L.A. Riots Show Dem-Media Complex’s Loss Of Narrative Control

As much as it’s horrifying to watch a city burn and the lives of cops and federal agents threatened by violent protesters, there is a silver lining to the last several days of rioting in Los Angeles. The desperate attempts to spin what’s happening do a fairly good job of illustrating what’s wrong with the political discourse in this country — and further demonstrate that the dishonest sophistry used to excuse violent riots in 2020 is no longer remotely persuasive.

Still it’s worth classifying and breaking down the specific arguments and talking points that have been employed by the Democrat Party-media-industrial complex since the riots began. When those arguments are examined in isolation, it becomes even clearer why attempts to justify the violence in L.A. are falling on deaf ears.

Misleading Attempts to ‘Contextualize’

Since the riots began, there have been the usual attempts to selectively present the violence and protests in such a way as to downplay what’s happening. For some reason, media figures have been obsessed with pointing out that the rioting is only occurring in a small portion of L.A. Here’s a local news reporter in L.A.:

Some perspective for people that don’t live here. The protests in L.A. are happening downtown, within the red area. That red area is 0.2% of the city, and 0.02% of the county. The majority of the protests are peaceful, a small fraction are violent. pic.twitter.com/9LhV5Afc63

— Adam Krueger (@AdamKrueger) June 11, 2025

CNN’s Brian Stelter, along with many others, has also been at pains to emphasize this same point:

This clip is for all my L.A. friends who texted me tonight saying things like “I’m sure you know this, but 99.9% of LA is going about their Sunday normally” pic.twitter.com/9NwaRzMruK

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 9, 2025

The Associated Press chimed in by emphasizing that “much of the city saw no violence.”

So what? It’s true that the violence and protests have occurred over a small part of L.A., but what’s the point? L.A. is a vast, sprawling urban area, and regardless of whether the violence is confined to the downtown, ordinary Americans find burning cars, looting stores, and throwing large rocks at cops from freeway overpasses utterly unacceptable no matter where they occur.

The problem is that context in these cases is always selective; so while you can attempt to couch everything in facts that make these protests seem less significant than they are, there are usually other salient facts that get ignored when choosing the context.

For instance, the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol essentially lasted four hours — and the media spent the next four years scrutinizing everything that happened with the specific goal of portraying the American right broadly as a uniquely threatening. We’re now on day eight of the L.A. riots, and from the moment it began the media have been looking for ways to downplay the significance. The double standards are glaringly obvious.

Downplaying Violence

The attempts to recontextualize everything all have an ultimate goal, intended or not, and that is to excuse violence. Note the reporter above saying, “The majority of the protests are peaceful, a small fraction are violent.”

Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made a point of blatantly lying, “There’s no riot outside. We have more so-called ‘unrest’ here when one of our teams wins a championship.”

After rioters looted an Apple store the night before, The New York Times called L.A. protests “muted.”

Someone on a local ABC affiliate actually described the riots on air as “just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn.”

The New Yorker ran a cartoon with a couple of cops on horseback looking at a crowd with the caption: “The protesters seem to be doing some sort of joyful synchronized dance. Is it time to call in the Marines?” And on and on.

Look, you can go online and see videos of the protesters breaking up sidewalks to create rocks to throw at the cops and creating barriers in the middle of the street to hide behind as they use actual mortars to launch illegal exploding fireworks at the cops. These protests are undeniably violent, and anyone who says otherwise is straight-up lying.

Again, some context would be helpful. Just because not everyone at a protest is violent or rioting doesn’t mean you get to say everything is mostly peaceful. In 2020, there were around 11,000 BLM protests, and one out of every ten turned violent. Yes, you could argue 90 percent of Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful — but it would be more honest to say that there was an overwhelming rash of civic violence all across the country in 2020 that was directly connected to the BLM movement. It was a straight-up insurgency by historical definitions. At the same time, a far smaller portion of the total police or ICE interactions turn violent, and you would never see the media characterizing either as “mostly peaceful.”

