Seeing Los Angeles, Confronting Ourselves

The L.A. Desk on American Distortions. Plus: BookWag Reads Caroline Fraser, Evan Osnos, S.A. Cosby, Susan Choi, and More…

Dear Wags,

Los Angeles confounds even those who live there. The false face it wears—palm trees (imported), ease (strenuously performed), glamour (cracking like pancake makeup)—is familiar to millions. Its dark side is nearly as famous. A hive of global media, L.A. projects its horrors far and wide. If you want attention for doing something terrible, there’s no better place.

Bear with me—this is relevant. When I was very young, I found myself in Cairo. I remember many things about that experience, but one memory always springs to mind first: a conversation over tea in the Khan el-Khalili. The shopkeeper who hosted me was an effusive man with broken teeth, living up to his city’s 1,000-year-old reputation for hospitality. Not long after I sat down, he asked me a startling question.

Why does America hate the Black man? This bomb was dropped without malice—he was genuinely curious. I had no idea what he was driving at. Then, in a mix of Arabic and English, he broke the news of the 1992 L.A. riots. CNN had fed a carpet trader in a gelabiya sensational dispatches from my world-famous state.

Back then, it seemed novel—maybe even a positive sign—that an intoxicating, disastrous culture could be made familiar to a stranger halfway around the world, simply because information traveled so fast. Now we all know how images can distort reality and reinforce deep prejudices.

No city has done more to shape a global culture driven by lurid pictures than Los Angeles—slickly produced by studios or captured by amateurs on mobile phones. Whether you live in Cairo or Washington, you’ll never want for evidence that Southern California is hell on earth.

What played out on the streets of Los Angeles in the past few days is an unintended legacy of that media revolution. We are pummeled with imagery—brutality captured by countless handheld devices, then shared and splintered into ideological frames at lightning pace. There is what we see, and then there are ur-narratives we vastly prefer: a noble fight for justice or insidious Marxism, depending on your programming director.

Complex realities—that most aggrieved people demonstrate peacefully, but that some throw bottles; that most police officers will try to maintain order honorably, but that some will act with wanton brutality; that none of us can grasp the complete picture from any picture—are no match for a spray of provocations. Our ingenuity when it comes to recording injustice has not yet made us free. It may have only taught authoritarians how to mug for the camera.

Trying to understand what’s really happening in L.A.—even from inside it—is made harder by the collapse of institutional journalism, drowned in a flood of emotive content. Cameras alter the alchemy of a precarious situation. They relay many things colorfully, but not necessarily the truth.

At the same time, we’ve all become sensitized to the threat of being captured in someone else’s movie—the fear that some distorted or ugly version of ourselves will come back to haunt us. This makes us act differently, not better.

Right now, a video of Lauren Tomasi, a U.S. correspondent for Australia’s Nine News, is rocketing around the internet. She was reporting outside the Metropolitan Detention Center on Sunday, a bristling block of concrete in downtown L.A., during the third day of anti-ICE protests. Police were attempting to disperse demonstrators gathered outside the dun-colored complex of federal buildings.

“After hours of standing off, this situation has now rapidly deteriorated—the LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters,” she reports in the clip, standing near a cluster of officers in riot gear. The scene is strangely calm.

The hazy context surrounding a few provocative seconds—a tense and chaotic situation, the noise, fear, and danger thick in the air—doesn’t transmit as cleanly as an appalling image. Still, this is what the pictures appear to show: the officer closest to her seems to aim his weapon in her direction and fire, striking her in the leg.

“You just fucking shot the reporter,” a voice off-camera shouts.

A shaken Tomasi can be heard reassuring her crew: “Yeah, I’m good,” she says. “I’m OK.” At some point, another female voice—possibly a protester—breaks in: “You’re not OK.” She wasn’t seriously hurt. At least three other journalists have been hit by projectiles fired by police.

Street battles today unfold under constant surveillance—phones, drones, livestreams. Protesters wear masks to shield their identities. So, even more disturbingly, do ICE agents. War-zone hardware is now routine in urban neighborhoods. Journalists, once marginally protected, are treated as adversaries. We may never know whether the officer intentionally shot Tomasi; we can’t read his mind or see the protesters behind her. What’s obvious is that some of our most powerful leaders are not incentivized to tamp down the escalation of violence. Chaos serves them.

