Democrats Play With Fire, Get Burned

Deportations are popular, riots and looting are not

What are the poll numbers for Democrats on this image, I wonder?

Americans favor deportation of foreigners who are in the United States without permission. Support declines if the question involves ICE raids on schools or churches, since Americans are not evil. Deporting criminal aliens is however extremely popular in America because evil is unpopular. So context matters, but one key qualifier is that Americans definitely approve of deporting undocumented aliens who are arrested for taking part in protests. Democrats embracing criminal aliens and immigration riots therefore also embrace voter backlash, risking the whirlwind.

When Democrats speak of “the right side of history,” they are engaging in progressive word magic. They project a future history in which they have returned to national political power while still hanging on to their most unpopular and divisive ideological stances, such as open border policies and ‘sanctuary’ states. Much like prosperity gospel believers ‘manifesting,’ they think this turn of history is both ordained by destiny and also something they cause to happen though faith. Democrats are therefore dying on their least-popular hills, inviting Donald Trump to engage them on his most advantageous political ground.

In her once-a-week appearance Monday night, $25 million MSNBC star Rachel Maddow declared that Trump “has no idea what to do with the sustained and growing and intractable and indominable protest and opposition of the American people against him” in a coordinated series of protests across the country. “Game over, big guy. You lose,” Maddow declared. What game does she think she is playing?

Meanwhile, data analyst Harry Enten explained on CNN that Democrats have lost immigrants. That’s right: legal immigrants say they trust the Republican Party more than Democrats on immigration issues by eight points, a swing of 40 points(!) since the 2016 election. Undocumented aliens were underwater by six points in net favorability, a swing of 29 points. “There is no block of voters that shifted more to the right from 2020 to 2024 than immigrant voters, and Donald Trump, at least in some surveys, actually won that vote. On average, it’s about equal.”

Progressive nonprofit networks and labor unions and communists are organizing these street protests, of course. Resistance Media frames them as a spontaneous display of widespread pro-immigration sentiment bursting forth. It is Black Lives Matter all over again, right down to the fiery-yet-mostly-peaceful protests and the Cuban state influence, but without the Black Lives Matter activists. Indeed, black Americans are conspicuously absent from these protests.

There has however been a distinct return of the 2020 era news talkers going out of their way to describe protests as peaceful while images of arson, looting, and assaults on law enforcement officers play in the background. They speak as if we have no eyes to see that reality is not what they tell us. This is gaslighting, a form of abuse. It even happens in print. Consider this account of events in Los Angeles from the LA Times. Emphasis added:

Around 1 p.m., a phalanx of National Guard troops charged into the crowd, yelling “push” as they rammed people with riot shields. The troops and federal officers used pepper balls, tear gas canisters as well as flash-bang and smoke grenades to break up the crowd.

No one in the crowd had been violent toward the federal deployment up to that point. The purpose of the surge appeared to be to clear space for a convoy of approaching federal vehicles.

Department of Homeland Security police officers had asked protesters to keep vehicle paths clear earlier in the morning, but their commands over a loudspeaker were often drowned out by protesters' chants. They offered no warning before charging the crowd.

This gem of propaganda is written in the ‘past perfect,’ a grammatical exploit that allows the writers to reverse the sequence of events in order to frame the recipients of the National Guard action as pure, innocent angels who did nothing to deserve this fascist police state action. Commands to move out of the way or be removed do not count as warnings to get out of the way or be removed. See how that works?

Elected Democrats too are playing a very dangerous game of words. Gov. Gavin Newsom would like us to believe that the riots were not even happening until Trump sent troops to Los Angeles. Mayor Karen Bass would like us to believe that the riots happened, but they were Trump’s fault in the first place because he inspired “fear” in Los Angeles.

Newsom and Bass both blame Trump as the ‘root cause’ of the riots, even if they have to pretend that time flows backwards, even if their stories contradict one another. Neither of them wish to examine how sanctuary city/state and open border policies inspired a popular vote majority for Trump in the first place. They think this is what winning looks like.

News consumers are not as easy to fool as they were just five years ago, though. They watch viral video clips of the devastated business owners cleaning up after the rioters. For some reason that Democrats never really explain, stopping Trump requires that some people have to steal jewelry and iPhones and other merchandise.

Democrats have a simple plan: (a) blame Trump for everything, and (b) fight the deportations. The formula will no longer work because (a) Trump is doing exactly what his electoral majority elected him to do, and (b) nobody trusts Democrats or their media surrogates anymore. They have told too many bald lies to our faces. Public trust in legacy media institutions has evaporated from all the hot air.

Fool me once, etc.

Instinctively, the media wants to tell the story of the LA riots as a Trump vs Newsom contest of wills rather than unlawful and violent resistance to constitutional federal authority. Gavin Newsom is happy to be the Democrats’ champion. He has 2028 ambitions, after all. California being synonymous with progressive policy, Newsom is exactly the sort of leader the party wants, right now: able to excite the David Hogg wing of the party without letting those clowns run the entire circus.

But it has not gone well. After Trump told reporters that he had spoken to Newsom on the phone, the governor of California tried to gaslight America, claiming that no such conversation had taken place. Trump then contacted John Roberts at Fox News and shared a screenshot of the call log showing the two men had spoken for 16 minutes early Sunday morning, Eastern Time, when the intensity of the riots was still growing. Newsom simply lied because it works for his narrative of a dangerous dictator-Trump who is out of control. He believes he is justified in lying.

