Dumb Anti-ICE Hysteria Is Safe To Ignore

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — On its best days, the news struggles to depict reality. But the current trend runs toward actual narrative psychosis, and the headlines don’t match the world at all.

In the news, currently, all the brown people in America are in hiding. ICE is storming through the streets, sweeping up anyone who doesn’t look white, so whole families are bunkered down in basements to escape the brutal machinery of the fascist state. Go look at the first picture that illustrates this January 22 story from NPR, photographing a brave Latina in profile and in the shadows so that the goon squads don’t learn her identity and haul her away. Sample paragraph: “In an apartment on this street, the blinds are drawn. Inside, a 2-year-old toddles toward her mother, crying to be picked up.”

This “the blinds are drawn” narrative is everywhere, though NPR — which now has no brand identity beyond amygdala-pounding news about feelings for an audience of AWFLs — seems to specialize in it. Meanwhile, a January 29 statement from the California Faculty Association warns that the victims of ICE’s “racial profiling” are re-evaluating everything from “routine drives to work and school to avoiding public spaces” in order to avoid being dragged away to the camps. If you aren’t white, it’s too frightening to go out in public right now.

But somebody forgot to tell the brown people, who may have missed the memo because they were out at dinner. I went to a minor riot this Saturday in Downtown Los Angeles, but I kept running into routine life on the way to the uprising. A football field away from the federal buildings where the brave resistance was boldly fighting the Nazi feds, a bunch of what our progressive friends would call Latinx people were dancing in a public park, apparently forgetting to express terror.

In Little Tokyo, a single block away from the riot, a bunch of ramen restaurants were running waiting lists, and largely Asian crowds lined the sidewalks. In Chinatown, an outdoor festival with live music and a bunch of booths selling food and crafts was well-attended by a noticeably unworried and not-very-white crowd. And at the famous Philippe the Original, where I paused mid-riot to grab a sandwich later in the evening before strolling back to work, Los Angeles was the absolute same multi-racial and multi-ethnic place it always is, like a Benetton ad with sawdust on the floor. Setting the news aside, people were just living their lives. On that theme, take a moment to watch some shrewd advice about not being swept up in a confrontation with terrifying ICE officers.

At that remarkably unimpressive riot behind the complex of federal buildings, a few hundred idiots faced off against a few dozen federal law enforcement personnel and another few dozen LAPD officers. Everyone gaggled up at the loading dock, which the federal officers aggressively defended, while all of the front and side entrances to all of the federal buildings in the same large federal complex were completely unguarded and completely without protesters. Eventually, the evening turned into a fight. The LAPD later announced that its officers had made dozens of arrests, and there were a good number of serious physical confrontations between cops and mostly pretty lame rioters. A few journalists were menaced by the crowd, and the federal officers in the loading dock took several salvos of fireworks.

Throughout all of that chaos, though, a protester had parked his priceless and quite elegant vintage Chevrolet maybe thirty feet outside the yellow police tape that marked the edge of the one-block riot zone, and I apologize for the profanity here that you can’t really avoid if you photograph this area right now:

The owner of that car drove it to a riot, parked it thirty feet away, and with good reason didn’t worry that it would be damaged. That’s precisely how controlled and limited the “riot” was. In fairness, there was a sign in the side window to protect the car, expressing sentiments about ICE that the rioters would share.

So the terrified non-white potential victims of the ICE terror squads are just going to dinner and ignoring the whole stupid thing, and the riots end precisely where the police put up some yellow tape. The whole thing is narrative performance, a hysterical show for the cameras.

On that note, the New York Times is declaring that the death of Alex Pretti is a “national tipping point,” a shocking event that has gripped the attention of the whole nation. There are two Americas, you see: before Alex Pretti and after Alex Pretti. We’ll never be the same. We can’t get Saint Alex the Martyred Nurse out of our minds.

Meanwhile, courtesy of Google Trends:

The whole country is reeling from the death of what’s-his-name, that guy who did the, uh. What were we talking about?

A bunch of ICE-related topics that are consuming the news media right now are demonstrably not consuming the country. They’re faking it, and you can ignore them.

This article was adapted from a piece originally published on the author’s Substack, “Tell Me How This Ends.”

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.