Thread: Heavy military presence seen in downtown Los Angeles after days of immigration protes

Originally Posted by Troy

Perhaps a visit to Dallas, taking a familiar route, would be appropriate.

Do book repositories still exist?

If so, no need to lock up.

Recent polling across various surveys shows a conflicting message about whether people approve of Trump's deportation policies. This week, a CBS poll found 54% of people approved of his approach to deportation. But yesterday, a Quinnipiac poll showed 56% disapproved. The numbers indicate unpredictability within the public's opinion, showing that a percentage of people are open to being swayed, NPR's Domenico Montanaro tells Up First.

Up First briefing: Trump's immigration policies; Hurricane season prep : NPR

Originally Posted by cyrille

Do book repositories still exist?

The Dallas book depository still exists.

Originally Posted by cyrille

Do book repositories still exist?

If so, no need to lock up.

There's a very convenient grassy knoll too.

Originally Posted by bsnub

What riots?

It looks fairly 'rioty' to me

Originally Posted by bsnub

It was less than 6 square blocks in two small locations in LA

I am not sure that being confined to 'only' 6 blocks disqualifies it as a riot.

Why are they flying the Mexican flag and burning the Merkin flag if they are wanting to stay in Merka rather than be sent home to Mexico?

Originally Posted by Looper

It looks fairly 'rioty' to me

It suddenly became much hotter when TACO wacko brought gasoline to the fire.
The video is shot after he took command.

Originally Posted by Looper

Why are they flying the Mexican flag and burning the Merkin flag if they are wanting to stay in Merka rather than be sent home to Mexico?

Viva Mexico, but they dont want to Viva en Mexico.

Originally Posted by Molle

The video is shot after he took command.

What do you mean by 'took command'?

The rioting started in response to the ICE agent activity.

The mobilisation of national guard and marines was in response to cars being burned, police cars being wrecked, cars being hit with rocks, police officers being stoned, flags being burned and city blocks resembling war zones etc.

Originally Posted by Looper

The mobilisation of national guard and marines was in response to cars being burned, police cars being wrecked, cars being hit with rocks, police officers being stoned, flags being burned and city blocks resembling war zones etc.

That is utter fucking horseshit. Your orange moron mobilized the guard almost immediately, he wants to incite violence, that is right out of the project 2025 playbook.

Pretty obvious where you are getting your "news".

Protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles have triggered a flood of falsehoods and conspiracy theories online, and Russia has sought to exploit and amplify them, experts say.

Russian media and pro-Russian voices have embraced right-wing conspiracy theories about the protests, including one that alleged the Mexican government was encouraging the demonstrations against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Mexico has strongly rejected the accusation — which was repeated by Trump’s chief of homeland security — as utterly false.

The episode illustrates how foreign adversaries are taking advantage of genuine divisions among Americans, a tried-and-true strategy in information warfare, analysts say. Right-wing American voices online are pushing the idea that the protests in Los Angeles are not what they appear and that a secret, leftist cabal tied to Democratic politicians and the billionaire philanthropist George Soros is orchestrating unrest, experts said.

“We are following a playbook that we’ve followed many times before. We’re seeing a lot of the same tropes, even a lot of the same exact conspiracy theories that we’ve seen circulate around previous protests,” said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University who studies social media disinformation. There were echoes of how falsehoods spread during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, he said.

“People are, as they tend to do on social media, believing the messages that they’re inclined to believe,” Linvill said. “And influencers are taking advantage of that, oftentimes with false or sort of purposefully misleading content.”

Right-wing users have posted baseless assertions that the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, has ties to the CIA and is orchestrating protests to oust Trump. “Bass is a political warlord. She’s utilizing her expertise to encourage these riots—to try to topple Trump & you,” wrote conservative podcast host Liz Wheeler on a post on X.

Moustafa Ayad of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international nonprofit that focuses on “safeguarding democracy,” said there were parallels to how social media users have reacted to previous protests or to hurricanes that struck the Southeast last year.

“I liken it to the aftermath of Milton and Helene last year,” Ayad said. “We have a crisis or a conflict point that is occurring, and there are numerous narratives that are being spread online that the government is somehow involved in the protests, paying protesters, or this is a deep-state plot against the United States by the CIA and other government actors,” Ayad said.

