A recent AT article posited that our tech overlords have not so much created our future by independent thinking as they have by realizing the futures predicted by others. In essence, they are making real ideas that they appropriated. These visions of tomorrow, which the tech giants admit influenced them, virtually all end in dystopian nightmares.
This is good in at least one respect. We know what is coming. The roadmaps are there for us to read. Nowhere is this more clear than in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is Hollywood. Hollywood is cinema.
Cinema has long served as a cultural seismograph, registering the tremors of societal anxiety and projecting potential seismic shifts onto the screen. Some films merely entertain, but others seem to foreshadow reality, framing deep social tensions that later explode into historical events.
Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979) and John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996) are two such films—dystopian visions of urban chaos that, in hindsight, eerily mirror the real-life breakdown of law enforcement we are seeing in Los Angeles. These movies don’t warn of excessive government control but rather expose the dangers of government neglect, where years of weak enforcement and ignored warning signs allowed unrest to simmer beneath the surface until it erupted.
an X screen grab and AI.
Set in a gang-ridden New York City, The Warriors dramatizes the consequences of a city where police authority has disintegrated, leaving street gangs (tribes) to rule their own territories. Though stylistically exaggerated, the film’s themes of neighborhood division, unchecked violence, and desperate survival mirror Los Angeles’s history of tribalism, as manifested by gang conflicts and riots. The Warriors, falsely accused of murder, must traverse hostile boroughs, similarly dominated by tribalistic factions, each operating under its own violent code.
This scenario played out in real-world Los Angeles during the 1992 Rodney King riots. When law enforcement failed to intervene effectively, the city became a battleground of roving gangs, looters, and vigilante justice. Police presence was minimal or absent in many areas, allowing the streets to be ruled by fear, retaliation, and territorial survival—much like the nightmarish vision in The Warriors. The film suggests that when enforcement collapses, an underground network emerges, with civilians, gangs, and local groups enforcing their own rules of law.
Another eerie parallel lies in how misinformation fuels chaos. In The Warriors, gangs spiral into violence based on a false accusation, leading to needless bloodshed.
Similarly, in Los Angeles, a misinformation crisis involving the current city and state administrations has contributed to the erosion of trust in law enforcement by framing federal agencies as oppressive forces. California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have repeatedly criticized federal law enforcement actions, with Newsom calling the deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles “deranged behavior” and accusing the federal government of provoking violence. Bass has similarly been accused of siding with protesters over law enforcement, with ICE officials claiming she has undermined federal operations.
These statements, amplified through media and social platforms, have fueled public skepticism toward law enforcement, reinforcing the idea that police forces are inherently oppressive rather than protective – and they deserve to be hunted as were The Warriors.
One of the most striking elements in The Warriors is its use of radio broadcasts to coordinate gang movements. A mysterious female radio host, acting as an underground informant, directs gangs throughout the city using cryptic updates. This unseen figure operates as a centralized communication hub, ensuring that enemy factions stay updated on The Warriors’ movements.
This foreshadowed the role of social media in modern unrest, where real-time updates, viral misinformation, and coordinated efforts drive public action. In the Los Angeles riots and other protests, Twitter, Facebook, and encrypted messaging apps have become digital command centers, allowing individuals to organize, warn others of police presence, and spread videos that fuel outrage. Much like the radio host in The Warriors, influencers and activists on social media shape narratives, direct groups, and create decentralized movements. In both cases, traditional authority structures lose control as underground networks dictate real-time action.
John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. imagines a Los Angeles so unmanageable that the government abandons it entirely. Unlike dystopias where oppressive control sparks rebellion, Escape from L.A. suggests the opposite: chaos thrives when leadership fails altogether. Carpenter’s Los Angeles is a walled-off, anarchic wasteland ruled by shifting factions, directly resulting from governmental neglect.
This prophetic imagery aligns eerily with moments in Los Angeles where the city became virtually ungovernable. During the 1992 riots, entire blocks were left to burn, with emergency responders overwhelmed or unable to reach the affected areas. Law enforcement all but disappeared, and civilians were forced to rely on their own networks—whether community organizations, armed business owners, or local gangs—to dictate justice. Just as Carpenter envisioned a city abandoned by institutions, Los Angeles witnessed firsthand what happens when leadership evaporates, leaving desperation to dictate survival.
Then, there is today in Los Angeles. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Both films emphasize that urban breakdown isn’t sudden—it’s decades in the making. The real cause of Los Angeles’s turmoil isn’t a single arrest, protest, or act of government. Rather, it is a long-standing failure to govern properly, allowing tensions to brew and tribes to tribalize until unrest erupted. The police presence in The Warriors is so ineffective that gangs dominate entire boroughs. In real Los Angeles, periods of crisis have proven law enforcement incapable or unwilling to intervene, letting chaos unfold.
The prophetic aspect of The Warriors and Escape from L.A. lies not in their precise depiction of history, but in their exposure of societal fragility. They warn that cities don’t collapse from one event—they collapse when governments lose control for years, allowing factions to dictate survival. This is what happened in Los Angeles: years of neglected enforcement led to inevitable chaos, akin to allowing sleeper cells into the country and watching them release all at once.
Instead of warning against government oppression, these films showcase the failure of institutions to enforce basic order and basic law. When cities lack central leadership that punishes lawbreaking, e.g., illegal immigration, when law enforcement turns a blind eye to growing lawlessness, and when communities are left to govern themselves – not infrequently according to the low-bar laws of the countries from which they illegally came, civil disorder becomes inevitable. These films weren’t simply dystopian fantasies—they were roadmaps to real-life catastrophe.
That AT article demonstrated that some of the expected dystopias have already arrived. To get ahead of the upcoming portions of the dystopian curve, we appear to have a choice.
Read the roadmaps and weep, or read the roadmaps and prepare.
Jesus Christ is King
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