Chaos is a friend to authoritarians and radicals. In another corner, it is not the Tomasi clip that’s driving traffic, but sensational footage—however unrepresentative—of burning cars, masked figures, Mexican flags, and Viva la raza shouted through smoke. No one understands the triggering potential of this imagery better than President Trump. By leapfrogging California Governor Gavin Newsom to deploy thousands of National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, he fanned a crisis and again demonstrated a chilling willingness to use state power.

He also dominated the news cycle. The gambit was that the pictures would work in his favor, at least with his base. It’s a good bet.

At this writing, the protests in L.A. continue, though with fewer clashes with authorities. Demonstrations have spread to other cities; the governor of Texas has called in the National Guard. Most are peaceful—but “most” is no magic guarantee. Newsom, an imperfect champion, has displayed real anger—a rarity among Democrats. The governor is suing the federal government, accusing Trump of engineering a mess he can then take credit for cleaning up.

If the Trump administration is routinely accused of incoherence, here they have been chillingly consistent. The militarization of ICE and the aggressiveness of its raids are deliberately provocative. Resistance in Los Angeles—where 10 percent of the population is undocumented—was inevitable, and perhaps desired. Immigration laws may cry out for reform, but no serious person believes that’s what White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller had in mind when he excoriated agency leaders for failing to deport more migrants.

To even begin approaching the 20 million undocumented migrants Trump claims he wants removed, the government would have to target not a relative few criminals, but ordinary people going about their lives. It’s not just about slowing immigration to a trickle—it means rooting out individuals who’ve lived here for years, using whatever’s handy. Whatever the legalities—a good motto for this purge—it is bound to enrage the people affected. But what Trump knows is that arguments against his policies can’t compete with a brick thrown through a window.

Local politicians, including Mayor Karen Bass and her perennial nemesis, developer Rick Caruso, have been fairly united in criticism of Trump’s incursion. However one judges their competence, there is no real precedent for the intervention. Protests have been geographically confined to downtown and a few communities south of it. Most of L.A.—the Valley, Mid-City, Hollywood, the affluent West Side—remains untouched. In scale, the disruption is nowhere near the catastrophe of 1992 or the wildfires that devastated Southern California earlier this year. And while there have been many arrests, no one, so far, has been killed.

L.A.’s infrastructure is notoriously designed to shield the affluent and contain unrest. It’s a difficult place to walk, let alone hold a march. Yet it remains the most volatile of American cities. Demonstrations erupt at gas stations, in strip malls, in parking lots. Activists may lack public squares, but they’ll block the 101 Freeway. All this can happen while the oleanders bloom and life ambles sleepily along. The city that pioneered hemming in humanity on screens is not so easily confined.

If you’re a president under pressure—facing a budget crisis, feuding with a loony tech mogul—you might welcome a spectacle in a venue that knows how to produce one. He will pay no price for vilifying a blue city in a blue state. Trump’s rhetoric about “liberating Los Angeles” from a “migrant invasion” stokes rage and delight in predictable corners. His opponents may be right to be appalled, but they are trapped in a circus with an uncontested ringmaster.

Fear of disorder remains one of the most potent levers both in L.A. and American politics. Law-and-order rhetoric has a long history of flattening liberals, from Nixon in 1968 to Trump in 2020. The pressure on those who oppose ICE’s tactics and their disregard for due process is to somehow never give in to fury—while rage remains a powerful weapon on the MAGA right. When Miller posted “this is a violent insurrection,” you could almost hear the glee.

Trump’s deputy chief of staff, raised in liberal Santa Monica, has long harbored a febrile hostility toward immigration. That’s not unusual—L.A. was built on cultural and racial fault lines. In 1871, rioters lynched 17 in Chinatown. In 1943, white servicemen attacked Mexican American youths. In 1965, Watts burned. In 1992, the city exploded again—more than 60 people were killed, with damages exceeding $1 billion. The anti-ICE protests of 2025 are a far less wrenching chapter in a restive history. Each of these episodes reveals a fracture line running not just through Los Angeles, but through the nation itself.

