You Say You Want a Revolution…
Pride, Protest, and the Riots in L.A.
It’s Pride Month, and Los Angeles is burning.
I’ve lived in L.A. twice. She never quite felt like home, but I’ve always loved her—bright, sprawling, impossible. So I’ve been watching the Trump administration’s ICE raids and the protests that followed with mounting dread. Not just for the people I care about who still live there, but for what this might mean for the country. Because something about this feels different. Like a fuse has been lit.
Online, I’ve been arguing with people—many of them friends—about nonviolent protest, about waving the American flag, about optics and outcomes. And by and large, my lefty comrades are kinda not having it.
It’s… frustrating.
Napoleon said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” These ICE raids, politically speaking, were a mistake. The American public is generally down with swift deportation of Venezuelan gangs—even to the point where they might be willing to tolerate the occasional handsome barber getting accidentally caught up in the sweep. But they draw the line at ICE agents goose-stepping into elementary schools. I’m not just pulling that out of my ass. Trump’s ICE raids in L.A. were pretty unpopular.
But they’re also so clearly a distraction—an intentional provocation designed to flood the timeline and drown out headlines about Elon Musk’s accusations linking the American president and the world’s most famous sex trafficker. Donald Trump sent border control agents into the second most immigrant-heavy city in the country with the clear purpose of separating children from their families and provoking a violent reaction. That was his goal.
And it worked.
The narrative shifted. Now, all over the internet, we see the same image: a masked protester waving the Mexican flag, standing astride a burning Waymo. That’s the story now. Not the raids. Not the families.
And it’s such a brutal self-own.
Because this isn’t a fight with federal agents—it’s a PR battle with the Trump administration. And if you respond by torching shit and waving foreign flags, you will be painted—gleefully, effectively—as an invading horde.
That’s not fair. But it is predictable.
If you must wave a flag, let it be the flag of Los Angeles. Or California. Or the United States, even. Find a Mexican flag in red, white, and blue if you have to—but understand that the goal here is to claim the symbolic high ground. The American flag matters to people. It matters a lot. And too often, the Left forgets that.
Someone on a podcast recently said, "The little guy loves his country, because it’s all he has." That line stuck with me. Symbols matter.
That’s why seeing footage from the No Kings Day protest felt like a deep breath: huge crowds, American flags, people not just owning the symbols of America but claiming its mythology—its metaphysical DNA. It felt like the anger we saw in the ICE riots, transmuted into something constructive.
This is why nonviolent protest matters. Not because it’s necessarily morally superior. But because it works.
Nonviolence leverages the conscience of a liberal democracy. It forces a reckoning between our values and our violence. It requires discipline, and it demands that you be willing to absorb damage on camera. It’s not passive—it’s strategic. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t bring kids to marches because he was naive. He did it because photographs of Southern cops beating children might just jolt complacent Northern liberals off their couches. A peaceful protest says: we are capable of violence, but we are choosing restraint.
That’s power.
That’s what Jesus meant when he said the meek shall inherit the Earth.
But look, I’m not here to sell pacifism as a moral absolute. Violence can be a valid political tool—sometimes the only one left. As certain very online middle-class white girls love to remind me every June, Pride was a riot. And so it was.
The Stonewall Uprising was a violent rejection of everyday police brutality against queer people just trying to exist. If straight folks know anything about queer history, it usually begins (and ends) there. Hell, for most queer folks, it begins and ends there. (If you didn’t even know that—well, that’s why June looks like unicorns vomited up over every major American city.)
Stonewall wasn’t the start of the gay rights movement, and it sure as hell wasn’t the end. But it was a turning point—a moment when rage became effective. It pushed the cops back. It captured national attention. And attention is the currency of politics.
The White Night riots—after Harvey Milk’s assassin received a slap on the wrist—were also effective. They communicated something very clearly: we are not infinitely tolerant of your oppression.
Maybe that’s what the riots in L.A. are trying to say now.
And maybe they’re right.
It’s easy, from the comfort of the present, to sort past uprisings into tidy moral categories: this one was justified, that one was criminal, this one worked, that one didn’t. But I know—deeply—that history isn’t that clean. It’s not a scorecard, or an instruction manual. It’s a story we tell ourselves about events we can’t fully understand. Contexts are complicated. Decisions happen in the heat.
But here’s what I’m afraid of:
Stonewall didn’t have a chance of igniting a nationwide insurgency.
The White Night riots weren’t ever going to trigger a civil war.
But America under Trump is a powder keg. And L.A. might be the match. Honestly, I'm afraid the first shots of the Second American Civil War have already been fired.
I hope, to the Gayngels above, that I’m wrong. (I’m 44 and I can’t shoot for shit.)
I’ve long resisted calling Trump a fascist. You actually have to believe in something to be a fascist. Trump believes in crowd size, his own awesomeness, and enriching himself and his family. But by sending ICE and military agents into Los Angeles, it feels like he’s taking a page straight from Hitler’s 1933 playbook: provoke violence in the streets, use the reaction to consolidate power. Hitler sent the SA into Communist neighborhoods. The Communists took the bait. He won.
I don’t want to watch that story play out—not with my friends and loved ones getting Kristallnachted.
Democracy is downstream from safety and prosperity. People vote for strongmen not because they hate liberty, but because they’re scared. Scared for their kids. Scared for their homes. If we don’t take those fears seriously, someone else will.
If you want to change someone’s mind, you have to meet them where they are. You have to try to understand their fear. Not everyone concerned about immigration is a racist.
Personally, I love the vibrancy of multicultural cities. I admire the courage it takes to start over in a new country, far from your family. I think the energy and determination that immigrants bring are a net benefit to America.
But I also understand the unease some people feel when the place they’ve always called home begins to change around them—quickly, and without their consent.
I remember the first time I felt at home. I was 25, and newly arrived in San Francisco. There’s a celebration called Easter in the Park—it’s a big deal. Black families, Asian families, Mexican families, a whole shit-ton of Gays and Lesbians—all gathered in joy. I called my mom crying. I told her, “I finally found a place where I feel like I belong.”
San Francisco is a city of tribes, coexisting and celebrating each other. That’s what I love about it. I would never want it to change. And when the economy collapsed in ‘08, and the City got flooded with Tech money, so much of the political energy became focused on the way Tech money was changing the character and composition of San Francisco’s neighborhoods.
To those who fought—and are still fighting—to protect the character of their neighborhoods: to my friends and allies concerned about how new development in the Mission or Bayview might erode the fabric of their communities, I say this with love.
I invite you—implore you—to summon the emotional imagination it takes to empathize with someone living in small-town Middle America. Someone who’s watched their community double in size, often with people who don’t speak the same language, who hold different values.
Setting aside, for a moment, the economic strain—on housing, wages, infrastructure.
We don’t want San Francisco to look like Middle America. It’s not crazy that Middle America might have concerns about looking like San Francisco. And even if you disagree with them, dismissing them out of hand is a mistake.
If we can address those concerns, if we conduct ourselves with dignity and discipline in the streets, and if we can tell a better story about what it means to be an American—we can avert disaster.
So no, I don’t think violence is the path forward. Not yet. Not until every other option has been exhausted.
America is a nation of immigrants. That is also part of our mythology—our national story, that everyone who is here ultimately came here from somewhere else, and our sum is greater than our parts.
E Pluribus Unum.
Queer people have always been bridges—between worlds, between identities, between communities in conflict. And every civil war is brother against brother. If we have a chance to pull this country back from the edge, we have a duty to try.
If we succeed? That’s something to be proud of.