One out of every eight Americans lives in California.
One out of every four Californians live in Los Angeles County. So whenever we talk about my city, I think it is important to remember that roughly one in every 34 Americans call it home.
We might not be America’s City, but we sure as hell are America’s county, with 9.3 million Americans enjoying the mild weather, beautiful beaches, and all the Cybertrucks and aspiring OnlyFans influencers it has to offer.
I fucking love my city. It took me a while to love it, but it finally worked.
It has been a slow-growing love, but something about the way we all came together in the face of the wildfires earlier this year accelerated my affection. It is a feeling of affection that only increased as I watched a Latino teenager in Jncos deface an overpass with the words “Trump and Musk Like Cock” in bright orange spray paint last weekend.
Whenever we talk about my city, I think it is important to remember that roughly one in every 34 Americans call it home.
I wiped a tear from my eyes as he grabbed his girlfriend’s hand and fled the scene as police sirens blared in the background.
Surely, this is what it’s all about right?
I imagined myself doing something that at his age, and then remembered that I was on a very different path back then. I had never even flirted with a woman yet, and was at a Christian Nationalist bootcamp run by former Green Berets where I recited Bible verses while standing at attention in the rain with a 102 degree fever.
But that’s a story for another time.
LA: The Living Paradox
Los Angeles is a cornucopia of contradiction.
The city constantly touts its progressive character, while living under a literal police occupation led by a department that regularly abuses its unhoused population, cracks the heads of crackheads and protestors alike, and tolerates active gangs inside its own ranks. All while enjoying a combined budget (LAPD + LASD) larger than the pre-invasion military expenditure of Ukraine.
It features insane wealth juxtaposed with crippling poverty, and the division of the city into its distinctive neighborhoods separated by highways often ensures that the city’s wealthiest residents never even see its poorest ones, except when they wander into their suburban enclaves, only to have the cops sicked on them by frightened housewives.
LA featured some of the largest protests for the Palestinian cause at the same time that Brentwood and Beverly Hills were planting Israeli flags on their public parks and even, in some cases, featuring them on their police vehicles.
Its the richest, poorest, blackest, whitest, brownest, most selfless, self-obsessed place I have ever lived. And I love it!
Anyway, about the immigrants.
Much Ado About Migrants
LA is home to a significant immigrant population, and a not insignificant proportion of them are undocumented.
The primary reason for this is that California accounts for a huge percentage of the American economy, and the American economy literally cannot be sustained under the current legal immigration structure.
There is a massive need for “low skill” work that can only be filled by migrant labor, at least until they finish building the work camps that the latest Palantir-tech will ensure we all get sent to.
If farms and businesses could get this labor legally, they probably would at least try to. But the current immigration laws make that literally impossible, leading to a ongoing influx of illegal immigration. This is why immigration reform has been a huge issue in the US for decades.
The wheels of capital needed to be greased and there was an endless supply of cheap labor pouring in from the south as a result of NAFTA and fifty years of American meddling destabilizing their economies.
There is a huge demand for migrant labor here, and the supply comes from people who, in many cases, are culturally similar to the people who “became” a part of the United States when we stole places like Texas, Nevada, and California from Mexico, who stole them from Spain, who stole them from their original inhabitants, whose descendants are the people we call immigrants.
Two decades ago, everyone involved in the conversation at the federal level, Left and Right, was talking (more or less) seriously about the desperate need for immigration reform.
The incentives were obvious. The wheels of capital needed to be greased and there was an endless supply of cheap labor pouring in from the south as a result of NAFTA and fifty years of American meddling destabilizing their economies.
Then about ten years ago, the highly nativist sentiment that had remained mostly a fringe right wing view asserted itself strongly in the national consciousness and materialized from the ether of talk radio into the rhetoric of a major political candidate, one who would eventually become president.
Now both the Democratic and Republican parties attempt to outdo eachother with “tough on immigration” talk. The Democrats are currently trying to resuscitate the hypocritical pro-migrant rhetoric they employed to great effect in the first Trump administration, and the Republicans are posting GIFs of A-10 Warthogs in the comments sections of posts about migrant caravans.
I hate it here, man. This country aggravates every fibre of my being.
Anyway, I don’t have time to go over all the things that led to LA’s current standoff with the National Guard (and its own police force). Just read the news and watch my Alex Garland-esque video montage above to get an idea of how the protests I’ve been covering are currently unfolding.
But it’s safe to say that LA is having none of it!
Very based and cool.
I hope that Waymos continue to light the night sky of my beautiful city.
Sic Semper Waymos.
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