The System is the Riot: Part 2 / 3
Why the LA Riots Expose a Structural Clash Between Rival American Orders
Editorial Note
This multi-part series examines the LA riots through the lens of Existential Imperative Realism, framing them not as isolated chaos but as structural symptoms of America's regime transition—from liberal-globalist order to civilizational state. Each part offers a standalone insight into the deeper forces shaping this transformation.
— Global Realist
Chapter V: Perception as a Weapon — The War for Meaning in the Age of Collapse
In an era of strategic entropy, where the foundations of a system are in flux and legitimacy itself is contested, the battle for narrative becomes as vital as the battle for territory. What is unfolding on the streets of Los Angeles is not simply a civil disturbance—it is a struggle over meaning. The rioters and the enforcers, the protestors and the pundits, the government officials and the social media activists—all are participating in a theater of perception, where the real conflict is over who gets to define the reality that others must live within.
From the perspective of Existential Imperative Realism (EIR), propaganda is not a deviation from politics. It is politics by other means. Every state, every faction, every actor engaged in existential struggle seeks to shape the public mind—not to discover truth, but to manufacture strategic alignment. Headlines, images, hashtags, and official statements do not reflect objective reality; they reflect the narrative interests of power.
In this sense, the media coverage of the LA riots is not neutral. Nor is it merely biased in a partisan sense. It is structurally aligned with the imperatives of the faction that controls its dissemination. Legacy media, corporate platforms, and institutional voices will consistently frame events in terms that reinforce their ideological scaffolding. This is not conspiracy. It is function.
For decades, the liberal-globalist regime constructed a narrative architecture based on moral binaries: tolerance vs. hate, progress vs. regression, inclusion vs. exclusion. This architecture was essential for maintaining the legitimacy of the post-national, diversity-centric order. But as that order collapses under the weight of internal contradictions—demographic tension, cultural incoherence, elite hypocrisy—its architects must double down on narrative control to delay systemic disintegration.
Thus, we see emotionally charged imagery looped endlessly. We see edited footage, curated outrage, algorithmic signal-boosting of select causes. We see officials carefully script their language to evoke sympathy for one group while condemning another, not based on facts, but on political usefulness. The result is not understanding. It is emotional possession. The public, denied strategic literacy, is offered only reactive sentiment.
But this dynamic is not unique to the liberal-globalist apparatus. As the America First civilizational paradigm rises, it too deploys narrative strategies. Trump’s rhetoric, his choice of framing, the symbolic elevation of border agents and victims of immigrant crime—all of it is designed to create a coherent story that binds his faction together. The populist-nationalist right, long excluded from institutional power, has learned to bypass legacy filters and create its own media ecosystems. Here too, emotion is used. Images of carnage, statistics on demographic displacement, cultural references to “invasion” or “replacement” are not objective summaries—they are instruments of mobilization.
(Examples: Two stories are being told about the LA riots—each claiming moral high ground, each shaping public perception. But beneath these dueling narratives lies a deeper structural truth.)
What emerges is a battlefield of competing simulations, each side constructing a worldview in which its position is not only righteous but inevitable. The people, largely unschooled in systems thinking or existential frameworks, are swept into these simulations. They choose sides not based on structural understanding, but on narrative resonance. And once inside the simulation, critique becomes treason, and nuance becomes cowardice.
EIR refuses this collapse into binary myth. It recognizes that both simulations are partial reflections of deeper structural forces. The riots are not merely “uprisings of the oppressed” nor “anarchist revolts against order.” They are the visible outputs of clashing systems—imported populations whose identities were never integrated, legacy populations who feel betrayed by elite disloyalty, institutional actors caught between legitimacy and survival.
In such a context, propaganda is not the corruption of the system. It is the nervous system. And emotional weaponry—grief, outrage, fear, solidarity—is the fuel. Those who control the frame control the fight.
But this, too, has limits. The more sophisticated the public becomes, the less effective overt manipulation proves. As institutional trust declines and the cracks in narrative consistency grow, more individuals begin to see through the simulation. They may not have language for what they see, but they sense the performance. This is where EIR offers not a position, but a clarity: you are not being informed, you are being aligned.
