Making My Life in Los Angeles Means I'm a Dangerous Outlaw, Says My National Government
I’m not just your columnist. I’m your outlaw.
I’m not telling you this to seem cool, or to sell a country album.
No, siree. I am telling you that, as an official matter of public record, I am a criminal. According to the government of the United States of America.
If you’re a Californian, you might be one, too.
To be sure, my criminality isn’t entirely my fault, and yours likely isn’t, either. I haven’t knocked over any banks or defrauded investors. At least not yet. But I have chosen to make my life in Los Angeles. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recently declared that my city is not a “city of immigrants” but “a city of criminals.” And she clearly means everybody in L.A., even California’s senior U.S. senator, Alex Padilla, who was thrown to the ground and hogtied for his crime of trying to ask her a question.
When you think of people acting outside the law, Senator Padilla and I—both proud Angeleno fathers of three boys who attended fancy Boston-area colleges—are probably not the first who come to mind.
But we are also both rebels.
Again, not bragging here. This status was officially confirmed by the President of the United States and the White House in a June 7 memorandum to Noem, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Pam Bondi.
In that correspondence, Trump wrote that Californians who oppose his mass deportation—and have protested against it, as some people do on the streets and as I do in my commentary—are engaged in “a form of rebellion against the authority of the United States.”
Trump is particularly incensed about street protesters, and he doesn’t make a distinction between us journalists, who cover demonstrations, and the actual protesters (he’s called all of us “human scum”). Up close, those protests don’t sound like rebellion. What I’ve heard are people are angry that U.S. immigration authorities are grabbing community members off the streets, without warrants, identification, or knowing if the arrestees are subject to deportation. And many of the “protesters” are actually just trying to find friends and family who have been abducted by the feds.
But hey, if interviewing “protesters” who are my Los Angeles neighbors makes me a rebel in the eyes of Uncle Sam, well, I’ll take it!
I’d like to think that makes me a cool, James Dean-style rebel without a cause. But no, the president also says I, and my fellow Californians who object to his rights violations, have a cause. We are “insurrectionists.” I looked up the word, and it refers to a participant, to quote Britannica, in “an organized and usually violent act of revolt or rebellion against an established government or governing authority of a nation-state or other political entity by a group of its citizens or subjects.”
I don’t remember ever trying to overthrow the government, and as a rule I avoid joining organized enterprises (which is why I work in the media and think tanks). I’m better-known for overthrowing open receivers in flag football games. But my fellow Californians are apparently so dangerous to the American government that Trump has called out the Marines to stop us.
Now, you may think I’m just making fun here. But I’m taking these accusations against me seriously. Donald Trump is a convicted criminal (multiple felonies in New York), a rebel (in a racist Confederate way), and an insurrectionist (January 6). When Trump calls me those things, he is speaking from long personal experience.
So, I respect Trump’s judgment, and embrace these labels. And not just because being an outlaw gives me an excuse to finally have that mid-life crisis and start wearing leather jackets and hanging-dagger earrings.
Trump labeling me—and so many of my readers across L.A. and California—as rebels is actually a gift in this small civil war in which we are engaged. He is granting us permission to behave badly.
One reason liberals, Democrats, and sunny Californians are so bad at fighting is their overly developed sense of self-righteousness, their belief in benevolence. They want to do and be good, and they spend a lot of energy policing the behavior and language of people on their own side.
But in a fight with a big nasty criminal enterprise—like the Trump administration—we can’t worry about “saving the soul of the nation” (to use a Joe Biden formulation), or keeping ourselves clean. We need to focus on saving our communities, and our most vulnerable people from those who deploy soldiers and weapons of war against us, from those who are willing to sacrifice our lives in their pursuit of power.
Facing an American “Dirty War” against our state, we may sometimes have to fight dirty. Especially because we are fighting alone. In this Los Angeles moment, our police officers and sheriffs and local leaders have called many of our peaceful assemblies unlawful. They have even blamed us, the everyday Angelenos who are the target of federal violence, for pushing back too aggressively. The cops have fired their “less lethal” rounds and their pepper balls and their tear gas canisters at our people on the streets. They’ve done this as they protect the federal agents whose lawless behavior is the real source of danger, the real cause of the conflict.
Worse still, too many politicians who nominally oversee these cops—politicians who claim they are progressives and supporters of the people—have not been on the streets with the protesters. They’ve remained in the safety of studios, criticizing the flags that Angelenos fly, the graffiti and other words we write, and the tone of our speech.
Without much official support, we the people—we criminals, we rebels, we insurrectionists of California—will have to defend ourselves. We’ll have to create networks and organizations of self-defense for our communities and cities, operated by citizens. This is already happening, with the growth of California Rapid Response Networks to defend immigrants.
Of course, the U.S. government regime will probably lie and say that our networks are really gangs. The Trump regime might even use that as an excuse to send the federal agents to infiltrate our neighborhood watches and self-defense organizations.
Bring it on. Your columnist can hardly wait to be called a gangster.
