The L.A. Riots Are A Disastrous Own-Goal for the Left
It's hard to imagine a more unsympathetic image for Trump's critics.
Over the past week, I’ve enjoyed watching the nation be subjected to the perverse morality of a Left that, because of its near-theological commitment to illegal immigration and the idea that supporting and subsidizing vast cadres of third-worlders should take priority over the rights and prosperity of actual Americans, pushed our former puppet-in-chief to create a de facto open border and is now defending his administration’s cataclysmic handiwork to the last. Enjoyed it, because I’m sick and tired of watching progressives destroy the country, and I get the sense that the public is finally beginning to understand that is exactly what’s happening. Enjoyed it, because JD Vance is a shoo-in for the 2028 presidency.
This is quickly becoming a PR nightmare1 for Team Blue, which is very much on the wrong side of the public when it comes to support for deportations, but which has decided that, in response to 44 illegal aliens being picked up in the allegedly “mass” deportation raids in Los Angeles County — including criminals wanted for second-degree murder, assault with the intent to commit rape, assault with a deadly weapon, sexual battery, grand theft larceny, illegal weapon possession, and drug trafficking — American cities should experience another “summer of love.”
It’s remarkable, really. Neither Democratic politicians, nor the leading figures within California’s state government, nor the mainstream press seem to understand how damning the optics are, and how the “unrest” only reinforces a connection many Americans have already made between left-wing causes and the violence too often carried out in the name of Progress™. They seem to be as equally ignorant of how their reaction to the mayhem — a transparent ploy to paper over undeniable left-wing radicalism by sensationalizing the Trump administration’s deportation efforts — is going to be received by a public that has access to the internet and is now keenly aware of how often Democrats and the media rally together to orchestrate elaborate gaslighting operations.
CNN, which infamously described the George Floyd riots as “mostly peaceful” in 2020, describes the recent rioting in L.A. as “lawful protests” with “some unrest.” Brian Stelter is using his perch to emphasize that “Offline, in real-world Los Angeles, most Angelenos are having a perfectly normal day,”2 and the “protests” are simply “a cry of hope, and a reminder of the human need for community, the need to turn to each other to find something to believe in.” ABC News says it’s “just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn.” Robert Reich, writing in The Guardian, warns that “We are witnessing the first stages of a Trump police state.” The Atlantic has published yet another article comparing Trump to Hitler, who was also “a master of manufacturing public-security crises to advance his authoritarian agenda.”3 The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump writes that Trump is sending troops to L.A. because “He couldn’t figure out how to rationalize sending them to Harvard.” According to the NYT editorial board, “Trump Calling Troops Into Los Angeles Is the Real Emergency.” And The New Yorker put out this cartoon yesterday:
Does this look like a “joyful synchronized dance”?
How about this?
Yup, everything is just hunky-dory.
Democratic Rep. Linda Sánchez wants you to know that the riots are “no different than when a team wins a national championship and people get overexcited.”4 Maxine Waters is imploring the public to understand that “There was no violence!“ Gavin Newsom seems to be spending most of his time on X, “posting through it,” as they say, pissed off that Los Angeles is being forced to “respond to protests provoked by chaos from Washington,” which is “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism that threatens the foundation of our republic.”5 Hillary Clinton seconded this line, calling the riots “peaceful demonstrations” and explaining to her 30.5 million followers that “Trump’s goal isn’t to keep Californians safe. His goal is to cause chaos, because chaos is good for Trump.” And then there’s LA Mayor Karen Bass, a veritable paragon of competence, telling CNN that “if you dial back time and go to Friday, if immigration raids had not happened here, we would not have the disorder that went on last night.”
So, in other words, if the federal government hadn’t been trying to enforce federal law, then the idiots who are opposed to the federal government enforcing federal law wouldn’t have started riots to prevent the federal government from enforcing federal law? “If you don’t want mobs burning down American cities, Trump shouldn’t have tried to enforce the law, so this is his fault.”
Spare me. If people are here illegally, then they’re liable to be deported. If you disagree, then you fundamentally disagree with American law. And I have no patience for anyone who argues that some laws aren’t important while other ones are.
The causal sleight-of-hand — insinuating that the whole affair has been contrived by the Trump administration as a pretext for the establishment of a dictatorship — is the actual approved Democratic Party leadership position right now despite how laughable it is to suggest that Trump is the one who “provoked” the riots. The real tinder has been accumulating for months: Democratic politicians’ maximalist rhetoric encouraging Lefties to take more radical stands in opposition to ICE.
