Social Studies

There was an extraordinarily boring and hysterical article published last month in The Guardian that you almost certainly did not read. It was written by Jason Wilson and Ali Winston, and it was about an idyllic campground called the Wagon Box Inn in a tiny, rural Wyoming town called Story, at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. The article insinuates that the new owner of the campground, Paul McNiel, is a far-right radical connected to Silicon Valley billionaires who are bent on dismantling the nation-state and replacing democracy with rule by a cabal of tech overlords, and that the Wagon Box Inn will be a headquarters of some kind for the enactment of their devious plans. The evidence it offers includes that a reporter once wrote about the Wagon Box Inn in an outlet that some right-wing venture capitalists have invested in, and that a speaker at a Wagon Box event once also spoke at a conference founded by a guy who also founded a “rightwing business network.” It’s almost impossible to keep track of the connections without a crazy wall. It might be one of the dumbest articles I’ve ever read.

If you attended their 3-day campout this week, as I did, you might be confused to discover that the headliner of the event was the novelist Paul Kingsnorth, whose entire philosophy is founded on the idea that technology has ensnared humankind in a soul-crushing mental and spiritual prison that we must liberate ourselves from by cutting ourselves free from its digital tentacles and re-establishing authentic connections with each other and the natural world, preferably in a remote setting surrounded by an abundance of plants and animals. Or that one of the major themes of the meeting was the promise and urgent need for regenerative agriculture. Or that one of the talks was about the need to use the government to bust up corporate monopolies as we did under the New Deal. Or that when I had the honor of interviewing Kingsnorth on stage, he condemned Artificial Intelligence as “demonic” and announced a new initiative to get writers to pledge to abstain from ever using it.

The Guardian reporters seem to be vaguely aware of the deep skepticism of technology that pervades the Wagon Box project, as they point to a tongue-in-cheek reference to Ted Kaczynski in the title of an April event, who they inexplicably appear to believe is a figure “associated with the far right.” The entire guilt-by-association hatchet job just highlights how incomprehensible and meaningless the entire left/right political paradigm has become, one in which the world’s most infamous anti-technology eco-terrorist is lumped in with Silicon Valley billionaire transhumanists in some undefined and incoherent common political category.

The main theme of the campout was, in fact, that its attendees largely didn’t agree with each other, but were all eager to come together in a civil and sublimely beautiful setting to have thoughtful conversations about the things we disagreed on. And the main thing we disagreed on was AI. Kingsnorth is famous for his opposition to the cyborg-ization of society, specifically through AI. That didn’t stop at least three AI engineers from attending, including Jon Stokes who has an entire Substack about it, as well as an AI investor. Those AI enthusiasts were given the same amount of stage time as Kingsnorth and as War Room correspondent Joe Allen, who wrote a book about the abominations of transhumanism. Then we all had beers together and listened to live bluegrass. I got in a heated happy hour debate with a hardcore Zionist over Israel, Gaza and Iran, a subject on which readers of this Substack know my opinions. Then I pulled a seat up next to him, bummed a cigarette and yakked about some other topic I had too many drinks at the time to recall now. That kind of respectful debate over stuff we had passionately divergent opinions on was literally the reason we were there.

The other reason we were there was to be in Wyoming. In between talks, I took a day hike with a friend from college in the Bighorns. Others learned how to fly fish or shoot guns. A few went on a horseback ride. There was WiFi there, but mostly we were too preoccupied with talking to each other and doing meat space stuff to spend much time online. That was consistent with the general Wagon Box ethos, which is that human communities are rooted in face-to-face connection and physical activity in our natural environments, not in the mediated synthetic hyperreality of The Machine.

To the Guardian I guess that codes as “right-wing,” though as a Gen Xer I’ll never understand how. But even the Guardian can’t explain how any of this can possibly align with the world domination fantasies of tech oligarchs. But of course, they don’t have to explain anything. They can just drop scary names and point accusatory fingers and hope you’re stupid enough believe them.

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I was in the car with my wife and kids on a short vacation with my extended family when my dad sent me a text that the U.S. had started dropping bunker busters on Iranian nuclear facilities. Like any good parent, I generally try to stay as present as I can when my children are with me. As with any parent, that’s sometimes a challenge. Normally it’s the incessant chatter of social media and private chat groups that steals my attention away, though I’ve gotten better at ignoring those. But from time to time it’s the actual news.

I told my wife what was happening, and instead of reminding me, as she has a thousand times before, to put my phone away when the family is together, she volunteered to switch driving with me after lunch so I could dive into my twitter hole. This time, we both understood, it wasn’t some stupid online squabble that was competing for my attention; it was an actual war. Sometimes it’s ok to be distracted.

I found myself checking my phone through lunch, as I would throughout the next couple of days, to find out if Iran had struck back, whether we were truly in another Middle Eastern war. I work in journalism, so I like to stay on top of the news, but more than that, it felt important as a human being in a moment of peril such as this to keep track of what was unfolding in the real world outside of the narrow bubble of my immediate, vacation-bound existence. It felt like the morally responsible thing to do.

But this was where I began to feel a touch of existential cognitive dissonance. I’ve become accustomed to thinking of the world on my screen — the world of breaking news — as a synthetic reality that steals time away from my actual life with my kids, my wife, my friends and relatives. For the most part that’s exactly what it is. But it’s also the looking glass through which I expand my horizons beyond my comfortable middle class American existence, as any good global citizen should do.

