The Violence in L.A. Isn't Organic

"It's not magic, it's just hard work"

Jun 12, 2025

This week’s new edition of The Big Ben Show is out, and you guessed it, it’s about California. Guests are Mic Solana of Pirate Wires on the tech-populist right split, and Matt Finn from Los Angeles on the ICE reaction there. Listen now, and read three related articles below:

Park Macdougald interviews Kyle Shideler in Tablet: Who Is Behind the LA Riots?

The Scroll: What is your sense of how the riot got started?
Kyle Shideler: Well, my understanding is that protesters essentially attempted to barricade ICE inside where they were staging for their raids, which is an activity that has been going on around the country for some time now. But this operation is obviously at a greater scale. The key indicator that this was intended to become a major incident to capture national attention was the presence of the SEIU, the SEIU president getting arrested, and the degree to which this rapidly escalated. So clearly this was not a handful of antifa guys just tracking ICE and causing mischief; this was intended to provoke a larger event, an event that would nationalize, and we’re now seeing today that they’re trying to spur things up in Chicago, New York, Houston. My concern is that if you look back before the election, they were talking about how to confront a future Trump administration over immigration, so they have been preparing for this for some time. This is the conflict that they wanted, and it’s the topic that they wanted.
Who is the “they” there?
Well, for a while, the hard radical left—the campus communists, the Palestinians, the pro-Hamas people—has been focused 100% on the Palestinian issue. And that was largely aimed at the Democrat establishment. Now we’re seeing the onus of street action shifting from the Palestinian angle to the ICE/immigration/Trump angle, which is where the establishment left would much rather have the conversation. So this seems to me like an attempt for the traditional American establishment left to reclaim control of the street radicals.
That isn’t to say there aren’t foreign activists involved. But you have the SEIU, you had Maxine Waters showing up right away to try to get in everybody’s face, you have very vocal opposition from [Los Angeles Mayor] Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom. So it’s much more like what we saw with BLM than what we’ve seen with the Palestinian stuff, where a lot of the animus was directed at the Democratic Party, especially in the lead up to the election.
So the institutional left is bringing the radicals back into the party fold?
I’d put it in terms of orienting everyone toward a shared opposition. People will sometimes think these radical groups are centrally directed by one set of bad actors, like George Soros sitting in the middle of a spider’s web. I think of them much more as an asset that can be deployed by a variety of groups for a variety of reasons. With the Palestine stuff, for instance, we’ve clearly seen targets chosen by groups that have links to foreign adversaries, but then you also have tentacles that direct them toward what we might think of as the American left’s priorities and focuses. For instance, you didn’t really see the major radical unions, like SEIU and the teachers’ unions, go to bat in the Palestinian protest stuff. Now they’re activating.
Talk about the SEIU’s role here. It seems to provide a sort of connective tissue between the street-level radicals, on the one hand, and Democratic donors and politicians, on the other hand. The union played a critical role in founding the Democracy Alliance, the Democratic donor association, and it raises hundreds of millions of dollars for Democratic candidates in every election cycle.
“Connective tissue” is exactly right. You often find that these unions serve as a home for street agitators, the professional protesters and the “direct action” trainers. It’s a place where they still understand the value of a certain amount of street politics—the ability to hold a pop-up rally, a protest, maybe a riot. So the unions provide for the institutionalization of certain capabilities, a place where they can live in a more or less respectable way. And a lot of the genuine radicals find a home in everyday union organizing. And then when something like this happens, they take off one hat and they put on the other hat. The SEIU in particular has a history of radical activity and also of being willing to rough up their opponents. People used to refer to them as the “purple people beaters” during the Tea Party town halls, because you had SEIU and ACORN reps who would show up and make things difficult for people.
So you have a lot of those types in the SEIU, and then I imagine there’s some kind of conversation that’s taking place with the more official elements of the Democratic Party, and there’s give and take. If you go back to that 2021 Time article about “fortifying” the 2020 election, it mentions the union leadership being one of the major players calling for aggressive resistance to Trump. The more establishment Dems, and Democrat money, were saying no, let’s do this [by] changing the rules and controlling state election boards and filing lawsuits.
I have thought for a while that there is a conversation of a sort taking place on the left between these various groups over how they want to run the left in America generally. There are certainly elements of the left agitating for street action. They want politics to be the politics of revolution. The Palestinian protests were trying to send that message to the party establishment before the election. Part of it is there’s a civil war inside the American left over how they are going to operate in a Trump world. Are the Democrats the party of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Party of Socialism and Liberation? Or are they the party of Wall Street and establishment money? The SEIU is this weird little nexus for that, because it has a foot in both camps.

Tal Fortgang in City Journal: LA Protests Aren’t Organic

The new dominant form of organized crime has shown its face in Los Angeles in recent days. Though it comes under the banner of “protest” and is whitewashed in the media as “mostly peaceful” and presumed spontaneous, a close observer can see that it is none of these things. It is in fact the result of a calculated civil terrorism movement taking advantage of Americans’ reluctance to treat criminals as criminals.
Images and videos from the riots give the game away. Why are there keffiyehs everywhere? What does Palestinianism have to do with preventing the federal government from enforcing immigration law, and how did the rioters know to show up covering their faces with the same symbolic gear? Who brought gas masks by the truckload? Who managed to convince hundreds of people to take up rock-throwing, Molotov cocktail-dropping, and arson at seemingly arbitrary places and times? Who laid the groundwork for street violence by training people in the tactics that prevent law enforcement from ending it promptly? As domestic-extremism expert Kyle Shideler puts it, this violence is “not black magic, it’s just hard work.”

