For What It's Worth - The Political Consequences of Governmental Induced Civil Unrest

A Clarification About Current Events in Los Angeles From An Actual Angeleno

A reality check is in order.

There is no mass civil unrest, lawlessness, or chaos in the City of Los Angeles. I live in L.A. and I can tell you, using my own eyes and ears (rather than listening to what overpaid pundits tell me), that the city is relatively calm (with most tension being due to fears of ICE raids).¹

Unfortunately, there are a few blocks in Downtown L.A. where there have been sporadic incidents of violence and vandalism, carried out by a group of anarchists who appear to show up at every major demonstration now for the purposes of disrupting them, hijacking the event for their own message, and attacking the police.

A few opportunists have attempted to loot businesses in the downtown area.²

Mayor Karen Bass

imposed a nightly curfew for a one square mile area to protect businesses (L.A. is 469 square miles).

Violence, vandalism, and looting are unacceptable. Every elected official has condemned them and those getting caught are being prosecuted.

However, there is no justification for sending in military troops, which should only ever be used against civilian populations as an emergency option of last resort. In 1992, only as an absolute last resort, President Bush deployed the 103rd Airborne Division to quell rioting.

I vividly remember the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. My father was a police officer who spent four straight days and nights dodging rocks, bottles, Molotov cocktails, and bullets. A first grader, my family watched at home as the city descended into madness, wondering whether we would see my dad again.

Is this a “riot”?

To quote former United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, “I know it when I see it,” and this ain’t it.³

Now, why has there been mass public demonstration? And what has prompted opportunities for the anarchists?

The actions of the federal government.

Last Thursday, Los Angeles was calm and peaceful. There were no demonstrations in the streets. There were no opportunities for anarchists and looters. The streets were safer than usual as violent crime has dropped significantly across the city.⁴ On a sunny 74 degree day in which the Dodgers came back to the beat the New York Mets, most Angelenos went about their daily lives as usual.

But last Friday, indiscriminate ICE Raids began in L.A. and the greater L.A. area.

ICE actions have included:

• Roundups of day laborers at Home Depot parking lots.

• A raid at a factory in the Garment District.

• ICE Agents committing a hit-and-run in Boyle Heights against a car driven by U.S. citizens.

• Attempts by ICE agents to enter public elementary schools and access children by pretending to have permission from parents (which they did not have and school administrators denied).

• Arrests of asylum seekers checking in with immigration officials as required.

• Detainment of lawful permanent resident green card holders and U.S. citizens.

• Raids at car washes.

• Raids at local Catholic Church parishes.

• Entering an elementary school in Torrance to deport a 9 year old child.

• Handcuffing United States Senator Alex Padilla for attempting to ask Department of Homeland Security Chief Kristi Noem questions at a press conference.

ICE Raids have often included masked ICE agents grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into vans. The raids have instilled fear and panic into the greater Los Angeles area.

Making matters worse, ICE did not pre-warn the LAPD who would have otherwise mobilized to help protect them from potential assaults from large and angry crowds who might potentially resist to protect loved ones. Trump Administration officials then complained about the LAPD not responding quickly enough to protect them.⁵

Now, the purported aim of these ICE raids is to arrest dangerous criminals. And it is true that some undocumented immigrants definitely deserve deportation.

Recently, renowned journalist

Sam Quinones

did a walking tour video of the Tenderloin, Talking Crime Reporting, Walking the Tenderloin, where he discussed the Honduran gang members who openly sold fentanyl in the Tenderloin during broad daylight, wreaking havoc on the neighborhood and further harming the addicts.

Those guys can go.

So can someone like Ingmar Guandique, the undocumented immigrant from El Salvador who was convicted of killing Washington D.C. intern Chandra Levy, only to have his sentence vacated due to prosecutorial misconduct. When he completed his sentences for attempting to rape two other women in Rock Creek Park, he was promptly deported.

As both Helen Hunt and David Spade, working as flight attendants for Total Bastard Airlines, once said: “Buh-Bye!”⁶

However, Los Angeles’s ICE raids have not targeted criminals. Instead, the raids appear to be a preview of mass deportation.

But if this is a preview, it’s a preview airing for a movie that hasn’t actually been made yet.

That’s because while Trump has talked about mass deportation, there doesn’t seem to be much of a plan for how mass deportation will actually work.⁷

There are many unanswered questions about removing 13 million undocumented immigrants who currently reside in the United States.

