Listen
LA does not need the federal government to “liberate” it from anything. If you are under a different impression, I would highly encourage you to seek additional news sources. Local publications like LAist and LA Taco are doing excellent work. They’re also working hard to tell the story of LA’s immigrant population, who are actually under siege in many ways.
One of my faves, LA Podcast, just did an episode walking through most of the events over the last week, up until their recording on Saturday. It provides some excellent nuance and context missing in most national news coverage. Highly recommend.
Watch
The video of a sitting U.S. Senator—in a federal building, on official business—being wrestled to the ground by law enforcement is possibly one of the most chilling things I’ve seen. As the senator himself articulates, if this is how he is being treated by the government, one can only imagine the treatment of the average person on the street who catches the ire of an immigration enforcement official.
I don’t know where we go from here.
Read
What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown.
Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what’s happening in L.A. varies considerably.