Los Angeles Is Not Burning: Dispatch from L.A.
The truth is less dramatic—and more important.
"Are things really that bad?" a friend in the media texted me on Wednesday, regarding what the public is being told and shown about the protests in Los Angeles, where I am currently reporting. "I want to murder the media," they continued.
The concept of "the fog of war" can accurately be applied to the protest movement. Opposing factions will, for obvious reasons, obfuscate the positions and tactics of protestors, while politically sympathetic media gleefully amplify those obfuscations. Weapons of mass destruction, the Russia collusion, "Biden is fine." We've been conditioned to expect news outlets to lie, or at least mush around the truth to serve a specific agenda.
I'm mostly indifferent to messaging that is little more than P.R. Do I care that Kylie Jenner admitted her boobs aren't real? I don't, and I probably wouldn't know the difference. But there are a few things I do know about, and one of them is protesting. Since 2019, I have spent more than 100 days and nights with protesters on the streets of Portland, New York, and Chicago, writing about my experiences dozens of times throughout.
Thus, just like my friend, I am irked by the exaggerations, omissions, and comparisons I see being spread about the situation on the ground in Los Angeles. Do I have all the answers? Yes! No. But I can clarify a few easily disprovable claims and provide some needed nuance, as someone who is on the ground and who also lived in Los Angeles for 18 years.
Los Angeles is not on lockdown. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass imposed a curfew—from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.—to "stop the vandalism and looting" seen on several previous nights. The curfew area covers only one square mile of downtown. The city of Los Angeles is more than 500 square miles. Most of L.A. looks exactly as it always does, and life goes on as it always has.
Angelenos are not living in terror. Law enforcement is selectively inspiring terror, as on Tuesday night, when they shot a young woman trying to walk to her home, ostensibly within the curfew zone. The majority of sounds coming from downtown in the hours before the curfew were from law enforcement: helicopters, sirens, flash-bang grenades. Still, by 9:15 p.m., the curfew zone was mostly quiet, with local TV stations playing the Dodgers and Angels games.
The protesters are not being bussed in or paid by George Soros. This is the lazy man's explanation for every protest he doesn't like. Does Soros support some things you or I might find counterproductive to the health of a community? Sure. But the notion that there are thousands of people who are part of a professional outrage class, waiting by their bat-phones for marching orders from the billionaire is not merely a fever dream—it's an insult to ordinary people's ability to think for themselves and exercise their right to take to the streets and speak out.
The protests in Los Angeles 2025 are not the same as the protests in Portland 2020. Where do I even begin? How about: With the exception of federal troops being sent in by President Donald Trump, they are not even similar.
George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. By May 27, there were marches throughout the U.S. protesting racial injustice and police brutality. By May 29, the protests in Portland devolved into violence, including vandalizing a police station and endangering the lives of both officers and prisoners. This effectively lit a proverbial matchhead that burned without pause into 2021. While the people doing the figurative and literal burning (nearly all young, some antifa and more antifa LARPers) would occasionally shout Black Lives Matters slogans, the main objects of their ire were the police, sometimes the government at large, and occasionally the Apple Store, which they took repeated relish in pelting and burning, often while filming the mayhem with their iPhones. If you asked the cohort what their larger goals were—what they wanted to build once they'd burned everything down—they shouted things like, "PHOTOGRAPHY EQUALS DEATH!" and "THE POLICE ARE SHOOTING ALL OUR BLACK FRIENDS IN THE STREETS!" (No black people were killed by Portland police in 2020.) This repeated night after night, until the weather turned cold and COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, at which time the incoherent protesters stashed their hoodies and resumed their lives, which were never in jeopardy in the first place.
The protesters in Los Angeles have a clear objective: They want the arrests of their undocumented neighbors, coworkers, and family members to stop. If the Trump administration were to call off the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids tomorrow and cease the grabbing of hundreds of undocumented migrants from farms, car washes, libraries, and homes, it's an excellent bet the protests would also stop. Unlike Portland's protesters—almost uniformly young and locked out of their lives due to the pandemic—L.A. protesters presumably have other responsibilities to attend to, as I wrote about earlier this week.
I can hear some of you saying, "But Nancy, what about the smashed cop car window? What about the looting?" Peaceful protests often turn violent once the sun goes down, the normies go home, and the boys my late ex called "young, dumb, and full of cum" decide it's time to cause chaos. I saw it ad nauseam in Portland 2020, and I've seen it this week, when the mass of protesters in front of ICE headquarters melted away, leaving a hardcore crew of maybe 150 people yelling into the faces of law enforcement. It was that time of the night when all the players knew the next move, including the cops who started charging, and the young man next to me who shouted, "This is what I came for!" But he and his ilk make up a tiny minority of the protesters—a group nevertheless given a disproportionate amount of airtime because it gets clicks and reinforces what many on the right need to believe: that Trump is doing what needs to be done. Look at these hooligans, how can anybody not see that the streets of L.A. would be running with blood were it not for federal intervention?
Angelenos know this is not true. They live here; they don't axiomatically demonize their neighbors and "other" the undocumented.
The Los Angeles protests are also less performative than those in Portland. Not entirely, of course. We are surely in for more dueling threats from California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Trump, as they try to one-up each other. But Portland was nearly all performance, and for the first time in its history, it landed them centerstage every night. It was their turn in the spotlight, and they didn't foresee the consequences of burning downtown or tanking the economy. They had no institutional knowledge of the ruination they had brought upon themselves.
Los Angeles does. There are enough locals still living who experienced the 1965 Watts Riots, which lasted for six days and resulted in 34 deaths. More were here for the 1992 Rodney King riots, when 63 people died. Yours truly very well remembers standing on her block with her toddler, the daytime sky blackened by nearly 1,000 fires raging concurrently. The wildfires of January this year were worse—18,000 homes lost as well as 30 lives. Los Angeles knows what it's like to explode; to lose or almost lose everything in an instant. The idea that they want to bask in the glow of their own destruction? I don't buy it.
I worry about those who are drawn to destruction, wherever and whenever it may occur. Every movement forms its own incandescence, and even the noblest movement cannot control the outliers and the crazies drawn in. Portland saw only one murder in the streets when Michael Reinoehl, a latecomer who claimed to be "BLM all the way!" shot Trump supporter Aaron "Jay" Danielson point blank in August 2020. I worry about what will happen if the level of military presence in Los Angeles continues to ramp up, if the Marines—who will have had little to no training in riot control—are sent into the streets, and if someone who opposes this administration, or is just a stone-cold lunatic looking for the spotlight, takes a shot or is shot. Then, perhaps, we will see blood in the streets and the media unbridled to shape the narrative as it pleases. And the circle we still have time to break will close for good.