1. Why should we remove some of society’s most productive and genuinely needed members?

2. How will we make up the lost tax revenue?

3. What are the social impacts when we remove fathers from millions of households and leave massive numbers of American kids to be raised in fatherless households?

4. When we remove both parents from households and leave American kids parentless, what burden will we put on the foster care system?

5. Economically, how will we make up the lost consumer purchasing power?

6. How much taxpayer money are we prepared to spend on mass deportation?

7. Will there be tax increases taxes to pay it?

8. If we can’t hire enough manpower to round up 13 million people, will we re-start the draft?

The ICE Raids in LA have reportedly picked up 330 undocumented immigrants. However, it is estimated that there are over a million undocumented immigrants in the greater Los Angeles area. Thus, this entire operation is really a drop in the bucket at best.

So why do this?

While they cannot implement mass deportation, the Trump Administration can still instill terror. This has prompted widespread outrage.

This outrage has confused many right wing and “centrist” political commentators, who cannot understand why there are mass demonstrations in response.

What these political commentators do not fully understand is that in the greater LA area, undocumented immigrants are not set apart as a wholly separate group of people.

Instead, they are mostly integrated into the fabric of society.

Countless Californians rely upon undocumented immigrants in their businesses, their religious congregations, their neighborhood associations, and for their personal care. Taking away the undocumented immigrants would have ruinous consequences for many American citizens.

Moreover, most undocumented immigrants live in mixed status families. In particular, the children of undocumented immigrants who are born in the United States are American citizens.⁸ There is very real fear of families being separated. Many kids fear coming home from school to find mom and dad gone.

Some would argue that it should not be this way and would criticize decades of governmental policies that allowed 13 million undocumented immigrants to take up residence in the United States.

But what should be isn’t what is. And government policy needs to reflect reality, not ideal scenarios.

Put yourself in the shoes of an American child, especially a teenager, whose parents are undocumented.

How would you feel? What might you do to protect your family members? Or voice your displeasure? And what might you do if you realized you weren’t the only one in this situation?

For many teenage kids and young adults who have undocumented parents or other close relatives or undocumented friends, that sense of fear combined with lack of maturity lead to responses that are not always within the law. This will sometimes include ill-thought out things like running onto the middle of freeways. Last Friday, some attempted to actively impede ICE operations.

To be clear, I do not support actively impeding ICE operations (outside of exercising one’s constitutional rights). I further encourage anyone who decides to not listen to my advice to at least engage in civil disobedience in a peaceful and safe way. Most demonstrators are.

Now, the punditry believes any violence that occurs at demonstrations against ICE Raids is beneficial for Trump and the Republican Party. And right wing activists are thrilled when they can cheer someone unconnected to the protests loot a small business, vandalize a building, or harm a police officer.

Most Americans dislike civil unrest, want safe streets, and strongly dislike violence directed at police officers. The pseudo-intellectual justifications for violence, looting, and vandalism often fail to persuade them otherwise.

Thus, any kind of civil unrest is looked upon as being in the best political interests of Trump and the Republican Party.

But is it?

There is a strain of conservative thought that believes that the government should not be allowed to benefit from its own wrongdoing.⁹ Albeit rare, in some cases, when an individual commits a prohibited act that they otherwise would not have committed but for the bad acts of government, the government cannot then penalize that individual.¹⁰

It’s a concept that many centrists and moderate center-leftists agree with, particularly those who don’t accept pseudo-intellectual justifications for criminal behavior.

Thus, when the government stokes lawlessness, many voters who ordinarily disapprove of that violence have a very different reaction to the politicians who style themselves the champions of “law and order”.

In 1969, Ronald Reagan brought in National Guard troops to crush student protesters at UC Berkeley. As Governor, he was tough on student demonstrations, cracking down on the exercise of First Amendment rights. This often produced lawless reactions, including from those protesting at the People’s Park.

In 1970, Reagan won re-election against Assemblyman Jesse “Big Daddy” Unruh, but suffered a significant swing against him and was held to a single digit victory (the only time in his political career). However, Republicans lost control of the California State Assembly, which they had won in 1968 with a bare one seat majority.

This loss was singlehandedly caused by Reagan’s triumphant crushing of UC Berkeley students at the People’s Park.

