Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: Rachel Kushner talks about an informant and provacateur who infiltrates an anarchist eco-commune in rural France – that’s the central character in her award-winning novel, “Creation Lake” – it’s out now, in paperback. But first: Trump versus Los Angeles. Harold Meyerson will explain – In a minute.
(BREAK)
Los Angeles is ground zero for Trump’s campaign to deport millions of undocumented residents, but the city has a big alliance of immigrants’ rights groups defending the vulnerable – and having some success. For comment, we turn to Harold Myerson. He’s editor at large of The American Prospect. He’s also written for The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The LA Times, and he worked as executive editor of the late lamented LA Weekly for more than a decade, mostly in the nineties. We reached him today in our nation’s capital. Harold, welcome back.
Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here. Jon.
JW: Trump is attacking LA, first of all, because LA County has more Democratic votes than any place else in the country – 3 million Democratic votes in LA County. Second place, cook County, Illinois, 2 million votes. And Trump is attacking LA also because there are a lot of undocumented people in LA, maybe a million — out of a total of almost 5 million Latinos, in a county with 10 million people.
Trump famously sent 4,200 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to LA to “support ICE operations.” So LA has a million undocumented residents. The total number detained by ICE in Los Angeles through July 4th, they say, is around 1800. In comparison, the number of people arrested and jailed in LA County by the police for crimes in the same period is around 50,000, more than 25 times as many. You can see why Stephen Miller, Trump’s evil head of deportation efforts, has been gnashing his teeth in frustration and demanding that ICE do more.
1800 people arrested and detained by ICE so far in 2025 is not really very many, but ICE has succeeded at one big thing: creating widespread fear.
For example, this week on Monday, when dozens of heavily armed ICE agents, some on horseback, and “protected” by 90 California National Guard troops, descended on MacArthur Park west of downtown LA. Tell us what happened in MacArthur Park.
HM: Well, they did descend and they paraded, through now, as events would have it, about the only people in MacArthur Park when they stormed the park were some little kids and their childcare providers who were suitably terrified and scrammed out of there. And I guess we have to say “mission accomplished” because according to some army documents that the invaluable Ken Klippenstein was able to lay his hands on, the intent of the action was as a show of force, a show of presence, demonstrating that they can pop up anywhere, anytime and scare the bejesus out of whoever might be in their path.
JW: People who were there called this one “a big perverse publicity stunt,” just a show of force “to take pictures.” Marqueece Harris–Dawson, president of the LA City Council, said if the Border Patrol wants to film in LA, they “should apply for a film permit like anybody else.”
HM: I should add that if they’re marching through the park, the least they could do is pick up the trash.
JW: Rachel Maddow on Monday night called MacArthur Park “some random park in LA.” Actually, it’s not a random park at all.
HM: No. It is the center of the lower-class immigrant community. In fact, since you mentioned The LA Weekly, in 1990, I did a piece for the weekly abetted by our great photographer Ted Soqui, in which I determined that the immediate census tract around MacArthur Park was actually the most densely populated census tract in the United States.
JW: Wow.
HM: I went block by block through the neighborhood. There are no buildings there that are taller than seven stories, so we’re not talking about high rises. We’re talking about an incredible concentration, largely working-class immigrants. It’s sort of the lower East side port of entry. So the ICE agents essentially were trying to be saying, “if you dare poke your head outside, we’re going to get you.” That’s sort of the message they were trying to convey.
JW: And ICE was active elsewhere in LA on July 4th in West Hollywood. Channel 4 showed film of ice agents in bulletproof vests at the Santa Palm carwash where they detained two people. A man whose father was detained told Channel 4, He’s not a criminal, he wasn’t doing anything he wasn’t supposed to. He came into work on the 4th of July and also on July 4th, The LA Times reported that ICE agents detained a food vendor with a cart in front of the Target store on Eagle Rock Boulevard. This is a birria stand. Birria is a stew usually made, I think with goat meat. This apparently is a long-time beloved spot for residents of Eagle Rock and Highland Park. For this one, a GoFundMe was started by the vendor’s brother that’s raised more than $26,000 in the last two days, 736 people gave money. He wrote at the GoFundMe site: “we are trying to raise money to get a lawyer for Luis. He’s a hardworking man. He needs to feed his family and three kids. I will appreciate a lot your help and support.”