It’s hard to reconcile the two. We deplore the bubbles we live in, which shelter us from the bleak realities of the world that we’d rather turn away from: poverty, starvation, war, genocide. We expect ourselves to bear witness to the crimes and tragedies befalling millions of people in countries we’ve never set foot in — it’s literally the least we can do. But when we shift our focus to those tragedies, it’s by turning our eyes toward the same screens that are relentlessly hawking us Blue Chews and Grand Theft Auto 6, that bait us with cartoon memes and fake AI humanoids, that goad us into outrage with news clips stripped of context and dishonest headlines designed to reinforce our prior assumptions and prejudices. It’s like taking Communion in a strip club.

So we learn of the latest news from Gaza in a stream of undifferentiated verbal vomit that looks something like this:

absolutely INSANE footage coming out of nyc right now WOW JK Rowling is a TERF CUNT who deserves to DIE a SLOW DEATH an infant died of starvation this morning in a NICU for lack of milk due to Israel’s humanitarian blockade GOD BLESS TRUMP FOR MAKING LIBTARDS SCARED AGAIN the Islamic-left alliance is paving the way for the next Holocaust lmfao Ted Cruz is a sea cucumber in a human flesh suit KEEP HER UP ALL NIGHT WITH BLUE CHEWS Gaza tent encampment bombed by IDF 14 people dead in blaze holy shit this new kendrick lamar is straight fire

This is the medium through which we learn of the gravest events that befall humankind. It’s how we become informed of a US military strike on Iran, riots in Los Angeles, an escalation of the war in Ukraine. After learning of the breaking news, we might then turn to the New York Times for a less adulterated experience, but even there, the Times’ Live Updates feed reduces our news consumption into 200 word chunks, refreshed every 20 or so minutes. It’s cleaner, more reliable, more serious and less toxic than your social media news feed, but it mimics it in form if not in content. No less than Twitter or Facebook, it turns events into posts.

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None of this is new. For decades, we’ve watched wars and catastrophes unfold within the endlessly looping cable news cycle, interspersed with ads for geriatric pharmaceutical drugs and Indian casinos. Years ago, even reading an actual morning newspaper was nothing more than a ritual of exposing yourself to a digest of the world’s horrors between deciding whether to eat oatmeal or toast for breakfast and listening to the same news repackaged for the radio in your gridlocked morning commute. That’s nobody’s fault; it’s just being human in the modern world. We zoom out and then we zoom in again. That longer focal length is where we live our lives. It’s where find the people we love, the work that fulfills us, and the comforts that fill our days with small pleasures and rewards. Zooming out is mostly a chore we perform out of moral obligation.

But it’s also different now than it was before. We no longer choose when and where the broader world intrudes into our field of vision. If your job is in front of a computer, the flotsam and jetsam of the news floats in and out of your workflow at random, usually sequestered in your peripheral vision but sometimes pushing your daily tasks momentarily out of view. Waiting for the subway, in between sets at the gym, or surreptitiously at the dinner table, we might check in with our screen and scroll past an image of a lifeless, limbless child in a pool of blood, just below a post about the state of Beyoncé’s marriage to JAY-Z and above one comparing some politician to Hitler. It’s all presented in the same aspect ratio and in the same visual format with the same flat level of attention-seeking urgency. We know that one is more important than the other — we’re not stupid — but all of the sensory cues invite us to believe otherwise. Our thumbs scroll through it all at the same pace. Our cortisol levels barely budge. Celebrity gossip, war crimes, life hacks: it’s all just a single stream of informational slop.

The very real pain of others — families running from invading armies, refugees huddled into camps, patients bombed in their hospital beds — dissipate into the simulacra of mass media. They become spectacle, and then an instant later, weaponry for partisan outrage-mongering. They morph into caricatures of politicians as Churchills and Chamberlains, into tirades against the libtard media or the right-wing hate machine, into prompts for split second decisions on whether to share or keep scrolling, into unhinged conspiracy theories. The world is transmuted into signal and then into noise.

I’m increasingly alarmed by the suspicion that it’s no different for those who are actually creating the events that we scroll through than it is for the rest of us. Many world leaders today are younger than me. If anything, they’re even more online than I am. They aren’t juggling their attention to world events with taking their kids to swim class or cooking them dinner — they have people for that. Far from detoxing themselves from social media, they can’t afford not to know what the algorithms are serving up to the constituencies they answer to. Their brains are as addled by social media platforms as a high school teenager. Are the wars they start responses to actual material conditions and circumstances in the world? Or are they just more content, public performances for online clout accumulation, no different than a TikTok video or a Twitch livestream? Netanyahu appears to have lured Trump into striking Iran largely by getting more likes, shares, and obsequious cable pundit news hits than the President for a few hours following Israel’s bombardment. Does the seamless marbling of real life and the simulacrum of our news feeds poison the brains of our generals, our heads of state, and our corporate oligarchs as much as, and quite possibly more than, you and I? How much of the world’s conflict is driven these days by shitposting?

The real world is no longer for everyone. It’s for the unlucky few. If you live in Ukraine or the Gaza Strip, you know it well. If you live below the poverty line in America, you know it, too. If you watch most of the world’s tragedies unfold on your screen, you probably float between it and its mediated representation, never quite aware of the boundary between the two.

