David’s view
The story of the week was told in two less-touristed parts of Los Angeles, 12 miles apart. Protests against ICE enforcement in the city, and of the National Guard deployment that followed it, mostly took place in a square mile curfew zone between Dodger Stadium and the Fashion District. Sen. Alex Padilla, the state’s first Latino senator, was arrested at a Department of Homeland Security press conference in the Wilshire Federal building, a bleached set of modernist towers designed by the firm that made Madison Square Garden.
Those incidents, both legally unresolved, told us how differently the Trump administration and Democrats see the world. Kristi Noem, whom Padilla had tried to interrupt at the FBI’s field office, pledged to “liberate this city from the socialist and burdensome leadership” of “this Governor Newsom and this mayor.” It was, in her telling, an intervention against an oppressive government, probably (according to the president) with rigged elections, occupied (according to him again) by a “Migrant Invasion.”
Most Republicans agreed that the intervention would save lives and livelihoods. The deportations needed to continue, and the city needed to be saved from rioting. In a Thursday afternoon email, the president’s joint fundraising committee told donors that “if I didn’t ‘SEND IN THE TROOPS’ to Los Angeles, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now due to these incompetent leaders.” This was Minneapolis in the summer of 2020, and the lesson of that was to maintain “peace through strength” and prevent mass rioting.
Padilla’s protest was in the Democrats’ tradition of resistance, which looks back to Selma in 1965. Conflicts are won by street mobilization and civil disobedience, until conservative governments overreact and spark a backlash. “Arrest me — but stop attacking these vulnerable people,” Gov. Gavin Newsom told Trump, through reporters, whom he talked to all week.
On MSNBC, Padilla said that he had interrupted because “at a certain point hearing Noem say they had to rescue LA from the governor and mayor was too much to take.” In the House Oversight Committee, where news of the Padilla arrest was brought in by Democrats during a hearing with Democratic governors, Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) led them in calling for Noem to be subpoenaed, while Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called Frost a former Antifa member.
“Me?” asked Frost. After a short break, Greene corrected herself: Frost had been arrested at a voting rights protest. “Proudly,” he said.
That’s the conflict. Democrats don’t venerate every protest, as a Canadian trucker could tell you. They don’t control everything that happens at their favored protests, such as the anarchists who crack concrete blocks to throw them at windows. They are waiting for the electorate to get as outraged as them. The administration sees that outrage as manufactured, something to save real people from.
Notable
- In Reason, Nancy Rommelmann covers the L.A. protests up close, explaining how descriptions of war zone or a city nearly burning down were bogus. “The majority of sounds coming from downtown in the hours before the curfew were from law enforcement: helicopters, sirens, flash-bang grenades.”
- In Politico, Catherine Kim examines how AI-generated images and videos are making the protests and scattered violence look much worse. “One of a hypocritical protester who preaches peace and then throws a molotov cocktail. Or another of a man screaming ‘Viva Mexico,’ but then cowering away from an officer who says he will take him to Mexico.”