On Wednesday, Newsom tried to give an address to the state of California. It was supposed to be his big, viral leadership moment. Unfortunately, his staff proved incompetent at streaming, so he spoke for a few seconds without any sound until his staff hurriedly cut the feed. The clip of the technical glitch has gotten far more attention than Newsom’s speech. Trump has the best luck in picking enemies, it seems.

Karen Bass also announced city-wide curfews as well as rebuilding efforts for affected areas, which is hard to square with her wishcasting on CNN that everything was fine, nothing was wrong, everyone has been peaceful, and no major damage was done. Bass justified the riots-that-were-not-even-a-big-deal as proper responses to the “fear” of being “chased” by ICE, the “fear of deportation,” the “chaos and fear” and Trump’s “provoking.” She did it while cars burned and bricks flew onscreen.

This is the same Karen Bass who proved so useless during the recent fires, and whose administration has botched the job of fire recovery exactly as Trump predicted. She talks as if Americans cannot see her, or see behind her, but we can. We have eyes.

Tom Homan, Trump’s ‘border czar,’ says that the protests are making it harder to do the job of arresting criminal aliens, but ICE is “going ahead” with arrests. While the focus is criminals, ICE is also arresting every undocumented alien they encounter in the process, which is what median America wants them to do. “We’ve been running the ICE operation in Los Angeles every single day during this protest, and we're arresting a lot of bad people in that city. We're going to continue to do that,” Homan told CNN on Monday. “They're not going to stop us. They're not going to slow us down.”

Homan has dismissed Trump’s talk of arresting Newsom. He did however say that California officials may be arrested if they “go over the line,” inspiring catastrophist hand-wringing about the fate of American democracy. This week, federal prosecutors indicted Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey for physically assaulting ICE agents in May, which certainly counts as going over the line. Politico immediately minimized the charges as a partisan political attack.

Democrats and their media lackeys spent four years waving a bloody shirt over the 6 January Capitol Hill protests, but they have nothing to say about “rule of law” to business owners affected by the mob in a lawless city, not even the legal immigrant families who are the most devastated. Then Democrats wonder why they lose elections.

We see Newsom complain that federal troops are “purposefully inflammatory” while rioters set fire to vehicles. We hear him claim that local law enforcement can handle things just fine while we see the LA Police Department is clearly, visibly losing control, on loop. The contrast of words and images is a cognitive dissonance that resolves in viewers as distrust.

It makes the Democrats look lawless, and also weak.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta attempted to block Trump’s order in a federal court this weekend. Judge Charles Breyer did not grant immediate relief, and in all likelihood will rule for the federal government after the hearing today, because Bonta’s case is constitutionally weak.

Rather than a serious attempt to resist Trump overreach, Bonta is virtue signalling through litigation. He is ‘fighting Trump.’ This makes him ‘look strong’ — until Bonta loses, and then looks weak.

Democrats have chosen a debilitating fight. They look weak by trying to appear strong in ways that repel a majority of Americans. The meaningless prose of Kamala Harris’s statement on the riots simply reinforces her uselessness as the Biden administration ‘border czar.’ Americans have short memories, but not that short.

They see the keffiyehs on the protesters and follow independent reporters who identify pro-Paelstinian organizers in the crowd. The communist politics of Karen Bass in the 1970s and her involvement with the pro-Castro Venceramos Brigade are just icing on the ideological cake. None of this is going to win back voters who flipped to Trump in 2024. Democrats convince no one.

Nearly alone among Democrats, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania seems to understand how toxic these riots are. “You can’t defend how people are setting things on fire, they start damaging buildings or going after members of law enforcement,” he told a CNN reporter. “That’s not free speech … that is not peaceful protests.”

It is sad to watch Fetterman struggle like this, but sadder still to know that his own chief of staff is just as ideologically committed to party platform planks that repel normie voters. Even the most sensible Democrat is still beholden to bad ideas.

The Democratic Party Civil War Makes It Even Harder To Give Up Genderwoo

Democrats tell us to fear Donald Trump. They worry that he will use the military against everyday American citizens to impose a national socialist state with goose-stepping, jackbooted government thugs carrying off moms and dads and kids to faraway lands.

Speaking to troops at Fort Bragg on Tuesday, Trump received resounding support for the Los Angeles mission. “They say that's not nice, well if we didn't do it, there wouldn't be a Los Angeles — it would be burning today, just like the houses were burning a number of months ago.”

“Generations of army heroes did not shed their blood on distant shores only to watch our country be destroyed by invasion and third world lawlessness here at home, like is happening in California. As commander in chief I will not let that happen. It's never going to happen.”

If this is the monster that Democrats define, then it is the monster they have created. Working class America has rejected their lies and weakness. Trump makes them feel strong. He makes them feel heard. Democrats, on the other hand, keep making normie America feel unsafe, and then wonder why they lose to Trump.

Across the country, thousands of local leftist organizers are planning to show up in the streets on Saturday to remind Trump voters why they voted for him. Rachel Maddow thinks “No Kings” is the revolutionary formula for success against Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the Rasmussen Reports presidential tracking poll shows his approval rising from 50 percent to 52 over the last week. At this rate, Democrats might just make him king.