What’s changed is how violence is posted and expertly politicized in a society not just polarized, but fully digitized. On May 6, Miller reportedly lambasted ICE leaders for underperforming on deportation targets. “Why aren’t you at Home Depot?” he asked. “Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?” Exactly one month later, ICE raided a Home Depot in Westlake, a heavily Latino neighborhood near downtown L.A. Raids followed in the Fashion District and beyond. More than 40 people, including a union president, were detained. Protesters gathered at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Tomasi was later shot.

The next morning, demonstrators clashed with police and federal agents in the Latino suburb of Paramount. On Saturday, protests around the downtown cluster of federal buildings grew and intensified. Trump’s federalization of California’s National Guard—the first such move since 1965, when it was used to enforce civil rights in the South—ratcheted up tensions. There was sporadic looting and scattered fires; ICE said its agents were attacked. But by the time the first troops arrived, ostensibly to guard government property, the disturbances were already ebbing.

Trump will declare victory for having acted decisively—a contrast, he’ll claim, with the ineffectual response of blue cities to the unrest that followed George Floyd’s killing. If the situation worsens in L.A.—or in any of the other cities where anti-ICE protests are unfolding—he will naturally frame it as further justification for cracking down. Critics are challenged to push back without serving his chosen narrative. It’s much harder to be Gandhi than Che Guevara, but Gandhi was keenly attuned to the stories pictures told—not just to his followers, but to the moderate British public, who were ultimately moved by the morality of his cause.

Such an opposition might lack masks or revolutionary flair. Still, there’s a small chance it could pierce the binaries of the information system by speaking higher moral truths. Outrage is understandable. It is wrong to detain a high school student who has lived in this country since age six, or a waitress who dutifully shows up at her immigration hearing to advance her residency case. It is abominable to terrorize humble people who toil in low-paying jobs simply because they’ve run afoul of bureaucratic technicalities. Most Americans agree.

The MAGA response, blunt as a sledgehammer, is that those here legally should have nothing to fear—and that it’s their feckless opponents who created a disordered immigration system. On social media, these arguments may have a cold, false tidiness. Reality is messier. The web of human relationships is more complicated; the blameless are denied due process alongside the guilty, and the innocent are impugned for the sake of scoring points. Meanwhile, the president is planning a June 14 military parade—his birthday—in the capital, a spectacle that will be met with nationwide counter-demonstrations. The similarities with supposedly less enlightened regimes are deeply disturbing.

Distortions on screens can’t capture the tangled truths in all of this. They do better with car chases, imaginary uprisings, and despotic strutting. The unyielding reality of Los Angeles is also true in the Khan el-Khalili: people with the least power always pay the steepest price.

If Los Angeles exported the world’s most distracting entertainment, its payment has been in its exhaustively documented dysfunction. Sprawling violence bleeds across freeways and other barriers—between rich and poor, legal and illegal. That’s the great lie of the glittering basin: that what happens in one part of the city stays there. In truth, violence—like the pictures—moves. It can leap like a spark from a beatdown by the 210 Freeway to screens in Cairo, Kansas, or Capitol Hill.

Los Angeles is where America rehearses its breakdowns. That was true the day a plumber pointed his Handycam at Rodney King, and it’s true now. Cameras can catch abuse, but they rarely stop it. They can gin up action—or excuse it. It all depends on who’s watching, and what they want to see.

Yours Ever,

Evelyn Mulwray

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Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin

A very long time ago, Bright Lights, Big City told the story of a lost New Yorker and Bolivian Marching Powder. Franklin’s blazing debut offers a very different take. Black Stanford alum Smith has his whole life ahead of him—until he’s arrested for possession after partying in the Hamptons. A product of a high-powered Atlanta family that sees him as “a liability,” he learns the hard way how race and sexuality can trump social class in the justice system. Shadowing these troubles is the grief over Elle, a friend and daughter of a celebrity, whose overdose becomes tabloid fodder (the incident recalls the 2018 death of Stanford graduate Lyric McHenry). Torn between high expectations and low temptations, he keeps choosing the latter. The result is a crackling, sharply observed novel of a life lost in the fast lane.

— Lauren Hynde

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Flashlight by Susan Choi