Trump Started the Fire

Donald Trump and his Republican Party started the fire in Los Angeles.They incited protest with masked kidnappings of people in public spaces and now they're trying to blame Democrats for the results.

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Republicans are, naturally, blaming Democrats for the protests, using Trump’s favorite trick of bad-mouthing blue cities, Democrats, Democratic officials, and voters, a habit of his that for which he is never held accountable by our media.

It’s just taken for granted that the standards are different for Trump; he is allowed to taunt, to mock, to humiliate, to harass citizens and peaceful protesters and voters but they can’t return fire.

Trump can send masked, unidentifiable agents to kidnap people off the streets and from peaceful public areas and Home Depots and people are supposed to stay peaceful. He can have 4-year-olds detained without their parents and people are charged to stay peaceful. He can send people without due process to a prison in El Salvador and people are supposed to not be scared when a team of masked lunatics behaving a lot more like a militia than a well-trained immigration agent grab family or friends and disappear them.

People are to remain completely calm and not even set fire to a vehicle when their neighbors are being disappeared without due process. The people are charged with remaining peaceful when the head of the SEIU is detained without cause in an overcrowded facility after being hospitalized with injuries from that masked militia. People are charged with remaining 100% peaceful even as Trump violates the law by sending in federal troops against the wishes of the state and local government. People

are charged with every single individual remaining 100% peaceful when their elected officials are denied access to conduct oversight on those detainment facilities, which is yet another violation of the law by Trump.

Just how many laws does the convicted felon need to violate before his party will hold him, and not the People or the Democrats, responsible for the actions of a few among hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters?

Just exactly how low is the bar for Trump? Because right now it appears as if even Trump, who is out of shape and doesn’t know what he’s signed or what D-Day is, can clear this bar without a thought because the bar does not exist.

I question the focus of the media, Republicans and Democrats lecturing people about remaining peaceful when their inherent rights are being stolen and the highest court in the land has granted the person doing it “immunity,” especially when the majority of people are being peaceful even as they are being incited and inflamed with militarized violence aimed at them.

They should be using power to demand the rights of the people be upheld and that Trump cease violating the law, because that is what started this.

They should ask one of the many Republican lawmakers defending the violent January 6th insurrectionists who attacked police officers to explain to us all exactly where the line is. They are “peaceful patriots” for attacking law enforcement to the point of terrorizing them and causing so much trauma that some did not recover — they did this over a lie that Trump had won an election that he lost — but folks watching peaceful neighbors being grabbed off of the streets by masked agents in unmarked cars are supposed to remain 100% peaceful when military troops are sent in, and law enforcement is firing rubber bullets, tear gas, and flash-bangs at them?

This was started, unsurprisingly, by the man who lied about immigrants in his campaign repeating his baseless accusation, “They’re eating the dogs."

Trump continues to lie about the protestors and Democrats, blasting Newsom for “causing a lot of death” in the protests, but California authorities hadn’t reported ANY deaths as of the time he said this, and any that occur now will most likely be as a result of Trump’s aggressive militarization to silence First Amendment rights — unlike what happened as a result of Bloody 1/6.

Will the media allow Republicans and the White House Press Secretary to blame Democrats for that, too?

Marines deployed to Los Angeles against the Governor’s expressed wishes as part of Trump’s efforts to silence the right to protest in a free country are authorized “to detain anyone who interferes with immigration officers on raids or protesters who confront federal agents,” according to Reuters.

Reuters also reports that the protests are still “largely peaceful, but occasionally punctuated by violence, mostly contained to a few blocks of the city's downtown area.”

Los Angeles is a huge city (former Angeleno here), yet the media and Republicans keep showing just a few blocks of footage and then the 101 protest footage, which is not an accurate depiction of the majority of the protests.

No doubt they are showing that footage because it’s attention grabbing, but it does not reflect the majority of the protests or the city. For example, some folks have been dancing in a line in front of federal troops, others have been leaving flowers for the troops. People have been getting ICE kicked out of hotels through objections and yelling at them as they leave - yelling at the people who kidnapped your neighbor who is not a criminal is hardly out of line.

Dancing protesters:

Why is ICE masked? Why aren’t they identifying themselves as all other law enforcement must do?