Tear Gas and Salmon Farms

Trump militarizes LA, abandons Ukraine, greenwashes collapse, and calls it order

Good morning! There are protests in the streets of Los Angeles. Protests, not riots like Fox News wants to call them. Protests against ICE raids that have swept up parents outside courthouses, day laborers outside Home Depot, and children who now don’t know where their parents are. Protests against a president who declared the City of Angels a war zone, sent in the National Guard without permission, and put Marines on alert to attack the American people they are sworn to protect.

The chaos isn’t organic, it’s engineered. And if it feels familiar, that’s because we’ve seen it before. Tear gas clouding Lafayette Square so Trump could hold a Bible upside down for a photo op. Federal agents in unmarked vans sweeping protesters off Portland’s streets in 2020. George W. Bush posing on an aircraft carrier beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner while the war he started dragged on for years. Richard Nixon invoking “law and order” to mask the lawlessness of his own administration, tapping the unrest of 1968 to win the presidency, and then again in 1972 to cling to it.

Authoritarianism has a formula. Create a crisis. Blame your enemies. Offer yourself as the only cure. Burn it down, then point to the ashes and say “See? I told you it was broken.” Trump plagiarizes history’s darkest instincts. This weekend in Los Angeles, he followed the script to the letter: provoke unrest with ICE raids and disinformation, then declare an emergency of his own making, and call in the troops to solve it.

The fire is not a consequence, it’s the plan. And like every strongman before him, Trump insists he alone can put it out.

This time, the fire’s name is Title 10. Trump has invoked it to seize control of California’s National Guard, violating the protocols laid out in both federal law and the Defense Department’s own procedures. Governor Gavin Newsom, speaking from LA’s Emergency Operations Center, didn’t equivocate: “This is illegal. It’s unconstitutional. And it’s immoral.”

He’s right. Under 10 U.S. Code § 12406, a president may only federalize the Guard in the event of insurrection, invasion, or an inability to enforce federal law, not because he saw a protest on Fox News. No such condition exists in Los Angeles. No aid was requested. LAPD said they were caught off guard, literally. ICE never coordinated. And the Guard hadn’t even been deployed when Trump falsely declared the city “secured” in a tweet that Newsom flatly called “Orwellian.”

But that wasn’t all. Newsom revealed that during a 20-minute phone call with Trump on Friday night, after the protests had already begun, the president never once mentioned his intention to take control of the Guard. “He’s a stone cold liar,” Newsom said. “He never brought it up. And hours later, he pulled the trigger.”

Then, when Trump’s ICE agents began detaining immigrants en masse, including mothers separated from children, and detainees denied medical access, Newsom was asked about threats from federal officials to arrest state leaders for obstruction. His response was blunt, and broadcast live:

“Come after me. Arrest me. Let’s just get it over with, tough guy.”

That’s not posturing. That’s a sitting governor, calling out a sitting president, in the middle of an unfolding federal occupation of his state.

And this isn’t a constitutional gray area. It’s a constitutional alarm bell. One that Trump is daring the courts, and the country, to ignore.

Katie Phang, one of the few legal voices still speaking above the algorithm, made it plain: this is not the Insurrection Act. This is not 9/11. It’s not even 1992. It’s theater, marshaled with uniforms and rifles and a Twitter clone called Truth Social. And it is unlawful.

But while the president plays generalissimo in downtown LA, the administration quietly buried something else: the truth about immigrants and the economy.

According to internal documents recently leaked from within the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), immigrants, yes, even the undocumented ones Donald Trump loves to paint as moochers and invaders, contribute a net positive of over $34 billion annually to the federal budget. This figure, compiled by nonpartisan analysts at the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, accounts for tax payments into Social Security, Medicare, and state and local coffers, none of which undocumented workers can ever fully draw from.

They also spend disproportionately on sales taxes, overpay in payroll withholdings due to lack of access to refunds, and are statistically less likely to use public benefits than native-born citizens. Far from being a drain, these are the very people who prop up industries most Americans rely on: construction, caregiving, hospitality, food service, agriculture. They are the invisible scaffolding of the American economy, and without them, it collapses.

That truth, however, didn’t make it into the version released by the Trump administration. According to sources familiar with the DOGE edit, Stephen Miller personally intervened to suppress the full findings and ordered a rewritten version that emphasized costs only, selectively citing healthcare and schooling expenses while stripping out revenue contributions, GDP impacts, and long-term demographic benefits.

