Immigration protests and media distrust: Everything comes back to 2020

We're still grappling with the aftermath of journalism's profound failure during Covid and the George Floyd protests. The lies reporters told five years ago continue to haunt them - and all of us.

What’s really happening in Los Angeles right now? What’s happening on the ground? How bad are these immigration protests/riots?

I don’t know. And neither do you.

The legacy media insists the protests are minor and the National Guard’s deployment is unnecessary. The New York Times complains of “the false impression that the entire city was engulfed in violence, when the clashes were limited to only a small part.”

So. Los Angeles is huge. It has four million people and stretches 500 square miles from the ocean over a mountain ridge into uplands that can be 30 degrees hotter than the coast.¹ No, the “entire city” isn’t “engulfed in violence.” Let’s get real. Even the 1992 Rodney King riots left most of Los Angeles unscathed.

But that doesn’t mean the city isn’t seeing serious trouble.

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(Engaging in the most troublesome activity of all: truth telling. With your help.)

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On Sunday, the third night of the riots, Los Angeles Police Chief James McDonnell — who is presumably in a position to know — said this:

The violence I’ve seen is disgusting; it has escalated now since the beginning of this incident. What we saw the first night was bad, but what we're seeing on subsequent nights have been increasingly worse and more violent.

Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers—fireworks that can kill you. We have adapted our tactics to be able to take these people into custody and hold them accountable. We are overwhelmed as far as the number of people engaging in this type of activity... There’s no limit to what they’re doing to our officers.

Meanwhile, a reporter for the Free Press, which has become a leading independent outlet - not conspiratorial, independent - described the scene this way:

Sunday afternoon, tens of thousands of protesters occupied about eight square blocks above the closed 101 Freeway [which runs through downtown Los Angeles and is a crucial highway]. Helicopters soared overhead. A Waymo in a line of Waymo taxis was engulfed in bonfire-size flames, a massive plume of black smoke clogging the sky above it. The others were smashed and covered in graffiti. Within an hour, they would all be on fire.

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The situation this week isn’t nearly as bad as the King riots, which killed 63 people and left large sections of south-central Los Angeles devastated for years. It isn’t as bad as the 1965 riots in the city’s Watts section, or the 1968 protests that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King. These protestors aren’t shooting, and they mostly aren’t looting.

But they are causing serious civil unrest that escalated over the weekend. Bringing in the Marines is an overreaction. Bringing in the National Guard to restore order before the situation gets out of control might not have been.

Like I said at the top, I don’t know. I wish I were there firsthand to report on the situation.

I wish even more I trusted the legacy media to give me, and all of us, a clear picture.

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(A clear picture from 1992. Let’s agree it would be better if this didn’t happen again.)

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Unfortunately, five years ago, the media gaslit us relentlessly about the “mostly peaceful protests” in the late spring and summer of 2020 that followed the death of George Floyd. (They gaslit us about who Floyd was, too, but that’s another story.)

Yes, many cities had large and mostly peaceful protests and marches that summer. But many others had riots. Parts of downtown Seattle became an “autonomous zone” that was essentially anarchic and unpoliced. Rioters burned down a police station in Minneapolis and set over 100 fires. Chicago, Atlanta and other cities saw uncontrolled vandalism and looting.

Overall, murders rose almost 30 percent compared to 2019 — the largest one-year increase in American history, a death wave that cost about 5,000 people their lives. The media, in gaslighting that would have been funny if hadn’t been so idiotic, blamed the increase on Covid and lockdowns rather than the riots and police pullback that followed.

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(I got your antidote to gaslighting right here. For less than 20 cents a day.)

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Now the Times and other liberal legacy media outlets are again claiming protests over an issue dear to the heart of the left are controlled and, yes, mostly peaceful. They’re claiming again that a crackdown is the real risk. (In 2020, black Times reporters infamously claimed Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had “put them in danger” by calling for an “overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.”)

Maybe so. I’d like to believe them. But the way the Times framed the situation in its piece today — all of Los Angeles isn’t burning, so everything is fine — doesn’t give me much confidence.

What really got torched in 2020 was the legacy media’s credibility. And, sadly, it’s still on fire.

1. Los Angeles County, which outsiders often confuse with the city, is a whole different kind of mammoth, with 10 million people across almost 5,000 square miles.