Photo by me

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.