The LA riots are real. The grievances are real. The policies and countermeasures are real. But the emotional fog that surrounds them is engineered. The question is not whether one approves of the protestors or the police. The question is: what are the structural incentives driving this crisis? Who benefits from chaos? Who suffers from coherence? And why, at this moment, is the public being pushed to choose a side, rather than to understand the system?
The answer is uncomfortable. The old order needs conflict to justify its continuity. And the emerging order needs conflict to justify its birth. The riots are not an aberration. They are a ritual.
And like all rituals of transition, they are full of fire, confusion, and the war for meaning.
Chapter VI: Seeds of Collapse — The Long Arc of Liberal-Globalist Policy
To understand why American cities now burn—not merely with fire, but with identity disintegration and existential confusion—one must return to the architects of the order now failing. The liberal-globalist regime, ascendant in the wake of World War II and dominant after the Cold War, pursued a project it believed to be moral, universal, and historically inevitable: the transcendence of nationalism.
This was not merely a set of foreign policies or economic treaties. It was a comprehensive civilizational operating system, rooted in Enlightenment assumptions about reason, rights, and human convergence. Its core promise was that liberal democracy, global integration, and multicultural harmony would produce peace, prosperity, and unity. Borders were to soften. Sovereignty was to be pooled. Identity was to be expanded beyond tribe or nation. The future was post-everything: post-national, post-racial, post-ideological.
But power does not yield to aspiration. It conforms to structure.
Over the span of decades, this order institutionalized a range of policies that undermined the very conditions required for societal cohesion. Mass immigration was pursued without regard for assimilation. Economic globalization hollowed out domestic industries and severed local identities from national production. Universities and media institutions rewrote the moral framework, replacing pride with shame, and belonging with alienation. The family unit eroded. The neighborhood fragmented. The citizen became a consumer, and then a liability.
In EIR terms, the liberal-globalist regime constructed an unsustainable system: it imported competing identities while dissolving the core identity; it opened borders while outsourcing control; it celebrated diversity while eroding unity. These are not moral failings. They are strategic contradictions.
The riots in Los Angeles—and elsewhere—are not glitches in the machine. They are outputs of a system that, for decades, refused to confront the survival logic of statehood. When millions of people are welcomed into a society without a demand for allegiance, without a transmission of cultural memory, without the structures necessary to transform them from foreign bodies into fellow citizens, the result is not pluralism. It is internal civilizational entropy.
The America First paradigm recognizes this, even if in crude or populist terms. Its assertion is not just about trade or borders—it is a reassertion of existential coherence. It insists that a nation must be more than a collection of economic actors. It must be a people with a shared mythos, bounded space, and enforceable continuity.
Trump, for all his flaws, serves as the symbolic vehicle of this paradigm shift. His crude language, theatrical style, and polarizing effect are not signs of strategic incoherence—they are the aesthetic expressions of a deeper structural recalibration. He is lionized not for policy brilliance, but for symbolic reversal: the return of “us” against the abstracted “all.”
This shift has alarmed the custodians of the old order. They see in this rise not just an ideological threat, but an existential one. And they are correct. For if the logic of America First spreads—if the U.S. begins to reassert cultural primacy, demographic coherence, and strategic protectionism—then the globalist framework dissolves. Its institutions lose relevance. Its managers lose status. Its myths collapse.
Hence the present chaos. It is not purely grassroots. Nor is it entirely top-down. It is structural decompression—a system built on denial being forced to confront the truths it suppressed. Race, loyalty, heritage, sovereignty—these were not illusions to be discarded. They were foundations.
And now that the house built without them is crumbling, the fire is not ideological. It is tectonic.
From the standpoint of EIR, the core lesson is not that liberalism was evil. It is that it was structurally blind. It assumed that peace was a moral project, not a strategic one. It believed that identity could be managed through slogans. It mistook material wealth for civilizational vitality. And in so doing, it set the conditions for its own disintegration.
