with the fascists or against them. And, remember, silence equals consent. You have to say it, and you have to make politicians and the press say it: Trump is a fascist.
Please, someone, prove me wrong. But make it proof, not wishful thinking.
PS – As I wrote this, Trump sent in the Marines. He’s promising more ICE raids, and why not? Despite news reports of “stand-offs” and protests “all over America,” to quote CNN, so what? When was the last time protests became something else, something threatening to the status quo? Fucking useless performative middle-class outrage! These useless assholes couldn’t stop Joe Biden – a member of their own fucking party – from supporting genocide in Gaza or giving additional billions to the very organizations that are why they’re protesting. The very people who are “organizing” the marches are the first to say, “Now, now, don’t anyone get violent! Or do anything else. No strikes or boycotts, either. What we’ll do is have a nice, happy little march and go home, and then everyone can pat themselves on the back on social media. We’ll make a nice hashtag! That worked so well with #BLM and #Occupy and #metoo without any backlash that made things worse because we all just went home and made some tweets! This obviously works!” Again, please, someone, prove me wrong.