On June 6th, ICE agents, Homeland Security investigators, and FBI officers conducted coordinated raids across multiple locations in Los Angeles — including a fashion district warehouse and a Home Depot parking lot. Like many similar operations across the country, the official goal was ordinary and familiar: arrest and deport undocumented immigrants. Just as ordinary and familiar, immigrant rights groups, union organizers, and other advocates quickly mobilized, staging peaceful protests and demanding an end to the raids.

In an alternate universe, reading the above paragraph would have been the first time you’d have heard this story. In that alternate universe, you wouldn’t already have seen the now-infamous videos of ICE agents swarming the Home Depot parking lot. You wouldn’t already know what happened in Los Angeles any more than you’d know about recent ICE raids in Omaha, Nebraska; Brownsville, Texas; or Norristown, Pennsylvania.

But of course, you do know. You know that — in a move both unprecedented and illegal — the Trump administration deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 United States Marines to Los Angeles. What could have remained a relatively low-profile event instantly escalated into a national spectacle. In a dramatic overreaction — not just in the sheer scale of the deployment, but in the fact that the military was sent at all — the Trump administration transformed small, peaceful protests into mass demonstrations across Los Angeles and beyond.

I could tell you that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 explicitly prohibits the use of the U.S. military as a domestic police force. I could point to reports of disillusioned National Guard troops and officers, some saying this mission was (as reported in The Guardian) “not the kind of national security we signed up for.” I could tell you that the Marines’ deployment was so hastily planned that it was symbolic — that leaked photos showed troops sleeping on concrete floors. But by now, either you’ve already heard this, or it sounds entirely believable given the Trump administration’s track record of chaos and spectacle.

In the first paragraph of this essay, I wrote that the ICE raids and the Left’s response were “ordinary and familiar.” But as the Left has long argued, we should interrogate what we’ve come to accept as normal. Is it really normal — or should it be — for farm workers to work grueling summer hours in California’s fields without access to overtime or OSHA protections? Should it be normal for immigrant parents to be torn from their children and deported, leaving those kids to fend for themselves? Should it be normal for plainclothes federal agents in unmarked vehicles to abduct people off the street and deport them without due process?

In a perverse way, I have to give Donald Trump credit. He has a singular talent: he exposes the brutality of what we’ve normalized by amplifying it into the absurd and spectacular. (By the way, the President is succeeding in his stated mission — it is absolutely true that illegal border crossings have dropped by over 90% compared to this same period last year.)

Predictably, moderate Democrats have responded by calling for Congress to “clarify” the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 — treating this crisis as a mere legal misunderstanding.

But the Left has always argued that the system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as intended. Real change requires going beyond surface-level reforms. The problem is structural. And Trump, more clearly than any president before him, understands this. He’s not bothering to operate within the legal system — he’s demonstrating just how optional the system is when you’re willing to ignore it entirely.

If the Left has long claimed the system is bullsh*t, Trump is proving it: yes, it is. And you can do whatever you want if you’re bold enough to just do it.

The Left should learn from Trump.

Of course the lesson isn’t to mimic his politics. The lesson is that the system can be defied — that transformative politics is possible not in theory, but in practice. Trump is showing us, day by day, how easily the rules can be rewritten — or discarded altogether.

Ironically, it’s Trump — more than any political figure in recent United States history — who has opened the door for radical, transformative politics. By tearing through the norms and exposing the system’s fragility, he hasn’t just bent the rules — he’s revealed how shallow those rules have been all along. The Left has a window, open now more than ever, for radical, transformative politics.

The question now is: will the Left seize the opportunity?

***

It’s telling that the most viral images from the Los Angeles protests have been those of the five Waymo cars engulfed in flames. (For the uninitiated: Waymo is Google’s autonomous vehicle company.)

Liberal commentators were quick to stress that the protests were overwhelmingly peaceful — and that the burning Waymos only went viral because spectacular images are what get eyeballs and clicks. Conservative commentators, predictably, seized on the images to paint immigrants as violent, dangerous, and anti-American. (Side note: it’s revealing that conservatives equate torching empty vehicles with violence. Violence is something humans experience. Property — especially unoccupied, corporate-owned machinery — doesn’t bleed.)

But these reactions miss the much more profound question: why did the images of burning Waymos capture the public imagination so deeply and widely in the first place?

When a particular image achieves hyper-virality, it usually taps into something raw, collective, and unspeakably familiar. In this case, the symbolism runs deep.

We’ve all seen the headlines. By the end of this decade, 60% of manufacturing jobs are expected to be automated. Countless hundreds of thousands of retail and cashier jobs will vanish. Nearly 2 million trucking jobs — gone. The jobs are disappearing, and the rent is still due. And the Waymo — sleek, driverless, eerily impersonal — is the perfect avatar of that anxiety.

Each Waymo is also equipped with 13 cameras. That’s not just a fun tech fact — it’s a warning. As has been widely reported, Google has a long history of cooperating with law enforcement. Footage from Waymos is already being used as courtroom evidence. The future of omnipresent, omnitemporal mass surveillance isn’t coming — it’s already here, parked outside your house and filming.

People are freaked out by this — and for good reason.

What the Left must realize is that this fear — like the fear surrounding Trump’s disregard for legal norms — is also an opening. Just as Trump’s actions reveal the system’s fragility, AI and automation are exposing capitalism’s deepest contradiction.

It’s the clearest, most immediate argument for socialism we’ve ever had.

In a world where labor is rapidly being eliminated, the central question becomes: who owns the machines and technology? Who owns the capital?

***

Large language models like ChatGPT don’t truly create new ideas. They don’t dream or reach into the unknown. Instead, they predict — drawing from a massive data set of 45 terabytes of text, the equivalent of roughly 83 million books. That’s a staggering amount of information, but it’s still limited to what already exists.

You can sense it when you use ChatGPT. The writing is often clear, even eloquent — but it follows a recognizable pattern. As I read ChatGPT-generated ideas, I can anticipate the structure behind each sentence and paragraph. The writing lacks the flashes of genuine spontaneity and surprise that make the best novels and the best conversations feel alive.

When you’re hanging out with your closest friends, those are the moments that matter most, aren’t they? The truly memorable conversations are the ones that surprise us — the conversations that feel unscripted, alive, and full of possibility.

What gives a conversation that quality of aliveness?

It’s the uniquely human ability to speak not only from what is, but toward what could be. To stand in the present while reaching toward an imagined future. That, I would argue, is what makes us fundamentally human.

We are not mindless machines cycling through learned scripts — and we’re not supernatural mystics either.

What makes us human is our capacity to be the mediating force between reality and potential.

And that, more than anything, is what excites me about the Los Angeles protests — and the protests Los Angeles has inspired across the country.

Because unlike the capital and technology that seek to erase us — to extract from us, surveil us, replace us — it is still humans who are the true agents of change. The ones who can imagine otherwise. The ones who can act. The ones who can sublate potential into reality.

As I discussed earlier, Trump has laid bare just how bullsh*t our existing political system is. By tearing through the conventions and constraints of the system, Trump has exposed just how fragile and performative those constraints actually are. He’s demonstrated that what people perceive as “normal” is far from normal — and we can create radical, transformative political change if we choose to act.

We are not the objects that the future acts upon. The future can be on our terms.

We have the opportunity to bring our future into our present when we decide to come together and organize.

The question is: will we organize?