Yesterday I was sitting on my fat ass watching the internet, as is my job, when the videos started flying, again, from Los Angeles.
ICE or Border Patrol or the National Guard (all three?) were doing some performative brownshirt bullshit, driving their horses on a “sweep” (for what?) through MacArthur Park, protected by trucks with machine guns bolted on top.
At the park were citizens, immigrants, children at a city-run summer camp, and doctors from St. John’s Clinic treating the poor.
It was a gross display of hostile state power, meant to intimidate The People. They succeeded in scaring children, so heckuva job.
While I was looking at the (excellent) pix and video from an on-the-ground independent journalist, Mel Buer, she reported that LA Mayor Karen Bass had arrived. The immediate assumption among many of her readers was that Bass was there to join in. “Ghoul,” they called her. They demanded Bass resign.
I am a longtime fan of Karen Bass, back to her career in the California Assembly, where she was the first speaker in ages who was able to wrangle her cats into a cohesive governing party. She’s creative-thinking, problem-solving, always-working, all the attributes that come from her hero origin story as a community organizer cofounding the Community Coalition in South LA. I was worried though when she ran for LA mayor — that job along with mayor of New York seems to be one where it’ll end your career lonely and alone. Shit’s always going to be fucked up and bullshit, and nobody ever seems to notice when things get better instead of worse.
When Bass became mayor, the hardest challenge facing the city was thousands upon thousands of homeless people living in conditions that are a moral catastrophe.
She began her “Inside Safe” campaign to move people voluntarily from encampments to temporary and then permanent housing. (Not everybody always wanted to go!) Every week we’d get an email: After scores of outreach “touches” for each unhoused person, 14 people had agreed to move into housing this week, or 20, or 100. It is work that takes forever. But in the first year, 21,000 people were housed, according to the Inside Safe page that includes all figures from “comprehensive strategies.” And she did other shit like “maybe unhoused people need less paperwork?” That was good too!
LA Mayor Karen Bass: Maybe Unhoused People Need Roofs Over Their Heads, Not 30-Page Forms Proving They’re Poor
Then — exactly six months ago — the city got bombed by 98-mile-an-hour winds and turned into a fire tornado, and all of a sudden Karen Bass — who had been in Ghana for the new president’s inauguration — was Ted Cruz abandoning her constituents, while Fox News and everybody from the president down called for her head. (Unlike Cruz, who just this weekend stayed an extra day in Greece while the bodies of his constituents were being pulled from the Guadalupe River, Bass was on the next plane back.) Fox News decided that the problem (aside from the fire chief being a woman and some firefighters being Black) was that Bass was “incompetent.”
This woman — this incredibly detail-oriented woman, the kind who coordinates emergency response across city departments and thinks about everything like “but where will the children get daycare” and “people are going to need the permit process to not be bullshit” — was “incompetent.” She really shouldn’t have refused to answer that first reporter’s question off the plane. (I also don’t know that she needed to fire the fire chief, which seems like it was done for the benefit of Fox News — though the stated reason was the fire chief badmouthing the city about resources — who will never ever ever be satisfied, but managed to piss off the firefighters union instead. But you know who’s perfect all of the time? Not anyone, not even me.)
LA Mayor Karen Bass Taking Heat … Wait, That’s A Terrible Headline
Five months later, Trump started sending in ICE to terrorize Angelenos, followed by the National Guard and then the fucking Marines. Bass instituted a shortlived curfew downtown (lifted a few days later) and while yelling her head off about Trump and ICE also sometimes reminded protesters to refrain from violence.
(Also, the LAPD has been violent and started shit against protesters, as is consistent with the entire history of the city of Los Angeles, but I agree: I would like her to think of some creative-problem-solving ways to stop that.)
Which means that when people started seeing Karen Bass show up to tell ICE and CBP to get the fuck out of MacArthur Park, they just naturally assumed she was there to get her pro-ICE closeup, Mr. DeMille.
Which of these statements yelling at Trump, demanding he get ICE out of her city, reiterating that Los Angeles is a sanctuary for immigrants, calling Trump and Kristi Noem liars, and telling them to keep their hands off our senators would make people think she was there to do a cameo in the b-roll for Noem’s latest Leni Riefenstahl hit?
Instead what actually happened was that Bass jumped in her car and went to MacArthur Park where she found whoever was in charge and demanded to talk to his boss. She then told him to get his people the fuck out of there, and — their b-roll apparently accomplished — surprisingly, he did.
Bass held a news conference yesterday afternoon, with LA City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson as well as a slew of community organizers who — like Karen Bass — are devoting their lives to serving the city of LA, as Bass said, a city of immigrants who are all Angelenos, no matter when they arrived.
I encourage you to watch it.
She is having another press conference today at 4 p.m. Pacific/7 p.m. Eastern, about the city’s “efforts to challenge the unlawful immigration enforcement activities in Los Angeles.”
It should be streaming here.
I wish every city was led by a public servant like Karen Bass, one as determined and thoughtful and faithful and smart. I also wish she were perfect, as only some people are expected to be — but if she were? People would make up something to be livid about.
Because it sure as fuck wasn’t this.
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Militarized Border Patrol Storms Los Angeles Park, Gets B-Roll For Kristi Noem’s OnlyFans
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