At the time, UC Berkeley was represented in the State Assembly by seven (7) term Republican, Don Mulford, a law and order conservative, who had never won an election in that district by less than a double digit margin. Mulford, who had authored restrictive legislation against those he labeled “subversives”, strongly supported Reagan’s crackdown and applauded the use of armed troops against students.

In 1970, Mulford lost re-election in a landslide, suffering a 28% swing against him, which on its own delivered the Democrats control of the Assembly. Voters witnessed government-instigated violence and were appalled.

The Sunset Strip Riots of 1966, which Buffalo Springfield wrote “For What It’s Worth” about, tells a similar tale.¹¹

This disturbance occurred because of the efforts of Los Angeles County Supervisor Ernest Debs and Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Lamport to shut down the Pandora’s Box music club. Both staunchly conservative politicians disliked rock and roll music and hippies and supported aggressive law enforcement action to shut down Pandora’s Box, which resulted in violent responses from club patrons.

This was no one-off. Both politicians also opposed the gay and lesbian community. In their crusades against gays and lesbians, they supported brutal police raids of gay and lesbian clubs that had resulted in violence from resisting club patrons.

Did the violence of club patrons boost political support for Lamport and Debs?

No.

Lamport lost re-election in 1969 to a challenger who ran on a platform of full gay rights (two weeks prior to the Stonewall Riots, which is considered the birth of the gay rights movement).

By 1974, Debs was so unpopular that when challenged for re-election by Los Angeles City Councilman Ed Edelman, who supported gay rights and rock music, he opted to drop out and recruited conservative Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro to run in his place to carry on his conservative policies. Edelman won in a landslide anyway.

The moral of the story?

Voters find violence, vandalism, and looting unacceptable. However, when the violence, vandalism, and looting would not have occurred but for the government’s own improper actions, voters see through the virtue signaling politicians who support the government’s bad acts.

They will vote out politicians who either incite or excuse abhorrent government behavior. ICE Raids that are designed for the sole purpose of wreaking havoc and instilling fear into the community certainly fall under that category.

For what it’s worth, history demonstrates that there will be electoral accountability for politicians who support such behavior.

1. The author of this article is an attorney licensed to practice in the State of California and the District of Columbia. This article and all of the works on this Substack page are statements of the opinions of the author, only, and do not constitute legal advice; they are not intended to be relied upon by any individual or entity in any transaction or other legal matter, past, pending, or future. A paid subscription to this Substack page supports the author’s scholarship and provides access to research that the author has compiled, but does not establish an attorney-client relationship. The author does not accept unsolicited requests for legal advice or representation, and this Substack page is not intended as legal advertising. The opinions expressed on this Substack page reflect the personal views of the author only.

2. Sadly, this group of garbage people has unfortunately existed for a long time. They come out during riots, celebrations of Laker, Dodger, and Ram championships, and natural disasters. It hadn’t been 10 minutes from the 1994 Northridge Earthquake when these guys began looting Wilson’s House of Suede and Leather on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. When the Palisades Fire broke out and people began leaving their homes, they showed up to take. I don’t know what they do with themselves other times. But whatever it is, they were bound to show up here because when tens of thousands of people, mostly upset kids upset over the possibility of their parents being deported, what better time than to go loot the Adidas Store and the Apple Store on Broadway?

3. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1963)(Stewart, J., concurring).

4. It’s amazing what occurs when you fully fund the LAPD and elect a City Attorney and a District Attorney who will both actually prosecute crimes and not devote their departments into advocacy centers for criminal defendants.

5. Led by an alcoholic Secretary of Defense who discusses state secrets on social media, Pete Hegseth, and a Department of Homeland Security Chief, Kristi Noem, who is unfamiliar with basic provisions of the United States Constitution and bragged about killing her dog, perhaps this sort of total incompetence should be expected.

6.

7. Last month, after proposing massive tariffs on foreign produced films (that would be disastrous for Hollywood), in Trump Finds His Class War Wedge Issue in Hollywood: Movie Tariffs, journalist

Peter Kiefer

wrote of the proposed movie tariffs: “It’s unclear how it would work. No one knows what it would cost. And it’s anyone’s guess whether it will ever actually happen.” This line applies to Trump’s promises mass deportation plans. However, the result of this uncertainty is far worse.