HM: There is a study out from the Libertarian Cato Institute, which was able to get records of all 204,000 detentions that ICE agents performed between the beginning of last October, the beginning of the fiscal year and mid-June, and what it found was that the percentage of the folks that ICE detained who were convicted of violent crimes was 7%. And when you add property crimes to that, it only goes up to 10%, which means 90% of the folks that ICE detains aren’t guilty of anything except in case they aren’t documented. That’s all they’re guilty of, and we know of a number of cases where ICE is simply arresting Latinos and seeing if they’re documented or not.
JW: Yeah. Tell us about the rate on that big swap meet. I think it was in Santa Fe Springs.
HM: They sent in somewhere upwards of 50 agents to swarm a swap meet. It doesn’t follow that the attendees at swap meets are necessarily people convicted of violent crimes. It’s almost like the agents themselves have kind of a shopping mentality. They’ll pick up whatever is there. If they bother to ask questions, they will have to relinquish some of the people they pick up. Although when they can’t find any particularly violent crime or property crime convictions, they are happy to deport those folks anyway if they don’t have documentation.
JW: Well, I want to talk about the resistance here. Of course, Governor Gavin Newsom has the highest profile. He filed an emergency legal challenge to block the use of National Guard troops in immigration raids and one, an initial decision by the Federal District court, which ruled that guard deployment was illegal and exceeded Trump’s authority. But that was quickly reversed by a three Judge Appeals panel consisting of Trump appointed judges that blocked that order and has allowed the Trump administration to maintain control of guard troops while this lawsuit wins its way through the courts. And then there was a new lawsuit filed last week by the ACLU of Southern California and the group’s public counsel in CHIRLA, C-H-I-R-L-A, we’ve talked about them here before, the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, Los Angeles. This was a federal lawsuit accusing Trump of systematically targeting brown-skinned people that was joined on Monday by all of the blue states, a total of 18 states, including California. What do you know about that case?
HM: That too is now in district court. What struck me about what clearly is the racial profiling that ICE is now doing, particularly since Steven Miller told them they got to make 3000 arrests per day. This runs against what is ostensibly the drive of the Trump administration to have what it alleges a race-neutral opposition to DEI policies. So on the one hand, the Trump administration professes that it wants to get back to pre-affirmative action, pre DEI-legislation—
JW: And if I may insert, cuts the funding for any college that refuses to eliminate racial distinctions.
HM: Exactly. And at the same time, the most visible employees of the Trump administration, visible though masked, the ICE agents and other deportation agents, are relying increasingly on race-specific criteria. “Hey, he looks Latino” for their detention. So there’s a slight contradiction there, although once you realize that opposition to DEI basically means “we favor whites,” then it all kind of comes together.
JW: And it’s not just the immigrants’ rights groups and the Democratic state Attorney Generals. Six Republicans in the California state legislature sent a letter last week to Trump imploring him to refocus the ICE arrests. So it would be limited to convicted felons only. Tell us about that.
HM: Look, what the ICE raids are doing is wreaking havoc among California Latinos and these Republicans, like every other California legislator, has a lot of Latinos in their districts. A lot of the small businesses that are really the base of contributions to Republican state legislators, a lot of the small businesses are Latino run, are immigrant-owned, that sort of thing. And the patronage at all of those businesses has shrunk to virtually zero since Latinos have been afraid to go out of their homes. So you can understand the level of disruption of normal life writ large that Trump’s actions in California are causing.
JW: We’ve talked here about the immigrants’ rights groups, the ACLU of Southern California, Public Counsel, and CHIRLA. They’re joined by the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, ImmDef, which provides volunteer attorneys for people who have been detained, and they cooperate with several other groups, and something called the LA Rapid Response Network Hotline, which monitors and puts out alerts about ICE activity. They put out an alert for the MacArthur Park raid, which is the main reason I think why MacArthur Park was basically empty when ICE arrived. Also active on this front are some of the key labor unions of LA County in particular SEIU service employees, local 721, which has over 95,000 members. It’s the largest public sector union in California. What has their role been in this round of immigration protests?
