Lawful protests? ‘Mostly peaceful’? Or insurrection? The Protection Racket Media ‘reports,’ but Racket News gives you the actual picture of Los Angeles over the past week.
Matt Taibbi and his team went into LA this weekend to test claims by city and state leadership, as well as the mainstream media, that LA has been mainly peaceful this entire time — despite all sorts of videos suggesting otherwise. Ford Fisher of Activism Uncensored took a small team to record the clashes, and as he says, CNN is lying to its viewers.
That’s not exactly news, either. In fact, for those of us who lived through the 2020 ‘Mostly Peaceful’ riots up close and personal in Minneapolis, this looks like the same old, same old, and involving the same players:
Five years later, “mostly peaceful” — or at least a form of it — is in vogue again.
But there is also another message in play this time around: most of LA is all good because the protests are only in a “part of” downtown. … It’s also a talking point for LA Mayor Karen Bass, who says the “unrest that has [sic] happened are a few blocks within the downtown area. It is not all of downtown, and it is not all of the city.”
Of course it’s not all of the city. It wasn’t all of Minneapolis in 2020 either, but it was enough to cause $500 million in arson damage, damage hundreds of buildings and businesses, and devastate the city’s economy, especially in the Lake Street District. As a native Angeleno, I know full well how large my native metropolis is. Riots don’t stop being riots simply because they only damage part of a city. The 1992 Rodney King riots were contained to a relatively small area of the city too, and no one suggested that there wasn’t a problem because 95% of the Greater Los Angeles Area wasn’t under attack.
At that time, the governor and the city took it seriously, and so did the media, albeit with heavy sympathy for the rioters. Here’s what Gavin Newsom wants to claim is happening in Los Angeles this time around:
PETE, SEND THE MARINES ! pic.twitter.com/30BU5OMj6M
— Governor Newsom Press Office (@GovPressOffice) June 12, 2025
Taibbi blasted the media and the political leadership for gaslighting Americans on Tuesday, anticipating the release of the video. This is precisely how Donald Trump won a second term, Taibbi wrote:
By Sunday night, in a repeat of the Floyd story, protests were planned across the country. This is the critical part of every Trump news cycle. Instead of accepting political reality (Trump got elected, Trump nominated a judge, Trump got elected again, Trump started executing a promised immigration policy), press and elected opposition rally behind protests that are encouraged to spread everywhere, not-so-subtly pining for an administration-toppling Disorder Event, even if we just had an election. The same national security experts who ten seconds ago wanted to tear up the Constitution to stop “extremism” or “authoritarianism” now say throwing rocks at cops or burning shit is “legal protest” with a “little unrest,” the First Amendment with a citrus twist of revolt. Usual Suspects like John Heilemann pop up to tell us there’s nothing to see here, just people chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” in front of burning vehicles.
This is the moment when the previously disinterested voter looks up, notices governors and mayors and congresspersons expressing apparently limitless support for illegal immigration, tax evasion, even crime, and wonders what the deal is. As in, a civilian protester can hold signs saying “No one is illegal” or “Abolish ICE Now” or even wave the Mexican flag on seized highways, but officials who command police forces or are charged with immigration enforcement probably shouldn’t cheer — unless they harbor utopian notions about a borderless world, which they inevitably do because they went to college in America. This zone of realization is where Trump cleans up every time. I used to think it was unfortunate, now I think it’s deserved. These idiots can’t muster the energy to even pretend to care at even a baseline level about mundane patriotic concerns like not letting absolutely everyone over the border, or drawing some kind of line when it comes to vandalism or school standards. Even the most liberal voter reaches a moment of exhaustion with this bullshit. …
Trump is in office in significant part because the goofball principles of the last “mostly peaceful” revolution made the majority want to puke its guts out. Why run it back? Are there really no other ideas?
Those in charge of the Democrat Party are not interested in governance. They want a revolution, one that will put them in power permanently and unconditionally. Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Tim Walz, Kamala Harris et al want to gaslight Americans while their shock troops dismantle ordered liberty and rational self-governance. They’re using Orwell as a playbook rather than a warning, and the rest of us have finally awoken to the danger.
