Journal: When the Angels Scream
Author’s note: consisting primarily of my personal writing, Journal features are published irregularly here on NIDC. Want more? Click here to subscribe to Nina Illingworth Dot Com today.
“This ain’t no fucking motion picture.” – Ice Cube, “Check Yo Self”
Like a lot of Americans, I’ve spent the last five days glued to livestream videos, updating news feeds constantly as the Trump regime’s invasion of the City of Angels rages on. Since the day the Klepto Kaiser came down that escalator to launch his political career with an explicitly fascist tirade against Mexican migrants and Muslim Americans, I’ve warned readers the Swine Emperor is serious about conducting an overt fascist takeover of the United States; and suddenly there it was, unfolding in slow motion across my TV screen. Over a decade of analyzing and describing how everything about the pre-existing American police state and Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence was leading towards a moment like this should have prepared me to analyze this situation in real time; but it didn’t. Instead, watching the very nightmare I’ve been predicting play out on livestream has left me full of doubt, emotionally overwhelmed, and utterly terrified, perhaps because as a scholar of historical fascist movements, I have a pretty good idea of what is likely coming next, and it will involve body bags if not mass graves.
So I waited, and I watched, and the story of Trump’s invasion of LA got so large, so quickly, that I’m already in danger of losing it. Frankly, I think someone could write a whole book about just these past five days since nazi-style ICE raids across Los Angeles touched off protests the Pork Reich used as an excuse to deploy military forces to the city, over the objections of its Democrat Mayor and Governor. I’m doing my best to keep pace on my Fediverse blog, but this event is unfolding so rapidly it feels like everything I might publish on NIDC will already be out of date by the time I post it. Even in the two short days since I originally wrote the words in this journal, I’ve come to understand that the Trumpenreich invasion of LA signals that we’ve moved beyond the hypothetical, or installation phase of a fascist dictatorship in America. That dictatorship is now operating in broad daylight under the perpetual threat of militarized martial law; the only questions that remain are about how all-encompassing, and durable in the face of opposition, Trump’s attempt to seize control of the entire American state will actually be.
Despite all of this however, I have no intention of sitting out what I believe may be the defining story of this second Trump era so far, and for reasons I go over in the journal below, I think it’s extremely important to remember the opening days of this terrifying bit of fascist security state theater. We’ve got to start somewhere, so I’m going to start by publishing a cleaned up version of the journal I wrote on June 9th, 2025 and hopefully we can quickly catch up as I publish further articles going forward.
“Los Angeles is a microcosm of the United States. If L.A. falls, the country falls.” – Ice T
Earlier this weekend, I told readers of my blog that I was waiting to write about the Trump regime’s fascist federal invasion of the city of Los Angeles, because I didn’t think we were yet at a point where the whole story, which remains ongoing, could be properly understood and contextualized. On Sunday morning, by illegally commandeering 2,000 California National Guardsmen, and deploying them on camera to suppress protests that were at that time entirely peaceful, the Trumpenreich provided that context without a shadow of a doubt, and punctuated the point with teargas. The federal government is staging a miniature invasion of Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, partly as a form of reprisal for Angelinos disrupting Trump’s fascist mass deportation project, partly in order to provoke a conflict that would allow the government to at least threaten to invoke the Insurrection Act, and partly to further criminalize Trump’s political opposition as he drives America towards a one-party fascist dictatorship.
A cursory examination of the Trump regime’s statements and behavior over this past weekend make it abundantly clear that this bit of violent fascist political theater was not spontaneous; Stephen Miller, Trump’s hate goblin deputy chief of staff who is clearly running this nazi shitshow, is fully aware of the size of the game he and the entire Trump regime are now playing. No matter what happens in California from here, this is a huge story with ramifications that are going to be felt for the rest of the Swine Emperor’s time in office, and beyond. Much as the first 100 days of Trump’s clearly fascist presidency were defined by human trafficking flights to El Salvador, and the Swine-Emperor’s quest to deport Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk for anti-genocide speech, the invasion of LA is going to define the next phase of the fight against American fascism. This is it, the moment every fascist thing Trump has ever done was building towards, and folks who don’t want to, or can’t, learn how to goosestep, had better come up with a battle plan to resist this nazi bullshit, and quickly.
