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The L.A. Awakening: Repression, Resistance, and the Possibility of Radical Democratic Renewal
It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent.
Jun 10, 2025
The crackle of tear gas canisters and the rumble of tactical boots on asphalt echoed through Los Angeles this week as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), backed by federal agents and U.S. Marines, descended upon protestors decrying a sweeping series of immigration raids. What began as a protest against ICE quickly exploded into a broader protest. Progressive community members of all types flooded intersections, blocked freeways, and surrounded detention centers in a show of mass resistance. Federal forces responded with mass arrests, tear gas, and brute force—but the crowds didn’t disperse. They stayed. They returned. They grew.
The targets of the raids revealed the intent. ICE didn’t go after exploitative bosses or the companies violating labor laws. Instead, they rounded up garment workers, day laborers, and food delivery drivers—those whose labor keeps the city alive but whose status makes them vulnerable. Meanwhile, as Congress quietly pushed forward legislation providing major tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy, the manufactured “immigration emergency” shifted public attention away from growing inequality and back toward fear and division. The raids were less about enforcement than they were about distraction—shaping a narrative, channeling anger, and justifying control.
But this time, the usual script isn’t working. Instead of dividing people, the spectacle has clarified the real lines of conflict. Communities once siloed by race, language, or status are joining together—seeing the true threat not in each other but in those who profit from their separation. Warehouse unions, immigrant rights groups, tenant associations, and progressive local officials are increasingly aligned. A shared understanding is taking hold: the enemy is not the worker next to you—it is the elite profiting from your instability.
The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life.
This is also a stark illustration of the imperial boomerang in motion: the tools of empire—surveillance, militarized policing, psychological control—returning home. What was once deployed to suppress resistance abroad is now turned inward. But rather than subdue, this backlash is catalyzing a broader awakening. The brutality in Los Angeles has illuminated the deeper architecture of repression, drawing new political lines that unite across race, status, and geography. From LA to Gaza, the common thread is clear: state violence serves elite power, and the response from below is no longer fragmented. It is building into a global resistance that sees through the old divisions and names its adversary plainly—oligarchy.
Oligarchic Backlash and the Authoritarian-Financial Complex
President Trump’s activation of the National Guard under Title 10 and his readiness to deploy Marines from Camp Pendleton was never about public safety. It was a choreographed assertion of power meant to produce fear and reaffirm control. Helicopters circled. Tactical units patrolled neighborhoods. Cable news cycled images of property damage while ignoring the scenes of solidarity unfolding at the ground level.
This is how the authoritarian-financial complex operates—a system in which political repression and economic extraction are not separate but interdependent. Moments of unrest become business opportunities: more riot gear, more surveillance contracts, more privatized detention. Each crackdown funds the next. Each protest becomes another justification to expand the reach of state and corporate power.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the fusion of political repression and economic opportunism more blatant than in the machinery of immigration enforcement. The so-called “immigration crisis” has become a lucrative engine for private interests, with for profit prison companies expanding detention capacity well beyond ICE’s funded limits. The recent spike to over 48,000 detainees—far exceeding official capacity—is not a logistical error; it’s a business model. These companies are not just building prisons, they are lobbying for policies that fill them. Trump’s push to detain 100,000 people, coupled with doubled arrest quotas for ICE agents, has created an insatiable demand for space, surveillance, and services. Private contractors now profit not only from detention but from the entire apparatus of deportation—transportation, medical care, legal processing, and data collection—embedding their profit margins deep into the logic of state violence.
This financialization of immigration control explains why enforcement is not designed to succeed, but to persist. The spectacle of militarized raids and mass detentions serves a dual function: it energizes a political base while funneling billions in public money to politically connected firms. It’s no coincidence that watchdog agencies overseeing detention conditions were recently gutted, just as complaints of medical neglect and overcrowding mount. Nor is it accidental that local police forces, through programs like 287(g), are being deputized into ICE’s mission—blurring the line between civil enforcement and criminal policing, eroding community trust, and diverting resources from genuine public safety. This is not about border security; it’s about embedding a permanent state of exception, where fear and control are monetized, and immigrant lives are raw material for profit.
In Los Angeles, this convergence was unmistakable. While federal agents arrested undocumented workers, not one exploitative employer faced charges. The very actors enabling and profiting from illegal labor practices were shielded. The crackdown revealed the true purpose of enforcement: to preserve a system of racialized labor and elite impunity. But instead of breaking public resolve, the repression fueled it. Community leaders who might once have stood apart are now strategizing together. City council members are now publicly calling Trump’s actions “purposefully inflammatory”. The backlash is becoming organized—and political.
