When President Donald Trump announced on Saturday night that he would send the National Guard to Los Angeles to crush protests, a narrative emerged on social media that demonstrators had somehow given a gift to the authoritarian president by escalating confrontations with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

“Los Angeles — violence is never the answer. Assaulting law enforcement is never ok,” Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., posted on Sunday. “Indeed, doing so plays directly into the hands of those who seek to antagonize and weaponize the situation for their own gain. Don’t let them succeed.”

Would the situation somehow be less violent were ICE left to snatch and disappear people without impediment?

“It is the fight President Trump had been waiting for,” began the New York Times’s analysis on Monday morning. “Trump and his top aides leaned into the confrontation with California leaders on Sunday, portraying the demonstrations as an existential threat to the country.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders added his own unhelpful entry to the predictable chorus. “Dr. King defeated racist government officials & ended segregation through disciplined non-violent resistance,” he wrote, eliding militancy in the civil rights movement. “Violent protests are counterproductive and play right into Trump’s playbook.”

After over a decade of reporting on police brutality, fascist acceleration, and dissent, I have come to expect this sort of framing from centrist politicians and media organs, and occasionally those further on the left like Sanders. It is a willful refusal to correctly locate the agents of violence in a violent scenario.

In reality, the protesters throwing rocks at heavily armed security forces or attempting to damage the vehicles used to kidnap their immigrant neighbors did not introduce violence. They are instead acting in militant community defense.

After all, would the situation somehow be less violent were ICE left to snatch and disappear people without impediment? Does Schiff imagine either his pronouncements or the empty condemnations of his Democratic Party colleagues will slow down the deportation of our neighbors?

The “situation” that Schiff named — which he did not want Trump to “antagonize and weaponize” — was already a state of intolerable violence. Militarized federal immigration agents were carrying out raids across LA to rip immigrants away from their lives and loved ones in service of the whitening of America.

Contrary to the New York Times’s description, Trump had not been waiting for a fight that then presented itself in the LA protests. His border regime, which Democrats helped build for over three decades, has already been waging an all-out war throughout the country.

Six months into Trump’s draconian second term — Venezuelan men have been sent to a gulag in El Salvador on the basis of their tattoos; students and graduates have been kidnapped and face deportation for protected speech; and judges and members of Congress face federal prosecution for doing their jobs — it is laughable to imagine that the president and his loyalists would moderate their responses were protesters to remain placid.

The Los Angeles Police Department itself put out a statement describing the demonstrations as “peaceful” on Friday, but Trump’s deputy chief of staff, maniacal white nationalist Stephen Miller, had already posted on X earlier that day that the protests were an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States.” His post was above a video of a slow march of a few hundred people surrounding LA’s federal detention center.

It should be abundantly obvious by now that the Trump administration will conjure its own perverse reality out of thin air and treat all opposition as an enemy in need of crushing.

“One side is for enforcing the law and protecting Americans,” Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and Trump ally told the Times, “and the other side is for defending illegals and being on the side of the people who break the law.”

Gingrich conveniently leaves out that, according to today’s Republican Party, the law is whatever Trump says it is.

The old “good protester, bad protester” canard, which has always served to divide movements, is a particularly absurd line to draw in the face of an authoritarian government that has made clear it will enforce “law and order” on solely ideological, loyalist lines. January 6 rioters are free; Mahmoud Khalil is caged.

Here, a reference to Martin Luther King Jr. can prove useful — but not Sanders’s vanilla rewriting of the civil rights movement. We might instead recall King’s 1963 letter from Birmingham jail, in which he decried “the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.’”

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This post was originally published on The Intercept.