Welcome to Los Angeles, where all manner of laws are optional, the slogans are preposterous, and the politicians behave like extras in their own Netflix docudrama.
This week’s moral hallucination? “No one’s illegal on stolen land.”
Yes, that’s now a standard feature of the protest scene in the City of Angels—where civic disorder is a form of self-expression, and slogans are a substitute for intelligent discourse.
A powerful statement—if you’re high on hashtags and low on history. Or just plain high.
Which, judging by the last few decades of California ballot returns, seems to be both a pastime and a prerequisite for public office.
The flashpoint came after ICE agents—cast by the left as medieval villains in a morality play no one asked for—executed a series of lawful immigration enforcement actions, and in response, activists, anarchists, and Antifa cosplayers erupted in protest—chanting absurd incantations to the protest demigods, and offering the usual tribute to that most sacred of rituals: political violence.
By sundown, downtown L.A. looked like a sequel to Escape from—well—L.A., with better lighting and a worse casting director.
Looters liberated iPhones and vape pens from bourgeois retailers. Protesters blocked highways and set dumpsters ablaze—hopefully with no homeless injured in this particular civil disobedience exercise.
The city burned, the slogans echoed, and once again, the Democrat establishment found itself struggling to tell the difference between civil disobedience and felony arson.
President Trump, unimpressed with California’s usual cocktail of shilly-shallying and moral preening, invoked Title 10 and deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles.
In any event, the federal government acted while California’s leadership issued statements telling America to ignore its lying eyes.
No Los Angeles riot scene is complete without a cameo from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the perennial flame-thrower who long ago confused volume with virtue.
Waters first denied that there was any violence. “No one was shot. No one was killed,” she declared, as flaming barricades lit up the skyline and journalists staggered away from tear gas with bleeding faces—live on cable news.
Then again, Maxine Waters has been in politics so long that she may no longer recognize a riot—especially when it fits the narrative. When you’ve cheered enough mayhem, it stops looking like mayhem. It just looks like Tuesday.
Not satisfied with gaslighting the country, she then attempted to storm a federal detention facility—at least as much as her 86-year-old legs would allow—unauthorized—and reportedly taunted National Guard members stationed outside. “You better shoot straight,” she told them.
Let that sink in. An elected member of Congress, standing in front of uniformed soldiers, demanding they “shoot straight.”
Never one to shoot straight herself, today’s Maxine sounds less like a hero and more like Private Slovik—oblivious, derelict, and unfit for duty.
The Department of Homeland Security promptly condemned her behavior, calling it “dangerous” and the congresswoman was “spewing lies” about the violence.
But not, somehow, surprising.
Now, back to this bit about “No one’s illegal on stolen land.”
I learned a long time ago there’s little to gain from interpreting—with reason—the mind-droppings of the irrational.
But do these mental giants realize that, at some point in time, every piece of land on earth was taken from someone, somewhere, somehow?
I’ll start taking this argument seriously the day every Ben & Jerry’s location shuts down and gifts deeds to the nearest government-recognized tribe. Until then, it’s just bumper-sticker theology for the mass-transit wing of the progressive movement—meaning, they don’t even own a bumper to slap the sticker on.
This might explain why they’re so quick to burn cars during “peaceful” protests.
The irony of torching Teslas in the name of environmental justice and this week’s cause du jour is lost on them—along with the carbon plume from flaming lithium batteries and polymer interiors.
Native Americans have suffered enough at the hands of sanctimonious white people through the years—reservation agents, bootleggers, land speculators, and social reformers alike. They’ve been displaced, patronized, and exploited for generations.
So the idea that they must now suffer the additional indignity of having their historic trauma appropriated for the sloganeering of progressive rabble—most of whom wouldn’t last five minutes on a reservation without Wi-Fi or a can of Olipop—is beyond tone-deaf.
It’s insulting. And it reveals what much of this movement is: not solidarity, but self-indulgence dressed in someone else’s suffering.
Something tells me that, given the context, at least some of the rabble believe the land was “stolen from Mexico”—as if Alta California were some utopian patchwork of ranchos and pueblos before the Mexican-American War.
Conveniently forgotten, of course, are the Chumash, Tongva, and other indigenous tribes whose land was seized by the Centralist Mexican Republic—née First Mexican Republic, née Mexican Provisional Government, née First Mexican Empire, née Spanish Empire—long before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ever made it to print.
And lest we forget, the Russian Empire had outposts in California too. One wonders if Adam Schiff knows about Fort Ross—though since it’s not mentioned in the Steele Dossier, he probably assumes it’s Kamala’s favorite vineyard in Sonoma.
But that only proves the point: this isn’t about justice—it’s about narrative control. History is selectively edited to fit a chant, a hashtag, or a Soros-funded placard that arrived fresher than the protesters did.
Colonialism is condemned—but only the correct kind, which more often than not isn’t colonialism at all. If it doesn’t serve the message, it didn’t happen.
Also worth noting: there’s a reason so many of these migrants crossed the border into the United States—many illegally—and want to stay.
And it’s not because Tijuana is the Second Rome—or even a Second Trebizond.
They came because the American system—for all its imperfections—offers opportunity, safety, and structure: things in short supply in the very countries these activists now romanticize.
And, lamentably, in short supply in Los Angeles these days.
Now, if an illegal alien is waving a Mexican flag over a smoldering American street, it looks and smells—(looking at you, Gwen Walz)—like an invasion.
And how does one defeat an invasion?
I’ll leave that for your consideration.
The left’s narrative, predictably, is that this entire episode is Trump’s fault—because how dare the president enforce the law.
But let’s pause for a moment and remember first principles. Enforcement of our nation’s laws is a constitutional duty of the presidency.
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution mandates that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”
It is not contingent on whether state officials approve. It is not contingent on how much those violating the law throw rocks or torch motor vehicles. It is an affirmative obligation—embedded at the core of presidential responsibility.
Sadly, the last administration lacked the wherewithal to have President Autopen take care to execute much of anything. And it’s hard to pen—oops, pin—the blame when no one can say for sure who was in charge while Joe Biden sat in the corner thinking he was a bird about to fly to Baskin-Robbins.
What the Democrats still can’t seem to grasp is that Trump has a gift for putting them on the wrong side of what you might call the 80–20 issues—the fights where four out of five Americans land squarely against them.
This is one of those fights.
As Brit Hume recently put it, the Democrats’ positioning here is beyond politically unsustainable—it’s political insanity. Truth.
Americans overwhelmingly support law and order. They don’t want to see their cities in flames, their police officers under siege, or their neighborhoods turned into staging grounds for riot-themed performance art.
And they certainly don’t appreciate being told it’s all “mostly peaceful” while a flaming hellscape flickers in the background.
Ultimately, if there is a unifying leitmotif in modern American progressivism—beyond its Pavlovian opposition to Trump—it is the embrace of a narcissistic nihilism: a worldview that destroys institutions it cannot control, deconstructs history it cannot comprehend, and desecrates values it never believed in to begin with—all with a messianic zeal bordering on mania.
If the Democrat party does not cast off the yoke of madness and bind itself once more to law and order, then it shall reap the whirlwind.
For those who sup with anarchy do not inherit a nation—they inherit the void. And the void, as always, smells of sulfur, melted asphalt, broken glass—and broken dreams.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. X: @CharltonAllenNC
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