The following passage is from a May 28 article in a magazine called Mosaic, which is funded by a conservative, self-described Zionist foundation called the Tikvah Fund, which has on its board, among others, Elliott Abrams, who helped fund Central American terrorist death squads in the 1980s and was criminally complicit in the Iran-Contra scandal (Abrams also writes a lot for Mosaic). It describes an Israeli special forces operation that took place last September on an Iranian underground missile factory in Syria:

In an era of subterranean warfare and dispersed threats, the IDF didn’t just eliminate a missile factory. It demonstrated that no target is beyond reach. This raid will be remembered as one of the most significant military operations in modern Israeli history—an assertion of capability, a recalibration of deterrence, and a signal to every adversary in the region that Israel’s reach is not limited by geography, and its resolve is not constrained by risk. Future adversaries will now think twice about burying threats underground—because Israel has proven it can bury them deeper.

The whole piece leading up to that climactic final paragraph is filled with the kinds of nouns and adjectives that stimulate a kind of almost sexual arousal from a certain type of militarily-enamored reader: “deep-penetration commando raid,” “physically breaching,” “hardened underground target,” “joint-force synchronization,” “strategic threat,” “doctrinal inflection point,” “battlefield logic,” “assault force,” “complexity and risk,” “rapid and lethal neutralization,” “clinical precision,” “tactical prowess,” “exfiltration,” “boots on the ground,” “expeditionary resolve.” The message it conveys is impossible to ignore: The IDF are a bunch of bad-ass motherfuckers, and Israel’s enemies best think twice about testing them.

The other message is that Israel is fully capable of dealing with Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, like Fordow and Natanz, all by itself:

Fordow, carved directly into a mountainside, is likely buried at a similar or even greater depth. Airstrikes alone may not suffice. If Israel assesses that Iran is on the brink of weaponizing its nuclear program, it may ultimately require a ground-based, deep-penetration operation akin to what was done at Deep Layer—one capable of physically breaching and disabling the hardened components of Iran’s nuclear apparatus. That would entail extraordinary risks, but, after the success of Many Ways, it is no longer beyond the realm of operational possibility. Israel has shown it can operate beneath hardened concrete and across sovereign boundaries alike.

Other close observers agree. Michael Weiss at New Lines Magazine writes that Israel can destroy Fordow on its own, though the effort would be “far more daring and complex” than the operation carried out in Syria.

Or maybe it wouldn’t be. This is from an interview with former International Atomic Energy Agency inspector David Albright in Tablet Magazine, another unapologetically Zionist publication (which I’ve written for).

Can Israel destroy Fordow without American help?

Yeah, I think so. They could mine it during a commando raid. They could potentially crack the ceiling or undermine the support structure of the halls. They can make it very difficult to get into. Effectively that’s destroying it, if you can’t get in without months and months of work. Then when you get in, it’s more than likely most of the centrifuges are going to be broken.

. . .

Can Israel disable Fordow without destroying it, and without the use of large bunker-busters?

They could take out the electricity. They could destroy the ventilation system. They can easily destroy the pedestrian entrance. They can destroy the main entrances. There’s two, and they can even use more powerful armaments to work their way back to the tunnel entrances. They can’t get to the [centrifuge] hall perhaps, but they can get a good way there. It would be inaccessible for months. And then they can always go back if there’s some sign of the Iranians trying to dig out new tunnel entrances, but I think it would be tough for them.

Blowing up pedestrian entrances isn’t as thrilling or cathartic as death-defying underground commando raids, but it’s a lot easier. Albright seems perplexed that Israel hasn’t done these things already. “It’s possible the Israelis aren’t that worried about Fordow and have some information that says, no, Iran’s not making weapon-grade uranium at Fordow,” he says, “and it’s on a list, and they’ll eventually get to [attacking it]. But it is a mystery to me.”

So what we can learn from these three reports, two of them from avidly pro-Israel outlets, is that the IDF can take out Fordow on its own, that it can in fact do so “easily” and without a risky special forces operation, and that it’s possible Fordow isn’t even an important target anyway.

And yet what we hear over and over again is that the United States in the only military force in the world that can destroy Fordow, because it alone has 30,000 pound “bunker buster” bombs and the B-52s that carry them. Thus, Israel needs the U.S. to participate in its war or all will be for naught. Israel can’t save the world from the Ayatollah’s nukes without us.

Iran suspended its nuclear weaponization program in 2003 and there is no evidence that it is trying to reconstitute it. This was the view of the former CIA director, and it’s the view of the current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. It has, however, enriched enough uranium to a high enough level to take it a step closer to building a nuclear warhead if it wishes to. This is Iran’s prerogative, since Trump, with Israel’s backing, scrapped the nuclear deal that Obama negotiated, which had limited Iran’s uranium enrichment to levels suitable for civilian use, with IAEA monitoring. Iran claims to be enriching uranium to weaponization levels so that it can have something to trade the U.S. for removal of sanctions, which Trump reimposed. If Iran were to take the additional steps beyond enrichment needed to create a bomb, the world would know it in advance, though not as far in advance as we would have if Obama’s agreement were still in place.

