Tag: riots
Violent Protests In Los Angeles Serve Up Trump's Midterm Propaganda

Violent Protests In Los Angeles Serve Up Trump's Midterm Propaganda

Democrats had better start getting their shit together. In pitting the National Guard and now the U.S. Marines – he mobilized 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton, CA today – against anti-ICE street protesters in Los Angeles, Donald Trump created the question that will be asked every time a Democrat steps in front of a camera for the next 18 months: which side are you on, the violent rioters or the troops? Today, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) spelled out Trump’s strategy in two sentences: “Americans have a choice between Republicans’ law & order vs. the Democrats’ car-burning, illegal alien rioters. So far, every Senate Democrat who has spoken out has backed the rioters.”

There you go, folks. You can say what you will about Trump provoking worse riots by federalizing the CA National Guard without asking Governor Gavin Newsom, but he has framed his politics for the mid-terms. He was always going to use immigration as an issue. Now he can say it’s us against them and point to the riots in L.A. and not just talk about amorphous “illegal immigrants.” Last night on Truth Social, Trump called them “Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers.” At mid-afternoon, returning from a weekend meeting at Camp David, Trump called the protesters “insurrectionists.” The New York Times reported that the word “may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act.”

Last night, protests spread to San Francisco, where 150 were arrested in clashes with police. Videos of the protests showed men in all-black outfits, wearing hoodies, masks, and backpacks, breaking the windows of downtown buildings with a hammer and vandalizing a SFPD patrol car.


The video images were almost identical to video taken of the Ferguson riots after the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 showing a man wearing black pants and a black hoodie and a backpack systematically breaking the windows of an auto parts store. He was followed by another man dressed identically who threw Molotov fire bombs into the store, setting it on fire.

In Los Angeles, several Waymo driverless cars were set on fire by protesters. There is one photo (above) of a masked man standing atop a vandalized Waymo car between two burning cars waving a Mexican flag. More photos showed a vandalized LAPD car with a broken windshield surrounded by paving stones that had been hurled at the police cars.

It is obvious, at least to me, that the men breaking windows and vandalizing the police car in San Francisco are provocateurs. Regular citizens don’t go to a protest wearing black hoodies and masks and backpacks, carrying hammers. These people were dressed that way and equipped with the tools they needed to commit premeditated destruction of private and public property.

I’m going into detail about the photos from both riots, because these are exactly the images Trump has been looking for. So far, images of ICE arrests have depicted federal agents kitted out in combat gear and masks handcuffing individual undocumented immigrants. He can’t run on those images. They may seem extreme but they depict lawful arrests. But he can run on the riots, and that is exactly what he is going to do. Trump and Republican candidates for the House and Senate will use still photos and video footage of the riots during their campaigns in midterm elections next year.

In the meantime, Democrats had better start thinking of what they’re going to do at the “No Kings” protests this coming weekend. There will probably be a great deal of pressure to turn the whole thing into anti-ICE demonstrations in solidarity with L.A. and San Francisco protests and other protests if they spread further around the country this week, as I think they are likely to do.

Donald Trump is a master at this kind of provocation-reaction-more provocation stuff. He has already used Title 10 to call out the National Guard. They haven’t announced what law they will cite in the deployment of active-duty Marines to the L.A. riots. But as the Times pointed out, invoking the Insurrection Act is his obvious next step.

Which raises the question I have seen in my newsfeed and am getting in emails and direct messages: Will Trump “declare martial law?” Some people are even raising the specter of Trump using “martial law” to step in and take over elections during the midterms.

The term “martial law” refers to a situation where the armed forces step in and assume not only law enforcement but governance of an area. There is no federal law or provision in the Constitution for the President to declare martial law. Martial law has been imposed by states more than 60 times since the nation’s founding, because of war or invasion, civil unrest, labor unrest, and natural disaster. Abraham Lincoln imposed martial law on the country during the Civil War, from 1862 to 1866. Franklin Roosevelt approved a declaration of martial law for two years over the territory of Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Other impositions of martial law were done by state governors due to riots. Several times, one of them after the Tulsa race riot in 1921, an Army general imposed martial law until order could be restored, which in the Tulsa case was four days.

Trump is of course notorious for ignoring norms and the law and would probably seek to use the Insurrection Act as a de facto imposition of martial law over blue states such as Illinois, New York, California or others. How far he would go beyond putting troops in the streets of cities, such as he has done in Los Angeles, is something we will have to contend with if or when he tries to make it happen. It is unlikely that either federal or state courts would be amenable to having their jurisdictions cancelled or interfered with in an area over which Trump attempts to impose martial law. That would mean military courts or tribunals would take over the judiciary in the states affected, and that military prosecutors would assume the function of a state attorney general and local district attorneys. It would seem to be a bridge too far even for Donald Trump, but he has exploded a lot of bridges over the last eight years, and it would be foolish to suppose that he wouldn’t at least try.

