I’m truly exhausted to the point where it is literally causing me physical pain, so try and cut me a little slack if my usual level of intolerance for poorly executed strategies is a bit enhanced. I’ll confess to being right up there with the level that a good friend’ surly, ego-maniacal and significantly unqualified boss once had. You know the type–what’s left of the media industry, and apparently a good deal of our country’s cabinet–is crawling with them.
Return with me to the thrilling days of yesteryear before phones and tablets assured anyone with a charging cable and some version of AirPods ubiquitous screen access. There was a time when going online at home was a chore, a laborious process than involved a desktop, baud rates and busy signals. Businesses at least were rapidly installing high-speed cable connections where access was instantaneous and content loaded dramatically quicker. Like so many of us, my friend took full advantage of that when he had down time at work–and often even when he supposedly had some more pressing deadlines. His boss was particularly pricklish about that, and whenever he’d see anything but something work-related on his screen he’d tersely and forcefully warn him to “get off the internet!”. Occasionally, he’d listen. Me? I had far less demanding and active bosses.
But to his boss’ defense, he was simply trying to focus him on devoting his paid time to the job he was hired to do, which is a lot more than we’ve seen out of folks making headlines this week who are weighing in on the events that are transpiring in the city I live, work and commute in. Folks who are getting a lot of their information from the internet initially from venues hundreds or thousands of miles away. And as anyone who has logged onto it any time recently can attest, not all that’s available is fully accurate.
For starters, let me assure those of you who have actually taken the trouble to check in with some of us that save for a one square mile flashpoint in downtown Los Angeles which is primarily a business district, there are no active protests and no curfew. I also can add that I actually commute several times a week to a Home Depot and in fact worked several times at the Paramount store where Friday morning’s ICE action took place that apparently lit a match to the responses have occurred. The biggest hassle I typically deal with is the proliferation of oversized work trucks that take away the majority of decent parking spaces. not only for the day laborers seeking a gig but so many others intent on selling lukewarm agua fresca and sometimes ripe mangos out of their flatbeds. The few times I’ve dared to throw a little business their way my stomach quickly paid for in spades. And darned if those day laborers don’t produce sometimes intolerably long lines and increasingly frequent clogged toilets in the men’s room.
So contrary to the video narrative that the MAGA net is putting out there, life is essentially normal in LA–or at least what some might consider normal in a city where masks are still enough in vogue that they can be donned by both protestors and enforcers determined to keep their identities hidden to be able to use the ever-flimsy excuse that “they’re trying to stay safe in the midst of a global pandemic”. For a change, I won’t go down that particular rabbit hole.
But I will ask those of you reacting to the heinous act of setting autonomous vehicles aflame what might be their motivation. When you actually talk to some of the day laborers as I have while waiting for a clean open stall, one learns that the reason they’re seeking such work is that their demand as Uber and Doordash drivers has waned because Waymos and Seemos are now all the rage with the cool kids with disposable income and a fixation on social distancing from strangers. So yep, it’s just as dopey an act of violence as torching a Cybertruck–a comparison MAG(A)-gots seem quick to draw, but it has far more to do with their livelihood than making a political statement.
And if indeed the rollout of AI is taking away gig opportunities for so many earnest folks who happen to be fully documented and legal U.S. citizens and who aren’t actively aiding and abetting folks they know who aren’t, my apologies if I seem to think that perhaps they deserve first crack at the ones that still remain. And please, spare me the lecture of being insensitive to those in need. Charles Darwin and my bank would both back me up in this case.
This might have been a great opportunity for a top-notch journalist like Terry Moran to perhaps get his boots on the ground and schlep out here to talk to those actually on the front lines of these protests. Maybe even attempt to confront cosplayers like Kristi Noem or some of the elected officials leading the Los Angeles resistance. Moran did a damn good job in the White House, after all. Those are all amateurs by comparison.
But no, Moran couldn’t help but get on the internet and offer up his personal views on Fat Orane Jesus and his deranged puppeteer. And as THE ASSOCIATED PRESS’ David Bauder reported yesterday, he’s now paid the price for his own internet dalliance:
Correspondent Terry Moran is out at ABC News, two days after the organization suspended its correspondent for a social media post that called Trump administration deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller a “world class hater.”
The network said Tuesday that it was at the end of its contract with Moran “and based on his recent post — which was a clear violation of ABC News policies — we have made the decision not to renew.” The Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, quickly condemned Moran for his late-night X post criticizing Miller, which was swiftly deleted.
