This Is Not "Politics," and it Perfectly Encapsulates the Entire National Crisis

We don’t have politics. We don’t “disagree.”

The federal raid on MacArthur Park is a political layup, but no one will take it. A giant, clumsy operation, it was meant to send a message, and it resulted in no arrests. It was telegraphed, with signs posted around the park by activists warning that ICE was coming, and the use of horses means that the Border Patrol equestrian units had to stage nearby and unload horse trailers. There was no danger that this law enforcement operation would result in any law enforcement. There’s a long and not-obscure history of policing as symbol performance and the use of federal agents as narrative instruments, and it’s the last thing that MacArthur Park needs. I went there on the night of the raids, and the day after, and the park and surrounding neighborhoods went right back to being filthy and dangerous. The Trump administration sent a message and then…left. If you oppose Trump, this is your opening. Here it is. Easy shot.

The reason no one is taking the shot in any meaningful way is that the moment requires critics to start from reality. MacArthur Park is dirty, dangerous, violent, a site of ruin and despair, a place of death — the coroner was hauling the body of a young man out of the MacArthur Park light rail station yesterday, while I was there — and a symbol of failure. Now, here’s the New York Times, explaining what happened:

Yes, MacArthur Park, a quiet neighborhood hub where gentle immigrant children play happily in an atmosphere of peace and tranquility. And then suddenly, armed men on the march!

Famously, the New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired over a long series of invented scenes, writing stories that described his visits to places he’d never been. He filed moving reports about his long discussions with wounded Marines who had never met him, and he sat on the porch with Jessica Lynch’s family, watching cattle graze in the nearby pastures — which didn’t exist. Writing about children playing in the peace and quiet of MacArthur Park is Jayson Blair-level invention. They’re faking the world. Similarly:

As always, read the replies, which are radioactive with well-informed hostility.

Excellent use of sources and numbers in these:

So the political disagreement — is this kind of performative raid a useful response to the crisis at MacArthur Park? — never arrives, because an expression of the disagreement can’t begin until you acknowledge the fact of the crisis, criminally neglected by the governments of Los Angeles and California. People who live by the empty deployment of performative symbols have no place to stand to criticize the empty deployment of performative symbols.

This is what precisely what happens in America now, over and over and over and over and over. Donald Trump is proposing $9 billion in vicious Nazi rescissions, PEOPLE WILL DIE!!!!!! Okay, so what do you propose to do about $37 trillion in federal debt? OHHHHH, IT’S TERRIFYINGLY RECKLESS TO CUT ANY SPENDING AT ALL, AT LEAST 14 MILLION PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY DIED!!!!! The discussion never begins, because the vaudeville impedes the curtain. Donald Trump is tying Penelope to the train tracks again. Hysterical symbols fly around an information vacuum. We’re arguing about nothing.

The federal health agencies have withdrawn the recommendation that children and pregnant women receive the mRNA injections that are mislabeled as Covid-19 “vaccines” despite the fact that they don’t prevent transmission or infection, and a coalition of public health organizations is suing to get a court to force them to recommend the shots again. News stories explain that the plaintiffs are concerned about the government’s failure to perform the correct symbols, leading to the wrong psychological orientation:

A growing body of entirely mainstream research, undertaken at major universities and highly regarded hospitals and published under conditions of peer review at respected medical journals, warns that the mRNA products have deeply troubling effects. Recent example, highlighted by Alex Berenson:

Take more “vaccine,” get a much higher risk of infection. That’s…not how that’s supposed to work? But government has to recommend the “vaccine,” because vaccines are science, and you have to Believe In Science. You have to be a believer.

The casting out of mRNA unbelievers, the aggressive and insane insistence on MacArthur Park as a sylvan paradise where happy children play in an atmosphere of peace and quiet, the grim certainty that there’s absolutely nothing at all in the federal budget that can ever be cut without MURDERING ALL THE CHILDREN: None of this is argument. It’s a cultural crisis pretending to be political conflict, an epistemological implosion that manifests in bumperstickers and condescending social media rants. Well, and tenure.

We’ve been emptied. Seen on X, usefully quoting Christopher Lasch:

MacArthur Park “is a playground, a picnic spot.” It’s a paradise for children, if we can just get the mean federal agents to stay away.

A series of overlapping status groups in media, academia, and government have seceded from reality itself. This fact hangs in the air like smog.