HM: The president of that local David Huerta was alerted to an ICE raid and went there and apparently stood to thwart one of the cars that ICE was pulling up in which to put its arrested folks, who were garment workers, and was pushed down by an ICE agent, hit his head, was hospitalized, and then was indicted for obstruction or for having to be hospitalized, whatever the cause of his indictment may have been.
JW: And he remains charged with felonies and is out on bail.
HM: And there’s a host of unions in the other area in particular, SEIU’s janitors, HERE hotel worker,s and so on, and the building trades that are composed heavily of immigrants. And so this really affects the rank and file of a lot of California labor.
JW: There’s something called the Summer of Resistance underway now in LA, which involves the immigrants’ rights groups, the big unions, clergy and laity, United CLUE. I think you know something about them.
HM: Well, this is an organization that rose alongside the LA Alliance for a New Economy and has been an economic justice organization for a long time. What I also know about them was that about four or five years ago, they gave their annual awards to the great Jim Lawson, its leading figure in the Civil Rights Movement going back to the 1950s who was a minister in la and my Aunt Harriet, who had turned out and testified for them well into her nineties before some city council hearing. So yes, I am certainly aware of CLUE as it is called.
JW: CLUE runs weekly prayer vigils in downtown LA outside the federal building. They represent the mothers of the disappeared and our constant presence at these demonstrations, and they’re running a big nonviolent training program at the convention center. I think it’s next
HM: In the best tradition of Jim Lawson who had studied nonviolence in the 1950s and even the 1940s in India under Gandhi himself, and then was instrumental in instructing Martin Luther King in the tenets of nonviolence or beginning with the Montgomery Bus boycott.
JW: I want to look at the political side of all of this, these raids on longtime residents who have jobs and families. This is not popular with anybody except the Republicans. You’d think that Trump’s attacks on Latino communities would be especially important in reducing his support among Latinos. We were all alarmed to see the results from the 2024 election where Trump did frighteningly well nationally among Latinos. He won Pence, which poll you’re looking at 45 or maybe 48% of the total Latino vote. Trump had gotten only 32% in 2020. Apparently, it was Latino men especially switched to support Trump in 2024. I think this was not true in LA County as much. The figures that I’ve seen are about 34% of LA County Latinos supported Trump. And the latest national poll, which was just last month in June, found only 19% of Latinos approve of the current ice raids, 62% disapprove. So where does that leave us on what we were told is a major realignment in American politics?
HM: It puts a lot of that realignment up for grabs, as does the budget bill, the reconciliation bill, which is also very damaging to the working-class that the Republicans are now trying to claim. There are things in the Republican DNA always create economic policies that benefit the rich at the expense of everyone else. The white nationalist, these things are part of traditional Republican positions with the white nationalism. It certainly gets intensified under Trump as the reconciliation bill intensified it, but does not play well with a lot of the constituency that has been swinging Republican in recent elections as you yourself just noted.
JW: Trump himself: you have to wonder what is Trump going to do with himself every day, now that the hundred days of shock and awe executive orders have come to an end. His big ugly budget bill has passed. As Simon Rosenberg reminds us at the Hopium website, Trump needs a constant daily diet of spectacle and bread and circuses in order to feed his desperate and pathetic need to be the center of attention — to prove he’s not weak and unpopular, that he’s not a loser. And also, to keep his base mobilized. On Monday in LA we got a glimpse of what seems to be next in Trump’s agenda, the spectacle of National Guard troops in full combat dress, riding in armored personnel carriers into a park in LA, looking for Latinos. But thanks to the Rapid Response Network, they didn’t find any. I guess that’s better than bombing Iran, but it’s not really good for the rest of us.
HM: No, it’s not really good for the rest of us. And I think one of the things in the reconciliation bill is to greatly increase the funding and therefore the size and scope of the deportation efforts. So we’re going to see more and more of that. And I think cumulatively this damages Republican prospects, certainly in a state like California. I think there are probably four Republican House districts in the state where the cumulative effect of the deportation policy and the slashes to Medicaid are very likely going against the Republicans in most if not all of those four districts — and maybe even five or six. What Trump wants and what the MAGA base wants, and even more what Steven Miller wants, do not necessarily help the Republicans on election day.