Moran had interviewed President Donald Trump only a few weeks ago. He said in his X post that the president was also a hater, but that his hatred was in service of his own glorification. But for Miller, Moran said, “his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
No one, especially moi, is questioning the accuracy of that personality assessment. But as a credentialed journalist it was not a lane Moran had any professional obligation to saunter down. And it also denied him the opportunity to perhaps go one-on-one with Miller in the disarmingly effective manner he did Trump. Perhaps he might have brought up the rejection and taunting Miller endured as an incel student at Santa Monica High School—some apparently first generation Americans. Perhaps he could have even tracked down someone who may have known one of those Mean Girls back in the day. He could have started by asking around Home Depots and 7-11s, as Miller reportedly demanded his underperforming ICE agents do. I could have provided him with a detailed and prioritized map as to which ones might have been more likely to have someone with any connection to Miller’s past than his present might be. Alas, yet another missed opportunity.
And as for our esteemed governor, you do get props for actually holding a press conference to weigh in on this morass and for actually finding your way to L.A. to do so. THE NEW YORK TIMES’ writeup was especially laudatory, quelle surprise. But then you too had to engage in some extracurricular and debatably bizarre internet activity, as DEADLINE’s Tom Tapp observed yesterday:
Gavin Newsom cast aside subtlety today in his war of words — and now lawsuits — with President Donald Trump.
The California Governor’s Press Office posted two seemingly AI-generated TikTok videos with a voice that sounds a lot like Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine (played by Ian McDiarmid) reading recent military-minded posts from the president related to the unrest in Los Angeles. The first features a very marital, John Williams-sounding score playing over animated images of storm troopers mobilizing on the ground as star destroyers float overhead. The ominous voice reading Trump’s words begins, “A once great American city, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by illegal aliens and criminals…”. The second video features footage from the imperial attack on the rebel base from the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back. The Trump text used in the video warns that “Los Angeles would have been completely obliterated” if not for his interventions.
Maybe it was good for a chuckle, and it at least resonated with moi a bit more than seeing AOC and her millennial Congressional colleagues cutting superhero Tik Toks. But it was also a nakedly ambitious political play, as CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere pointed out this morning:
Allies and opponents agree how Newsom handles the protests – including Trump’s calling in the National Guard and sending in active-duty Marines over the governor’s objections – will reverberate far beyond California, and long after this week…Other Democratic governors have been calling Newsom, checking in, ticking through scenarios in their minds of how what’s happened in California could play out at home for them, according to multiple people briefed on the conversations.
Someone who hasn’t ruled out desiring his party’s nomination for a potential next job wouldn’t be amping up the rhetoric and Dirty Harry-like dialogue to curry favor with his peers, would they? Shame on me for even thinking that.
But don’t be surprised if he happens to show up at one of the many “No Kings” rallies scheduled for Saturday that apparently are popping up like jackaranda plants all throughout the city–you know, for convenience. The ones that so many folks on my Internet feeds are salivating at the thought of attending–the counterprogramming to the birthday–excuse me, Flag Day–military-focused celebration with a $45 million price tag passed down to taxpayers that the Schmuck-In-Chief is gifting to Washngton.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, gatherings that don’t even attempt to rival the scale and forcefulness that those who back those who ground Terry Moran’s gears are putting out are, as my British grandfather would remark, merely a pimple on Pop’s cross. Clearly, those who you might piously hope might listen–as you lecture me, just like when Nixon heeded the will of the people and eventually pulled us out of Vietnam–will be otherwise preoccupied. And bluntly, they couldn’t give a rat’s ass–pimpled or otherwise–what you say or do.
You’ve got as much access to money and machinery as them. Find a central location–I’d suggest South Florida or western New Jersey, since it’s far more likely the object of your scorn will be there than D.C.–and stage a mass rally of your own. Get Newsom to make an in-person speech there. Have Moran introduce him since he’s now got more free time. Maybe throw a few other newer and less well-known voices onto the undercard. July 4th might be a little too disrespectful a date to target, but how’s ’bout July 5th?
Efforts as inconsequential and muted as some de facto block parties when you’re facing some truly determined evil genuises only perpetuate the very dystopia you believe is inevitable. Fight fire with fire, so to speak. And don’t aim it at any vehicles.
Until next time…