Unfortunately, we live in a society controlled by rich reactionaries who themselves work for even richer nazis that prefer fascism, even under a gauche assclown like Trump, to sharing either their wealth or power with broader American society. This has created a political and media class that values property over people and instinctively embraces violent murderpigs or soldiers at the first sign of constitutionally-protected dissent, while simultaneously demonizing marginalized people and protestors. Already the story of what we all just watched go down in Los Angeles on livestreams and newsfeeds is being massaged into a victim-blaming narrative that simultaneously absolves both the Trump regime’s fascist provocations, and the excessive violence of local police forces against almost entirely peaceful protestors who had every right, if not a civic responsibility, to try and stop illegal fascist ICE abductions, and open civil rights violations in their communities. Statements are being memory-holed, timelines are being distorted, and a million (mostly) white talking heads in your media are starting to “just ask questions” about whether or not the horrifying security state violence on your screen was justified because some of the protestors had bottle rockets, and someone set some robo-taxis on fire; as if “violence” against property is a thing that exists, and mere vandalism is morally equivalent to stomping protestors with police horses or firing “nonlethal” rounds at journalists.
In order to combat that phenomenon, I’d like to establish in extremely broad strokes, a rough outline of what I personally just watched unfold over three days in L.A. If we’re going to spend perhaps the next several years talking together about the heinous fascist shit that just went down, and may continue to go down long after I publish this, then allow me to offer you a roadmap of where I’m coming from on the subject of the Trumpenreich invasion of Los Angeles.
- At the end of May, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and Trump’s unofficial minister of nazi shit Stephen Miller, met with ICE officials and conveyed orders to drastically increase the regime’s Nazi Party-esque daily caged migrant quota from around 1,000, to 3,000 arrests per day. Importantly, at those meetings Miller reportedly demanded the Gestapo stop focusing on criminals, and to conduct snatch and grab kidnapping raids in community areas where working migrants may congregate, like “Home Depot.”
- Last week reports leaked that ICE leadership responded to the increased quota demands by telling Gestapo agents go “get creative” to make their numbers and providing instructions on how to do so that appear to be at least inspired by Miller’s directives. These instructions included orders to raid community businesses, make arrests without judicial warrants, and grab bystanders agents merely think might be undocumented; all of which are clear civil rights violations. These directives also result in federal agents in LA detaining migrant families who are reporting for ICE check-ins and holding them, sometimes overnight, and always without adequate access to bedding, food, or water, in the basement of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in downtown L.A. These blatant civil rights violations were widely reported in Los Angeles and created an environment of entirely rational anger and fear towards ICE agents before dawn even cracked on Friday morning.
- On Friday, militarized ICE units started conducting raids across the LA area using these new tactics, which are racist, bald-faced civil rights violations; Angelinos, who receive no protection from these fascist abuses whatsoever from local authorities, understandably became angry and begin nonviolently protesting and working to disrupt the fascist ICE mass deportation operation being conducted around them. At this point, the protests were peaceful, and the only crimes committed were vandalism and obstructing the literal American Gestapo in the form of ICE; who again were violating civil rights, and conducting militarized raids around the greater Los Angeles area as part of Trump’s fascist mass deportation scheme.
- Despite this, the Trump regime repeatedly declared that there was a violent insurrection going on in LA, illegally commandeered 2,000 California National Guardsmen, and deployed them to the LA area; these soldiers were then used on Sunday to threaten protestors and clear roads for the feds conducting mass migrant arrests. At that point and only that point, Angelinos realized they were being invaded, and started fighting back, which resulted in numerous filmed and widely disseminated violent police reprisals against protestors and journalists.
- This police state violence, conducted entirely by local law enforcement who in theory hold no fealty to Trump, continued throughout Sunday until we arrived at the moment I wrote this journal, with US president Donald Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsom in a political standoff as the whole US establishment tried to pretend that vandalism is violence, and that “breaking the law” to stop fascist murderpigs from rounding up your neighbors is a greater crime than the fascist mass deportations Angelinos were obstructing in the first place.
That’s the story I saw this past weekend, and its the story I’m going to keep talking about going forward, no matter how many Very Serious People TM in our discourse try to make lies the truth, and fascist police repression the moral option. Stephen Miller can call it an “insurrection,” and corporate American media can claim there was “violence on both sides” until they’re all blue in the face, but they can’t stop reality from being real. A protest is not a riot. Vandalism is not violence. And if blocking traffic to stop militarized Gestapo thugs from kidnapping your neighbors and carting them away to be caged like animals is a crime, it is certainly a far less grave offense to our society than the act of militarily invading a sanctuary city to conduct ethno-nationalist migrant round-ups. The protestors in Los Angeles are not invaders; that’s ICE. And they’re not criminals either; that’s the fascist regime conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign in slow motion. The Angelinos who stood, and continue to stand bravely against the Swine Emperor’s fascist takeover of their city are in fact heroes, and we had all better hope there are more people just like them all around the country, because you can bet your ass that LA won’t be the last city the Trumpenreich invades.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
Subscribe to NIDC to for email updates whenever a new post is published.
Support my work on Ko-Fi by clicking here.
