The Federal Government is organizing a political theater in LAy

From Jim NewtonCalmness

This comment was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

Welcome to Enswest in Los Angeles, the television show.

A month ago the president was this president Donald Trump Unilaterally decided that the city needs troops of the National Guard to master anger about the efforts of its Ministry of Homeland Security Yes Forcibly remove undocumented immigrants from the cityS

From that moment on, in practice, everything about the protests or the federal response of them lacks a connection with reality. To a large extent, this is a series of orchestrated appearances, driving observations and theater pronouncements. Relatively few in a city of 4 million people even notice.

Everything is cosplay, set for images and political advantage.

Let’s take it from the top: On June 6 Pay into the neighborhoods in Los AngelesIn claiming that they are after the “worst of the worst”, criminal migrants whose presence in the United States threatened our way of life. It is strange, however, that ICE has set out to look for those hardened criminals at domestic landfills and car wash, not known as cartel magnets, but rather for hard -working people who are trying to provide families.

Immigrant communities reacted with shock and anger, and some protested this night outside the federal building in the center of La, it became debauchery, and some demonstrators had to be pursued with tear gas or otherwise scattered. There were glimpses of violence, something to order a parade of the Laker Championship, which lasted too long. As of late that evening, the order was restored by the Los Angeles police station.

The next morning in the center of Los Angeles he was peaceful. The Dimes hike held a fair. Diners enjoyed coffee and breakfast in open markets and cafes. The streets were calm and quiet.

President Trump, however over the objections Mayor Karen Bass and governor Gavin Newpom. Trump immediately announced a victory, saying that the units had reimbursed the order in the city. It was peaceful, yes, but not because of everything the federal government did. The guard had not even arrived At that moment.

On the contrary, the arrival of the security and then the active Marines gave the protesters to direct their anger. Over the next few days, the protesters accumulated outside the federal building in the city center and committed to peaceful protests during the day, which sometimes turned into violence after dark. The images were scary the protesters set fire to taxis without drivers were particularly indelible-but the whole saga unfolded in a block of 5 to 10 square square area from the city of 470 square miles.

No military unit played a meaningful role in responding to these protests. The soldiers were appointed to defend two buildings: one in the city center and the other in Westwood.

They should qualify as two of the best protected buildings in the country.

Outside, all this seemed ominous. Every angeno I know called a friend or family member elsewhere, asking about the danger. The fact is that the city was almost completely calm all the time, scenes of violence, exaggerated by close-up photos that did not back away to see a larger, scattered city at rest.

This drama made for television continued as the selected employees raised their moments in the spotlight. Home Security Secretary Christie November immersed a finger within the city’s borders, to host a self-estimated press conference in Westwood, just to make American senator Alex Padila be on his way and be thrown to the ground by excessive FBI agentsS The episode of this day provided images to a senator – Latin American, of course – in handcuffs.

In order not to be overtaken, Vice President JD Vance was attracted by the flame of attention, and he made his La Cameo with another look at the city by many of his turbulences.

His short episode was made in front of a fire truck and emphasized by his deliberate management of the name of Padila – the Vice President called a colleague of the Senate “Jose” with all the smug, opportunistic racism, who determined the rise of Vance to prominence and was sure to face his. Then Comically rejected the incident as a “political theater”.

The queen of the drama is needed to know one.

And so Los Angeles’ trags continues. For the bass, the whirlwind of politics is particularly annoyed.

“I feel like I’m in one of his television shows,” she told Trump when we talked last week. But for her and for Los Angeles, this is not a game of ratings.

“This is an experiment in the seizure of power,” she said, a test of how far politicians and the public are ready to leave Trump and his acting composition of Mispit advisers to bend their muscles on a city uninterested in hosting them.

A point of comparison offers a reminder of how absurd this is. In 1992, the then government. Pete Wilson sent the Los Angeles National Guard. I waited for the guards to unfold from her place to place the exhibition park, and when he finally did it, his arrival was welcome (the deployment of Marines did not go and they were quickly sent).

In 1992, the guard arrived in a city that melted: more than 60 people were killed, 1000 buildings burned and dismantled from the mayor’s office to Hollywood, with entire units from South Los Angeles, torn apart. In this huge explosion of violence, the guard helped to restore order and most troops were drawn two weeks later.

This time, approximately 1850 National Guards remain in Los Angeles more than a month after they first arrived on stage, which was already under control. No one has died (One death is in the process of investigating), without buildings they have not burned. Still, the soldiers are still here. They do virtually nothing taken from homes, jobs, schools and even a fire obligation to serve as extras in Trump’s theater.

But as the Guards are waiting for permission to go home, the administration increases its monitoring bending. On Monday, internal security staff dressed as soldiers and rode on a horse, Squeezed through Park MacArthur ParkS Thehe scene It was more good than threatening – viewers killed mobile cameras to document the view of horses touring the grounds.

By the way, horses are proof of the theater of this: the real police do not use horses to make arrests. False police ride them to do what they, in complete unconsciousness of the irony, are described as “showing a presence”.

A signal from residents of the excitement, Bass arrived at the scene and called for the forces to leave. In the end, when they fired some dust, they did.

The federal government called it “Excalibur Operation”. Seriously. You can’t think of these things.

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.