At War with the Facts

The attempts to downplay such obvious violence quickly run into absurd territory. What are you going to believe? What the media tells you or your lying eyes? Here’s The New York Times:

Here’s the NYT doing some heavy lifting on the “don’t believe your lyin’ eyes” beat. pic.twitter.com/zCagt3KX8e

— Disinformation Expert Lizzy (@StarChamberMaid) June 10, 2025

And here’s Stelter, again, telling us, “The powerful algorithms that fuel social media platforms are feeding users days-old and sometimes completely fake content about the recent unrest in L.A., contributing to a sense of nonstop crisis.”

Yes, it’s true that misinformation online is a problem. But it’s also true that nearly everyone complaining about it in the context of the L.A. riots is also downplaying the violence and is unhappy that the legacy media no longer gets to set a political narrative helpful to the protesters and national Democrats.

Stelter at least tips his cap to the fact that the misinformation can cut both ways but isn’t really hiding his sympathies. In any event, a few hours after Stelter suggested the “sense of nonstop crisis” was an online invention, the crisis proved real enough that L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, no doubt reluctantly, declared a curfew.

Blame Shifting

Since the beginning of the riots, Democrats have tried to shift the blame — with virtually no pushback. It’s basically an approved talking point that all the violence in L.A. is the Trump administration’s fault, an argument that has been made with sociopathic intentions.

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 10, 2025

Gavin Newsom has been making the same disingenuous argument, telling J.D. Vance, “We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved.” Again, ICE was trying to disrupt cartel activity in L.A., which seems like a big problem. He’s also dubiously saying Trump administration law enforcement caused criminal behavior: “Violent criminals who take advantage of Trump’s chaos WILL be held accountable.” (If past is prologue, the L.A. district attorney will drop almost all the charges against rioters.)

But the Trump administration is obviously not to blame for enforcing immigration law — and regardless, the media have conveniently buried the fact that the ICE raid that supposedly touched off the violence in L.A. wasn’t some random sweep of illegal immigrants. It was a raid to stop a cartel-linked money laundering operation.

Further, even if federal agents had been reckless, that doesn’t change the fact that cities such as L.A. have intentionally gutted their police forces and been deliberately lax on crime for so long that they can’t get a handle on unrest for days. As a result, the city is basically governed by anarcho-tyranny; it’s a place where, as Adam Carolla notes, they will arrest you for smoking on the beach but allow you to light cars on fire.

In any event, Karen Bass publicly suggesting there’s a connection between ICE agents doing their job and her voters looting a mall is risible. And yet the media will again tell you with a straight face, “These protests, which have been abbreviated in the media as ‘unrest,’ were actually a cry of hope, and a reminder of the human need for community, the need to turn to each other to find something to believe in.”

Anyway, take some comfort in the fact that the attempts to retcon obvious criminal behavior into a “cry of hope” aren’t exactly going well.

Conspiracies

Political conspiracies are everywhere these days, and I won’t excuse the conspiratorial thinking on the right. That said, at least the worst conspiracies on the right come from the online fever swamps. The left not only has their own online extremists, but some of their most insane conspiracies come from the supposedly prestigious legacy media outlets they excoriate us for dismissing. A major feature of the coverage of the riots from the beginning has been that Trump didn’t just intentionally stoke the violence in L.A. — he’s deliberately doing this to seize power.

Here’s CNN: “Trump is hyping a case to use American troops on domestic soil”

The New York Times: “Trump Declares Dubious Emergencies to Amass Power, Scholars Say”

David Frum in The Atlantic: “If Trump can incite disturbances in blue states before the midterm elections, he can assert emergency powers to impose federal control over the voting process, which is to say his control.”