From the political left, narratives online have focused on how the federal government and the military were allegedly preparing to use lethal force, while right-leaning voices warned of plots to oust Trump and cause chaos in American cities, according to Ayad.

“It’s a bit like being on a seesaw, just gyrating between those two things,” he said. “Sadly, there’s this giant reinforcing loop that just builds further steam as the protests continue day to day.”

Baseless claims of Mexico fomenting violence

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Tuesday repeated baseless assertions online that the Mexican government was encouraging violent protests. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, quickly responded, rejecting the accusation as “absolutely false” but saying she was confident that the “misunderstanding will be cleared up.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Conservative and pro-Russian social media accounts cited an outdated video of the Mexican president as the basis for their claims she was fomenting protests in Los Angeles, according to NewsGuard, a fact-checking website. The video was taken from a press conference on May 24, nearly two weeks before the start of the L.A. protests.

The Mexican president’s remarks were taken out of context. Sheinbaum was referring to a proposed tax by the Trump administration on any income earned by Mexican immigrants that is sent on to their families in Mexico. She criticized the proposal and said at the time: “If necessary, we’ll mobilize” against the tax.

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson then posted the May 24 clip of Sheinbaum after protests began last week in Los Angeles and wrote that she was calling for protests in the United States. The post has received 6.7 million views. At a news conference on Monday, Sheinbaum made clear her government opposes any violence associated with protests. “We do not agree with violent actions as a form of protest.”

An opportunity for Russia

Bret Schafer, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund think tank’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, said Russia’s information operations online were embracing pro-Trump portrayals of the protests as a leftist violent assault.

“Russia is in effect cheering on Trump’s response and suggesting that it’s warranted,” Schafer said. “They have certainly intimated that these protests are being staged or funded by the radical left.”

Russian news outlet Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted a Russian blogger in L.A. saying the protesters were not migrants but “militants” who arrived on buses. Russian nationalist commentator Alexander Dugin wrote on X that the protests were an insurrection, a “nationwide conspiracy of liberals against not only Trump but against American people in general.”

Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer dubbed the “Merchant of Death” by U.S. and British authorities who was released in a prisoner exchange in 2022 after spending 11 years behind bars in the United States, also weighed in on the protests. Russian media outlet Pravda quoted Bout comparing the demonstrations to the 2014 Maidan protests in Ukraine against what was then a pro-Moscow government, with Bout claiming the L.A. protests were highly organized.

Pravda also quoted Sergei Markov, a former adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying the United States was in the middle of a “civil war” pitting coastal states against interior states.

Sputnik reposted a viral image of a pallet of bricks, asking why it was near the protest sites. But fact-checkers at Lead Stories geolocated the photo to a construction site about 3,000 miles away, in New Jersey.

Beijing accuses Washington of hypocrisy

China, however, was taking a different tack. Instead of leaning into pro-Trump narratives and repeating right-wing conspiracy theories, Beijing portrayed America as a country in turmoil. Chinese media and pro-China voices argued the American government’s response to protests in Los Angeles was “heavy-handed and therefore hypocritical” in light of Washington’s criticisms of other countries’ treatment of dissent, according to Schafer.

An affiliate of China’s global television network reminded viewers that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had praised protests in Hong Kong in 2019 as a “beautiful sight” but asked if the American government viewed the L.A. protests in the same way. A pro-Beijing commentator, Li Jingjing, denounced what she called U.S. interference in other countries’ affairs even as it denounced protesters on its soil. “US hypocrisy at its best,” she wrote in a post.

The pervasive online image of the supposed pallet of bricks frequently shows up when there are street protests, according to the Social Media Lab, a research team at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“It’s catnip for right-wing agitators and grifters,” the lab said in a social media post.

“The fact that these types of fake images are used isn’t a coincidence. It’s part of a pernicious & persistent narrative that protests against government policies are somehow inauthentic,” it added. The approach is “meant to make these movements seem less legitimate or less worthy of public support.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/nat...sts-rcna212652

And we've all forgotten Musk's tweet about the orange turd hiding the Epstein files.

Just fancy that.