JW: Harold Myerson of The American Prospect. Harold, thanks for talking with us today.
HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
(BREAK)
Jon Wiener: Everybody who’s worked in social movements or in helping organize political demonstrations knows how activists are often concerned about undercover agents, informants, and provocateurs. Now, Rachel Kushner has written a novel where the protagonist IS the informant and provocateur—it’s called Creation Lake,and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and longlisted for the National Book Award, also a New York Times Bestseller, named a Best Book Of the Year by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, lots of other places – and it’s out now, in paperback. Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels, The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, both nominated for the National Book Award, and The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her books have been translated into 27 languages. We’ve talked about each of them here. Rachel, welcome back.
Rachel Kushner: Thank you. Nice to be here.
JW: In this book, the first thing you highlight about being the provocateur is that it’s a job. It can be a government job, working for the FBI or the DEA, but there’s also a huge private sector workforce that spies on critics and opponents of big corporations and tries to undermine their organizations and disrupt their actions. And in all these jobs, if you don’t get the results your boss wants, you are fired. In your new book, our protagonist — she calls herself Sadie Smith — has not been very successful in her career. In fact, she’s been sort of a failure as a provocateur. There was a time, she tells us, when she felt invincible. Not anymore. What happened? Why has she ended up infiltrating a commune in rural southwestern France, instead of working in Berkeley or LA or New York City?
RK: Sadie tells herself that she is ahead of the game, that things have worked out as they should, and that maybe she’s better off in the private sector where you can make more money, it’s a more shadowy world where there are no rules, where an agent can, a priori, be somewhat rogue in her methods and her choices. She is basically kicked out of the world of the Feds, being an undercover agent, because somebody that she was surveilling had his conviction overturned by a lawyer who claims entrapment, and she was the entrapper. And I’ve read about a few of these cases. I don’t know if there’s a large workforce doing that, but there are certainly a few. And it whets the imagination, if you will, of what that world is like, and that these corporations think that there are leftist groups agitating in such a way that could cause trouble for power and profit, and that these kinds of green anarchists need government surveillance.
It could be both comical and also somewhat serious, because we have seen cases of it in real life. But maybe the larger point for me was to write a narrator who would automatically, in most cases, take a view that would be like 180 degrees from my own view. She would report on people with a kind of cruel amusement in a way that I never would. She would not have a natural sympathy for the people she’s surveilling, whereas I sort of would. And the question became in the novel and the tension of the narrative, whether she is vulnerable to the laments of this figure, Bruno Lacombe, whose correspondence she’s illicitly reading.
JW: You imagine Sadie the provocateur so thoroughly, and you have so much fun doing it. She’s a wonderful protagonist and a terrific narrator, even though what she’s doing is – so wrong!
RK: Yeah. Again, it was like — to get into her and move through a landscape was almost to get behind the wheel of a tank where I’m already occupying a space that is very insulated from my own actual feelings about the world. And she did turn out to be, in other ways, a kind of generative conduit for my own vulgar and immature sense of humor.
JW: (Laughter) I would never say that.
RK: And I was able to bestow her with characteristics that I don’t myself possess, and that just – it was very fun for me.
Another part of it was the way that she seems to sort of contribute to, comment on, or occupy a certain literary genre that was new to me. I do not claim that Creation Lake is a roman noir. It’s not a spy novel per se, because it wants to reserve for itself spaces to speculate on the human condition in a way that’s a little more like lavish than the tight control and set of rules that one should learn, incorporate, and submit to when writing a genre novel. That said, when you have a spy as you’re a narrator, it’s kind of wonderfully freeing — because suddenly you have this very active protagonist who can put guns in other people’s hands and plans in their head.
And the kind of fragile, lifelike semblance of reality that is created through the voice of a narrator who’s more like real people is much more self-doubting and passive in a lot of situations. You’re listening and intuiting, and she is constantly manipulating and projecting and overplaying her own idea that she is the one who knows more than everyone else in the room.
JW: I wanted to ask you to read one of the passages I really like. This is where she’s thinking about the people in the group that she’s infiltrated.
