The Optics of Power: What I Saw While Protesting in LA This Weekend

A long read for folks who refuse to look away.

Jun 11, 2025

To watch the news, you’d think LA was raging out of control with crazy protesting lunatics. I’ve watched a lot of the coverage and imagine the news producers salivating over video of people on the freeway, a few Waymos burning and some kid setting fireworks. For balance, we also get to see law enforcement of some kind (who the hell knows which agency at this point) on horseback, in riot gear, in a Blackhawk. And then, last night’s breathless reporting with furrowed brow (I’m looking at you, ABC News): “The Marines are coming!”

It’s a lot. Let me share what I saw Sunday on the streets of downtown LA while protesting. Because it sure wasn’t what I saw on TV.

It was around 2:30pm or so when speeches from the temporary platform in front of City Hall were becoming faint behind us as my ears tuned into chanting around the corner. We’d heard there were people being detained without due process in the basement of a federal building a few blocks away. Just a rumor at first, but the kind worth looking into. I wanted to see what was happening there. Were there families outside waiting? Was there a protest there?

My friends and I turned the corner and found two police cruisers angled in the street. Maybe 200 or so people were moving slowly around them. No one running and no mayhem, just chanting and going around them. There was a loud pop of a non-lethal. Then another. Still, the crowd moved. No one even really flinched because we’d been hearing those pops for awhile at that point.

Then, the chemicals came. Different people experience tear gas differently. For some, its the eyes first. For others, the skin. Others, the taste. For me, I usually first feel a tickle that makes me want to cough. Someone yelled tear gas. Others called out “masks on.” So, folks covered their faces and kept walking, trying to get around a corner to the assumed detention facility.

But, then the air turned again. This time harder and harsher. A barrage of deterrent flares. Felt punishing and hard to press forward. Most turned back. Had to. A few had the right gear and pushed forward. I turned around with many others. A little defeated.

And that’s when I saw them. A wave of people cresting the hill behind us. A heart expanding sight as it was so unexpected. I saw about a thousand people coming towards us. I swear to you, it’s probably one of the most cinematic feelings I’ve ever personally experienced in the real world. My heart cracked open with joy. Everyone in my small group of a couple hundred seemed to gasp. A moment ago, we had been retreating from the place we wanted to get to, with eyes watering from chemicals. And now, we weren’t. There was a collective cheer. The big group got closer and closer and started to cheer and wave back. When both sides met it was incredible. Hard to explain. It felt like a cavalry when we saw them in the distance coming over that hill. When they got closer, we saw that they were just people. Beautiful people of all kinds. Who decided not to brunch and be poolside on an absolutely perfect Sunday in LA. They’d decided to make sure that the streets were not quiet in the face of an invasion of force that was comically overblown and purposefully harmful and hateful. This was an organic moment of solidarity.

With only 48 hours notice since the most recent ICE aggressions, this protest was loud in its elegance. It said: “We see you. We don’t agree. And we are not going away.” Because on Sunday, Your President contrived a reason to send in the National Guard for some scattered localized protests with the kind of vigor he never had for the January 6 insurrectionists who he pardoned and called heroes. No threat in LA this weekend required the response that came and continued throughout the day and night. And the numbers of people out there, while solid for an unplanned action on short notice, were nowhere near what would pose a threat massive enough to even fathom calling in the US military (The Marines!) on citizens by any justice loving person. Not even on the protest’s fourth day.

This is about theater. Your President isn’t responding to anything. We all know that he’s provoking and creating a crisis so he can claim to quell it. The point is never peace, it’s power. This is the playbook these days. Punish your enemies, militarize dissent, criminalize compassion and on and on. We’re expected to accept it.

Someone I love said to me when I was going to the protest: What’s the goal? What’s the plan? They believe that without a strategy a protest is silly. That’s hard to hear, but I hear it.

To that, my answer is that for certain protests, the goals may not be to listen to speakers or abide by the permit. Some are spontaneous. Some are scattered. Some are unruly. And I believe that’s okay. I believe we should do what we can where we are to say NO. To bear witness to all of this by putting our faces in front of what’s happening and refusing to look away. I believe that if you don’t say NO, they assume yes.

Sweeps of Home Depot parking lots looking for “illegal criminal aliens who are rapists and murderers and drug cartel runners!“ Yes, the Home Depot parking lot and elementary school graduations is where all the killers hang out! The reality is that whole families are now hiding indoors. Good people are terrified. The cruelty is the point.

And, the cruelty gets you on camera. But what the news cameras didn’t catch this weekend (and never seem to catch) was the solidarity. I saw a Latino father and mother and their two teenagers in a minivan dropping off pallets of water bottles on the curb for people to use, then waving thank you and driving away quietly. The father’s eyes moved me. Like, “This is what I can do. I hope it’s enough.” It was.

Saw a young white girl handing out flowers to strangers and as soon as folks realized she didn’t want money, why did everyone have a flower in their hand or attached to their shirts somehow? Even the hardest of the folks out there, rocking a yellow daisy.