The riots are not caused by inequality. They are catalyzed by incoherence. They are not the revenge of the oppressed. They are the immune response of a body politic poisoned by incompatible inputs. What we are witnessing is not the failure of policy, but the expiration of a paradigm.
And as that paradigm dies, the void is being filled—not with nothingness, but with something older, harder, and more aligned with the ancient logic of survival: the civilization-state.
Chapter VII: The Optics of Outrage — Propaganda as a Weapon of the Structure
In every age, the first casualty of structural conflict is clarity. When existential imperatives collide—when systems face off over who will remain and under what terms—language, imagery, and narrative become weapons. And in our hyper-mediated society, where perception is engineered in real time across a thousand screens, propaganda no longer takes the form of crude slogans or wartime posters. It is ambient. Saturated. Invisible to the untrained eye.
This is the landscape of the current LA riots. Not merely a site of protest, but a theater of perception management. Competing factions—ideological, institutional, and algorithmic—scramble to define the event in terms that will activate their base and disarm their rivals. Headlines focus on emotion, not structure. Photos are cropped for sentiment, not context. Statements from public officials are optimized not for truth, but for utility. And the masses, conditioned by decades of ideological programming, collapse instinctively into binary frames: righteous protest or domestic terror, justice or suppression, freedom or fascism.
Existential Imperative Realism rejects all such binaries. It recognizes that both sides—the rioters and the police, the politicians and the pundits, the social media influencers and the editorial boards—are operating from within systemic incentives. None are free agents in a neutral field. They are all actors within structures, enacting scripts designed not by morality but by necessity. And those scripts often demand the manufacturing of perception.
For the fading liberal regime, narrative control is essential to legitimacy. It cannot afford to admit that multiculturalism has fractured civil coherence, that decades of permissive immigration and cultural relativism have produced enclaves of anti-assimilation, or that its own institutions are now strategically incoherent. To do so would be to confess its failure—not only of governance but of worldview. And so it reverts to its old operating system: moralism, victimology, selective outrage. It weaponizes sympathy, instrumentalizes grievance, and floods the infosphere with emotionally charged content designed to bypass critical analysis.
But the emerging civilization-state paradigm is not immune to propaganda either. Its proponents too deploy curated imagery, emphasize moments of chaos, and frame themselves as defenders of a besieged homeland. Their messaging often trades in hyperbole, mythologizing Trump as a savior, portraying riots as existential invasions, and casting all dissent as subversion. The danger here is not in the desire for order—it is in the temptation to sacralize one’s own narrative as immune from distortion.
In truth, both narratives are reactive. They reflect systems struggling for coherence in a time of paradigm shift. The liberal regime uses propaganda to sustain a dissolving order. The civilizational realignment uses it to galvanize legitimacy. Neither is operating from a place of settled confidence. Both are improvising against the erosion of consensus.
EIR offers a different lens. It asks: what structural conditions make these narratives necessary? What incentives drive the manipulation of public perception? What imperatives shape which events are emphasized, which voices are amplified, and which facts are suppressed?
It is not difficult to answer. In a collapsing liberal system, narrative becomes triage. If the public sees the riots as evidence of liberal failure, the regime hemorrhages credibility. If, conversely, the public sees the state response as authoritarian overreach, the narrative of systemic oppression can be reignited. Each faction must keep its audience agitated and aligned. This is not about education. It is about mobilization.
And this is why propaganda is not merely a tool—it is a survival function. In system stress, truth becomes subordinate to strategy. The goal is not accuracy. It is positioning. This is not to excuse falsehood—it is to recognize why falsehood thrives under pressure.
Thus, the average citizen—saturated with information but starved of understanding—becomes a pawn. Pulled toward outrage, fed curated trauma, taught to interpret every event through moral simplifications. But under EIR, we refuse the trap. We recognize that structural stress produces narrative warfare, and that the only defense is clarity.
Not neutrality. Not passivity. But clarity: a refusal to be captured by either side’s optics without first understanding the system that made those optics necessary.
This is the realist’s task—not to moralize the chaos, but to decode its machinery.