America's Angry Loser Problem
The federal invasion of California: by losers, for losers, starring losers.
If you get all of your information from cable news, you might think that Los Angeles is brimming with projectile-hurling protesters. I’m actually here. It’s not.
The “riots” are a photo op that is serving as a pretext for what’s really going on— Los Angeles has been invaded. We are being terrorized by ICE, a lawless American Gestapo made up, primarily, of men who are losers and cheered on by people of all genders who are, also, losers.
Over the last week, watching cable news has become so frustrating that I feel myself physically tense up while sitting in my office, where cable news plays constantly like an intrusive thought at 3 am.
It’s wild to watch the president of the United States making shit up about the city where I live, from thousands of miles away. I can look out of my window and see that he’s lying, but his words air unchecked.
It’s infuriating to watch the smug faux concern on the faces of the Fox News anchors who must know better than the lies that they’re telling their viewers. They are worldly, educated, presumably wealthy members of the media with access to information and resources. They absolutely know people who live in Los Angeles and have relayed the truth to them. They have to know that they’re lying to their audience.
I felt insane watching Senator Alex Padilla— one of my Senators— thrown to the floor and handcuffed after trying to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a press conference today. Shortly after the incident, Noem appeared on Fox News, and said that Senator Padilla hadn’t identified himself. While she said this, the other half of the split screen showed Senator Padilla calmly identifying himself right before being thrown to the ground and handcuffed. The Fox News anchor did not press Secretary Noem on the easily disproven lie that she’d just told. Fox News is confident that its viewers are so far gone that they will believe what they’re told over what they see with their own eyes.
Here in the Los Angeles that exists in reality, we are witnessing an invasion. ICE is not rounding up criminals. They are going for easy targets. They are rounding up schoolchildren. ICE agents raided a park where nannies take their kids the other day. They’ve raided places like fruit stands, Home Depot parking lots, 7-11 stores, and elementary school graduations. On Wednesday, ICE posted up outside of UCLA Harbor Hospital, which serves uninsured patients. Outside of a hospital.
Our child care provider isn’t comfortable taking our one-year-old daughter to music class anymore, because the last time she took her to music, she saw ICE agents in the area. The baby music class is not held at a criminal den. It’s in a large outdoor Disneyland-like mall in Glendale, California that contains a Nordstrom and a Cheesecake Factory. Our child care provider is a longtime American citizen. But she’s worried for other child care providers, she’s worried for the safety of the children they look after, and the families of the child care providers whose mothers and wives and sisters are now in harm’s way.
And being a citizen doesn’t always matter, either. ICE arrested a pregnant American citizen this week. They’ve sent green card holders to prisons. On Wednesday, ICE agents in Los Angeles rammed a car with three Mexican passengers inside, all of whom were American citizens. (They shouldn’t be ramming anybody’s car, for any reason, but it shows that they’re really simply targeting people for being brown.)
I’m confused by the lack of concern from the President or right wing media about the haphazard nature of raids. If self-professed immigration hawks actually cared about deporting undocumented people, wouldn’t they want the process to run in an orderly and precise way, in order to foster trust from the public and spare the general population from the intrusion of raids and the terror of potentially mistaken identity? Their lack of concern tells me that they never actually cared about people immigrating here “the right way;” “cracking down on immigration” was always about ethnic cleansing, and it was always about terror. It was never about doing things the right way. It was always, always about racism.
This isn’t law or order. We are witnessing an extrajudicial army of hateful fucks LARP a racist version of The Purge. ICE agents don’t seem bound by any due process or concern for whether they accidentally send Americans to a foreign gulag, so long as they nab enough Latino-looking people to meet an arbitrary quota determined by Nazi-adjacent psychopath Stephen Miller, who is the worst version of himself now that everybody thinks that his wife has left him for Elon Musk.
ICE agents aren’t brave enough to show their own faces; they wear masks, prowl around neighborhoods in unmarked cars, sneak attack people like cowards. If the aim of a terrorist act is to cause fear among the general population, then what ICE is doing now to the people of California— and especially Latinos— could be considered a series of racially motivated terrorist acts.
And for what? According to what I could find online, the starting income for an ICE agent is between $27,000 and $35,000 annually, with higher ranks earning $54,000 a year. That’s part-time golf caddie money. That’s early 2010’s digital sweatshop staff writer money. That’s not even enough to afford a studio apartment in LA. That’s comparable to the starting wage for a McDonald’s cashier — except McDonald’s salaries top off at $83,000 for managers. ICE agents, therefore, are kidnapping children for the equivalent of a fry cook’s salary.
Since it’s clearly not the money, I have to think that the appeal of working for ICE is that some people just enjoy causing suffering. What kind of person would agree to do this? What kind of pathetic fucking loser gets off on this? Why not just work at Wendy’s? At least French fries and Frosties make people happy.
Why? What is the benefit? Who does this help, apart from people who get their rocks off looking at brown people in handcuffs? Are these ICE losers desperate to feel strong and important and getting that feeling by beating up on the people least able to defend themselves? Does that make them feel big and strong and significant?
On a local NPR station today, reporters interviewed bystanders who witnessed ICE agents kidnapping a man from a church parking lot. When the bystanders tried to intervene and told them that they were not authorized to be on their property, one of the masked agents pointed a gun at the unarmed people and told them that all of America was their property. Meanwhile, all of the blondes on Fox News are still displaying their oversized cross necklaces while they lie about all of it.
Images of masked men running around like they’re raiding Osama Bin Laden’s compound as they try to take down taco stands and terrorize agricultural workers has left me with a horrible feeling deep in the pit of my stomach. This country is so incurably fucked up. The men who work for ICE are broken and sick in their souls—that there are so many of them willing to do this work is a testament to a rot in our society. The people supporting this are irretrievably broken. The media perpetuating these lies is evil. Those who view it all as entertainment are ghouls. There is no coming back from this, so long as this many people are sick enough to inflict this much pain live inside our borders.
God help us.
I'm betting they're all Proud Boys, Three Percenters & Patriot Fronters.
They are not motivated by money but by sadism.