Don’t buy the chicken hawk bullshit we’re being sold. There is no good reason for a single American to be put at risk by a U.S. attack on Iran. Israel wants this war because with Iran weakened by the loss of its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the preoccupation of its ally Russia in Ukraine, and the crippling of its proxy army Hezbollah by the IDF, Israel has a rare opportunity to finally achieve uncontested regional hegemony in the Middle East, and a short window to exploit it. And even that narrow outcome is not good for Americans. To be sure, Iran is a violent, despotic regime. But Israel is currently led by religious fanatics who are happily carrying out a genocide in Gaza. People like Itamar Ben-Gvir aren’t interested in creating a peaceful liberal democratic oasis in the Middle East. They’re interested in ethnically cleansing Gaza and the West Bank and defeating their regional neighbors in a holy war. Israeli domination of the region is an invitation to decades of further U.S. embroilment in the Middle East, which will inevitably involve terrorist attacks at home. This is a war by and for elites. It has nothing to offer the rest of us but more death and ruin.

Back in the medieval days, wars were the hobbies of princes and kings. They had little to nothing to do with the interests of the overwhelming majority of people, who were peasants. Nobles fought to expand their kingdoms, but if you were a farmer in the French countryside somewhere, it didn’t make much tangible difference to you whether the lord of the lord of your lord pledged his fealty to the Duke of This Place or the Duke of That Place. You or your sons might be conscripted into battle as part of your feudal duties, or hired to join the fight. Or your village might be plundered by some invading horde. But even then, your only real stake in the battle was your life. After the dust settled, so long as your rents or obligations remained the same, the title claimed by the head of some victorious army on some battlefield miles away was immaterial to you, even if the land he was fighting for included the little plot out of which you eked your living.

Back then, when wars were fought with swords, there was a physical limit to how destructive they could be. At their very worst — say, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England — they might displace or kill everyone you know, force a foreign religion on your community, and end your way of living forever. But these kinds of wars were rare, world historical events that we remember to this day. Much more often, wars were just a series of skirmishes between people much richer and more renowned than you. You might take a voyeuristic interest in them but they were otherwise inconsequential to your household, like the NFL playoffs or the Academy Awards.

Then came the modern world and the innovation of total war. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, war became something impossible for regular people to ignore. The bureaucratic machinery of the nation-state made it feasible to mobilize every last physical resource within a geographical territory, most importantly its population, and direct it toward war-fighting. Advances in military technology made it possible to slaughter civilian populations on a scale never before known to humanity.

Now everyone had a stake in the battles carried out by their governments, and success or failure in war relied as never before on the active participation of the national population. It became necessary, then, for the state to persuade regular people to embrace the cause. Without their consent, one risked, at best, a lackluster war effort, and at worst, a social revolution.

In the European world wars, it wasn’t particularly difficult to make this case. Defeat in war could mean conquest and occupation by a vengeful and bloodthirsty enemy. You could expect all of your wealth and possessions to be expropriated, your traditional legal and political rights denied, and, potentially, your family murdered. You didn’t have to be a flag-waving patriot to be highly motivated to do whatever was necessary for your government to prevail.

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It was a different proposition, however, with conflicts overseas. There was a limit to how many Americans in the twentieth century could be convinced that a German victory in World War 1 would fundamentally degrade their lives an ocean away. Even in World War 2, it wasn’t completely self-evident that a Nazi victory in Europe or a Japanese triumph in the Pacific would turn the lives of U.S. citizens upside down. A more laborious propaganda effort was needed to overcome the natural reluctance of Americans to fight someone else’s war.

The Nazis, of course, provided more than enough material to make an alarmingly convincing case, as did the Japanese. Likewise, the scale of Stalin’s crimes against humanity fueled a half century of effective propaganda against the Soviet Union. After that, in Vietnam, Iraq, and even Afghanistan, the U.S. government had to do more with much less. In each case, the absence of a plausible argument for seemingly endless war required levels of fear mongering and ideological bullying that produced only diminishing returns as each war dragged ever more disastrously on.

Now we’re seeing the start of a new propaganda effort, this time against Iran, and the case is so weak that it feels as if we’ve returned, full circle, to those medieval days when waging wars was the blood sport of an indifferent aristocracy, with no connection whatsoever to the stakes of our everyday lives. You open the paper and read about 60-day deadlines, uranium enrichment capabilities, and the ominous geo-strategic aspirations of a distant civilization few of us spend much time even thinking about. It’s all very abstract, technical, and intellectual. These are the concerns of princes in castles, not peasants on their plots. They’re hopelessly foreign. They’re vaguely reminiscent of the war games of dueling empires from an era we thought we had left behind. There is no line you can draw between them and the price of eggs, your inadequate health insurance, the addiction crisis on our streets, and your children’s shitty public schools.

To make it more visceral, we’re told that the enemy is weeks away from developing a nuclear weapon, the same as we’ve been told for decades. We’re warned of an impending nuclear holocaust, which is exactly how we were sold the invasion of Iraq. We’re told of the valor and heroism of the Israeli military and the backwardness of its dark, exotic enemies.

But it doesn’t feel like it did when the threat we were warned of consisted of thousands of Russian ICBMs pointed at American cities, when we climbed under our desks in classroom nuclear attack drills. Back then it felt like there was substance behind the propaganda, because there was. It felt like we might all pay the price if our country wasn’t vigilant enough. It was legitimately scary.

This time it feels cheap. It feels like we’re being fed fish sticks and french fries because they don’t think we’ll eat the fresh vegetable salad they’ve served themselves. It feels like they don’t even believe the bullshit they’re selling. It feels like 2003, when they whipped us up into a hysterical frenzy through the brute force of their vulgar and melodramatic war propaganda. It feels like the Dukes of This Place and That Place have a disagreement over the borders of their duchies and, to raise armies, need the rest of us to believe that it has anything to do with our lives. It feels like exactly the lie that it is.

