Trump’s ICE War on Los Angeles

I started this a month ago, intending to fill it up, but the actual labor of learning to spot ICE, and how to react, and rearranging society to contend with this war, has diverted me. So, first, a message to those of us privileged enough to be doomers, a post from Teka:

https://www.facebook.com/brickbatrevue/posts/pfbid02z9MZL2Tr6mqhLJAUWrBATwJEn5dM9oKUtdZd6uaqJHFoetCu7aDJ4fidTSJTnXphl

The post:

If you have health insurance, a 401(k), home equity, vacation photos, and a freshly stamped passport—take a moment before weaponizing your privilege to prophecy doom online. Your critiques, masquerading as “reality checks,” typically don’t help —what they do is fray the fragile rope of collective hope.

Neither a PhD in literature nor an executive title in engineering automatically means you have expertise in the political economy or futurology.

When I published a newspaper, I intentionally excluded op-eds fixated on civic disengagement. Because mobilizing people is arduous and demobilizing (and demoralizing) them after four decades of institutional decay is perversely efficient and simple.

We dwell in an age where sadistic market logic masquerades as destiny—where “TINA” (There Is No Alternative) substitutes for imagination. Your prediction that “people won’t vote” & “nothing you do matters” & “this is the end”—it is a deceptive mirage—it reflects not diagnostic acumen, but your own capture by the very system you claim to transcend.

There is also a psychological toll for all your so-called truth telling. When those with material security broadcast despair, what message echoes among those clinging to your example? “If they see no future, why should I struggle?”

Once I gave a tale of woe online and a person messaged me offline and stated, “You’re amazing, if things aren’t working out for you, what chance do I have?”

Such rhetoric doesn’t merely suppress voter turnout—it fertilizes the soil of su!c!dal despair.

Nightmares hold no more truth than dreams. Imperial fascist futurism is not more likely than Cooperative Utopianism. Choose your words like they are a lifeline— because they truly might be.