The danger we face right now is if unrest in the streets of L.A. and San Francisco and other blue cities provides Trump with the opportunity to deploy Reserve, National Guard, or active-duty soldiers to quell unrest that Trump can define as a rebellion or insurrection. The images I’ve seen from L.A. and San Francisco are giving him all the propaganda he needs. No matter who is out there demonstrating against ICE or Trump himself, anarchist provocateurs are likely to take this opportunity to sow chaos and cause more violence than the legitimate demonstrators.

This is an ugly situation, it’s likely to get uglier before it gets better, and there is one person we can count on to make sure that happens: Donald Trump.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

You Won't Believe...What Trump's Fluffers Once Said About January 6

You Won't Believe...What Trump's Fluffers Once Said About January 6

On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of Trump, who had summoned the enraged crowd to Washington, D.C., and incited it with lies that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a plot to subvert that election.

Kilmeade expressed a drastically different view on Monday, as a new Congress prepared to count the electoral votes that would return Trump to the Oval Office.

In one of Fox & Friends’ few references to the January 6 insurrection that morning, he mocked Democrats who “want to point out how different” today’s events will be “from four years ago” when “democracy was in danger.”

Kilmeade added that the American people think that January 6, “as bad as that day was, it’s a small part of the Donald Trump story” and that it would be “put to bed even further after today happens.”

The Fox & Friends host is one of an array of right-wing media figures who said at the time that the January 6 insurrection was a calamity, that the rioters were criminals, and that Trump himself bore responsibility for their actions. But over the past four years, they have participated in the right’s Great Forgetting, making their peace with Trump’s attempted coup and supporting his return to the presidency.

When the right said January 6 was “deplorable” and its participants were “criminals”

“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different,” The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the next day. “The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.”

Graham’s warning proved prescient. As the attack unfolded and in its immediate aftermath, many media figures on the right joined those on center and left in condemning the attack — and Trump’s work to incite it — in the strongest possible terms. But they did not sustain their initial response.

“Shoot the protestors,” influential commentator Erick Erickson wrote that afternoon. He added that Trump should receive immediate consequences that would end his political career: “Waive the rules, impeach. Waive the rules, convict. Waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.”

Four years later, Erickson offered this take: “First, Happy January 6th to all who celebrate. Note to the media: The exit polling in November showed that most voters do not care. That you will try to make them care today is another reason trust in the media is beneath that of Congress itself.”

Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume likewise denounced Trump at the time for having “fueled the worst suspicions of his supporters with wild claims that the election was stolen. And now we see the result.” But on Election Day 2024, he declared this “a BS issue” because “the thing was over in a matter of hours.”

Erickson and Hume are among a long list of right-wing media notables who condemned January 6 — and even Trump for bringing it about — but came around to implicitly or explicitly support his return to the presidency, even as he showed no remorse for his own actions and valorized the rioters.

Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire is one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, wrote in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Inauguration Day 2021 that Trump’s election lies had been “pretty much a crime” that made January 6 “inevitable.” He added: “Best we don't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him."

On Fox, numerous hosts condemned the criminal acts of the mob and said its members deserved punishment, with some even describing such denunciations as morally necessary.

“Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” offered Fox host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. “Every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol.”

“The actions at the United States Capitol three days ago were deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” Jeanine Pirro likewise declared. “Anyone watching this must condemn it.”

Fox contributor Marc Thiessen was among the few to single out Trump on the network’s airwaves, saying the then-president had been “responsible for what happened,” and he went much further in a Washington Post column.

“It was one of the darkest moments in the history of our democracy. And Trump is responsible for it,” he wrote. “Trump formed and incited the mob. He stoked their anger with self-serving lies. He betrayed his followers. He betrayed his office. And now he has blood on his hands.”

The organs of the upper-crust right were united in blaming Trump for the attack.

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journalwrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.”

The hosts of the All-In podcast, which became a key venue of the MAGA tech right, were even more scathing at the time, describing Trump as “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag” who had engaged in “insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”

The Great Forgetting and what comes next

These comments reflected the widespread initial consensus that January 6 had been horrific — and that Trump had been responsible for it. In the first days following the attack, politicians of both parties, corporate leaders, and the public at large responded with revulsion and demands for consequences.

But that unity ultimately proved fragile. A coterie of Trumpists, led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson, worked diligently to unwind it, reframing the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as either unimportant — or a conspiracy driven by Democrats and the media in which the assailants were the real victims of a crackdown on “political dissidents,” as Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy put it last week.

