Random Thoughts (13): LA Burning Edition

Taking a step back from the unfolding story in Los Angeles to look at the bigger picture, some thoughts:

One, Trump’s superpower is that he is perpetually blessed with the right enemies. The Left, from its politicians to the media to its street muscle, unerringly finds itself on the wrong side of the 80/20 divide.

Two, as a case in point it looks like Newsom is going to sue Trump over the latter’s unilateral deployment of the National Guard to the Los Angeles area to protect federal property. So rather than be laser focused on dealing with downtown LA going up in smoke, he wants to play legal games about his right to refuse federal assistance sent as a response to the mayhem?

Go Gavin!

Sadly, though, the general rule is when LA burns, we get more Californians moving to Arizona. Maybe if Trump did a Governor Moeur and deployed the National Guard to the Colorado River….

Three, John Yoo has a post regarding the legality of Trump’s deploying the National Guard to LA without the consent of Governor Newsom.

But there are exceptions, such as protecting the national government and its operations and breaking up resistance to federal law, which are authorized by the Constitution itself or in the Insurrection Act. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution makes clear that federal law is superior to state law; California’s officials and residents have no right to block the enforcement of federal immigration policy, no matter how much they disagree with it.

For decades Democrats on the state and local level have been playing footsie with nullification regarding federal immigration law, by declaring they would not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement efforts. In doing so they have simply followed their party’s long tradition of nullification when it came to desegregation and various other civil rights laws.

It’s one thing to refuse to cooperate, it’s another thing to actively interfere.

Fast forwarding a few minutes into the future, I wonder if we might see DOJ investigations into a possible conspiracy between various California governments and groups such as CHIRLA, which were involved in the attempts on Friday to intimidate federal law enforcement officers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, CHIRLA has received a lot of public money from California governments.

Think Trump might do it?

Four, I was going to write a post about a Supreme Court decision not to grant cert to Snope v. Brown, which is a case dealing with a Maryland law banning “assault weapons.”

Back during the LA riots in 1992 there was the phenomena of the “Rooftop Koreans.” Early in the riot the LA police withdrew from the riot zone to create (for themselves) a more secure perimeter. Of course that meant every place they withdrew from became a free-for-all, including Koreatown.

There was a lot of animosity by certain racial groups toward the Koreans. Rather than wait for the inevitable torching of their homes and businesses, the residents of Koreatown took matters into their own hands by posting teams on top of buildings armed with an array of rifles to conduct overwatch of the surrounding area. You can find plenty of images online of those teams, and there is at least one clip of them firing warning shots.

California continues to ban “assault weapons” and “large capacity magazines.” Think residents in the greater LA area might want to have some of those items right now?

In fairness to the Supreme Court, I’m guessing from the reaction from people like Kavanaugh that they are looking for a better case to overturn the weapon and magazine bans. However, as Clarence Thomas points out, the Court likes to treat the Second Amendment as a second class right and this is no longer an academic issue.

I wonder how many cars with California plates are in the parking lots of gun stores in Yuma and Phoenix?

Five, sometimes it’s just not the media as a whole that is clueless, but even within a single media outlet the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Case in point, a story in the Washington Post yesterday:

“An ICE raid disrupts life on Martha’s Vineyard”

Apparently, ICE came to the noted playground of America’s elite, and found that the local residents were harboring plenty of illegal immigrants including an MS-13 gang member and a child sex offender.

The fact that the raid came around Memorial Day, just as the island was reopening for the season, probably was not coincidental.

Pulls from the article:

“Life on Martha’s Vineyard and the adjacent island of Nantucket has been disrupted since officers arrested dozens of immigrants late last month, igniting fear among undocumented workers who form the backbone of the workforce here just as the busy summer season gets underway.”

Another from a person who is an illegal immigrant:

“The American people love us because we work so hard to help the community prosper and grow,” said M.N., a local business owner and community leader originally from Brazil who has raised three children here. She spoke on the condition that her initials be used instead of her full name because she feared her family would be targeted. “This was a safe place.”

So let me rewrite the article based on the facts it presented. The summer playground of the elite (including Barack Obama) is dependent on illegal immigrant labor to maintain its secluded, luxurious lifestyle. While the article focuses on Brazilians who have been in the US for a while, it also acknowledges more recent arrivals including a member of a notorious gang that has engaged in widespread human trafficking

So basically the article tells us that in the interest of maintaining that luxurious lifestyle on the cheap (average home value, $1.5 million), the wealthy elite of Martha’s Vineyard perpetuate human misery by exploiting illegal immigration and creating a market for human trafficking.

Got it.

Of course the article failed to mention that the generosity of Martha Vineyard’s residents towards illegal immigrants only goes so far, especially when they arrive out-of-season.