Anti-Oligarchic Backlash
The tactics on display in LA were not improvised. They were imported—from battlefields, occupied zones, and foreign policy handbooks. For decades, the U.S. honed its techniques of control overseas. Now, the same playbook—complete with unmarked vehicles, psychological warfare, and militarized response teams—is being applied domestically. This is the imperial boomerang: tactics of colonial dominance turned inward.
But as with foreign occupations, brute force rarely produces lasting submission. Instead, it deepens opposition. In LA, it is catalyzing an unprecedented alignment. Labor unions are holding joint press conferences with immigration organizers. Neighborhood coalitions are coordinating transportation and legal aid for arrestees. Local politicians are being forced to publicly clarify their loyalties: will they support their constituents, or will they remain silent in the face of elite-led repression?
Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.
Mayor Karen Bass’s denunciation of the federal intervention sharpened the political meaning of the crackdown. Framing Los Angeles as a "test case" for the erosion of local authority, Bass exposed the authoritarian logic at work: not the restoration of order, but the imposition of federal dominance through manufactured crisis. Bass’s warning cuts through the noise: Los Angeles wasn’t descending into chaos—it was pushed. The ICE raids didn’t restore order; they shattered it, unleashing fear across communities, including among legal residents. This wasn’t enforcement—it was the imperial boomerang in action. Tactics honed abroad to control foreign populations are now being used at home to fracture civic life and neutralize dissent. Under the guise of national security, federal power bypassed local authority, transforming the city into a living laboratory for domination.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to sue the Trump administration marks an even sharp escalation in the standoff, transforming the crisis into a battle over who holds real authority in a democratic society. By calling the federal deployment of the National Guard “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” Newsom exposed the move as a naked power grab—an attempt to override state control and impose federal force without consent. His defiance was visceral: “Arrest me,” he dared Trump’s border czar. This isn’t just legal pushback—it’s political resistance at the highest level, signaling that California won’t quietly submit to Washington’s manufactured chaos.
The backlash in Los Angeles is not isolated. Across the country, cities like San Francisco have become flashpoints for parallel demonstrations, where thousands marched peacefully in solidarity with immigrant communities and in defiance of federal raids. The widespread mobilizations—from San Francisco’s Mission District to streets in New York, Atlanta, and Seattle—underscore that this is not merely a local crisis but a national awakening. What is unfolding is a geographically diffuse yet politically unified resistance to the authoritarian-financial complex—one that links neighborhoods, cities, and struggles under a shared call for justice and accountability.
More profoundly, this moment is giving rise to a new sense of political identity. An identity not based on citizenship or party, but on a shared understanding of how power operates. It is increasingly clear that the real threat lies not with the person crossing a border, working a warehouse shift, or marching in the street—but with the structure that enriches itself by sowing division and suppressing dissent. The very tools of imperial control that were meant to fragment and subdue are now forging a unified opposition—turning the boomerang's trajectory from division into solidarity, from repression into resistance against the oligarchy itself.
Reclaiming Democratic Power
The movement taking shape in LA is not just a response to injustice. It is the beginning of something more ambitious: a challenge to the foundational myths of American political life. People are beginning to realize that democracy, as it has been practiced, too often serves as a tool of preservation—not transformation. But this moment is shifting that understanding.
The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.
As political theorist Camila Vergara argues, real democracy must be plebeian—built from below, driven by those excluded from traditional power. In LA, that principle is being tested. Street actions are converging with union demands, tenant struggles, and local policy fights. Coalitions are being built not around identity alone, but around material interest and shared opposition to oligarchic control.
This uprising is also forcing a reckoning within the Democratic Party. For too long, party leaders have paid lip service to justice while quietly enabling enforcement budgets and border expansion. Now, protestors are demanding clarity: who are you with? Those who remain silent risk political irrelevance. The bipartisan oligarchy is cracking, and a new political line is emerging—between those who serve concentrated power and those who challenge it.
A new democratic force is awakening. And it is not going back to sleep.
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The Next 48-140 Hours Are Critical for the Movement to End the Gaza Genocide
Within days, the Gaza Flotilla Sailboat with 12 onboard will reach the “Danger Zone.” How will the world respond?
Jun 07, 2025
Within 48 hours, the Israeli military will have killed hundreds more Palestinians in Gaza who are being starved to death, many killed this week as they were enticed by food into killing zones.
Within 48 hours, more Palestinian children will die from U.S. bombs dropped from Israeli drones and jets.
