Let’s understand what’s going on in Los Angeles because most people don’t. This is not a battle of cops versus rioters; it is a battle between narratives. Most people see regime media video of Third World savages waving the tacky banners of their garbage homelands, lighting fires, hassling cops, and doing other things consistent with being barbarians, and think that Los Angeles is in chaos and therefore get scared. The idea behind this color revolution – it is organized and planned, not spontaneous or genuine – is to intimidate normal people into submitting and embracing the politicians associated with its goals in the hopes that it will stop. This is the work of the Democrat Party; the rioters are its useful idiots, acting to support the party’s goals while its maintaining deniability. But this scheme only succeeds if the target is feckless and weak, which such targets usually are. Trump isn’t. He’s going to win this because he understands this fight better than his enemies. The chaos is an illusion; his strength is reality.
Remember, this is not a kinetic operation. A kinetic operation achieves its goal by the violence itself. Kinetic operations destroy enemy personnel, reduce enemy combat power, or conquer territory through physical destruction. But this is an information operation. It accomplishes its mission by influencing the population. The violence itself is not an end, but a means; the goal is to compel people to submit by convincing them to accept the narrative.
And the narrative here is that Los Angeles is in complete chaos as a result of Donald Trump attempting to enforce federal law, so to stop the violence, Donald Trump must be compelled to cease enforcing federal law. This, of course, would be a devastating neutering of Trump while strengthening the Democrats. They want to make Trump look weak and convince America to submit to their intimidation. But this plot only works if we accept the illusion they are presenting.
Remember, it’s an information operation. None of what you see on the regime media is real. Oh, they are burning a few cars and screaming and yelling and running around waving flags of garbage countries, but what does any of that actually do? Nothing. They can’t make anyone do anything. They are not eliminating any federal law-enforcement capabilities. They are not significantly hindering federal law enforcement operations. They are not holding significant territory over time. They’re simply acting out in front of the cameras to try to convince you that Trump is powerless.
To some extent, this works. As a Southern Californian, I’ve been bombarded by people around the country asking me if I’m okay. Of course, I’m okay. I live among rich people who like their Chardonnay oaky and their illegal alien domestic help cheap and compliant. They won’t let that nonsense happen in my neighborhood. Hell, my liberal neighbors would call the local SWAT team in if poor people knocked over one of their “Hate Has No Home Here” signs. The violence is happening downtown, where practically nobody lives except bums and a few urban pioneers, as well as in some scruffy suburban cities on the east side of the metropolis. The impact on the daily life of 99% of people in Los Angeles is exactly zero. There are approximately 20 million people here. Maybe 5,000 have anything to do with this nonsense.
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Again, it’s all an illusion designed to frighten and confuse you. That’s what an information operation does. It creates a narrative in people’s brains to achieve an effect it can’t achieve by force. These mobs don’t have the capacity to do much of anything except block some freeways and set a few cars on fire. If the cops and the Guard decided to get kinetic, they’d be wiped out faster than they could chant, “No justice, no arrrggggghhhh.” They aren’t a revolutionary army. They are a bunch of jerks pretending to be a threat.
And Trump has called their bluff. They were counting on what usually happens when the professional agitators in blue cities start getting frisky – they get catered to by the Democrats who run these urban areas. The Democrats react like a mommy while Trump reacts like a daddy. He’s not taking any of their guff, but what is important is that he understands that this is an information operation. He escalated by activating the California Army National Guard – I was a deputy commander of the brigade Trump called out and on the streets with the Army during the Los Angeles riots – but not so he could go kinetic. He’s not calling in the Guard or the Marines to bust heads or quell disorder, like we did in 1992. The guardsmen are basically providing point security around federal facilities to free up federal cops to go out and do cop things like arrest scumbags.
