Archive for 2025

June 10, 2025

LOL, BRIAN STELTER:

I’m not saying that The Potato is always wrong, but that’s the way to bet.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokhh writes to note that the curfew isn’t really “citywide,” but just affects downtown where the riots are.

Posted at 11:01 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jun 10th, 2025

OPEN THREAD: It’s all for you.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jun 10th, 2025

DAN MCLAUGHLIN: You Picked the Wrong Time to Riot.

Trump is following through on nationalizing the California National Guard and putting them seriously to work in restoring order over the impotent protests of California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Anybody who read the situation and the man could have told them this would happen. Yes, there’s some truth in the TACO taunt: Trump doesn’t much like standing up to people who can fight back, and he often blusters his way into positions he can’t or won’t back up. But Trump has no downside here. He knows he was elected to restore some basic, commonsense ideas that are overwhelmingly popular like public order in the streets, and that Newsom, Bass, and Kamala Harris are about the least sympathetic adversaries possible. He’s also just over four months into his term; it’s not 2020 anymore. A new president responds to challenges such as this one not only with an eye to the situation, but also with an eye on the tone set for the remaining three-plus years. Why did Ronald Reagan come down so hard on the air traffic controller strike? Partly out of principle but also partly to send a message: There’s a new sheriff in town, and you’re not messing with him. The public-employee unions got the message; so did the Soviets and Congress. Reagan meant what he said and was prepared to go to the mattresses.

All of the incentives for Trump, against people burning Waymos and wearing keffiyehs and waving Mexican flags, point in the direction of doing the same. Before you try to use leverage against an opponent, you should first consider whether your acts are received by him as pressure or as a gift. Trump very obviously views disorder in the streets of Los Angeles, against federal authority, and under foreign flags, as a gift. You have to be a special kind of stupid to hand him that. But nobody ever said rioters were smart people.

Neither are looters: Troops and turmoil in LA: Masked looters raid Apple store.

Flashback to 2020’s Summer of Love: Photos show how Apple is tracking and locking demo iPhones that have been stolen from its stores. “Photos of reportedly stolen iPhones have been circulating on social media showing screenshots with a message from Apple requesting that the devices be returned to the store. ‘Please return to Apple Walnut Street,’ one screenshot read, likely referring to the Apple Store located on Walnut Street in Philadelphia. ‘This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted.’”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): My congressman, Tim Burchett, weighs in.

UPDATE (From Ed):

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

DOUG ROSS: Civil Unrest, Inc.: How America Learned to Spot Manufactured Mayhem.

With 40 million illegal immigrants in the country, foreign flags raised in burning American cities, and Democrats openly cheering for violence, we’ve crossed from civil unrest into something far more dangerous.

The tools exist to deal with this—the same ones used to destroy January 6th participants. The question isn’t capability; it’s will. America’s survival may depend on whether that will materializes before the next switch gets flipped.

The era of treating coordinated political violence as spontaneous protest must end now.

Don’t miss the lengthy accompanying flowchart that diagrams “The Manufactured Crisis.”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:

Posted at 8:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

IT’S COME TO THIS: LA Mayor Karen Bass issues World Cup threat in war with Trump over riots:

Mayor Karen Bass sent a message to Donald Trump claiming the response to the immigration protests will hurt the World Cup.

The United States is set to co-host the soccer showstopper along with Canada and Mexico next summer.

Bass, speaking at a press conference, said the city’s economy will ‘collapse’ if Trump deports more illegal migrants, and taunted him: ‘Don’t you want the World Cup to be a success for you?’

While it’s true that ESPN reported in March, “President Trump to lead 2026 World Cup task force,” Bass’s communist roots are really showing, if she thinks the former owner of a USFL team is worried all that much about soccer.

Meanwhile, as Joel Kotkin writes: Los Angeles has fallen. How can riot-rocked LA be trusted to host the Olympics?

But unless vast sums are spent on a Potemkin-like makeover, the world will also witness what many of us residents have long suspected – that the city is slipping into an inexorable decline.

Things were very different in 1932, when LA first hosted the Olympics. With a population of 1.2million – a third of today’s population – LA was still fledgling. But the 1932 games served as a wake-up call to the world that LA was on its way to becoming one of the planet’s great cities.

I covered the run-up to the second LA Olympics, in 1984. It was arguably the most successful games in history, despite Russia’s Cold War-era boycott. This was LA at its peak – with native son Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the defence, aerospace, housing and entertainment sectors all booming. ‘LA’s the place’, as the promoters then put it, and few could deny the truth of it.

