A mob of leftist activists surround federal agents, throwing rocks, insults and more. The tension is heightened as politicians do … well, nothing. Yes, police are dispatched as crowd control, but they don’t do all that much to control the crowd until at last the tear gas and flashbangs are finally deployed.
This is Los Angeles in 2025. This is also exactly what Democrats want and who they are.
Democrats have made emotional appeals to their activists — appeals based on decades of identity politics and fomenting racial tensions and hatreds. The party of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation never changed its objective, only its tactics. Segregation now is declared “tolerance” and “cultural respect” at race-based graduation ceremonies and dances and in segregated dormitories.
When ICE conducts raids and arrests illegal aliens for deportation, local politicians embrace the illegal aliens at the expense of the rule of law out of obedience to the principles of identity politics. No matter how passionately one argues that illegal immigrants are “a part of our community,” they cannot be because they are not in the country legally. You can’t talk the sun out of rising in the east, and you can’t talk an illegal immigrant into legal status.
The emotional and violent mob assembled — likely many of them white kids with trust funds and no jobs to keep them busy — and the inevitable soon followed. Cars and stores are now burning because … well, I’m sure this all helps the immigrants somehow. People in an emotional frenzy are not known for being rational, much less the ones who show up to “progressive actions.”
But once the bricks fly, there must be consequences, and serious ones. If you are trying to injure or kill police officers or National Guard soldiers, whatever “cause” you may have started off with is no longer relevant.
At a minimum, all of these people should be arrested and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I am glad someone stepped up to deploy the Guard to restore order, since Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) would not. I’m glad Trump sent in Marines to protect the federal buildings these hooligans are attacking. I have seen the videos, and in many cases officers would be justified even in using deadly force against those trying to do them harm. A badge does not eliminate one’s right to self-defense.
These riots occur in cities that are Democratic and have been for generation. The local politicians are therefore willing to say and do exactly nothing. And these actions are always called “protests,” no matter how violent they become — the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021 might be the only riot Democrats have ever properly called out. In general, they side with the violent agitators, not with residents or local business owners. You’d think this would occur to the voters there, but not yet — at least not in large enough numbers to make a difference.
The getaway driver in a liquor store robbery is just as guilty of murder as the masked man who actually kills the clerk. Likewise, if you are attending a protest and someone near you pulls a rock to throw or a glass bottle filled with gasoline and a sock, that’s when anyone with a conscience must leave. I don’t care if you were personally being violent or not — if you stay, you are now a member of a violent mob, and you deserve to be judged through that lens.
The rioters must be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. And it has to be federal law, because local Democrats won’t prosecute their own brownshirts. If you get injured participating in such an action, then you got what was coming to you — your choices have consequences.
As for the voters, they will never fix what’s ailing Los Angeles right now if they keep electing the same kind of liberal, Democratic politician, generation after generation. Please stop hitting yourself in the head with a frying pan, and maybe, just maybe, some electoral accountability will follow.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Show, daily from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern on WMAL in Washington, DC. He is a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
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