Is it any surprise that progressive shock troops are ratcheting up the rhetoric to a boiling point, feeding off the energy of collective grievance?
Leftists are acting like it’s some cosmic mystery as to why ICE was operating in California at all. Perhaps it has something to do with the state leading the country in its contempt for our immigration laws. As the Center for Immigration Studies highlighted, from October 1, 2022, to February 6, 2025, California’s jails and prisons refused to allow ICE agents to take custody of 13,025 illegal immigrant criminals. That number represents more than half of all such refusals nationwide. By comparison, Illinois was a distant second, with 2,946 refusals, and New York, with 873 refusals, was sixth. Jails controlled by the Los Angeles Police Department and by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department released 1,037 illegal-alien criminals over that period.
It’s not just that California’s welfare subsidies for illegals and its sanctuary policies have made it the preferred destination for border-crossing migrants. The state quite literally operates under the premise that ICE enforcement efforts are illegitimate,6 and because they’re illegitimate, radical “resistance” to those efforts is necessary.
The problem is that this deranged belief has become a central tenet of the modern Left’s ideology. It’s not just a California thing anymore.
The twofold takeaway to the events of the past week seems implicit: 1) Democrats are eagerly moving the country toward a prolonged state of civil conflict in which basic peace, public order, and safety are contingent upon Team Blue maintaining power (“Vote Democrat or get the molotov!”); and 2) when Democrats are in power, you can fully expect them to flood the country with illegal immigrants, and when they’re not in power, you can fully expect the Left to use violence in response to every minor Republican attempt to correct their suicidal policies.
Obviously none of this bodes well for the future. I think it’s a mistake to continue dismissing these radicals as mostly harmless, cause-playing morons who simply operate like nihilistic weathervanes bereft of principles twisting in the variable wind, eager to indulge in the frisson of riots. At a certain point, the line between playacting and true belief in this sort of fully immersive “omnicause'“ radicalism fades away after one has spent enough time steeped in it. And it’s now beyond argument that a growing number of progressives are discarding conventional notions of right and wrong in favor of an intersectional worldview that legitimizes terrorism committed out of performative empathy for the “oppressed.” This, combined with an increasingly militant culture of grievance, is normalizing the idea that political violence is an acceptable tool of social change. Mimetic escalation will be forthcoming.
As Ruy Teixeira recently emphasized, support for Trump’s deportations is overwhelming when the focus is on those who’ve committed violent crimes, and “the Republican Party is still preferred to the Democrats on crime, policing, and immigration, with particularly wide margins among the working class.” Teixeira also points to a Democracy Corps survey that asked voters what they would worry about the most if Biden won the election. At the top of the list was “the border being wide open to millions of impoverished immigrants, many are criminals and drug dealers who are overwhelming America’s cities.” A very close second was “crime and homelessness being out of control in cities and the violence killing small businesses and the police.”
Two hours after this tweet, LA announced a curfew in response to mass looting and vandalism.
MSNBC did a segment Tuesday night hyping this column, using it to buttress the claim that Trump “incited” the riots as an excuse to crack down—which, in turn, is a “dress rehearsal” to impose martial law before the next election.
Echoed by Jimmy Kimmel on Tuesday night: “There’s no riot outside. We have more so-called ‘unrest’ here when one of our teams wins a championship.”
The Our Democracy™ crowd is suggesting that the national government cannot enforce national laws defining who is and is not part of the demos, which seems like a rather literal threat to Our Democracy™.
CA lawmakers are now arguing against prosecuting child sex traffickers because it might make them deportable, just FYI.
You can feel them thinking: "crap, how do I distance myself from this clearly cracked Democrat party after pledging complete fealty to it, and where the hell do I go now to secure my status as an elite moralist of politics if not the Democrat party?"
Like the divorced ex-wife with four kids that burned down the family house, killed the dog and hired lawyers to drain their family bank accounts over her Ex-husband Derangement Syndrome, and now needs to figure out how she and the kids will survive.
The Democratic Party is rapidly becoming a five alarm floating dumpster🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Where this all ends is anyone’s guess, but things are likely to get very messy along the way. I have no pity or sympathy for them.