This one made it into the book. I wrote it in 2000, right after the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where I drove down from Seattle in a car full of hitchhikers and found 600 anarchists assembled in an orange warehouse by the LA River. It aged exactly as you’d expect an eyewitness account of American political policing to age — like a bruise that never quite healed.
The North American Anarchist Conference was not what most people picture when they hear the word “anarchist.” There were no masks, no broken windows, no chaos — or at least, not initially. There were nametags with handles instead of real names, a cooperatively owned Mexican café as check-in point, and house rules that explicitly prohibited anything that would give the police a pretext to shut it down. Everyone knew the police were watching. Everyone tried to be careful.
The LAPD was not careful. What unfolded over the following days was a case study in how a democratic government treats its most inconvenient citizens — the ones who show up in public with signs and the audacity to suggest that things could be different. The police didn’t wait for violence. They predicted it, prepared for it, and in several instances appear to have induced it through crowd management techniques designed less to protect public safety than to provoke a useful spectacle.
I watched it happen. I was one of the people who drove a car full of idealists toward a convention where they hoped to matter. What I found was the gap between American rhetoric about free assembly and the actual practice of it, which involves rubber bullets, horses, and a lot of bureaucratic paperwork justifying decisions made well before the first protester arrived.
The essay tracks what I actually saw: how the organizing worked, what the anarchists wanted, and how the state responded. Not with debate. Not with engagement. With force — preemptive, documented, and largely unremarked upon by the networks covering the convention inside.
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*This piece was expanded and collected in [Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/) — essays about America observed from the outside, by someone who left and couldn’t quite believe what he found when he looked back. Available in Kindle and paperback.*
**[Get Not My America on Amazon →](https://www.amazon.com/Not-My-America-Stranger-Strange-ebook/dp/B0G3C44X7D/)**
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**You might also like:** [It’s not a New America – It’s the same it always was](https://www.vagobond.com/its-not-a-new-america-its-the-same-it-always-was/), [Secret of ageing no longer a secret](https://www.vagobond.com/secret-of-ageing-no-longer-a-secret/), [The Newest Thing…Craigslist meets Youtube](https://www.vagobond.com/the-newest-thingcraigslist-meets-youtube/)
*Browse the full CD Damitio catalog at [indignified.com/books](https://indignified.com/books)*
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I called most of this chaos years ago. America is still unraveling — and the next chapters are already written.
If you want to understand what’s really coming (and why), read Not My America: A Stranger in a Strange Land. Available on Amazon.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
