Insurrection, LA style
This is the way it goes.
First you realize that summer is coming, and it’s the best season for riots. Next, you prepare the ground by choosing your favored cause, and make sure the MSM misrepresents it properly. Protecting criminal illegal aliens and opposing their arrest and deportation is a cause that’s a mite tricky to convince people to rally around. But after all, you don’t just want disruption and chaos – although you do indeed want that – but you also want the ordinary Democrat voter and even a few Independents to be sympathetic to your side. If the MSM does its job the way you want, they have delivered the message over and over that ICE is deporting ordinary illegal aliens (you call them “undocumented workers,” of course) and not dangerous people or criminals.
Once that’s done, you organize the riots. There’s no dearth of people willing to riot for money and/or for fun and/or for the leftist cause du jour. The venue is a blue city in a blue state, so that the mayor and governor won’t rein you in very much or very hard, if at all.
And there you have it:
The Los Angeles anti-ICE riots have erupted into a soft civil war in the streets. President Trump isn’t waiting for the local Democrats to get a handle on this; they can’t. They won’t. Some have even called agitators to escalate their actions against federal law enforcement. Around 2,000 National Guard units have been deployed for a riot that the media and the LAPD have called “mostly peaceful.”
There is a great deal of coverage of some of the details, so here are just a few articles: about CNN’s coverage, about ABC’s coverage, on the funding, and on the LAPD chief’s admission of being overwhelmed:
One day after President Trump deployed 2,000 National Guardsmen to the city — over the objections of Governor Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats who have insisted they have the situation in hand — Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell admitted that his officers were “overwhelmed” by the scale of the riots, which have continued for four consecutive days in Los Angeles.
“We are overwhelmed,” McDonnell said at a Sunday evening press conference. “Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers. That can kill you.”
“They’ll take a backpack, and the backpack will have a cinderblock in it,” he continued. “They’ll break up the cinderblock and use that, pass it around to throw at officers, to throw at cars and other people.”
Around 4 p.m. local time on Sunday, a crowd of at least 2,000 rioters blocked both lanes of traffic on the 101, prompting authorities in riot gear to create a line to prevent them from moving forward. They pushed the crowd onto an exit ramp, though two motorcyclists attempted to break through the skirmish line, injuring two officers.
The road was reopened around 5 p.m., but had to be shut down again around 7:30 p.m. when rioters started throwing objects and damaging police vehicles.
In downtown L.A., rioters were seen destroying self-driving Waymo taxis and spray painting anti-ICE messages on them. At least three were set on fire while protesters slashed tires and smashed windshields. Lime electric scooters were also thrown into the flames. One rioter appeared to have a makeshift flamethrower, according to the Los Angeles Times.
You can bet that neither the city of Los Angeles nor the state of California will be treating these people harshly. What the federal government will do remains to be seen. But with the J6 defendants, the feds had a venue – DC – that was very friendly to the prosecution. Not so now.
Governor Newsom says he’ll sue Trump for calling in the National Guard, and that the action was illegal. But the provisions of the Insurrection Act, which Trump invoked, seem to cover it:
Section 251 allows the president to deploy troops if a state’s legislature (or governor if the legislature is unavailable) requests federal aid to suppress an insurrection in that state. This provision is the oldest part of the law, and the one that has most often been invoked.
While Section 251 requires state consent, Sections 252 and 253 allow the president to deploy troops without a request from the affected state, even against the state’s wishes. Section 252 permits deployment in order to “enforce the laws” of the United States or to “suppress rebellion” whenever “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion” make it “impracticable” to enforce federal law in that state by the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.”
Section 253 has two parts. The first allows the president to use the military in a state to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” that “so hinders the execution of the laws” that any portion of the state’s inhabitants are deprived of a constitutional right and state authorities are unable or unwilling to protect that right. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy relied on this provision to deploy troops to desegregate schools in the South after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
The second part of Section 253 permits the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.” This provision is so bafflingly broad that it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.
You can find another discussion of the legal issues here.
ADDENDUM: RedState also has a great deal of coverage.
There need to be some parameters that control when governments can sue each other. This applies to all levels of government, and started to grow exponentially with the environmental movement. I know. I know. Dream on. How does the state of California have standing here?
You bet the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Train to nowhere, there will be a Judge supporting Newsom.
I saw video of the attack on the police by rioters on the overpass and sides of the road. Throwing chunks of what looks like concrete. To bad the police could not shoot them, not with rubber bullets either.
I think there’s no question the president has the authority to send in the National Guard to quell riots. It’s been done multiple times in my lifetime.
As I mentioned onthe Open Thread, myself and others have posted part of the growing collection of examples of the violence in LA. The response from the leftists? “Whattabout J6? Fake news! Trump is a fascist!”
The denial of reality is staggering.
…it cannot possibly mean what it says, or else it authorizes the president to use the military against any two people conspiring to break federal law.
That is exactly what it means, and if one reflects on it, it must be so. Presidents have tremendous power, which is why one should carefully consider who they vote for. They are accountable to congress, which has the power to impeach and convict, and more importantly to the people. The single most important thing we vote for in a president, whether we realize it or not, is the exercise of judgment.
The left seems to be ignoring the fact that one of the events that set off a raid in the Garment District near downtown L.A. is that a business there was involved in tax fraud and had $80 million of imported merchandise they had failed to pay duties on. During the raid, they caught somewhere around 40 employees who were all illegal.
But I guess that customs fraud (and probably money laundering and human trafficking) are “jobs Americans won’t do.”
Now the leftys I follow are saying that the rioters are actually Trump supporters and this whole thing is staged so Trump can take over LA and then California. God, I wish I was making this up.
It’s hard to imagine people believing that nonsense, physicsguy.
@Kate:It’s hard to imagine people believing that nonsense, physicsguy.
You find that all over the spectrum. Lot of folks on our side of the fence said something like that about the Parkland shooting that was so very good for David Hogg’s career, and plenty of people in Minnesota blamed mysterious white supremacists for their rioting; in fact law enforcement wasted a good deal of time looking for them.
So much of what we’re told and shown is fake in some way, it’s sometimes hard not to overreact.
Thats when alex jones chewed his own foot off to the tune of a billion dollars (because he was lazy) of course hogg reached his peter principle axis twiw
California is also letting Patricia Krenwinkle out of prison.
These riots are organized and well-funded.
“Hundreds took to the streets this weekend: blocking roads, attacking federal officers, even burning flags. But this wasn’t “spontaneous outrage.”
This was organized. Funded. Coordinated.
Here’s a breakdown of the groups, the money, and the people pulling the strings.
A number of NGOs have been implicated in this. Foremost is Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights or CHIRLA, and the photos of signs show they were printed by PSLWEB / Party for Socialism and Liberation.
CHIRLA has the EIN of 954421521. Most of its private funding appears to be from DAFs, which are the hardest to trace. However 34 million of its reported 45 million in revenue are from government grants.”
More here:
https://sunnysjournal.com/2025/06/08/whos-behind-the-anti-ice-riots-in-la/
It’s a test of will. Can the Democrats and their organized brown shirts overwhelm the federal government? IMO, that’s their intention.
Those of us who live in blue states need to buy more ammo and make sure our security cameras are working. The local and state governments will not protect us.