On The Right To Protest
civil disobedience all the way
When I heard that the National Guard had been deployed against the protestors of LA—my city, a city I have fallen in love with, adopted, and become a part of these last few years, a city I organize with and within—my heart didn’t skip a beat. I mourned what was coming, but I have also known that it would come to this for a long time. For the last few years, I have been training for this.
Of course, the reality TV star with zero political know-how and legitimacy, who is now the president of the free world (I say this in a very Olivia Pope Scandal kind of way), only understands violence as the singular weapon against the people. Forget that these very people are protesting for the dignity of their neighbors, friends, and family. To the idiots up top, like twat-faced Stephen Miller, this was an “insurrection.” Not a community defending their own, demanding the bare minimum.
If you didn’t know, the protestors in LA have been fighting ICE and against immigration enforcement operations, which have been escalating across the country since Trump’s return. On June 6th, Federal agents swept through Los Angeles, detaining a reported 121 undocumented individuals from construction sites, food trucks, and right off the street! “But this wasn't happening in shadows,” wrote Ahmad Ibsais in State of Siege. “It was conducted in broad daylight, with a calculated boldness that seemed designed to provoke.”
From the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil to Rumeysa Ozturk, ICE has been (historically, but even more so) disgustingly brazen. Wearing plain clothes and harassing anyone they assume is a threat. I watched a video last week of the NYPD*** arrest a Chilean mother in the middle of New York City, leaving her twelve-year-old daughter crying behind her on the sidewalk.
These protests are just the beginning of a very long fight that the citizens of the US need to admit to and process: Are you really willing to fight for what’s right? Because this will only escalate, it will only get more fascistic. So what are you willing to lose? What are you willing to fight for? What do you really believe in?
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As we know, the NYPD and LAPD continue to train with the IOF.
Recently, Harsha Walia, behind No One Is Illegal, tweeted:
“It isn’t just that domestic police (LAPD) are trained by foreign occupation forces” it’s that the cops (and ICE) are *themselves* also occupation & counterinsurgency forces.”
This is an important reminder: policing, itself, is a colonial practice and a literal occupation on all indigenous stolen lands. Walia reminds us that Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party told us that cops are indeed “an occupying army.” They protect land, wealth, and property, not people. Unless they’re white and rich.
The Hampton Institute recently tweeted that the Deputy Director of ICE was sent by the ADL for training with the Israeli military. The ADL (or the Anti-Defamation League), which self-proclaims to be the “leading anti-hate organization in the world,” regularly endangers the lives of Black and Palestinian activists.
Just last year The Guardian reported: “The ADL has come under fire in recent years as it has leveled charges of antisemitism against leftwing Jewish groups, Black Lives Matter, Palestinian rights groups, and other organizations critical of Israel.
It has become more aggressive since the Gaza war’s outset, but its credibility has also suffered – most recently, Wikipedia’s editors found the ADL could not be trusted to give reliable information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Perhaps Zionists are slowly realizing that they might openly manipulate the truth, but there is “historical truth” and “fact” that they can’t keep evading.
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These protests started because of grief. Grief of losing family and community members. “By afternoon, protesters had gathered downtown, not as rioters but as a grieving community. Teachers, nurses, janitors, and undocumented high schoolers banged pots, carried signs, and shouted the names of those taken. Someone played corridos from a portable speaker. Someone else clutched a list of the missing and wept,” wrote Ibsais. But when protesters gathered outside the ICE federal building, police responded swiftly with aggression. None of this stalled January 6th business when white people “stormed the capital” high on amphetamines and supremacy. Instead, protestors in LA faced the unleashed ugliness of the fascist savagery of the LAPD.
What escalated next is unfathomable, but exactly the way the State responds to Black and Brown people. “Tear gas canisters flew. Flash-bang grenades exploded. A peaceful demonstration transformed into a battlefield—not because protesters chose violence, but because the state chose escalation,” Ibsais writes. But of course, the media positioned the protestors as a threat, not the cops assaulting them. Adam Schiff, a Zionist Senator, posted:
Natasha Lennard wrote aptly in The Intercept, “It is a willful refusal to correctly locate the agents of violence in a violent scenario.” Adding, “In reality, the protesters throwing rocks at heavily armed security forces or attempting to damage the vehicles used to kidnap their immigrant neighbors did not introduce violence. They are instead acting in militant community defense.”