Obviously the major news of the day is that Israel has started a war with Iran that it hopes to drag us into. I’ll have things to say about that in the near future. I had this piece written, however, before Netanyahu launched his attack.

For free subscribers, I’ve removed the paywall on my piece from two days ago on the violence in Los Angeles. I hope you’ll read it.

—LW

At the historic immigration protests in Los Angeles in 2006, when a half million people marched downtown to oppose new federal legislation on immigration enforcement, much of the viewing public saw only one thing: Mexican flags.

They were everywhere, and the optics were terrible. A movement of immigrants making the case that they belonged in America seemed to be advertising their fealty to one of the very countries they were fighting to not be sent to.

Immigration hardliners had a field day. Fox News’ Brit Hume called it “a repellant spectacle.” A group of immigration restrictionists in Arizona burned the Mexican flag in front of the Mexican consulate.

The movement learned quickly from the experience, and within weeks, immigration marches in L.A. were a sea of stars and stripes. The bill was stopped, but immigration reform never happened. A decade later, Trump was elected, then re-elected 8 years later, and here we are.

Now, once again, immigrant rights protesters in L.A. are being castigated for waving Mexican flags. It’s easy to understand the criticism: the images play right into Trump’s depiction of undocumented immigrants as a fifth column in America.

But if I were the son of undocumented parents in Los Angeles today, I’m not sure I’d care this time around. There’s no bill to lobby for. There’s no public opinion to be won over. We’re far past the point of persuasion. Voters were given a choice and elected Trump; he has a mandate on this issue. For the immigrant community in L.A., the fight is no longer political. The resistance effort is physical.

I was in downtown L.A. last Sunday afternoon, when the weekend’s violence reached its crescendo. Activists had taken the southbound lanes of the 101 freeway, and had then been pushed off of it by California Highway Patrol. For the next few hours, the police defended the freeway while protesters stood on surface streets and overpasses about 25 feet above them, hurling rocks and shooting industrial fireworks at the officers, who shot rubber bullets and flashbangs in return. Black plumes of smoke from torched Waymos clogged the sky. Police helicopters and quadcopter drones flew overhead. There were ear-ringing explosions every minute. Amber alerts kept popping up on my phone warning me of the conditions in downtown L.A. that I was right in the middle of.

There must have been a Mexican flag every 15 feet, interspersed by the occasional American flag or combination Mexican-American flag. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem the least bit inappropriate.

Trump’s attacks on immigrants have explicitly name-checked Mexico since the day he came down the golden escalator. At Stephen Miller’s behest, the latest ICE sweeps have targeted Home Depot parking lots, where Mexican and Central American day laborers gather. Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted out an anti-immigrant propaganda poster that was created by a white nationalist.

It takes a lot of willful credulousness to believe that Trump’s deportation crusade is not driven in significant measure by racial prejudice. Plenty of Latinos, to be sure, voted for Trump and support his crackdown. That is not incompatible with the persistence of racial disdain in Trump’s coalition. It’s a big country. Lots of things can be true.

Protesters are not waving the Mexican flag for the benefit of the TV-viewing public. They’re waving it for themselves. It’s a symbol of solidarity and defiance against what is very clearly an attack on a specific disfavored community.

“My family, everyone that lives here, they’re just afraid to go out,“ a young man named Daniel Flores told me. “They’re afraid to go to their jobs, the store, home. Even home is not safe for them.”

“In our neighborhood, a lot of the families are First Gen, and they’re the most hardworking people we know,” a social worker named Adriana from Boyle Heights, who was there with her sister Amanda, said. They told me their father is American, from L.A., and their mother is from Durango, Mexico. “We’re going to come out for our community because we know a lot of the parents.”

I think on some level, many of the haters understand the real meaning behind the Mexican flags but pretend not to. Despite its avowed contempt for identity politics, the right has gone all in on the idea that America is in the midst of a massive wave of antisemitism. Their response has been to plaster the halls of Congress with Israeli flags outside of their office doors. “We fly the American flag in America,” tweeted Representative Jim Jordan, who has an Israeli flag outside of his Congressional office door.

Do these politicians believe that their embrace of the Israeli flag is a sign of their dual loyalty to the United States? Obviously not. More likely, they regard it as a sign of their solidarity with a group they perceive to be embattled, no different from straight “allies” flying LGBT flags.

There’s actually a much better case to be made that Jim Jordan has secret loyalty to Israel than that American protesters have secret loyalties to Mexico. Israel has plain lobbying interests in Congress and its American support groups spend a lot of money pursuing them. The theory that legislators might put Israel’s interests ahead of those of Americans is as self-evident as the theory that they put corporate interests before those of their constituents. What exactly is the theory as to why immigrants and their kids have some nefarious allegiance to Mexico? Their “Marxist indoctrination” by pointy-headed college professors and the New York Times? The debate quickly descends into a fever swamp.

What’s actually happening is not the least bit mysterious. People are waving Mexican flags to show that they’re unashamed of being immigrants or relatives of immigrants in the face of a campaign to malign them. That’s an important thing to do when you’re mustering your community to its self-defense. Those who despise immigrants, meanwhile, are using the opportunity to cast them as treasonous ingrates.