Within 48 hours, nations of the world will have again and again refused to take any concrete measures to force the government of Israel to stop the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Gaza Flotilla Sailboat Madleen
Yet, also within 48 hours, a small sailboat named Madleen will arrive near Gaza. (Watch on the https://t.me/FFC_official_channel, follow on Flotilla Instagram, and watch progress on a map here or here.)
Within 48 hours, 12 brave souls in the Madleen—Flotilla Steering Committee members Thiago Avila, Brazil and Yasemin Acar, Germany; Rima Hassan, French-Palestinian member of European Parliament; Dr. Baptiste Andre, France; Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Omar Faiad, France; Pascal Maurieras, France; Reva Viard, France; Yanis Mhamdi, France; Suayb Ordu, Turkiye; Sergio Toribio, Spain; Greta Thunberg, Swedish climate activist; and Marco van Rennes, The Netherlands—will carry the solidarity of citizens of the world to those in Gaza and the West Bank for the ending of the genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Within 48 hours, the 12 volunteers on the Madleen will most probably be stopped in international waters, arrested, taken against their wills to a place they do not want to go, imprisoned, and then deported… from Israel.
Only we the citizens can force our governments to isolate, boycott, and sanction the genocidal Israeli government to make them stop.
Within 48 hours, the 12 will be interrogated, possibly beaten and tasered, but probably treated much better than Palestinians in the prison who are stripped, humiliated, and starved.
Within 60 hours, the diplomatic missions of the 12, consular officers of the embassies of France, Spain, Germany, Brazil, Turkiye, Sweden, and the Netherlands will arrive at the prison to talk with the citizens of their country.
Within 60 hours, brave lawyers accredited in Israel who associated with the Freedom Flotilla will arrive to advise the 12.
Within 60 hours, Israelis horrified at the genocidal actions of their government will protest in the cities of Israel.
Within 72-96 hours, an Israeli court will declare that the 12 on the Madleen entered Israel illegally and were a threat to the national security of Israel and will deport the 12.
Within 100-120 hours, the 12 will arrive at their home countries, hopefully to a warm, warm welcome to those who oppose the genocide of Gaza.
Within 120-140 hours, the Global March to Gaza will bring 3,000 persons from 35 countries by air to Egypt to demand food trucks be allowed into Gaza.
Within 120-140 hours, the Overland Convoy to Break the Siege on Gaza—Sumud will bring 7,000 persons by land to Egypt to demand an end to the genocide.
Within 700 days, within 900 days the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza will end?
Or will it?
Only we the citizens can force our governments to isolate, boycott, and sanction the genocidal Israeli government to make them stop killing the last Palestinians and destroying the last of the remains of the Palestinian presence in Gaza.
Keep pushing, protesting, sailing.
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla will sail until the Israeli blockade and genocide of Gaza ends and Palestine is Free.
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The Most Dangerous Thing About Trump's Fascism? Getting Used to It
This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged.
Jun 06, 2025
It wasn’t all at once (although sometimes the last three months seem that way). Authoritarianism never is. It happens drip by drip, crisis by crisis, until people forget what normal even felt like.
This is how fascism seduces a nation: not by storming the gates, but by wearing down our ability to be outraged. And Donald Trump, more than any political figure in modern American history, has weaponized this steady march into moral and civic numbness.
Ten years ago, if you’d told Americans that a U.S. president would attempt to overturn an election, openly praise dictators, take naked bribes from both foreign potentates and drug dealers, call the press the “enemy of the people,” cage children, pardon traitors and war criminals, and promise to act as a dictator on his first day in office, they’d have laughed. They would’ve told you, “That can’t happen here.”
But it did. And now the real danger is that we’re getting used to it.
When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.
Let’s not forget:
— When Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, the political class gasped. Now it’s barely discussed.
— When he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, it was the top story in the world. Today, most Republicans call it “a protest” or a “tour.”
— Had any previous president invited an immigrant billionaire who promotes fascist memes to rip the guts out of the Social Security Administration and shut down USAID (handing our soft power to the Russians and Chinese) there would have been hell to pay. Now Musk’s extraordinary damage to our government is barely discussed.
— When Trump began calling undocumented immigrants “animals” and labeling judges and prosecutors as “scum,” it horrified the media. Now it’s part of the daily churn.
— When a federal judge’s son was murdered by a Trump campaign volunteer it shocked America; now judges are routinely threatened and Republicans won’t even give the judiciary control over the US Marshall’s Service to protect them.
— When Trump praised Putin and Viktor Orbán and suggested suspending the Constitution, the headlines flared, but then faded fast.
