RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/06/11/los-angeles-has-fallen/

Los Angeles is burning again, and it is not the Olympic flame. After riots in 1965, 1992 and 2020, Angelenos are bearing witness once more to a rash of violent unrest. US president Donald Trump deployed the National Guard at the weekend and he has since called in the Marines, too. Trumpian lunatic-in-chief Steve Bannon even suggests these riots augur a domestic ‘World War 3’.

Reality may not be quite so grim, but it is understandable if the world feels less than enthused about flocking to LA for the Olympic Games in 2028 – or the World Cup in 2026. Yet come they will.

Ahead of the Paris Olympics last year, the French capital was similarly disrupted by sometimes violent protests. And as happened there, a huge security presence will be needed for LA. Indeed, the Paris games required 45,000 police officers, 10,000 soldiers and 22,000 private security staff. If Kamala Harris were in the White House, substantial aid would surely flow to LA to allow it to mount an operation on a similar scale. But now the city must petition the mercurial and spiteful Trump for security assurances.

LA28, the organisation responsible for organising the games, claims it has secured enough sponsorship and television deals to meet its needs – and that had better be true, given the city’s fiscal situation. LA today lacks the entrepreneurial dynamism that once defined its remarkable rise. Fortunately, the city’s sporting legacy – notably its two previous Olympics – has bequeathed it the stadia and much of the infrastructure needed to host the world, and even to protect it.

But unless vast sums are spent on a Potemkin-like makeover, the world will also witness what many of us residents have long suspected – that the city is slipping into an inexorable decline.

Things were very different in 1932, when LA first hosted the Olympics. With a population of 1.2million – a third of today’s population – LA was still fledgling. But the 1932 games served as a wake-up call to the world that LA was on its way to becoming one of the planet’s great cities.

I covered the run-up to the second LA Olympics, in 1984. It was arguably the most successful games in history, despite Russia’s Cold War-era boycott. This was LA at its peak – with native son Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the defence, aerospace, housing and entertainment sectors all booming. ‘LA’s the place’, as the promoters then put it, and few could deny the truth of it.

Some may hope the new games will rescue the city from its doldrums. But numerous studies show that hosting an Olympics offers, at best, fleeting economic benefits – and often leaves enormous burdens. It can provide an opportunity to make a statement, heralding the rise of cities such as Berlin under the Nazis in 1936 or Beijing under the CCP in 2008. But staging an Olympics in a city plainly in decline seems a fool’s errand.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/los-angeles-riots-trump-national-guard-ice-immigration

After a day and a half of rioting in Los Angeles County, President Donald Trump activated the National Guard to protect federal officers and property. The riots were triggered by ICE’s attempts on Friday, June 6, to arrest a few dozen illegal aliens.

The president’s mobilization order, signed on Saturday, June 7, was clarifying and precise: “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

L.A.’s illegal-alien riots have provided Trump with a picture-perfect opportunity to deliver on his central campaign promises: the era of tolerating arson, looting, destruction of property, and attacks on law enforcement is over; the era of enabling endemic immigration lawlessness is over. And that picture-perfect opportunity has filled the Democratic establishment with impotent rage.

It is fitting that Los Angeles would be the staging ground for the White House’s affirmation of law and order. California leads the country in its contempt for immigration law in particular, and for public order more generally. From October 1, 2022, to February 6, 2025, California’s jails and prisons refused to allow ICE agents to take custody of 13,025 illegal-alien criminals—over half of all such refusals nationwide. By comparison, Illinois was a distant second, with 2,946 refusals, and New York State, with a “mere” 873 refusals, was sixth. Jails controlled by the Los Angeles Police Department and by the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department released 1,037 illegal-alien criminals over that period, including six homicide suspects or convicts, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

California’s cradle-to-grave welfare subsidies for illegal aliens and its widespread sanctuary policies have made the state a magnet for border-crossing migrants. That longstanding encouragement of immigration lawlessness has bred a sense of entitlement. The illegal-alien riots serve as an object lesson in Broken Windows theory: tolerate lawlessness in one sphere of activity, and you will cultivate it in another.

California’s Democratic officials and sanctuary activists take it as a given that ICE has no right to make immigration arrests at or around workplaces—which is where the Friday enforcement actions took place. This no-workplace enforcement principle, made up out of thin air, is just a site-specific variant of a broader rule that the open-borders lobby has willed into existence: the government may not create anxiety in illegal aliens.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/06/10/the-joe-biden-riots/

The National Guard was called in to California to protect law enforcement officers who are executing legitimate operations from the feral mobs. Had the previous president fulfilled his constitutional duty, as he promised he would when he took the oath of office, the spasm of violence over illegal immigrant arrests would have never happened, and President Donald Trump would have never had to make that call.

The scenes in Los Angeles are disturbing. An assortment of thugs, screeching harridans, and nothing-else-to-do troublemakers have been blocking and physically confronting officers, hurling bricks and rocks at them, setting fire to private property, destroying taxpayer-owned property, taking over streets, looting, and terrorizing businesses.

Protests? An exercise in free speech? It feels like an insurrection. Or maybe an invasion, since some of the agitators have waved foreign flags. Or an attempted blue massacre. Whatever the terminology, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass admits that if the administration weren’t enforcing the law, there would have been no “disorder.”

Andy Ngo, who has for years documented violent mob behavior (and been a victim of it), sees what many fear, yet some (let’s call them Democrats) want.

“If the political violence continues in Los Angeles,” he says, “it will be used to galvanize and inspire far-left extremists and Antifa cells across the country to incite anti-government insurrections in different cities. What we are witnessing now is almost exactly what happened five years ago. The same networks and militants are involved. It is their same playbook.”

The lawlessness has already spread to San Francisco, where nearly 150 have been arrested and two officers hurt. The police said some protesters “became violent and began to commit crimes.”

https://lizpeek.com/daily-rant/dont-bet-against-america-why-u-s-growth-still-beats-europe-and-china/?utm_source=newsletter.lizpeek.com&utm_

The big investment (and political) story of late suggests that the U.S. has lost its way, all because of President Trump. The administration’s “chaotic” trade policies and the U.S. fiscal picture, pundits tell us, are driving investors to send money elsewhere. American exceptionalism, we are told, is on the way out.

The Economist, for instance, posits that the U.S. is falling behind in the global race. But – spoiler alert – they’re struggling to win the argument.

Case in point: recently one of their writers, Stanley Pignal, head of the magazine’s Brussels bureau, wrote an amusing piece about Europe titled “The Unbearable Self-Indulgence of Europe.”

He sums up the European mindset thus: “The world is going to hell, meaningful economic growth is a long-forgotten phenomenon, and by the way what are your plans for summer?” What does Pignal think should keep Europeans up at night? War, of course, and Trump (he may be a realist but he’s still works for the Economist) and also, “its big companies are also-rans and the continent’s population is shrinking for the first time since the plague seven centuries ago.”

In short, “Europeans know the global race for economic supremacy is lost.” Why? Because “the continent’s business model endures: it is a third poorer than America, works a third less, and is a lot more tanned at the end of August.”

Meanwhile, last Friday cousin publication the Financial Times sounded the alarm: “Big investors lose faith in American exceptionalism,” saying concerns about US deficits and trade policies have caused a “sell-off in the dollar and left Wall Street stocks lagging behind European rivals”. The author points out that after 15 years of outperformance that has driven US markets higher, big investors have been shifting funds overseas. Why? Partly because Germany has decided to spend a boatload of money on infrastructure and defense.