It may not be politically well-advised to make it so easy for your critics to vilify you by waving a foreign flag. But that case made a lot more sense in 2006 than it does today. Back then, legislation mattered to immigrant families, and American public opinion was thus critical. We’re beyond that now. Today, immigrant households in L.A. have only one thing left to strive for: to make it as hard as possible for ICE agents to do their jobs. Waving American flags does nothing to serve that goal.

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This feels like something that shouldn’t have to be said, but I oppose political violence. I opposed the antics on January 6, 2021 and I opposed the rioting and looting of the summer of 2020. I oppose the violence of the protests against deportations in L.A., which I saw firsthand. But my opposition to it is irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything. It’s entirely beside the point.

I’ve heard a dozen different versions of the argument that the L.A. protesters should follow the lead of the Civil Rights Movement, with its discipline and its commitment to non-violence and its camera-ready optics. I agree with that argument, in the exact same way I would agree with the argument that we should strive for peace not war, or that tornadoes and earthquakes are bad.

But I think it’s a category error. Maybe it’s because we’ve become so brainwashed by the conspiratorial thinking of twenty-first century politics that we reflexively assume that every mass protest is organized — that there are committees of people behind the scenes making strategic and tactical decisions that then manifest on the streets. That nothing happens spontaneously or organically anymore. So we assume from this that the “movement” is making poor decisions by “allowing” violent activity and other impolitic things like property destruction and waving Mexican flags.

This is a monumental misunderstanding, in my opinion, of what’s happening. I’ve been to dozens of left-wing protests in my life, maybe hundreds. When organized groups are behind them, they don’t tend to be shy about it. If SEIU is turning out members, they’re all going to be wearing purple SEIU shirts and carrying SEIU picket signs. Even groups that didn’t organize a given protest try to leave the impression that they did, by putting their valor-stealing activists at the head of the march with a huge banner with their name on it (ahem, International ANSWER).

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This branding was not present in downtown L.A. on Sunday afternoon. More or less every sign I saw was handmade. There was no stage, no speaker lineup, no protest marshals. I can already hear someone pointing out that if you wanted to make a protest look organic, you would dress it up exactly that way. But if your theory is that this was some color revolution psy-op, then the burden is on you to prove it, not on others to disprove it. And so far the only attempt to offer such evidence is this incredibly weak shit from the terminally galaxy-brained Mike Benz.

The more obvious explanation is that what’s happening in L.A. is not organized by anyone. It’s a genuine, spontaneous outburst of anger and resistance.

Already, that language sounds as if I’m lionizing it. That’s not my intention. I mean the words “genuine,” “spontaneous,” and “resistance” by their flattest and most literal definitions. Just because something is genuinely spontaneous doesn’t mean it’s good or pretty. It’s often precisely the opposite: spontaneous outbursts of political anger tend to degrade into riots and looting. That has already happened this week in L.A.

But I think it’s important to understand it as such because it carries an entirely different set of implications than does the idea that these protests are being controlled by anyone in particular. The Civil Rights Movement emerged over a decade of relentless grassroots organizing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to compare it to, say, the 1965 Watts Riot and conclude, “the Watts rioters would have done much better if they had worn their Sunday best and engaged in non-violent civil disobedience.” Clearly that sentence is not wrong, but it’s about as useful as saying, “New Orleans would have been much better off if Hurricane Katrina had never happened.” Ok, yeah, sure. But Hurricane Katrina did happen.

The people I interviewed in L.A. on Sunday were primarily the American children and young relatives of immigrants. Their families are terrified — even those who are here with the proper authorization, as nobody has confidence in the fairness of the system. When Freddie Sayers asked me on the UnHerd podcast whether the protests were standing in the way of the exercise of democracy — after all, Trump was elected to do just this — it was a perfectly fair devil’s advocate-type question, but I think it misses the point if you’re trying to understand why this is happening. People who are afraid that their family members will be snatched off the street or their worksites don’t stop and think, “well, this is unfortunate but I guess the voters have spoken.” We’re humans and our primal obligations are toward our families, not our electorates. If there were realistic means of peaceful, democratic resistance to these raids, people would be pursuing them. They have been pursuing them for years, through advocacy, lobbying, and electioneering. None of that work has stopped this moment from arriving, and now it’s too late. Now people are simply trying to stop armed government agents from grabbing their relatives and pushing them into vans. The challenge has become not political, legal, or procedural, but physical. This is a very dangerous place to be. When the most fundamentally important things in our lives are under imminent threat and there are no feasible legal avenues for recourse, it’s exactly then that people turn to violence. To acknowledge this is not to condone it. It’s simply to understand how the world works.

Not only did I see the ugliness of the violence in L.A. firsthand a few days ago, I was directly threatened with it. So I’m not naive about its heinousness or the danger of the path it sets us down. But that’s not the point. This is not a value statement. It’s simply a recognition of the situation we find ourselves in. You can judge it all you want. You can wish it were something different. You can point out all the ways that non-violent civil disobedience is more politically efficacious. It doesn’t make a difference to the facts at hand. When state power is exercised in its rawest, most uncompromising way, forms of resistance to it tend to follow suit. If a better way is found, it’s usually after years of struggle, as in the Civil Rights Movement.

