I intended to plant a few red amaranth plants in my garden.

 

See, I love greens where you can take big handfuls and either make a salad or chuck it in soup or pasta or stir fries or scrambles. Of course, a lot of traditional greens that fit that bill—lettuce, spinach, pea tips, various things in the brassica family like mizuna or bok choy—are spring vegetables that start to bolt the moment it gets hot out, and here in the Denver area, that would mean that I stop having them once you hit mid-June.

 

So I did a bunch of searching and planted a bunch of hot weather greens: Malabar spinach, New Zealand spinach, and amaranth. Amaranth is a grain (technically a pseudo-grain) that’s native to the Americas. The leaves, sprouts, and seeds are edible, and it does incredibly well in heat. And it comes in red and green, and who doesn't love color?

 

So as I said, I intended to plant a few red amaranth plants in my garden.

 

Unfortunately, a thing I did not realize at the time I planted amaranth was that amaranth seeds are tiny and round and slippery. If you try to tip a few out of the packet onto your palm, you might end up spilling half the packet into your garden, and then the seeds are so tiny, there’s no picking them up. So I shrugged and said, “fine, whatever, the sprouts are edible, I’ll just thin them as they grow and throw them on top of things as a garnish.”

 

And that is what I have been doing.

I am not complaining about eating the amaranth. The amaranth is a bright red, almost fuchsia in color, and the sprouts make everything I put it on beautiful. Scrambles? Beautiful. Salads? Beautiful. Soups? Beautiful. 

The problem is that I cannot possibly eat enough amaranth to thin the garden to the point where there’s just a reasonable amount of amaranth. I’ll snip twenty baby sprouts and come out the next day and it looks like I haven’t done anything, because it keeps GROWING and there’s SO MUCH of it.

 

Finally, I realized that I needed to take drastic action: I needed to make tea. Today, I harvested a slightly bigger chunk, rinsed it, and dunked it in hot water.

The resulting tea did not disappoint. It was brightly, extraordinarily, pink. It was, dare I say it, positively fuchsine. The color would have seemed unnatural if I hadn’t just snipped the plants from the ground mere minutes before.

 

It tasted very strongly of amaranth. If you haven’t had amaranth before, amaranth is in the same family as quinoa, and it’s very similar to that: faintly nutty, with a sweet earthiness that almost reminds me of beets.

 

Once I’d drunk the whole pot, what remained in the pot was a dark, sodden green leaf with a hint of red. The rest of the color had all brewed out.

 

I lightly salted this green vegetable and then ate it, and it was delicious.

 

This was a delightfully, intensely wonderful tea, and it came with a free steamed vegetable course on the side. Some of you may guess what will happen next. I still have a ton of amaranth growing. Let the tea experiment commence!

I grew these plants myself! Or rather, they escaped containment and grew themselves at such a rate that I was forced to harvest them en masse.

 

But the variety of amaranth used here is Red Army Amaranth, which I purchased from True Leaf Market.

We need to talk about the lawlessness in this country. We will get to what happened in Los Angeles this weekend eventually.

 

But I want to retrace our steps up until this moment. In the last four and a half months, we have seen people legally in the United States targeted, people kidnapped, people handed over to brutal regimes without a single hearing as to their status, in defiance of the law. We have seen people grabbed off the street by federal agents in plain clothes. We have seen lawmakers try to exercise their statutory right to visit ICE holding facilities and be denied entrance, and then be charged with crimes. We have seen the Supreme Court--no enemy to Trump!--issue orders to the Trump administration, which the administration has ignored and lied about to lower courts.

 

We have seen people with no legal connection to the government walk in and steal our personal data and shutter entire agencies that Congress has duly funded without legal authority.

 

We have, in short, seen a nation descend into lawlessness.

 

Now we can talk about this weekend in Los Angeles. I have attempted to reconstruct what I observed via livestreams and on-site reporting with links where possible. On June 6th, during ICE raids in Los Angeles, a small number of people engaged in peaceful protest: witnessing the raids and calling for federal agents to stop. One of those people was SEIU union leader David Huerta, born and raised in Los Angeles. ICE agents pushed him to the ground, tased him, and arrested him in an attempt to intimidate other witnesses and deter further protests.

