Insurrection, Rebellion, and California Pacification

American decline just got a lot...steeper.

Two months ago, my buddy Lyle Rubin crystallized a prediction we’d both been talking about for close to a year:

the people at the highest levels of the Trump coalition do not plan to have elections...the plan is to cause total chaos and for Trump to declare a national emergency before the mid-terms.

If you follow my longstanding argument that MAGA is a force of reactionary revolution, then you expect that political instability was always inevitable. It was the bargain inherent to allowing Trump to take power.

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Los Angeles was peaceful before ICE started ripping up communities.

The city—like many cities in the US—has been plagued with heavily armed militia-looking bros in camouflage kidnapping friends and neighbors (usually brown folks) without warrants or identifying themselves. In any other country, we would recognize ICE agents as secret police. Under the cover of law, they abuse it. The people in affected communities have tried to resist, largely through education—making sure people know their rights—and non-violent civil disobedience.

That non-violence continued on June 7, as LA residents came out to protest the ICE agents confronting their communities with terror. LAPD, helping ICE rather than Angelinos, said they had everything well in hand. At the end of a day full of outrage against a surge of ICE raids, the LAPD issued the following statement, assuring everyone that everything’s cool:

But the US security state is lawless, a threat to the people in whose name it acts. And, as Lyle worried aloud, the political elites who sit atop the MAGA coalition came to office looking for an excuse to simply declare everything a “national security emergency.” Trump did that on his first day in office, announcing the national border a national security emergency—the very move that activated the ICE raids on American cities.

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Theater of Violence

In response to a situation that California’s governor, LA’s mayor, and the LAPD all say is under control, Trump has federalized the national guard and ordered 2,000 troops to occupy LA.

Trump has further put Marines at Camp Pendleton “on alert.” And his order to deploy troops—which explicitly declares the people to be in rebellion of the state—does not mention LA at all. In fact, the order has no geographic limitation. Trump himself said this morning that “we are going to have troops everywhere.”

The idea, to be clear, is that troops are being readied for deployment everywhere in the US where communities resist ICE raids…which is every large community in the US.

As I write this, Trump has not yet invoked the Insurrection Act, but he will. Why? Because the statute that Trump is currently relying on to deploy federalized national guard troops (10 USC 12406) is not an independent authority; it has only been used to call up troops for the Insurrection Act. If he doesn’t invoke the Insurrection Act, his current moves won’t survive a court challenge. But of course, by the time a court challenge happens, the situation will have escalated substantially.

There’s no insurrection happening, so why the Insurrection Act? Why need a pretext to justify troops?

Because, circling back to Lyle’s comment at the top of this post, Trump was always going to send in troops, but the Posse Comitatus Act makes it illegal to deploy the military (or federalized national guard) on US soil. The key exception—ie, the legal workaround—is the Insurrection Act, which hasn’t been used since the LA riots in 1992 (my crucial first memory of political consciousness, in fifth grade). And this would be the first time since 1965 that the president has sent troops into a state against the objections of the governor of that state.

And so it was always predictable that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act. So predictable that I can say that even as he technically hasn’t yet done so.

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Civil War or Pacification

A Kiwi friend who knows I have friends and family scattered throughout California asked how serious the situation was in America. I lamented that it was serious. Civil-war-level serious. He seemed somewhat in disbelief.

But Trump’s military deployment of the national guard is symbolic; a tripwire. 2,000 troops are but a drop in the ocean that is Los Angeles county. From an operational perspective, this is a “force-to-space ratio” problem. In other words, this is not a force deployment with the capacity for large-scale repression; it’s a flaccid, destined-to-fail deterrent against civil disobedience.

So if the token 2,000 troops are meant to be a beachhead or a tripwire, then a tyrannical crackdown is inevitable because more forces will soon be on the way. That’s precisely the scenario most likely to break toward civil war—the kind of intra-state conflict that opens LA as a front in a fascist-antifascist conflict.

But if the tokenistic troop deployment is meant to simply reinforce LAPD and ICE repression of communities, we have research showing that low- and mid-level amounts of state repression are likely to backfire, swelling the ranks of revolt.¹

Most importantly, the proximate source of grievance—deliberately terroristic ICE raids—is only going to escalate. If the state is not willing to compromise with protestor grievances, then the state is asking for a civil conflict.

But it’s not civil war if the people remain non-violent. If the state uses violence in a one-sided fashion, what we have is pacification. Bringing the Jakarta Method to America would be evil, but it would not be a war until the people fight back. Any lover of peace or democracy should prefer to avoid this path. But faced with state violence, we should expect even peace movements to fight back.

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Bad Luck Ghorman

They’re begging for martial law, or something like it.

Yesterday, 4 minutes after JD Vance called the LA protests an “invasion,” Stephen Miller called it an “insurrection.” 29 min later, Hegseth threatened to send in the Marines. This is not careful deliberation; this is MAGA salivating to continue a reactionary revolution.

It’s worth reminding everyone why I drew critical attention to Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense in the first place. Hegseth’s “war on woke” was about stripping out layers of civil staff who control the Pentagon’s war machine. The tool of state violence needed to be made unaccountable to the people in order to be made accountable to a tyrannical monarch.

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Self Care

I’m sure I’m not alone in struggling to stay focused, manage my many obligations, and keep healthy.

But it’s very hard to do self care while watching my own dismal predictions—about the country of my birth descending into violent tyranny—come true. It seems obvious where this is all heading, but it’s too painful to confront until you’re left no choice.

And in the immediate, what is to be done depends very much on how you’re positioned anyway. Most of us aren’t in LA or New York or Minneapolis. So we do what we can where we are.

Fortunately, there’s always something you can do. This reading—“What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked”—from the good folks at Waging Nonviolence, talks through three categories of action:

1. Refusal

2. Resistance

3. Ridicule

In the meantime, I hope everyone can get some exercise, read something that’s not on your phone, and stay away from drugs that aren’t caffeine. Maybe listen to a podcast or two or three!

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1. Thanks to Rory Truex for directing me to this research.