Shamelessness squared
Two can play the hyperbole game.
Remember that time protests reduced Minneapolis and Portland to ash following the murder of George Floyd? Neither do the residents. Occasionally one hears about someone’s surprise on their first visit to New York City, home to Fox News and Donald Trump’s former home, to find that it’s not a crime-ridden battlescape.
But Fox News and Trump make every effort to paint those pictures. Pull back the lens and what appears massive on TV is very, very local. Someone sets trash alight in the street and photographers lie on the ground to capture a conflagration closeup. (I can’t find the clip I saw now.) Blocks away, people go to work and buy groceries and gas.
The usual suspects are revving up their propaganda machines (and Elon Musk’s) again to declare Los Angeles invaded, under siege, the whole city “burning.”
Ask a few people who live there what’s really not happening.
Here’s the host of Marketplace Radio:
Spiro’s Ghost responded on Sunday afternoon to Trump’s claims that the city has been “invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals”:
This is beyond delusional insanity, it needs its own new terminology for how devoid of reality it is. This man is a deranged lunatic.
I live in L.A., am out doing errands. L.A. is exactly like it is on any other day, with a few hundred protestors in a couple of spots in a city of nearly 10,000,000
But no! It’s an “insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States,” declares a frothing Stephen Miller.
The few who set fire to vehicles or threw rocks at police or their vehicles are acting outside the law and deserve prosecution (and due process). But the cameras love them. They’ll be in your faces for days providing Trump the justification he craves for going full-on autocracy.
Trump stopped just shy of invoking the Insurrection Act for the entire country on the pretext of a neighborhood protest against ICE raids in Los Angeles. Rarely in the field of human protest has so little crime by so few been blamed on so many. But Trump, Fox News, and MAGAs are up to the challenge.
Trump’s demands for law and order, and his call to deploy National Guard in Los Angeles are especially rich given that Trump sat on his hands as thousands of his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The administration that declares its “zero tolerance policy for criminal behavior” is giving the world a master class in presidential criminality as well as incompetence. Trump, already a convicted felon, has taken bribes, defied federal court orders, pardoned convicted insurrectionists, murderers, money launderers, embezzlers, fraudsters and tax evaders while dispatching masked police to snatch people off the streets without due process in violation of Constitutional.
As we covered on Sunday, the lack of self-awareness and shamelessness from Trump and his cohort of un-American enablers is breathtaking. But then so is the swiftness with which they’re working to turn this once-proud republic into The United Police States of America.
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