 

This did not work: as news spread of this escalation, people gathered around an ICE holding facility and protested. June 7th saw larger crowds and a somewhat tense standoff resulted between heavily armed federal agents and regular people. ICE agents used tear gas and flashbangs to try and disperse the crowd, but this was unsuccessful. The LAPD released a statement at 8 PM commending the peaceful protests, and if you know the LAPD, and I grew up in the LA area and I do, if they say a protest is peaceful, it was definitely peaceful.

 

ICE agents escalated deploying teargas and so called non-lethal munitions in order to disperse the crowd. They were soon joined by the LAPD. This brought in more people to protest, because using state violence to repress free speech is counterproductive. It turns out that playing chicken with protesters in a metro area containing more than 18,000,000 people is a bad idea. More law enforcement was brought in to manage this much larger crowd, and the cycle of “let's try and oppress this protest out of existence” / “oh no the protest keeps getting bigger” continued.

 

Near the end of the day, Donald Trump announced that he would be sending in 2,000 members of the national guard, without consulting California's governor, Gavin Newsom. He also threatened to arrest Newsom when Newsom complained. In a shock to absolutely nobody, escalating the game of chicken and threatening the governor did not result in people giving up. The crowds grew even larger.

 

On June 8th, the cops (this term is used to encompass the medley of ICE/LAPD/National Guard) decided to move protesters away from the ICE holding facility, which was accomplished with tear gas and flashbangs and so-called non-lethals like rubber bullets. The crowd moved, and since the ICE holding facility was adjacent to the 101, the thousands of protesters then (predictably) blocked the freeway. Another confrontation with law enforcement took place.

 

The force used by law enforcement throughout was by no means commensurate to the danger posed by protesters. (The links in this section contain descriptions of violence and in some cases, video; please be aware if you find that disturbing). Law enforcement used gas, rubber bullets, truncheons, and flashbangs (also known as stun grenades) against peaceful crowds who were saying mildly rude things about ICE. There have been thirty incidents of journalists harmed by police this weekend; one required surgery, and another caught her shooting on camera, demonstrating that the officer who shot her deliberately turned to her, aimed in her direction, and fired. People were beaten with batons as they crouched on the ground, unarmed and helpless.

 

Images of this violence did nothing to reduce the crowds. So Trump called the US Marines to deploy into LA in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal troops from being used for law enforcement purposes in states of the Union. Since then, Trump has threatened to deploy troops to additional cities in an attempt to further quell protests.

 

(These next paragraphs are for those wondering about the protesters: A small number of protesters have committed misdemeanors. The photos you see trying to characterize the protesters as “lawlessness” need context. The war-like haze in those photos comes from tear gas thrown by cops. Many fires were started by the heat of law enforcement flashbangs.

 

The greater LA area is large: it is approximately the landmass of the entire country of Portugal, and has nearly twice the population. Misdemeanors were committed in less than one square mile out of approximately 34,000. 

 

The presidents of free countries do not threaten to impose martial law over multiple cities because misdemeanors are being committed. I have no interest in talking about scattered, minor disobedience when Donald Trump is acting without regard to any bounds of constitutional authority.)

 

Trump has induced protests by lawlessly, haphazardly, cruelly harming neighbors and destroying our institutions. He is now trying to illegally impose martial law upon all of us for exercising our first amendment rights.

 

We do not have to put up with his lawless behavior. If you are able to, I beg you to find a protest this weekend to exercise your first amendment rights. Donald Trump cannot possibly impose martial law on all of us.

 

A lot of protests are planned. There is probably one near you. If there is not one near you, you can host one, and then there will be one near you.

 

If you are worried about police violence in response to your peaceable assembly, your greatest safety is to pick a protest that isn't one of the “main” ones in your area, if you have a choice. It is possible for cops to use violence on one protest of 20,000 people. It is not possible for cops to manage twenty protests of 1,000 people. Practice your first amendment rights in a decentralized fashion.

 

 

If you can, go to a protest. Go to a small one or go to a big one. Donate to nationwide bail funds. 

 

And refuse the narrative that there is “lawlessness” in our cities or our crowds. The lawlessness is in the White House. We, the people, are trying to restore the rule of law which has been taken from us.

 

This administration needs to realize that you can't play chicken with people's rights. We will stare them down and we will win.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.