As this fraudulent counternarrative became increasingly widespread, most other conservative media figures eventually chose to join the right’s Great Forgetting. They pretended that a president who they knew had tried to overturn the republic was fit to return to that office. And in so doing, they helped power Trump from his post-January 6 position of disgrace back to the GOP nomination and the presidency.

Trump’s return to office sets the stage for more authoritarian acts. He never repudiated his election lies or the attack they incited, instead valorizing the January 6 “hostages” and promising they will receive pardons as one of his first acts in office. And he is assembling a team to carry out the “retribution” he has promised to inflict on his political foes, including an FBI director who proposed legal action against the conspirators, “not just in government but in the media,” who he claimed “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”

Trump’s authoritarian impulses may ultimately come to nothing. But with their actions after January 6, the leading lights of the right have already signaled their willingness to accept whatever he does.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

riots

If Riots Aren’t The Answer, What Is?

It is impossible to justify the violence, looting, arson and vandalism that took place in Minneapolis and other cities after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. Smashing windows, torching buildings and plundering stores do nothing to improve police behavior or help the African American community. They amount to useless destruction.

Impossible to justify, yes. Impossible to understand? Not at all. Police have participated in a quiet riot against black people for generations.

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What Democrats Need To Know About Violence At Trump Rallies

What Democrats Need To Know About Violence At Trump Rallies

Published with permission from the Washington Spectator.

This spring, Donald Trump added a new phrase to the stock of improvised riffs he throws out at his rallies: “I love my protesters.” And if my Twitter mentions are any indication, there are a lot of people who think they know why: disruptions inside or outside Trump’s events just might help elect him president.

Wrote one, a conservative: #Dems need to read @rickperlstein’s #Nixonland (#Liberalism gone amok led to riots, causing #conservative backlash.)” Liberals agree. “Rioting only makes Trump stronger,” wrote Esquire’s Charlie Pierce, linking to a clip of police responding to window-smashing and poster-burning at a Trump event in Albuquerque.

The syllogism is simple: first in 1966 with Ronald Reagan, then in 1968 and 1972 with Richard Nixon, Republicans ascended to higher office by pinning on the Democrats responsibility for riots and disruptive protests carried out on the left, successfully framing themselves (as I detailed in my 2008 book Nixonland) as the preservers of order and decorum in a society that seemed to be falling into chaos.

“Things are going to hell.”

“We need an ass-kicker in the White House.”

And presto, a generation of Republican presidents. Just read Rick Perlstein!

Well, I love my readers, conservative and liberal both. But the people using my historical work to make this particular argument need to read it less selectively and more attentively.

The first presidential candidate I wrote about who successfully exploited the anxieties of American voters about violence was Lyndon B. Johnson. When Theodore H. White wrote The Making of the President 1964, he included a long account of what happened in Birmingham in 1963. “Bombingham” was the nation’s epicenter of anti-black violence, where African-Americans led by Martin Luther King marched for integration and were set upon by police fire hoses and dogs while the whole world watched on TV.

His book began with the trauma of Kennedy’s assassination and continued with violent chaos throughout, because 1964 was a violent year. Some of it came from the right: the Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in the fall of 1963 and the Klan murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964; ruffianism at such political meetings as the Young Republicans Convention of 1963; all sorts of mayhem associated with the John Birch Society and its ideological cognates, like the time a Dallas matron clomped U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson on the head with a protest sign.

And some of it came from the left—at least if you accept the political semiotics of the time that held black militancy responsible for the first summer of urban race riots of the 1960s, which began in Harlem directly following the Republican National Convention in 1964.

As for the most profound incident of political violence in the U.S. since the Civil War, the Kennedy assassination, the perpetrator was a Communist, but until that fact was established, the almost universal presumption was that right-wingers—Klansmen, H.L. Hunt, Birchers, whatever—must have been responsible; because at that time it was right-wingers whom most Americans held responsible for all signs of political chaos. Barry Goldwater was held to be a symbol of those strange, scary forces (even those riots by black people).

The Johnson campaign worked brilliantly and indefatigably to exacerbate that public perception. LBJ prevailed, in an electoral landslide. #Conservatism gone amok led to riots, the electorate reasoned. Rioting only made LBJ stronger.

Then, of course, 1966: Ronald Reagan, excoriating “the mess at Berkeley” and its “orgies so vile I can’t even describe them to you,” drafting off the white backlash following the Watts riots and winning the California governorship. Then 1968, when Nixon borrowed Reagan’s script: “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night,” Nixon cried melodramatically in his speech accepting the nomination. “We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other, killing each other at home. And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish. Did we come all this way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?” He pledged a “new attorney general” who understood that “the first right of every American is to be free from domestic violence.”