Douglas Murray in The Spectator:

Yet from the time of his election as governor, Newsom tried to wheel out his San Francisco model on a state-wide level. The policies that had done for San Francisco and then Los Angeles include (in no particular order) incentivizing illegal migrants to come into the state, ensuring that homelessness is encouraged and home-ownership punished, legalizing just about every mind-altering substance known to man and presenting law enforcement as the enemy of the people.
Of course Newsom did all these things under the same glorious cover that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan wears – that great cloak of left-wing “compassion.” Law enforcement is easy to present as lacking in compassion. Making a city a “sanctuary” allows politicians to present themselves as “kind” and filled with “empathy.” Saying that illegality cannot be allowed is “mean” and “unkind.” Promote mass illegal migration? “Healing.” Try to stop it? “Divisive.”

Most of the problems in America, as in Europe, can be chased down to this asymmetry. If you encourage lawlessness you can be seen to be doing it for all the right reasons. If you encourage following the law you will be portrayed as doing it for all the wrong reasons. Allow people to break the law on a grand scale and there is no punishment. Try to mop up that mess and you will be the bad guy.

So it is with the stand-off between Donald Trump and Newsom. A conservative estimate suggests that between 10 and 12 million people entered the US illegally in the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency – almost doubling the number of illegals in the country. Trump has already fulfilled his campaign promise of sealing the southern border, so that the number still breaking into the country via that route is effectively zero. But he is also intent on fulfilling his campaign promise of removing the people already in the country who shouldn’t be. He and his border czar, Tom Homan, have made it clear that they are prioritizing the removal of the more than half a million illegal migrants in who are thought to have criminal records.

Why Zaslav’s Split Means the End of CNN

Dylan Byers in Puck:

On Monday, minutes after David Zaslav announced his long-awaited and well-telegraphed plan to split Warner Bros. Discovery into two companies—an allegedly growth-hungry streaming and studios business that he will run, and a debt-saddled, Versant-style cable channel spinco-shitco that he’s handing off to his C.F.O., Gunnar Wiedenfels—I received a deluge of text messages from addled employees at CNN, the asset that has arguably suffered the most during Zaz’s three-year leveraged buyout experiment. The question from many, whether in verbatim or in spiritu, was: What does this mean for us? Or, as one high-ranking CNN insider put it: Thoughts?! Reader, I have a few…
As you may have surmised, running a 24/7 global news network with foreign bureaus is expensive, and the underlying unit economics only make sense to the people inside the building. With the industry in inexorable decline, CNN’s ratings at a nadir, and younger audiences turning to user-generated schlock on YouTube and TikTok for news, those costs are increasingly hard to justify. The high-seven-figure salaries (or eight-figure, in a couple of cases) once seemed only slightly ridiculous. Now they seem appalling—especially since there’s no longer a market for this talent, or many of the producers that stand them up, at comparable rates.
Meanwhile, Fox News, which is built around relatively inexpensive studio programs, not newsgathering, has demonstrated an ability to effectively quadruple CNN’s audience—not just on any given weeknight, but increasingly during major national and international breaking news events where CNN once dominated. Inevitably, Gunnar will look at CNN and decide he can maintain relatively similar profits at a mere fraction of the cost.
This will have perceptible ramifications on the talent side. Why, for instance, would Gunnar pay Anderson Cooper $18 million a year when Kaitlan Collins draws the same ratings at roughly a fifth of the salary? (Of course, by the time Gunnar gets around to it, Anderson will likely have determined that he no longer wants to read the day’s news to less than a million people every night, either.) Does the network need more than a handful of marquee names hosting a few key hours, or can it pay younger, reasonably attractive talent mere hundreds of thousands to read the same transcripts off the teleprompter? Jake Tapper is locked into his own low-eight-figure multiyear deal, so will be the face of the network for a while longer—but is surely the last CNN talent who will ever come close to netting that kind of income…
There will also be significant layoffs, diminished resources, and persnickety indignities: shittier offices, fewer perks, and more scrutiny of the T&E. Along the way, there will be fond reveries about the old days, jokes about CNN+, and various reality checks. Earlier this week, Condé Nast hired a very nice 36-year-old to be the editor of Vanity Fair, for a fraction of Graydon’s old salary. That future is coming for CNN, too.

What Kind of Person Buys Sotheby’s New Merch?

Annie Armstrong for Artnet:

You are a budding young Hollywood starlet. You were plucked from obscurity in Wisconsin when a scout laid eyes on you, but got your breakout acting role just a year ago courtesy of a well-received indie movie. Around then, you moved to New York and were tepidly accepted into the cabal of powerful cultural players.
Late one night at a party, the son of a successful gallerist notices you from across the room. You’ve heard his name, but you still don’t really understand the “fine art” side of the New York cultural strata, so you’ve stayed gingerly out of it. The gallerist’s son is popular, though, and you are pleased he’s noticed you. He invites you to come out to Chelsea tomorrow, and he’ll give you a walkthrough of their new show, personally.
This feels like a big deal, so you accept. Then you excuse yourself to the restroom, where you go online and panic-buy a crop top that says SOTHEBY’S on it for $278, and the matching booty shorts for $228. You are too new to success to know if those are fair prices. But you need something to wear tomorrow, something that surely won’t give away your Midwestern roots. This—you think, half-drunkenly—is perfect.

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“Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”

— Cal Newport

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