RK: “These people were different from the West Coast eco warriors, with their piercings and their food coloring, hair dye, t-shirts whose logos were supposed to help define some micro split in movement ideology. Nor did these boys resemble the anti-globalist window smashers of Genoa, the milieu in which Pascal had been radicalized, among people who wore all black. Then again, Pascal didn’t look like that either.
“But whether people cultivate an exterior meant to signal their politics or they cultivate instead a straightlaced appearance that does not signal their politics, their self-presentation is deliberate. It is meant to reinforce who they are, who they consider themselves to be. People tell themselves strenuously that they believe in this or that political position, whether it is to do with wealth distribution or climate policy or the rights of animals. They commit to some plan, whether it is to stop old growth logging or protest nuclear power or block a shipping port in order to bring capitalism, or at least logistics to its knees.
“But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric, the values they promote, the lifestyle they have chosen, the look they present is to shore up their own identity. It is natural to attempt to reinforce identity, given how fragile people are underneath these identities, they present to the world as themselves. Their stridencies are fragile, while their need to protect their ego and what forms that ego is strong. People might claim to believe in this or that, but in the 4 a.m. version of themselves, most possess no fixed idea on how society should be organized. When people face themselves alone, the passions they have been busy performing all day, and that they rely on to reassure themselves that they are who they claim to be, to reassure their milieu of the same, those things fall away.
What is it people encounter in their stark and voluntary 4 a.m. self? What is inside them? Not politics. There are no politics inside of people. The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, the significations of group and type, the quiet truth underneath the noise of opinions and beliefs is a substance that is pure and stubborn and consistent. It is a hard white salt. This salt is the core, the 4 a.m. reality of being.”
JW: When Sadie says, ‘there are no politics inside of people,’ she’s talking here about herself, first of all. Sadie is not a political person.
RK: Well, I would push back a tiny bit and say that she may, at the end of the day, whether deliberate or not, be speaking also of herself. But I think that she believes that she has something like an accounting leisure. And she has been surveilling leftist groups for many years, and she has seen people be very strident in ways that may have had more to do with their identity and position in the group than had to do with what they truly want to uphold in some naked space standing before their God, if you will, which is what I think of as that four a.m. self. It’s a kind of anhedonic doubter who no longer has the veils of confidence that are produced by the repressions of questions of one’s own contradictions.
And in a certain way, I might even agree with her that politics, perhaps in the thinnest application of its meaning: this week’s political situation, the most topical version of politics or politics within something as vulgar as a two-party system, does not adhere in the spiritual texture of the person alone. There may be something there that could form a moral view of how life should be lived, but it is seldom the same thing as how people present themselves to be socially among peers and otherwise.
JW: But the book doesn’t open with Sadie. It begins with Neanderthals, who, we are told in the first sentence, were “prone to depression.” My first thought was, what the heck? But of course, in your hands, what we learned about Neanderthal life turns out to be pretty darn interesting. So this is a book of ideas, big ideas about how things went wrong and when. And the big ideas come from the mentor of these environmental activists. You call him Bruno Lacombe. He’s not exactly a Bill McKibben type.
RK: Yeah. Yeah, so the first line of the book about Neanderthals and depression: “Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said. He said they were prone to addiction too, and especially smoking.” I became interested in the question of life before the written down, shall we say? But also, the place of yearning for those who speculate upon the question or even try to provide something like an answer to what life was like before the written down. Both the thing itself and what it says about our own longings became interesting to me. That is the ultimate mystery to me, what these people were like, what they knew, how they lived, what they felt.
And a lot has been discovered in the last couple of decades with the mapping of the Neanderthal genome among molecular biologists. And I got interested in that, so I started reading a lot about it. And I was aware, while I was reading, that – and you can correct me. You know more about movement politics certainly than I ever could, and you’ve just been in it longer, but I feel like there’s this idea that agriculture was the big wrong turn.
JW: Yes.
RK: About 10,000 years ago.
JW: Yes. It gave rise to the possibility of organized exploitation and oppression.
RK: Yeah. And cities themselves were not this inevitable human development, etcetera. And Bruno kind of goes back to the propensity to even want to be in a crowd could perhaps be attributed to the propagation habits or numbers only among this one subspecies called Homo sapiens. And he develops a kind of romantic vision of the Neanderthal as sort of like his beautiful loser, which they did not stick around. They could not hack it.
