The Trump administration and the obliging mainstream media would have you believe that the real terror that is still unfolding every day in Los Angeles and throughout California as gangs of armed masked men attack and kidnap Mexican American immigrants is the contesting of these attacks, the symbol of which was the burning of three Google automatic delivery Waymo cars.
The cars are everywhere in the affluent (and generally white) west of Los Angeles, in Brentwood, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica, but hardly a presence in poorer and more diverse East LA. Equally lacking are SUVs, gas-guzzling “family” cars that consume more gas, take up more space on the highways, and require larger private garages for parking. So, yes, the burning of the Waymo cars was a class statement, a statement about inequality in Los Angeles.
But the far greater statement was made by the Trump administration in its attempt to turn back history and restore the city and the county and indeed Southern California by transforming it from the most diverse state in the country to the white, Anglo paradise of which its founders had always dreamed.
As the Pulitizer-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen of Vietnamese dissent, pointed out in The Financial Times, the city has benefited from spectacular immigration flows with many of those immigrants establishing beachhead communities and dismantling the original view of LA Times publisher Harry Chandler, a noted follower of the racial and racist “science” of Eugenics, of the city as a settler colony where the predominant population would be white protestant from the Midwest.
Wave after wave of immigrants upset this vision of an Aryan paradise, be they Mexican, African American or Chinese, and they were often met with attempts to cage them in or to repel them. Examples of this include the Chinese Exclusion Act(s) (1882 and 1947), the mass deportation of Mexicans in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression, and the enforcement, which continues to this day, of racial housing zones for African Americans. But the need for labor and the desire to themselves seek what was billed as the “Sunkist skies of glory” compelled these peoples to move forward.
These waves have been followed by still more as Vietnamese have settled large portions of Orange County, Asians in the San Gabriel Valley, and as the city itself boasts Little Tokyo, Koreatown, Little Ethiopia, and an Iranian enclave in Westwood nicknamed Tehrangeles, where there is even “Persian Square.” 
It is this Los Angeles that the Trump administration and the new Deporter-in-Chief Steven Miller have come to break up, starting with the Mexican community, and under the guise that resistance to this frontal assault amounts to “organized insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” This “revolt” thus necessitates the calling out not only of the LAPD but also the National Guard, the Marines, and whatever other shadowy forces now partially occupy the city, with the name and the government body of the participants carrying out this cleansing often hidden from view.
This is not only a deliberate targeting of immigrant workers but also an attempt to break up and destroy the accumulated wealth of a Mexican working and middle-class, wealth that, as in the now destroyed African American community of Altadena (this time hastened by global warming and a very possibly a derelict private power company), took generations to establish. The opening salvo in this attack took place in the Home Depot parking lot in the Mexican working-class enclave of Paramount, one of three such cities known as “gateway cities” to Los Angeles, and a place where immigrants gathered to be picked up for work that day.
Among the next cities targeted, just to the north, was Downey, a middle-class community known as “The Mexican Beverly Hills,” but still, whose average income is $88,000 in a city where it is generally conceded that its residents need to make $100,000 to $200,000 to live comfortably. That is, this is a city right on the edge of prosperity that Trump and his minion, Steven Miller, are trying to destroy.
There is a long line of attempts to make Southern California a “whites only” locale or to thoroughly dominate any other group settling in the region. General Otis, who established the LA Times as a regional powerhouse, was famous for his slaughter of women and children in the Philippines. He boasted of his crushing of the movement for independence, and its resistance to one conqueror, Spain, being replaced by another, the U.S., in the misnamed Spanish-American War, since the main casualties occurred after Spain was defeated as the U.S. put down rebellions in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Otis passed the torch to his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, the Eugenicist, who advocated for the creation of “white spots.”
This sentiment is voiced at the conclusion of my detective thriller A Hello To Arms, about the establishment of the permanent war economy after World War II. The wife of a general who is returning to civilian life as a Wall Street Banker tells the sleuth Harry Palmer that her son will carry on the couple’s goal of our “rebuilt” California.