When Martin Luther King described riots as “the voice of the unheard,” he wasn’t condoning them. He was just recognizing that they’re what happens when you close off every other political choice to desperate people. “These conditions,” he said, “are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.” That’s where things are for the immigrant community in Los Angeles. And it’s where things will be for all of us if this authoritarian rule keeps up.

Here’s my piece in The Free Press on the violence in L.A.:

I also did a long interview on the subject with Freddie Sayers at UnHerd. I thought he was the perfect interlocutor: dubious but fair.

Hope you’ll give it a read and a listen.

—LW

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I’m in L.A. working on a story for The Free Press on the unrest here. I have complicated feelings on it. But for now I thought I’d just show you some pictures. I’ll share some words as well in a later post.

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Oliver Stone’s Platoon came out in 1986, eleven years after the end of the Vietnam War. It has been a little longer than that — about 13-and-a half-years — since the Iraq War ended, and we now have Alex Garland’s Warfare. I make this comparison not because the two movies are in any way similar, but because they’re completely different, and that difference suggests something about the way we have come to understand the two wars.

Platoon was a big, important movie. It won Best Picture and Best Director in the 1987 Academy Awards. As a child I loved it, because it’s a childish movie. It’s a story about the evils of war, portrayed through the interpersonal conflicts between three American soldiers. One of them is so villainous he oversees a massacre that is clearly a stand-in for the one at My Lai. Another is so virtuous that when the evil character assassinates him, he assumes a Christ-like pose in slow motion. The third is the protagonist, who goes into the war green and naive, and comes out of it schooled in the darkness of humanity. The movie makes heavy use of the soaring melodrama of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

Warfare has no such moral lessons to teach the public. It’s a story not so much of a war as of a single battle in that war. Its characters aren’t moral agents with grave choices to make, as they are in Platoon. They’re desperate men trapped in a dangerous, confined space who are trying to get out of it. Their choices are not philosophical, but physical. They react to their circumstances; they don’t shape them.

I’ve never been in the military, much less in combat, so I can’t tell you which film is a more accurate depiction of the realities of war (though I could make an educated guess). But I can discern what they’re trying to do artistically and politically, and, further, what role their respective genres — the Vietnam War Movie and the Iraq War Movie — have played in our understanding of American warmaking.

Platoon was not an outlier in the Vietnam Movie genre of the 1970s and 80s. Its politics may have been more on-the-nose than Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, or Apocalypse Now, but like those other (and better) movies, it had many of the same things to say. All of those films served as correctives to the Hollywood myth-making that came out of the Second World War. In Europe and the Pacific, the United States had played the role of the world’s cavalry; on film, its heroes were portrayed by stars accustomed to playing cowboys, like Steve McQueen and Ronald Reagan. That rugged individualist tradition of war storytelling continued into the Vietnam War, with John Wayne’s 1968 film The Green Berets. The new crop of war movies was here to tell you that Vietnam was not World War 2. The United States was not the Lone Ranger, galloping into Indochina to save its damsels from the treachery of evildoers.

They were, instead, about America’s loss of innocence. It’s not that these movies lacked for heroes, it’s just that the heroes weren’t cowboys. Their heroism came not from their military prowess, but from the moral integrity that allowed them to see through the propaganda of generals and politicians and recognize the madness of the war around them. In this, they were proxies for the American public, who were learning to see past the mythology of World War 2, to put away childish things, to stop playing Cowboys and Indians.

Warfare is the inverse of both genres. Many of the characters in the film show great competence in combat, but their abilities aren’t showcased as expressions of their awesome courage or moral conviction; if anything, they’re just technical skills, well-executed. These are not cowboy-soldiers, but nor are they literary protagonists experiencing the disenchantment of their received worldviews. This may be in part because, unlike their Vietnam counterparts, the characters in Warfare are professional career soldiers, not conscripts. But I think it has more to do with the fact that the American public no longer needs to be shaken free of our naive attachment to some fairy tale version of war. Vietnam already did that for us. We went into Iraq with a healthy level of cynicism about the entire enterprise of armed conflict and a deep skepticism of the motives of our political leaders that was absent when we first became militarily engaged in Vietnam in the 50s and 60s.

Warfare certainly isn’t a pro-war movie, but I don’t know if I’d call it anti-war. I don’t know if I would have said so about Generation Kill, either, when it came out 17 years ago. Neither is a parable with a lesson at the end; to the extent that they horrify the viewer about the realities of the Iraq War — and that extent is profound — they do so merely by depicting it in an unflinching way. These are not political films, and for good reason. We don’t need to be told what to think about war or what to believe about America’s role in the world anymore. Decades of American foreign policy have belied the childish morality of the fables we were once told. The Iraq War was what the Iraq War was, and what it was was Hell. Warfare only needs to reflect that reality back to us. It doesn’t need to persuade, only depict. And in doing so it makes a more profound impression on its audience than the greatest directors of the 70s and 80s were ever able to.

You don’t have to read the other articles before this one, but if you’d like to, here are my essays on Making America, Parts 1 and 2.

America’s historical mythology has always been rooted in the northeast. In a sense that’s no surprise, as that’s where the story of the United States began. Following along this historical vector, America’s political and cultural traditions were born in Europe, transplanted to the East Coast, and then exported westward.