Some may hope the new games will rescue the city from its doldrums. But numerous studies show that hosting an Olympics offers, at best, fleeting economic benefits – and often leaves enormous burdens. It can provide an opportunity to make a statement, heralding the rise of cities such as Berlin under the Nazis in 1936 or Beijing under the CCP in 2008. But staging an Olympics in a city plainly in decline seems a fool’s errand.

Detroit’s Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh would concur. This 1965 film, created to sell Detroit as a possible host of the 1968 Olympics, looks like something out of The Last Days of Pompeii when viewed in 2025:

Or perhaps the precursor to Bill Whittle’s new “How L.A. Dies” video:

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

TERRY MORAN OUT AT ABC NEWS:

Moran dropped the mask, and revealed what everybody at the House of Stephanopoulos thinks about this administration, and with a fair amount of projection, Trump aide Stephen Miller in particular:

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

GRETA’S BLIND EYE TO MURDER:

The Israelis know how to deport people. If this had been Britain, Greta Thunberg would be sitting in an asylum hotel right now, using a taxpayer-funded mobile phone, working as a Deliveroo driver and gearing up for 20 years of legal battles that will line the pockets of human rights lawyers.

Good riddance, I say. My only regret is that Thunberg refused to watch the footage of October 7 at a screening provided by the Israeli authorities before she was sent back where she came from. Such are the reports, anyway. In an episode rich with irony, this was the turkey in the challah sandwich (provided to the activist by Israeli commandos upon arrival).

* * * * * * * *

Let’s stop beating around the selfie yacht. It was never truly about the climate, any more than it was truly about the conflict in the Middle East. Closing her eyes to the October 7 footage crystallised the sustaining principle of Greta Thunberg: she is absorbed in a world of her own. It is a world that began with hating her teachers; went on to hating the establishment; and has ended with hating the Jews and the West, powered by endless selfies.

More here: “What happened next gives the whole game away. Why is Thunberg on her way home, you might ask, instead of valiantly opposing the Israelis? The answer is because she immediately signed a voluntary deportation agreement, leaving the rest of her crew behind in detention to propagate their ‘revolution’… When push came to shove, Thunberg ran away back to Europe instead of standing against what she falsely claims is a ‘genocide.’ She’s not a revolutionary. She’s just an attention-seeking fraud who wants to post selfies and get on television while not paying any cost for her radical activism. We’ve seen that dynamic play out many times, where Thunberg is ‘arrested’ and released within hours. She’s cosplaying.”

UPDATE:

Posted at 8:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

NEO: What is the left’s goal in staging these LA riots?

So why does the left do this? I think there are many reasons. First of all, their base loves it. Secondly, it sows chaos and might actually impede some of the deportations, which stymies Trump and causes more chaos. But I believe the deeper desire is to provoke a strong reaction from Trump that can then be labeled in all the ways they love to label Trump: he’s a fascist and a power-mad brutal dictator. Today it’s the illegal criminal aliens, tomorrow it will be you!

It’s a classic leftist move. Their playbook – in US history, anyway – is the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. I wrote a piece back in 2006 about this leftist strategy. Most of the remainder of the present post will be quotes from that 2006 article, and I believe the relevance is obvious (the Horowitz link no longer works, however).

Read the whole thing.

Related: ABC News is shocked – shocked! – to discover: There are more US troops in LA than in Iraq, Syria.

There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than in Iraq and Syria.

There are 4,800 activated Guard and Marine personnel in LA, compared to the 2,500 troops in Iraq and 1,500 in Syria.

It’s a good start! Perhaps though, it’s time to really up the stakes in L.A.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

SCIENCE: Confirmed: People Really Do Tend to Look Like Their Dogs. “[A] group of researchers asked participants who had never met the dog-guardian pairs to match photos of dogs and their guardians based on perceived similarities. Interestingly, the participants were able to correctly match most of the dog-guardian pairs. This finding suggests that similarity may not just be a matter of the guardian’s own perception.”

Posted at 8:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Jun 10th, 2025

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:

 

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jun 10th, 2025

BILL WHITTLE: How L.A. Dies. “One man, 36 hours, and seven hundred dollars: a cautionary tale about the future of my home for 37 years.”

Posted at 5:22 pm by Stephen Green on Jun 10th, 2025

WHAT WAS I JUST SAYING?

Really, I was just saying this.

Posted at 4:33 pm by Stephen Green on Jun 10th, 2025
« Previous Entries
Next Entries »