Originally Posted by bsnub

That is utter fucking horseshit. Your orange moron mobilized the guard almost immediately

'Almost immmediately' after what?

My recollection of the events from the news cycle is that

1. ICE agents were going about ICEing as they have been doing for a while now.
2. Rioting started in LA including mehico, flags, burning cars, rocks thrown at public and police
3. The next day National guard and Marines were deployed by Trump

i.e. number 3 felt like a reasonable response to number 2 when I heard it

If you believe the sequence of events was different then what was the sequence?

Originally Posted by bsnub

he wants to incite violence

I think you are imagining this.

Originally Posted by bsnub

that is right out of the project 2025 playbook

What part of the '2025 playbook' does this represent?

Originally Posted by BLD

Command of the national guard has now been handed over to Gavin newsom by a judge.

Hopefully they will be disbursed at once and sent home, since they were never needed in the first fucking place. The LAPD and the LA county sheriff's office are perfectly able to handle these small, localized disruptions.

Originally Posted by Looper

I think you are imagining this.

Well, you are a clueless fucking idiot and have proven that time and again.

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

1. ICE are dragging anyone off the streets and locking them up/deporting them without due process. This is a clear violation of the constitution. There are protests against this in many states.
2. "Rioting" was when the police waded in heavy handed to a minor protest and turned it into a major one, but in a THREE BLOCK area. Do you know how big LA is?
3. The orange turd eagerly ordered the National Guard in when he has no authority to do so (as per federal court).
4. He then sent marines in.

I don't know if this sequence of events is correct or not, but Trumps actions still do not seem unreasonable, if so.

i.e.
1. ICE is doing its ICEing
2. Demonstration starts
3. Police (California State force) use heavy handed tactics
4. Riots begin with burning vehicles to which state police do not respond adequately
5. Trump sends in National Guard/Marines

Originally Posted by bsnub

The LAPD and the LA county sheriff's office are perfectly able to handle these small, localized disruptions.

They may be 'able to handle these small, localized disruptions' but they did not seem to actually be doing so, which made the National Guard escalation seem warranted.

It could be argued that it was Newsom's responsibility to do so and Trump was out of line. But if Newsom sits back and watches while LA burns (possibly hoping that the riots will reflect badly on ICE) then at some point federal intervention seems reasonable.

Originally Posted by BLD

I really can't see a way out of this madness that Americans have inflicted on themselves.

if only Thomas Matthew Crooks had a delorean

Originally Posted by Looper

But if Newsom sits back and watches while LA burns

Have you ever been to LA Looper? LA county is over 4000 square miles, my dude. These "riots" covered two small areas of less than 6 square blocks.

It seems to me you are just parroting the very right wing propaganda that is now being poisoned by even the ruzzians.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Have you ever been to LA Looper?

I cycled through LA and spent a few days exploring the place on a bicycle trip from Vancouver down the US east coast years ago.

I then flew back to Vancouver and swapped my bike for my rucksack before flying back to LA to continue south to Mexico and Central America on foot.

I have a vivid memory of the streets around the bus station in South Central and the shuffling army of zombie like characters that started slowly ambling in unison towards me like triffids as I tried to switch buses to get to Tijuana at 2am.

Originally Posted by bsnub

LA county is over 4000 square miles, my dude. These "riots" covered two small areas of less than 6 square blocks.

I still don't think being confined to 'only' 6 blocks disqualifies the activity as unriotworthy and therefore undeserving of possible federal intervention in the face of Democratic state governmental insouciance.

Have you ever been to LA Snubs?

^ It's gross overreaction in my book.

Seen bigger football riots than that.


...and yes, I've been to LA, worked there a few times.

If you have a business, home or work near the area of the riots, you would want the rioting to quickly stop. Governor Newsom seems to be a very capable man. I wish Mr. Trump had given him more time to sort it out. Interesting post from bsnub about the outside influences. I suspect Putin is briefed regularly about Russia's nefarious activities in the US. He probably enjoys those briefings as much as Mr. Trump enjoys Fox News.

Originally Posted by Looper

I still don't think

Yes, we fucking know, since you keep coming out with shit like:

Trumps actions still do not seem unreasonable

Originally Posted by Troy

^ It's gross overreaction in my book.

Yes it is, but deliberate.