Saw so many different kinds of folks handing out good masks to people who didn’t have one or urging folks to put theirs on. I said, the good masks. Not the cheapies. Regular people, not with any organization, who brought their whole box of masks for others… just in case.

But my favorite sight of the day: a young Latina sister with her hair flowing down her back on a bad ass motorcycle, bandana on her face as she revved her bike for the crowd and defiantly moved through a police barricade to wild cheers before she got arrested. The scene was so incredible and she was such a perfect character, I could have been watching a movie. I wasn’t the only person romanticizing the moment. A fine young Latino man about 20 something nearby shouted in her direction: “Marry me!” To that, about a dozen other young guys cheered and competed with “No, me!” “I’m the one!” Then the whole crowd cheered, “Let her go!” as she was handcuffed and her bike was taken.

On Sunday, I talked to an Iranian family from Glendale. An Ecuadorian father and his son from Watts. A Jewish couple from Marina Del Rey. Met a nurse’s assistant and a dancer and a law student and a water delivery man. They all chose to say NO.

To my loved one who asked me: What’s the plan? That’s the plan. NO. No to masked men dragging people off sidewalks without warning or warrants or due process. NO to declaring war on your own citizens for protesting. NO to demonizing, weaponizing, antagonizing, gaslighting. NO. NO. NO.

I’ve read the usual think pieces about how non-violence is the only way forward when protesting. “Trump is getting his way! Don’t light the trash can on fire! That’s violence! Don’t throw the rock at the police car! Don’t give him an excuse!” Respectfully, the false equivalency of anything small groups of protesters have done over the last few days in LA with the true violence that the government has unleashed on people through these raids and detentions is hard to reconcile. If you’re more upset with the person breaking glass than you are with thugs breaking the Constitution, I’d invite you rethink your priorities. And respectfully, people who believe that orderly marches are the only way to proceed are ill-informed about the contours of history and what processes have actually moved the needle. There are many effective tools in the tool box, and this is a repair job requiring all the tools.

However uncomfortable it may feel, some of the most significant advances in American justice and equality have sprung from moments when violence erupted as a desperate expression of NO.

The Coal Mine Wars of West Virginia in the early 1900s sparked because workers were facing such deadly conditions and company exploitation that they felt they had to turn to armed resistance. Reports of workers literally fighting for their lives created a national reckoning and lead to safety regulations that saved lives.

The urban uprisings of the 1960s in Watts, Detroit, Newark and just about everywhere following Dr. King’s assassination begat federal programs that attempted to address the economic despair of inner cities. In Detroit in 1967, that rebellion was met with tanks in the streets. Within a year, Congress had passed the Fair Housing Act. Experts say that Newark’s uprising transformed municipal hiring practices, if you trace it through.

Stonewall in 1969 began with people literally fighting against police harassment by throwing bottles, setting fires and battling with cops for three nights. A resistance moment that reshaped history for the better.

We can even go back to your 7th grade text book and remember Shays’ Rebellion (1786-87). Armed farmers threatening courthouses and government buildings and marching on a federal arsenal! This action compelled the Constitutional Convention that created our current government.

Aggressive tactics are democracy’s emergency brake sometimes. The challenge isn’t just in the violence itself, which is never ideal in its pain and cost. The failure of a country that makes desperate measures feel necessary to some people is the failure we might want to focus on in times like these. There are ways to hold the line of justice and dignity FOR ALL before it gets to more aggressive tactics. It requires more people paying attention and declaring NO.

If these last six months don’t move you to say NO in ways that can be heard and seen and felt and remembered, a challenge will arise that will. And when that time comes, you’ll hope that someone shows up for you. That someone is watching. That someone protests for and with you. That someone looked into it.

The great thinker bell hooks wrote: "One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places we know we are not alone." What does protest do beyond saying NO that’s perhaps even more powerful? It fortifies us and grows our knowledge and our courage.

So consider starting now. Show up. Speak up. Maybe its not at a protest. Maybe its with your friend group. Or talking to the person behind you at the grocery store. Or with the T-shirt you choose to wear. It’s all okay. Just begin. The idea that this disaster doesn’t or won’t touch you is a delusion.

You don’t have to agree with every tactic and you don’t have to know which way tear gas affects you to start. Just begin. Because one day the issue at hand will be yours. And you’ll hope the streets fill for you.

Real resistance doesn’t always roar and set fires and yell or even pick up arms. Sometimes it walks elegantly down a hill, one person, then another, until the street fills. And then it speaks through water bottles left on curbs or flowers passed from hand to hand. Or a girl on her motorcycle defying a line of riot shields. All of them are actually okay. What they are speaking to is not.

So what’s the plan? Mine is to say NO, again and again, in big ways and small, while I still have the freedom and voice to do so. That’s what I saw out there this weekend. People making that same choice in many ways that I won’t disparage or judge. Because the National Guard and Marines were coming in anyway. That was part of their plan. Why not say NO, while you can, as part of yours?