— When he arrested a Tufts University student for having written an op-ed in the student paper critical of Netanyahu and threw her into prison for months, the country was appalled. Now he’s rolling out loyalty tests for civil servants and investigating the social media posts of American citizens returning to the country and nobody’s even discussing it any more.
— When ICE agents showed up in Portland in 2020 in unmarked vans without uniforms and their ID missing, kidnapping people off the streets without warrants, Americans and the media were shocked. Now seeing jackbooted thugs with masks covering their faces and refusing to identify themselves has become “normal.”
This is the playbook. Fascism doesn’t arrive with jackboots; it arrives with media and voter fatigue. As the political theorist Hannah Arendt warned, the very banality and ordinariness of evil is its greatest weapon.
Victor Klemperer, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism and then chronicled the rise of Nazism in Germany, saw how average people learned to live with, to adapt to, to bear the unbearable. In his 1942 diary he wrote:
“Today over breakfast we talked about the extraordinary capacity of human beings to bear and become accustomed to things. The fantastic hideousness of our existence... and yet still hours of pleasure... and so we go on eking out a bare existence and go on hoping.”
Sebastian Haffner, another German observer, noted in Defying Hitler that even he, a staunch anti-Nazi, found himself one day saluting, wearing a uniform, and marching (and even secretly enjoying the feeling of authority associated with it).
“To resist seemed pointless;” he wrote, “finally, with astonishment, he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband, in the Nazi salute.”
And Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, described how good, decent Germans came to accept fascism. He was a Chicago reporter who, following World War II, went to Germany to interview “average Germans” to try to learn how such a terrible thing could have happened and, hopefully, thus prevent it from ever happening here.
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people,” Mayer wrote, “little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security....”
He wrote about living there and the ten Germans he befriended: I found his description of a college professor to be the most poignant. As Mayer’s professor friend noted, and Mayer recorded in his book:
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”
In this conversation, Mayer’s friend suggests that he wasn’t making an excuse for not resisting the rise of the fascists, but was simply pointing out what happens when you keep your head down and just “do your job” without engaging in politics.
“You see,” Mayer’s friend continued, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next.
“You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.
“Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. …
“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and the smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked — if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33.
“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.
“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.
“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”
Sound familiar?
Stephen Miller’s recent musing about suspending habeas corpus to lock up immigrants and even protestors without trial? That would’ve sparked emergency hearings a decade ago. Now it’s barely a blip.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint to purge civil servants and replace them with regime loyalists in complete defiance of the Pendelton Civil Service Act (and the reasons it came into being), should be setting off alarm bells. Instead, it’s getting the same treatment Trump gave Covid and his multiple defiances of the law and the courts: denial, deflection, delay.
It all comes back to normalization, as M. Gessen so brilliantly chronicles in The New York Times:
“And so just when we most need to act — while there is indeed room for action and some momentum to the resistance — we tend to be lulled into complacency by the sense of relief on the one hand and boredom on the other.
“Think of the trajectory of the so-called travel ban during Trump’s first term. Its first iteration drew thousands into the streets. The courts blocked it. The second iteration didn’t attract nearly as much attention, and most people didn’t notice when the third iteration of the travel ban, which had hardly changed, went into effect. Now Trump’s administration is drafting a new travel ban that targets more than five times as many countries.”
When we stop being shocked, we stop reacting. And when we stop reacting, democracy dies.
But there is a path forward.
The antidote to normalization is resistance. Not just in voting booths, but in the streets, in courtrooms, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in pulpits, and at dinner tables.
Thucydides, who had one of the clearest eyes in history about the dangers faced by democracies, said:
“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet nonetheless go out to meet it.”
We must regain our vision and resensitize ourselves. We must reclaim our capacity to be appalled.
That means when Trump calls Democrats “vermin,” we don’t say “that’s just Trump being Trump”; we say “That’s fascist rhetoric.”
When he promises to use the military against American citizens and sends out immigration officers dressed up like soldiers at war, we don’t shrug; we organize.
When Project 2025 tries to turn federal agencies into tools of vengeance, we don’t wait and see; we fight back now.
If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.
When armed federal agents hide their identification and their faces the way terroristic police do in dictatorships as they kidnap people off our streets, we call them out.
History won’t forgive us for sleepwalking into tyranny. And our children won’t either.
This is the time to remember that democracy is not self-sustaining. It requires outrage. It demands vigilance. And sometimes, it needs us in the streets with our fists in the air and our boots on the pavement.
If we still believe in this republic, in its ideals, and in the sacred value of a free and fair society, then our answer to Trump’s authoritarianism must be more than words. It must be peaceful action.
Don’t get used to fascism.
Get loud. Get active. Get in its way.
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