The Insurrection Act Is Here: Godspeed L.A.

Trump just seized Los Angeles. Not to stop a rebellion—but to start one.

Illustration (Donny Evans)

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There’s tear gas blooming over Sunset Boulevard. Armored vehicles idle at Pico and Grand. A grandmother clutches her grandson beneath a busted awning while helmeted riot police sweep through city streets. Protesters clashed with militarized federal agents near a Home Depot in Paramount.

Welcome to Los Angeles—under siege not by foreign invaders, but by its own government.

They didn’t announce it with a press conference. They didn’t bother with congressional debate. They sent soldiers.

As of this writing, Trump has not officially invoked the Insurrection Act—yet. Instead, he reached for Title 10: a wartime statute allowing him to seize control of state National Guard troops without a governor’s consent.

Over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom—who condemned the move as “purposefully inflammatory” and warned it would “only escalate tensions”—Trump deployed 2,000 federal troops into Los Angeles. These soldiers no longer report to California. They answer to Washington. Their mission is no longer public safety—it is political obedience.

Title 10 was designed for national defense, not domestic suppression. What began as an overreach now functions as a manual for repression. This is precedent: military force used to crush dissent. Not to quash disorder, but to promulgate it. The Insurrection Act hovers unspoken, but its silhouette is everywhere.

On the ground, it doesn’t feel like law enforcement—it feels like occupation. ICE agents in tactical gear have stormed homes, construction sites, and Home Depot parking lots. Protesters in Paramount were met with tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber bullets. A woman was injured during clashes outside the federal building, blood visible as she was assisted by protesters. Helicopters prowl over Boyle Heights. Parents shelter their children indoors, blinds drawn, afraid to open the door.

This is how fear becomes infrastructure.

Los Angeles wasn’t chosen because it was in chaos. It was chosen because it wasn’t. Because it’s blue. Because it’s immigrant. Because it votes. Governor Gavin Newsom confirmed that there was no request for National Guard assistance and no unmet security need. There was no insurrection. No breakdown of order. Only political defiance. This wasn’t deployment—it was demonstration. Protest was reframed as provocation. Resistance was treated as rebellion. Dissent had to be punished publicly.

The only sustained lawlessness in Los Angeles is coming from the state. There is no evidence of widespread violence to justify the scale of federal force. Protesters chant. Police fire. Immigrants vanish. ICE knocks. Law has become ritual. Violence, the liturgy. The state engineers the crisis, then prosecutes its aftermath. Protest becomes pretext. Suppression, the policy. The right to assemble lies crumpled beneath a phalanx of riot shields. Due process has been disappeared by unmarked vans and sealed courtrooms. There are no warrants. There are no votes. Only force—wielded without permission, restrained by nothing.

And a Constitution burning at both ends.

We have been here before. Eisenhower sent troops to enforce school integration at Little Rock. The Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students at Kent State. But what’s happening now is something new. The crisis is camouflage. The process is performance. Trump is not restoring order. He is staging it. With troops. With optics. With violence draped in legitimacy. And for the first time in living memory, federal power is not defending the republic. It is threatening it.

The campaign began with a convoy. It entered Los Angeles with rifles, not rhetoric.

Trump has turned the city into a stage set for authoritarian branding, deploying troops like ad copy. Every deployment is a signal. Every flash-bang is a campaign broadcast:

Fear your neighbor. Clutch your cross. Land of the free. Home of the gun.

There is no policy here. Only spectacle. Elections won’t be won by ideas but by images. And the image is this: America in flames, and one man willing to answer it with force.

Congress has not issued a rebuke nor passed a resolution condemning the federal siege of Los Angeles. No investigations. No hearings. No emergency orders—only passive press statements. The Supreme Court has issued no judgment. Governors remain cautious. The Department of Justice is stacked with sycophants. The party once billed as a defender of democracy now offers prayers instead of action.

Power abhors a vacuum. But tyranny thrives in one.

This is not paralysis—it is surrender. A republic reduced to press conferences and prayer.

What’s happening in Los Angeles is not an anomaly but a rehearsal. The architecture is already in place: federalized soldiers, militarized immigration enforcement, AI-guided surveillance grids, and a judiciary trained to flinch before power. The tests are coming—Atlanta, Chicago, Boston. The goal is not security but submission. Protest will be reclassified as riot. Immigration reframed as invasion. Cities will be occupied not to restore order, but to erase resistance.

If this model is allowed to metastasize, the next civil war won’t be declared. It will be administered, precinct by precinct, under color of law.

There will be no sirens when the republic ends. No speech. No detonation. Just the quiet normalization of the unacceptable. A curfew here. A raid there. Soldiers deployed under the banner of peace. And a population trained not to see the difference.

The Insurrection Act is not coming. It is here. And it arrived not as a last resort, but as opening move. If this is allowed to stand—if federal power can swallow a city whole without consequence—then democracy becomes theater. Citizenship becomes risk. And the Constitution becomes decor for a regime already writing its next decree.

Godspeed, Los Angeles.

You are not the battleground. You are the blueprint.