The instructions were to share some good news. It was late afternoon on the Saturday after the election and I was in the Arts District at an event celebrating the late pop artist Corita Kent. The Good News booth was a kind of participatory, conceptual art project meant to prompt people to observe and practice gratitude. I stood at the side of the booth with a friend, looking at the messages people had already posted and wondering what else could be said. Plenty had already written some variation of the “blue tsunami” that hit the country on Tuesday night. Between Tuesday night and Saturday afternoon, that was overwhelmingly the vibe in L.A.
I don’t know if I’m all that surprised by the election results. Eventually, people start coming to their senses, right? And the writing had been on the bathroom walls for years. “Fuck Trump.” “Fuck ICE.” “Free Palestine.” The messages people send when they have more anonymity than social media offers are the ones that lead me to believe that even the most mild-mannered amongst us are royally pissed off right now and it’s not just a “gas is really expensive” thing.
To be fair, the writing has been on L.A.’s bathroom walls since Trump 1.0, but it has grown in size and urgency over the past two years, crowding out the doodles, gossip and tidbits of shitter wisdom like, “The naked man fears no pickpocket.” It has spread from the hallowed thrones of dive bars and punk clubs to the streets. Stickers decorate broken street lamps and overflowing trashcans. Hastily spray-painted tags mark vacant storefronts. People tsk tsk the graffiti, but if they stopped to read it – I mean, really read it – they would get the intent of the message. Misspelled scrawl on walls that don’t autocorrect are signs that people are fueled by rage and adrenaline and are no longer content to vent in social media posts that only reach trollbots.
And then there are the legible, informational signs that have been posted across the city since the ICE siege began in Los Angeles. Directions on what to do if you see ICE are posted to utility boxes. Signs that, at least symbolically, ban ICE from businesses are in every neighborhood I’ve walked through since 2025. Hopes for an end to this dystopian nightmare hung from the Wish Tree outside The Broad during last summer’s Yoko Ono exhibition and were scribbled onto the walls in the artist’s interactive Refugee Boat instillation. Those are just the obvious signs that people are fed up with the megalomaniac in the White House and the politics of greed and cruelty that weigh so heavy on day-to-day life.
Maybe the best way to describe the mood in L.A. in the first few days post-election is cautiously optimistic. On Tuesday night, after watching a couple hours of election results, I went to a show at Gold-Diggers. The club was packed and the crowd was in high spirits. Two days later, Thai Town was jumpin’ for no particular reason. After 9 p.m., we stopped by a bakery where a line of people waiting to buy sweets. Then, we grabbed dinner at a very busy restaurant. We raced back to the Metro station, past a barber shop that was bumpin’ house bangers, and filed onto a full train sometime after 10 p.m. After the past few years of wandering around town after dark and wondering where the people went, the city felt different.
Even on Friday, after Trump dropped the Stephen Miller bombshell, the mood was good. If people were worried, they weren’t showing it. At the L.A. Live Regal, the line was long and slow. We waited for concessions in between two young women and one middle aged woman who were buying Heated Rivalry popcorn buckets before we watched Godzilla Minus Zero with a few families and a bunch of dudes who look like they’re on Letterboxd. (OMG, don’t take that as an insult, I’m on Letterboxd too.) I enjoyed the movie, but kept seeing Stephen Miller as Ghidorah. They kind of look alike. Then Godzilla showed up and caused a ruckus and you can guess whose face I had mentally imposed on that beast. Man, I wish we could just send Trump to the depths of the ocean too.
“Godzilla has been defeated for now,” I wrote on the Good News form on Saturday.
I wrote too soon. When I next checked Instagram, I saw that there was a protest in Boyle Heights in response to ICE causing a scene at White Memorial Hospital on Friday night. By the time I saw the post, I was at the Día de los Muertos event at Self Help Graphics, less than a mile away from White Memorial, where I strained my eyes to read the names of people who died during immigration raids. Some names and faces were recognizable from news reports. Others were not.
More altars honored people who were killed by police and victims of the genocide in Palestine, as well as activists, community leaders and many others.
Above one altar was a sculpture of a torso that read “Reproductive rights save women’s lives” held up by wire hangers fixed to an arch of paper flowers. The tiers of the altar were filled with photos of women, some of whom I recognized from ProPublica’s series on those who have died as a result of draconian post-Dobbs abortion laws.
You might argue that a blue city in a blue state isn’t representative of the rest of the country, but that misses the point. If you’re paying attention to the world that surrounds you – the actual, physical spaces and flesh-and-blood people, not Meta-recommended, AI-generated posts on your feeds- you’ll see that things aren’t okay. They haven’t been for a long time, but the past two years have been downright dystopian. Even if we see some light in the distance now, we’re nowhere near the end of this nightmare. There writing has been on the bathroom wall, you just have to stop to read it.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
Listen to the Beatique Mix for October, 2026, featuring music from Hercules & Love Affair, The Strokes, ADULT., Tinashe, Gorillaz and more.
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