What Trump is doing is messaging to the country that he’s not taking their crap. He’s not going to be intimidated. He’s not going to let this get out of control. The ones who are letting it get out of control are the Democrats who run California, like slack-jawed moron Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Hairstyle. Let’s understand the relationship between the riots and the Democrat establishment. The rioters are catspaws, cut-outs whose act of violence and intimidation support Democrat policies even as the Democrat establishment pretends to be upset about the chaos. However, the Democrats must at least appear to be trying to maintain order. Trump knows that is one of their weaknesses. He is sticking them with the consequences of their own disorder. Have you noticed how the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles sheriffs, and the California Highway Patrol are the ones dealing with riots? They are the ones who look powerless in the face of the rioters. This, in turn, makes Gavin Newsom and his pals look powerless – an image compounded when they whine and complain impotently about Trump calling up the Guard and Trump ignores them.
A color revolution information operation depends on an inept response from the targeted authority. Either the target of authority overreacts by going in and shooting a bunch of people, therefore appalling the weak-hearted citizenry, or it under-reacts and demonstrates its own powerlessness. But the color revolution fails when the target understands the game better than the leftists who initiated it. That’s what’s happened here. Donald Trump has projected strength, but not too much strength. He understands that normal American citizens are going to show absolutely no sympathy for the vandals, looters, illegal aliens, and other criminals, setting fires and looting 7-Elevens live on television. He has made Democrat officials look weak by ignoring their whining and forcing them to handle the part of the response that creates the worst optics.
At the same time, this situation provides an opportunity for Trump’s federal law enforcement to map out the network of organizations and individuals who coordinated and logistically supported rioting in Los Angeles. This isn’t a unique phenomenon. Leftist groups do this all around the country. Remember, time is on Trump’s side. Federal law enforcement can target the conspirators with criminal indictments and finally break this cycle. It can dismantle the infrastructure that allows these faux-spontaneous insurrections to pop up across the country. Offering rewards for specific criminals is another way to highlight to Americans that these people are criminals. And the situation also provides an opportunity to defund the government support to NGOs that launder government money to fund this kind of violence. The LA rioting has exposed our enemy to scrutiny, and we should take full advantage of that to crush it.
Trump is handling this just right. The battle isn’t on the streets of Los Angeles. The battle is in the hearts and minds of normal Americans. When normal Americans see burning and looting by degenerates, they are naturally frightened and appalled. What the leftists want to do, what the purpose of their information operation is, is to convince normal people that they have no choice but to submit because no one can protect them. Trump breaks that paradigm by providing an alternative – he will protect them, and therefore normal citizens don’t have to submit to the intimidation. All you need is someone willing to stand up to these dirtbags and it completely disrupts their info op.
The left has two main options going forward. One is to become even more violent and see if they can provoke an overreaction – remember, they don’t have the combat power to achieve anything by force. Even if they increase their level of violence, this is still an information operation. However, they risk overplaying their hand and justifying a forceful reaction by Trump. If some criminal – a substantial number of the rioters are not political activists but common street thugs – decides to shoot a fed and the feds shoot back, normal people are going to cheer.
The second and more likely course of action is for the word to go out to dial back the disorder. It’s not working. It’s not having the desired effect. It’s also hurting the Democrats, who tacitly support the violence but want to maintain distance from it. It’s their city that’s in chaos, not Trump’s. The Democrats are united in whining about Trump not submitting like cowards to the thugs, but all this is doing is making them look weak. It’s not Trump‘s forces that are getting pushed around by the rioters; it’s the Democrats’ local cops who are. The Democrats have had nothing but problems lately, and the last thing they needed was to have several days of news footage making them look ineffectual while also blowing the Elon vs. Donald cage match off the front pages.
The only real question is whether or not Donald Trump and his team planned this. It’s working to his advantage – the Big Beautiful Bill debate just stopped being about saving a few pennies and became about saving our country from foreign invaders. You have to wonder whether the Trump 2.0 administration specifically choose a super leftist city to spin up ICE raids knowing that there would be a riotous backlash that they could then co-opt to message strength. Did they make a conscious decision to provide America a clear and unequivocal choice?
All I can say is that I hope so.
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