In the final public release, any mention of the $34 billion surplus was scrubbed. In its place? Charts claiming undocumented immigration “exceeds fiscal tolerance,” a Miller phrase that now appears to be guiding policy, not analysis.

This is pure ideological manipulation. If the public knew that immigrants were keeping Social Security solvent and filling jobs that corporate tax cuts haven’t created, the myth of the migrant as villain would crumble. And with it, the authoritarian leverage Trump and Miller need to build their fortress of fear. So instead, we get choreographed ICE raids. National Guard troops deployed to working-class neighborhoods. Mothers dragged from their children on sidewalks. And Trump calling it “liberation.”

This is xenophobic, economic misinformation weaponized as propaganda. Because blaming immigrants is always easier than admitting the obvious: it’s capitalism that’s eating itself. And in Trump’s America, distraction isn’t just a political tactic, it’s the central governing strategy.

Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away, there is an actual war. An actual invasion. And an actual ally we are supposed to be helping. But instead of arming Ukraine, Donald Trump has now redirected 20,000 anti-drone missiles, originally agreed to under the Biden administration, away from Kyiv and toward U.S. forces in the Middle East. The weapons, designed to intercept Iranian-made Shahed drones, were urgently needed. On June 1, Russia launched 472 drones in a single night.

Volodymyr Zelensky, holding a press conference as Russian missiles fell around him, put it plainly: “We are not kids in a park. Putin is not a child. He came to kill children.” The Shahed factory Ukraine destroyed deep inside Russia this week, more than 1,000 kilometers from the border, wasn’t enough. Without those diverted weapons, Ukraine’s skies remain exposed.

So what’s the throughline here? Why do protesters in LA matter to Ukrainians in Kyiv and drone factories in Cheboksary? Because the American president is no longer interested in defending democracy, abroad or at home. He’s interested in distraction, control, in media optics. In wants chaos he can blame on someone else. If he has to burn it all down to stay in power, so be it. Just so long as it’s televised.

And while we’re here, let’s take a detour to the southern tip of the world. In Chile, Indigenous fishermen are watching their fjords turn into dead zones. Not from oil. Not from mining. But from the pristine white lies of green capitalism, industrial salmon farming.

The U.S. is one of the largest markets for Chilean salmon, and that demand fuels a sprawling network of floating feedlots disguised as “sustainable protein solutions.” But beneath the surface, these operations choke the seabed with chemical sludge, displace native fish populations, spread disease to wild species, and poison waters that have sustained generations of Indigenous families.

Reinaldo Caro, a fisherman from Puerto Natales, stood on the deck of his battered vessel and pointed toward a hillside above the sea, where a white-bark tree still stands. “That’s where I was born,” he said. And then, gesturing to the salmon pens below, he asked the only question that matters:

“How many billions is all this destruction worth?”

What’s good for the shareholders, we’re told, is good for the planet. It’s the gospel of ESG funds and carbon offsets, of Patagonia-branded devastation and Wall Street’s eco-flavored extraction. A lie told in the same breath that calls climate collapse “resilience investment.”

Like the migrant scapegoating in LA, this too is a fiction designed to serve capital. Industrial salmon farming is not about feeding the planet. It’s about feeding profit margins under the cover of aquamarine branding and NGO partnerships. The destruction of ecosystems, livelihoods, and cultures is simply another cost externalized onto the poor, a different kind of ICE raid, just wetter.

And once again, the pattern repeats: those who resist are criminalized. Those who profit are honored. And those who dare to ask what it’s really worth are silenced, or drowned out by the noise of exported progress.

This, too, is about control. About taking ecosystems and turning them into assets. About feeding a system that devours not only its laborers but its landscapes. And calling it growth.

So if you’re feeling whiplashed, watching your country treat day laborers like enemy combatants while drone factories burn halfway across the world, you’re not alone. But you’re not powerless either.

If you are in uniform, know this: you are not required to carry out an illegal order.

You swore an oath to the Constitution, not to the man currently stomping around the West Wing in a championship belt, barking orders at Marines.

GI Rights Hotline: 1-877-447-4487
Confidential. Free. And very, very necessary.

Because the enemy is not the immigrant. The enemy is not the protester. The enemy is the regime that can’t tell the difference.

And to the rest of us, still capable of recognizing both irony and cruelty when we see it, here’s a reminder that keeps floating through our timelines like a lifeboat of clarity:

“In Canada, the ICE is refreshing, not arresting.”

May we live to say the same here.