The Left gets one thing right about President Donald Trump’s response to the Los Angeles riots: He wants a fight.
That’s not the same as saying he is to blame for the violence, as Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, also a Democrat, claim. He is not.
Mobs that incinerate police cars, smash federal property, drop chunks of broken concrete onto vehicles from bridges, and spit at law enforcement officers are not forced to act as they do. They choose to. It is voluntary. They should be held accountable and get the severe punishment they deserve for the mayhem they have inflicted on their communities.
The reason to hope for serious accountability is that this also helps explain why Trump wants the fight. Punishment can be a salutary deterrent. Those who favor a law-abiding society should not want the violence simply to end and drop down a memory hole. They should want the perpetrators charged with crimes, hauled into court, convicted, and, where there are no mitigating circumstances, thrown into prison for maximum sentences.
This would give the wrongdoers time to ponder the consequences of their actions and repent them, and it would demonstrate to everyone else, citizens and immigrants, that you don’t get a pass but will be hit hard if you break the law by trying physically to prevent federal officers from arresting and deporting people in the country illegally.
It’s a version of the Byng Principle, so called after the Royal Navy executed Adm. John Byng in 1757 for his lamentable behavior in battle. His death by firing squad was, as the French writer Voltaire noted, “to encourage the others.” That is, future British officers recalling Byng’s treatment would do their duty properly.
There won’t be executions in the aftermath of the LA mayhem, but the federal crackdown with National Guard and U.S. Marines supporting local police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers should be a condign memento for anyone contemplating a jolly night of arson and looting. It needs to be shown that while the First Amendment guarantees the right to speak out and demonstrate, it does not permit people to express themselves with bricks and Molotov cocktails.
The nation reelected Trump in November to end illegal immigration, and that includes mass deportations. Everyone who wishes to may protest these policies, but that right does not extend to obstructing the administration from carrying out the legitimate wishes of citizens.
Illegal immigrants have ignored Americans’ wishes as expressed in laws passed by elected members of Congress. Most voters believe democracy requires their concerns and expressed desires to be acted upon by the government. Their sympathies are not with mobs that demand that citizens be ignored.
Democrats commit political malpractice when they support the street thugs as though they were freedom fighters. One of their number, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), pointed this out to them on X, but because he is sensible on such matters, he is persona non grata in his increasingly unstable party.
Supporting the mob makes the left-wing party less electable. As CNN reported, Trump’s public approval rating of his immigration policy has surged 21 points since his first term. The nation is on his side on this issue, which is also why he wants to make a show of force in LA.
More needs to be said about the nature of the violence. Is it old or is it new? The answer is that it is both in important ways. It has been nearly six decades since Black Power activist H. Rap Brown described violence as being “as American as cherry pie.” What he was describing then in 1967 was not the first political violence in America and was not the last. We’ve seen rioting fairly often since then, for example, in Los Angeles (again) in 1992 and nationwide in 2020 after George Floyd died beneath the knee of an arresting police officer.
But there is a new and important aspect to the violence today, which gives the lie both to Brown’s suggestion that it is normal and that it is American.
First, there is a vital new element of coordination among well-funded, far-left militants, who seize on incipient protests and stoke them into violence against the state — not the state of California but the entire superstructure of central government and the nation and civilization it represents. It is a sophisticated and premeditated attack on authority per se.
The proximate cause of local unrest is immaterial. Antifa and others of their ilk are just as happy to leverage the Floyd protests as they are to hijack Jew-hatred gatherings on university campuses and, indeed, as the Wall Street Journal points out, the mass street demonstrations following the World Series victory last year of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Violence and looting that erupted from celebrations of a baseball victory are very instructive because they were replicated recently in France following a soccer win by the local team, Paris Saint-Germain. In both Paris and LA, left-wing militants jumped at the chance to turn a mass gathering of whatever origin into an occasion to set vehicles on fire, smash property, loot businesses, and attack the forces of law and order.
That is where Rap Brown’s analysis does not fit modern violence. It is not especially American but international. This is partly because the LA rioters were manifestly not only American; they celebrated the burning of police vehicles and the breakdown of order by waving Mexican and Palestinian flags. But it is deeper than the simple fact of some foreign participation.
What we are seeing is the international Left’s declared determination to end Western civilization turned into action. To achieve its goal, the Left must end the nation-state, which is the principal entity in which democracy is vested. This involves erasing the border surrounding the nation and denying citizens of a country the right to choose who may enter their country and live among them. Immigration policy is, therefore, at the very heart of the fight between those who want to preserve the values, traditions, and character of America and those who want to destroy them.
It is a fight in which former President Joe Biden and the Democrats surrendered and indeed collaborated with the enemy. And it is a fight that voters called on Trump and Republicans to win.