But in another sense it’s entirely arbitrary. It just so happened that through centuries of national evolution, the brick-and-mortar institutions at the center of elite cultural production — the brand-name universities, museums, and media companies — remained stubbornly attached to the cities along the Acela corridor, from DC to Boston. Thus, for the same reason we’re indoctrinated from birth to associate Christmas with snow, we look to the historical events of the northeastern states as the catalysts of change and development in America. The things that happened in the South and the West, we unconsciously assume, were either epiphenomena or the reflection of a transitory social stage that eventually gave way to the superior civilizing force emanating from the upper eastern seaboard.

But that’s not the only way to look at the forming of modern America. There is a more geographically expansive perspective, which envelops the continental U.S. as a whole as both the subject and object of change, and which brings into the picture the deep foreign influences of countries beyond just those in Europe.

When you consider the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of the Western states and territories — by which I mean about 60% of the contemporary American landmass — the textbook version of American history remains chronologically the same, but thematically quite different. In the West, the most consequential event in American history, the Civil War, was experienced, at the time, as an almost foreign conflict in a distant land. The U.S. government itself was, in the western mind, something of an abstraction. The lives led by American settlers in the West felt less like those of citizens than those of a kind of U.S. diaspora.

Before the development of the transcontinental railroad, it’s hard to overstate how isolated California, which was the only place in the West with a substantial non-Indian population, was from the rest of the United States. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, California was a far flung and generally neglected outpost of Mexico. By 1850, when it became a U.S. state, it was, to its American settlers, as autonomous and culturally disconnected from the urban civilization emerging on the East Coast as the American backcountry colonies had been from the English landed gentry. The fastest way to get there from the east coast was by ship, either around Cape Horn at the very bottom of the planet, or through Panama, which involved a treacherous and often deadly equatorial land crossing that by itself could take as long as a week. It was faster to get from New York to India, or from California to Australia, than it was to get from one side of the North American continent to the other.

If the Union’s victory over the Confederacy was the seminal event that changed the destiny of the United States forever, not just objectively but in the hearts and minds of Americans along the Atlantic coast from Maine to Florida, it was the discovery of gold that did so in the West. In the decade after 1848, when James Marshall noticed a few sparkling flecks of the metal on John Sutter’s ranch, California’s population exploded. “From that point on,” writes historian Elliott West, “the region would be the most culturally and ethnically mixed part of the nation.”

The first to arrive and supplement the sparse population of Indians and Hispanic “Californios” were not Americans but Mexicans, Chileans, Peruvians, Tasmanians, and native Hawaiians. Then came the hundreds of thousands of overland gold seekers from the east along the Oregon Trail, as well as by ship from France and China. After them came the Homestead Act and the transcontinental railroad, which brought not just more Americans but also English, Germans and Scandinavians to both California and the rest of the western states and territories. By 1870, New York, the state with the highest percentage of foreign-born residents on the eastern seaboard, ranked only ninth when you factored in the West. Ahead of it were Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, California, Utah, and Dakota. “The percentage of immigrants in five Idaho mining towns (68.1 percent),” writes West, “was nearly twice that of Boston and Brooklyn (35.1 percent and 36.5 percent).” San Francisco had the largest per-capita foreign born population of any city in the country.

It would be a monumental mistake, however, to imagine that the West that emerged from this mass migration was a melting pot. Americans are accustomed, with good reason, to thinking of the decades following the Civil War in the former Confederacy as the period of the worst racial violence in our country’s history. It was in fact a sequel. As West writes, “events in the East after 1880 were a reprise of those in California and elsewhere in the West after the U.S.-Mexico War.”

In Gold Rush California, the principal victims were not free blacks, of whom there were but few, but Mexicans and Californios, of whom there were many. In the three decades following the discovery of gold, notes West, the rate of lynchings in California was nine times greater than that of Mississippi from 1880 to 1930. In 1854, the murder rate in Los Angeles, fueled by racial terrorism, was 56 times that of New York City. What emerged from this bloody period was a California and larger western region that was deeply multicultural, but with an uncontested ethnic pecking order. White, Anglo-Americans sat at the top of it.

This would comprise a merely regional subcategory of our national history but for the fact that the Gold Rush catalyzed the economic integration of the entire continent, just as the Civil War reconstituted the political integration of the United States. The real Gold Rush wasn’t from the miners extracting the metal from the creeks and hillsides of the western Sierras, but from the eastern merchants who set up shop in San Francisco, Sacramento and the mountain boom towns to sell those miners everything from boots to chocolates at obscenely inflated prices paid for in gold dust. Gold seekers in California produced little for themselves and consumed vast quantities of food, equipment, alcohol and sex, nearly all of it imported from the east. Then, as placer mining depleted the sources of gold on the earth’s surface, it was replaced by hydraulic mining, which blasted it out of mountains with industrial power hoses. With this shift, labor was displaced by capital. Instead of unskilled workers from around the world, the new mining companies needed huge, expensive machines and the means to finance them, along with the legal basis for exploiting claims, whether found or stolen. Thus emerged the legal and financial services industries of San Francisco that thrive to this day.

With the northeast as the first person narrator of our country’s history, we tend to think of America’s internationalist character as a secondary cultural layer that was placed, especially during the turn-of-the-century wave of migration through Ellis Island, atop a political foundation that is fundamentally Anglo-Saxon. And from that perspective it is not inaccurate. But from the western perspective, which begins at a later date in our history, American internationalism is baked into the dough. From this vantage point, the ancestral nationalism of the New Right feels far less intuitive. Indeed, it feels like a foreign import. In the West, immigration and multiculturalism is not something that happened to us. It is what America has always been.

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