We forget poverty is violence, houselessness is violence, stealing land is violence, polluting water is violence, killing unarmed Black and Brown people is violence, unlawfully detaining people is violence, subjugating people to colonial theft and extraction for centuries is violence, denying people the right to life and dignity is violence. We forget that telling you that you live in the land of the free and then refusing you the right to protest… is violence.
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Constitutionally, under US law, you are allowed to protest and what we are seeing in Los Angeles is resistance to injustice. The First Amendment protects your right to do so as a form of free speech—in fact, petitioning the government is seen as a democratic right, a right enshrined to all.
What's happening in Los Angeles by the LAPD is not law enforcement—it's occupation. From Gaza to Los Angeles, settler colonies use the same tactics of fearmongering, control and intimidation. As Ibsais shared recently: “What we're witnessing is not the lawful execution of federal authority but improvisation masquerading as law—the slow erosion of constitutional process, replaced by declaration, spectacle, and muscle.”
It does seem, under Trump, that legality and legal protection and precedent matter less. A blaring sign of authoritarianism. I mean, he’s been threatening this for a while; it’s not surprising. What’s most shocking, however, is the senselessness and how Orwell was right: ignorance is bliss. Twenty months into a genocide, and people still flinch and debate the word “genocide.” It’s clear that many prefer being wrong, so long as they never have to face themselves… that doesn’t and won’t last. These are existential times. Sooner or later, we will have to face ourselves. The internal and external collapse is coming. It’s been written. This, above all else, is a spiritual war. Not a religious one—a spiritual one. I’ll unpack this in a future newsletter.
This is what I’ve been writing about for a long time. We can’t hide from ourselves or each other anymore. Increasingly, it will be hard to hide. There’s too much at stake; our lives and our planet are at stake. Many people have experienced violence, extermination, genocide—indigenous peoples across the world faced their Armageddons, but they also survived. This survival is not accidental; we have survived for a reason. I believe that more of us, if not all of us, have to dedicate our lives to the revolution. Perhaps that’s a revolution of self, to face the trauma and do the ancestral work the people in your lineage couldn’t. Or maybe it’s a revolution of society, to fight for what’s good, what matters, for the world ahead, daring to be dreamt up by all of us. Don’t let the Tesla losers determine our futures, they don’t have us in mind. We must dream for ourselves now.
I saw my father this week for the first time in six years. We walked around the streets of London together and spoke about what’s to come: Gaza, revolution, and the U.S. He shared that civil disobedience has always been the only way. The future is in the hands of the people, the people have the power. As he spoke, I kept thinking of the famous Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture speech where he talks about non-violence. This week many a politician, speaking to the LA protests, brought up MLK and non-violence. They only ever use his words to go against his actual beliefs, it’s sickening. Carmichael/Ture famously said: “Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for Black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
I think about this a lot these days. Since the genocide began, people's moral compasses have been decaying. More often than not, I remember, these people who are against truth and fairness, who have no honesty, who cheer on the murder of women and children mercilessly, have no conscience. That’s why it’s so important to build a conscience. It’s not about sides, it’s not about right or wrong — it’s about morality. Is it wrong to kill people en masse? Yes. Is it wrong to arrest and deport people? Yes. Nobody is illegal on stolen land!
My father reminded me that pre-European colonization, Indians (as in from India) didn’t own land… people just lived on the land… but it was everyone’s because it was from God. There’s something sick about how many people who are being deported are from Mexico or El Salvador, and how for many of them, the US is also a part of their ancestral lands. Same thing for Palestinians being bombed for living on their lands, their family homes for generations.
All our struggles are united, and so are our futures. This past week, witnessing Angelinos made me proud. I couldn’t fight on the ground, but in spirit I was there.
So, please, have a conscience and keep fighting in big and small ways. Protest. Use the power of civil disobedience however you can. This one’s on all of us, so is our future.
I believe in us. I really do. 🤲🏾
*** An earlier version of this said ICE Agents but apparently it was the NYPD. Still trash though!
If you’d like to help people on the ground in Los Angeles, please donate on Venmo to: @jailsupportla