Most of us believe that if we obey the law, we are otherwise free to live our lives the way we see fit. Most of us believe in live and let live. 

But the president’s military incursion into Los Angeles and the state of California should reveal something important about rightwing politics. 

There is no such thing.

In rightwing politics, you cannot be allowed to live your life the way you see fit if you are not among the chosen. You yourself are the problem in such a case. Your actions are beside the point. Your crime is your existence. You’re already a criminal and you will have no peace.

Liberals often fail to grasp this. When they hear talk of “illegal immigration,” for instance, they believe the issue is one of law and order, and the solution is better laws and better law enforcement. 

But no policy will satisfy rightwing politics, unless that policy requires the systematic punishment of people for the crime of their identity. 

And because no policy is satisfactory, there’s no point in compromise. Liberals often believe that there’s a middle ground on immigration. There isn’t. There’s only an ever-expanding sphere of conflict. 

First, it was a military incursion. Then, today, it was the violent removal of a United States senator from a press briefing about that incursion. Tomorrow, well, I don’t know, but it stands to get much worse.

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Senator Alex Padilla has been physically shoved to the ground and handcuffed for entering Kristi Noem's press briefing to ask a question.

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2025-06-12T18:40:39.855Z

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Key to rightwing success is getting us to doubt reality. Fact is, crossing the border without proper authorization is a petty crime, a misdemeanor on the first offense, no worse than reckless driving. 

But Donald Trump and his regime have made it seem like this petty crime is a crime against the state (the government is reportedly planning to send thousands of immigrants to Guantanamo Bay). 

Similarly, they have made it seem like small, brief and isolated protests in the city of Los Angeles are the equivalent of suicide bombers in Baghdad, a situation so lethal that it warrants an occupying army. 

“We are not going away,” Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem said today. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

California Senator Alex Padilla was at that briefing. He said he had questions. He was thrown out, wrestled to the floor and handcuffed. Evidently, the regime has designs on “liberating” LA, saving it from “socialists,” the way Putin “liberated Ukraine,” saving it from “Nazis.”

It’s important to establish the truth. So I got in touch with Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, a book and newsletter about technology, politics and power. He also lives in LA. He told me that what you’re seeing in the press is not what’s happening at home. 

The president and his media are busy portraying Los Angeles as if it were in ashes, burned to the ground. I’m guessing that’s not true. What are you seeing today? What’s the atmosphere like locally?

It’s been pretty surreal to see the news coverage and the social media feeds portray LA as if it’s erupting into violent chaos. This is absolute nonsense. Ninety-nine percent of the city is unaffected, and as many folks have pointed out, the area where protests — quite justified ones — have taken root is pretty much confined to a few blocks downtown. Where I live in West LA you would have no idea there’s any conflict.

So it’s particularly surreal to see the headlines coming in — Trump has activated the National Guard, circumventing a governor for the first time in decades, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is sending in Marines, and so on — because there’s simply nothing to justify it. Some protestors were throwing rocks? You need the Marines for that?

It becomes clear as day that the Trump administration was going to do all this no matter what. There was going to be a reaction to awful and illegal ICE raids, to masked figures abducting day laborers at Home Depot and so on. They were going to mobilize a militaristic response even if it was just one guy with a “F–k Trump” sign they could photograph and share on Fox and X to justify it. Living in LA, you’re living the grim absurdity of encroaching authoritarianism.

The most common image of violence was burning self-driving cars called Waymos. You wrote about that recently. What is the message that protesters were trying to convey? Is it legit in your view?

It’s hard to say for sure. I did my best to answer that first question in my piece by going to the scene and interviewing eyewitnesses, but ultimately it’s still speculation. What we do know is people were calling the Waymos “spy cars” in a nod to their capacity to serve as surveillance technologies. They collect environment data at all times, troves that are increasingly tapped by police departments. There is a growing animosity towards big tech. Especially since Silicon Valley has increasingly allied itself with the Trump administration. So it’s likely that there is a political element to the statement of burning the Waymos in a manner that pretty clearly was coordinated.

Given that ICE is using data collected on migrants by Silicon Valley firms to enact its raids, I would say that the grievance is legitimate.

Since the founding, politicians have flattered and courted rural white voters, even setting them against their fellow Americans in large cities. These people are often thought of as “God’s chosen.” How much anti-city bias do you see in the press corps’ reporting? Are people there in LA aware of it and how is it affecting politics? 

That seems to be a central part of the strategy here, one that’s been seized on by Republicans and conservatives forever. It’s mostly predicated on racism, right? The photos Trump, Fox and Musk want to share are those of masked brown people being unruly in the streets, preferably waving a Mexican flag. Those images are disseminated to audiences of rural whites — or the social imaginary of “rural whites”  — to stoke animus. Same as it ever was. People in LA are aware of this, and have been since the Rodney King unrest in the 1990s and beyond.

The Democrats have not really stood up for immigration as a social good. Nor have they stood up for immigration law. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, for instance. Not the crime it’s made out to be.) That said, your governor is offering a robust defense of immigration as well as the rule of law (if not perhaps particular immigration laws). What’s the sense down there of Gavin Newsom’s fight with Trump?

It’s a little disorienting. Newsom started off the second Trump term on uneven footing, doing his weird podcast with maga folks and not really coming out fighting like people wanted him to. But he seems to have remembered that standing up to Trump is good political theater as well as the morally correct thing to do, so folks are glad he’s speaking up. A lot of people have been waiting for this Newsom to show up.

Personally, I think Democrats’ abandonment of migrants has been, along with their blind eye to Gaza, one of the greatest moral failures of the modern era. Starting with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and on through now, Democrats seem completely in thrall to a consultant class that is telling them to stay away from immigration at all costs. 

As you say, there’s a powerful case to be made for immigration as a social good, that it is a key pillar of the ideal America itself — that it is a beautiful and crucial part of what made this country exceptional — but no one seems interested in making it. That’s a travesty, and a shame.

That might be because most Democrats accept as valid the rightwing complaint, which is that illegal immigration is a matter of law and order. Most Democrats still do not understand that the crime in question isn’t illegal entry. It’s migrants themselves, their existence in America. Maybe things would change if Democrats understood of what the “illegal” part of “illegal immigration” really means.

Perhaps. My read is that Democrats have decided that the consultant class is right that immigration is a “losing issue” — or that it’s just easier not to touch it and have shied away from it. They’ve ceded the entire issue to the GOP, which is both a moral and political mistake.

I think you’re right that Democrats get hung up on the “illegal” framing and allow that to justify inaction. But I’m not sure many would have the appetite to fight even if it were — somehow — even clearer that what Trump and the GOP are doing is staging an all-out assault on (nonwhite) immigrants, period. I’d like to be proven wrong, however.

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