He won, of course. Then, in 1972, he staged himself once more as the man who could finally end the climate of violence in the nation—as if he hadn’t already been president for the past four years. And achieved the greatest landslide in U.S. history.

But there was another election in between. Nixon put enormous stock in the 1970 off-year congressional elections. (Another Watergate discovery was that Nixon organized a secret illegal slush fund for his favored candidates.) Nixon, and especially his attack dog Vice President Spiro Agnew, in the wake of a series of burnings of campus buildings across the country, hit the road to make the case that the country was on the verge of a violent left-wing putsch and that voting Republican was the only way to stave it off.

The Republicans broadcasted an election-eve speech from a Phoenix airplane hangar, a Trump-like affair in which the president sought to close the sale by speaking about a recent rally of his in San Jose, California (the same city, coincidentally, where two weeks ago Trump fans were pummeled by anti-Trump protesters). In San Jose, the presidential motorcade had been showered with protesters’ rocks. “For too long, we have appeased aggression here at home, and, as with all appeasement, the result has been more aggression and more violence!” Nixon, sounding much like Trump, said in Phoenix. “The time has come to draw the line. The time has come for the great silent majority of Americans of all ages, of every political persuasion, to stand up and be counted against appeasement of the rock throwers and the obscenity shouters in America.”

In fact, Nixon’s advance men had carefully arranged for the motorcade in San Jose to pass by those angry protesters, all but staging the incident. #Liberalism gone amok led to riots, causing #conservative backlash: Nixon was betting on it.

But the Democrats broadcast their own election-night speech. In it, Senator Edmund Muskie sat calmly in an armchair in his Maine home and explained—softly—that the election came down to a decision between “the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers. Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you. The other says: the world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men. In voting for the Democratic Party tomorrow, you cast your vote for trust, not just in leaders or policies, but trusting your fellow citizens, in the ancient tradition of this home for freedom and, most of all, for trust in yourself.”

The next day, America went to the polls, and overwhelmingly expanded the majority of the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress.

That’s the score: four elections, two where violence drove the electorate toward the Republicans, and two where violence drove the electorate toward the Democrats. And here is the heart of the pattern. Listen to what Richard Nixon said in that 1968 acceptance speech, after he invited Americans to listen to the sirens in the night, the angry voices, Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other. Later in the speech, he invited them to listen to “another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting.” That was the voice he promised to embody. He promised calm.

What made his promise credible were the images, three weeks later, at the Democratic convention: the worst violence at any convention in U.S. history. And the way that same chaos seemed to follow the Democratic nominee wherever he went—like the incident on October 31 when a rally for nominee Hubert Humphrey was interrupted by a naked woman who dashed down the aisle carrying the head of a pig on a charger. After she was apprehended, her male companion, also naked, seized the pig’s head, leapt to the stage, and presented it to the speaker, economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

Chaos seemed to follow the Democrats wherever they went. So Nixon, promising quiet, prevailed.

Then, two years later, when chaos seemed to follow the Republicans wherever they went—it was a Democrat, Edmund Muskie, who offered the credible appeal, quoted above, for quiet.

History, really, is not so neat as all this. Still and all, the evidence is suggestive. It’s not that the chaos of political rallies that devolve into mêlées invariably favors the authoritarian party of law and order. Instead, it is the party to whom chaos appears to attach itself that the public tends to reject—especially if the leaders of the opposing party do an effective job of framing themselves as the quiet, calm, and centering alternative.

That is the lesson for Hillary Clinton. What is the lesson for us? It’s most decidedly not to encourage chaos at Donald Trump rallies. This very act of encouragement, after all, clouds the story: it would make it credible to frame the Democrats as authors of chaos.

Trump is a fascist. Trumpism leads to riots. Already, the backlash in ensuing: in the first round of polling since both parties provisionally settled on their candidates, 70 percent of Americans said they viewed Trump unfavorably, 56 percent “strongly” unfavorably. Among independents he lags 38 points behind Hillary Clinton in favorability, 20 points behind among whites; and even among Republicans his favorability rating has plunged from 42 percent in April to 34 percent now. Asked to choose between the three candidates on the ballot, Clinton, Trump, and Libertarian Gary Johnson, polling has Trump 12 points behind. He is the pig on the platter. Let him stew in his own blood. The public recognizes the chaos of which he is author, and they are turning away in disgust.

Rick Perlstein is the Washington Spectator’s national correspondent.

Photo: Victor Cristobal (C), of San Jose, chants during a demonstration outside a campaign rally for Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump in San Jose, California, U.S. June 2, 2016. REUTERS/Stephen Lam 

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