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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: LA is not a a war zone, and the city has not been burnt to the ground [1]
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Date: 2025-06-14
Charlie Warzel, writing for The Atlantic, illustrates how the right-wing media juggernaut has convinced millions of Americans that the entire city of Los Angeles is going up in flames right now, ostensibly “justifying” the formidable and intimidating presence of the U.S. military and, by extension, justifying the potential for state-sanctioned violent action against peaceful protesters.
Implicit in his premise is that the vast majority of credulous MAGA voters are ignorant of — and in fact are wholly unfamiliar with, or have never set foot in (or spent a significant amount of time in) — “downtown” Los Angeles or indeed the downtowns of most major cities. It’s the same playbook that prompted the widespread assumption among the right that the city of Portland Oregon had been razed to the ground as a result of Black Lives Matter protests there in 2020 (it had not). But, as Warzel notes, in the case of the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests, this disinformation has risen to the level of a nearly institutionalized pattern of serial exaggeration.
Warzel acknowledges that phenomenon is shared by both the right and left: “What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas.” And that, in fact, if you aggregated all of the coverage prevalent on social media without regard to any one particular ideology you might actually end up with an evenhanded portrayal of the situation.
But that is not what is actually occurring. As Warzel notes:
[T]he situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone.
(Emphasis supplied)
As a result, “Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country’s largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives.”
x All the people I still know in LA laugh and laugh when they hear that "Los Angeles is burning." I made a couple of maps to show just how tiny and localized the protests are. GOPers are working really hard to make an excuse for declaring martial law. People should be very wary of that.
[image or embed] — Daniel - Desert Apostate (@hcexvangelical.bsky.social) June 10, 2025 at 5:50 PM
But it isn’t simply towards the protests occurring in LA and elsewhere where this paradigm is being weaponized to shape(and warp) public opinion. Warzel notes that this administration’s entire second term has been curated through such contrived distortions, with “mainstream” media carried along in the stream right along with it. He also notes how this phenomenon is corrosive even for those who are inured to it, because it tends to drown out and overwhelm the reality of what the country is actually experiencing: a fulsome, systematic and entirely planned descent into what can only be described as authoritarian fascism.
As Warzel writes:
This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump’s second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are.
The title to Warzel’s essay, “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)” speaks for itself. Sadly, his conclusions do not offer very much in the way of consolation.
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