This abundant land will flower and will be the rebirth of the Aryan dream. They call it the westernmost outpost of Nordic civilization. And that’s what my husband was making it. It has a population that is twice as white as New York, Chicago or any of the other cities of the country. It’s a new Valhalla and a new promised land.”
“Wow,” Harry replies, noting her origin in Austria and Berlin before the war, “you really are a Nazi.”
The current advocate of this position is the highly placed deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser Steven Miller, generally conceded to be the guiding hand behind the push to expel immigrants. Miller grew up in Santa Monica, where he railed against his more diverse and working-class high school., signing his yearbook with a quote from Teddy Roosevelt, right out of the General Otis playbook: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism.” At Duke, he helped fundraise and organize a talk by Richard Spencer, who went on to become influential in the white supremacist movement and was described by a university official as “incredibly intolerant.”
He is an advocate for a policy of stopping to provide visas to Chinese nationals, and a proponent of the idea of separating immigrant parents from their children to foster deportation. His comments may have laid the groundwork for the Trump administration’s justification for the actions of ICE and the seizing control and dispatching of the California National Guard, as taking place during a “rebellion.” These extreme measures, he claimed, as well as “the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” and invasion is a way Trump has often talked about Mexicans coming to the U.S.
Miller’s extreme views and his validation of settler colonialism in “Making California Great Again” are also a piece with Israel’s unprovoked attack on Iran, where a European outpost in the Middle East seeks to destroy a people other than its own and which is following to the letter the playbook, including false and phony “weapons of mass destruction,” of the invasion of Iraq.
Unfortunately, the contemporary Los Angeles power structure has not responded adequately to this extreme challenge to the state’s sovereignty. The argument of the Democrats, Los Angeles Mayor Bass and California Governor Newsom, has simply been that the LAPD can dispatch the demonstrators, and so there is no need for the National Guard. In fact, reports from journalists covering the protests from inside are that the LAPD, rather than the protestors, has, in most cases, initiated the violence and has been the active agent of repression, while the National Guard has stood in the background as a passive, intimidating force.
The most problematic response may have been that of the Los Angeles Dodgers, whose largest and most loyal fan base is Mexican American, a base that follows the team not only in the ballpark but also on the road, where Dodger fans often overwhelm and out-chant the opposition. In the heat of the protests, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, in a shameful advertising stunt, claimed he hoped that the team “can be a positive distraction for what people are going through in Los Angeles right now.”
The Dodgers then did some damage control, claiming they had turned away officials attempting to use one of their parking lots as a staging ground for the raids, though this was after rumors circulated earlier in the week that a lot was used for this purpose. In the wake of LA Times Hispanic sports columnist Dylan Hernandez’ scathing attack on the wealthy franchise—“Cowardly Dodgers Remain Silent As ICE Raids Terrorize Their Fans”—the team, valued at $6.9 billion, volunteered to donate $1 million to “families impacted by ICE,” with the team saying it “hoped to expand its outreach” in partnering with the city to deliver these funds.
In other words, the franchise hopes to increase its fan base in the Mexican community through this “commitment,” with the “commitment” being as much about selling tickets as it is about delivering aid. Its true sentiment might have been more honestly expressed when the franchise banned the Latina singer Neeza from ever singing in the stadium again after she disobeyed management and, in a gesture of solidarity, sang the National Anthem in Spanish.
Besides the protestors, another force of opposition is local gangs, who have called a truce to escort members of Mexican families to the courts for hearings so that they will not be grabbed either on the way in or on the way out of the court. This stands in stark contrast to centrist Democrats, whose rallying cry, while Trump shreds the Constitution and provokes a war with Iran that could devastate the world economy and lead to a nuclear catastrophe, is “Wait for the midterms.”
This, then, is “soft power” at the end of the neoliberal age. Only now, with the empire in decline, soft power is just the fading friendly face that is being unmasked, so that behind it we see what that order has always stood for, the organized and institutional terrorizing of its working and middle-class populations, which in no way is stopping with one immigrant group.
This article is part of a broadcast titled Culture and Barbarism. Please listen and subscribe here and here.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
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