And so for decades, this term, ‘Neanderthal,’ was used in a derogatory way to mean somebody who was too stupid to win at the game of life. Lately, there’s been some weirder reclamations of the Neanderthal to do with some new iteration of something like race science, but I’m not interested in that at all. And I think I see Bruno more looking at speculation on the life of the Neanderthal, like the way that scientists now and anthropologists are speculating on the Denisovans and also other populations deemed so far to be ghost populations whose evidence is in our DNA, but we have not found any archaeological evidence of them — which as Bruno says, basically means we have not yet found their trash.
And his idea is, what messages might have been left for us by these people? If we could tune in to a secret spiritual shortwave radio frequency where their life as a sound was continuous with ours, what would we hear? What would they tell us? So he moves the standard story, as people call it, of agricultural being the wrong turn – he moves that back 30,000 years. He does encounter, over the course of the novel – the novel has to be an occasion for such, generally speaking. He encounters a kind of crisis of confidence in his own idea of what might’ve been the case, but he’s looking for a potentiality in people that may still be something that is available to us, that could be attained — or at least dreamed of.
JW: I want to go back to your decision to write this novel in the first person about somebody who we would say is on the other side. Your books up to now have had a protagonist that have a lot in common with you, riding motorcycles fast, working on women’s prisons. How did you decide to make the “I” of this book the ruthless agent provocateur? Did you know somebody who worked for the FBI and then changed sides?
RK: No. No. No. It’s a good question. I find, so far in my brief writing life, fourth novel, I find the first person to be the hardest. It’s the biggest challenge, and for a few reasons. You have to be able to instill in yourself, and have it be there when you return to work each day, a sense of deep believability that the person is not you and has enough whiff of personhood that you can step back in. Because “I” does suggest me, so it takes a lot of creative juice on my part to build an “I” that is definitely not me. And none of the “I’s” have been, although the first-person voice in The Flamethrowers was much closer to my sense of experience in that she’s a young woman who moves to New York and is surrounded by older people who know more and take up more space, and she feels like the only way that she can really acclimate is to recede and listen to them. And that was how I felt once upon a time.
With Sadie, I don’t really rely on my own ideas, but I always can take what I would see, and then see what she would see — because her persona and her style feel very real to me. In this case, it also seemed like it would be a challenge because I decided to try to achieve a novel that would only be told in her voice, so that she has a total monopoly on the reality of the novel. And in all of my prior works, even if I at one point set out to do that, I ultimately changed my mind because I was going for a kind of amplitude that could not be filled up by one character alone. Other people were banging at the door to tell their version of things, to speak.
And in this case, I was not going to allow for that. I also didn’t think that the novel needed it. But it starts out with her interpolating Bruno. So she’s reading this correspondence and saying, “This is what Bruno says.” And I had been working on the book for three years and trying to figure out how to do it. And then finally one day, I wrote that first line; the whole first few pages of the book is the thing that I wrote first, and it was her describing a letter from him describing some things to a set of recipients that are decidedly not her.
And I had this tone in my head from the first line of the movie by Chris Marker, ‘Sans Soleil,’ where it’s a British woman speaking, and she’s recounting the letters of this fictional person named Sandor Krasna, which is really an alter ego for Chris Marker. And it goes something like, ‘The first thing he told me about was three children on the road in Iceland in 1965.’ And I love the mystery of that. You don’t know who she is. You don’t know who he is. The magic of cinema is that then you see the footage of the children on the road in Iceland.
The magic of the novel is that only I see what she’s describing. I loved the challenge of trying to get Bruno’s lonely yearning and his earned sagacity into the hands, into the voice of this much more sardonic and brittle woman. And the tension would be, how long can she keep pulling back to criticize Bruno’s assertion? And at what point will the tables flip, if they do? And she will be the one who’s kind of being tickled or seduced by him, rather than her being the one who was the master seductress who’s manipulating everybody around her?
JW: Rachel Kushner — her amazing new novel is Creation Lake. Rachel, thanks for talking with us today.
RK: Thanks so much, Jon. Always a pleasure.
JW: We spoke with Rachel Kusnher about Creation Lake in September, 2024. It’s out now, in paperback.