This is pure insanity and totally unsupported. There would be no deployment of troops if Dems swiftly cracked down on the rioters with their own cops, restoring law and order without letting violence drag on for days. But they simply lack the will to do that.

And in particular, Frum’s contention that Trump is provoking violence to seize control of elections is not only wildly unsubstantiated, it’s wildly irresponsible. If supposedly credible publications circulate the wholly unsupported claim that Trump is trying to nullify elections, they are justifying violence against the government.

Nakedly Anti-American Sentiment

One of the most revealing aspects of the coverage is that the media have been seriously entertaining bizarre left-wing claims about America’s ownership of California and the Southwest somehow being in dispute. The implication that it’s somehow unfair to kick illegal immigrant Mexicans off their own land has been everywhere.

Former Univision anchor María Elena Salinas went on CNN to argue that her family roots are deep in L.A. “California was part of Mexico, all of the Southwest is Mexico.” Except that when America acquired the Southwest from Mexico in 1848, Mexico had only controlled the territory a couple of decades — “The Simpsons” has been on the air longer than Mexico ruled California — and there were virtually no Mexicans living in the territory. To the extent that there are Hispanics in the area, it’s almost all from illegal migration since.

Pop star Katy Perry made a much-circulated, historically illiterate social media post arguing that Los Angeles was “founded by Mexican settlers in 1781.” L.A. was, of course, founded by the Spanish as a colonial settlement, not by “Mexican settlers,” and generally the pro-immigration left is of the opinion that settler colonialism is very bad. As David Polansky quipped, “Over a long enough timeline, I guess even conquistadors become indigenous.”

Another very problematic issue for the people supporting the protests has been that normal Americans have been repelled by images of rioters routinely waving Mexican flags. The rioters are presumably very upset about the possibility of ICE sending people to live in a country they take great pride in being from?

In any event, the media attempts to explain away flying a foreign flag in an uprising against the federal government have been something to behold. The New York Times probably takes the cake here:

The New York Times tried to tell us that a Supreme Court justice’s wife flying a flag associated with the Revolutionary War was “provocative” and possibly treasonous.

They are now telling us that flying foreign flags in the middle of violent riot is “pride in their heritage.” pic.twitter.com/jpO8tF86QN

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) June 10, 2025

Taking Sides

At root, though, there’s often no deeper analysis required — the media are just obviously taking sides. It’s pretty hard to read the coverage any other way; here are just a few examples pulled from Drew Holden’s eye-popping X thread:

No Morals, Just Politics

Finally, perhaps the biggest tell is that there are no moral arguments made against rioting or criminal behavior to be found anywhere. This is Gavin Newsom’s best attempt to discourage violence:

California — Don’t give Donald Trump what he wants.

Speak up. Stay peaceful. Stay calm.

Do not use violence and respect the law enforcement officers that are trying their best to keep the peace.

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) June 8, 2025

Note that there’s no moral argument against rioting. No pleading with protestors to stop damaging their communities. No telling people to stop destroying businesses. The most persuasive thing he can conceive of is telling people not to help Trump.

It’s politics all the way down. When you have an entire political movement willing to blur the line between rioting and “a cry of hope,” the unfortunate implication here is that the violence might be tolerable if the politics were different.

But condemnation of rioting MUST be without any political reservations for it to be effective. The Trump administration has been consistent about that, as well as serious about addressing the problem, given its willingness to call in the Marines and National Guard.

By contrast, Democrats such as Gov. Newsom and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have lamely shifted blame off themselves and sent mixed messages since the beginning of the riots. And national Democrats are struggling to support them.

Americans have wised up since 2020, and they’re not going to let politics and media gaslighting get in the way of seeing the L.A. riots for what they are — a complete failure of Democrat governance and a naked attempt to use violence to stop enforcing immigration laws a large majority of Americans want enforced.

Thankfully, none of these dishonest narratives appear to be working anymore — but that won’t necessarily stop us from seeing more radicalism and violence this summer.

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Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

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