Fool us once ...

Democrats, media no longer able to gaslight voters on law and order

California Gov. Gavin Newsom spent the last six months reinventing himself — or at least attempting to — in voters’ eyes as a middle-of-the-road pragmatist. He started up a new podcast, in which he invited conservative political and media figures on to discuss the issues of the day with him, and even seemingly backtracked on several lightning-rod issues, such as biological males competing in girls’ and women’s sports.

This weekend — poof — that’s all gone.

And along with it, any realistic path to the White House for the ambitious former San Francisco mayor.

When the anti-police riots broke out in Missouri in 2014 following the police shooting of a young black man in Ferguson, I predicted then that every day the riots continued, the Republicans were picking up another 50,000 voters nationally. Nobody except wealthy dilettantes enjoys seeing violent chaos in the streets.

That particular round of chaos helped propel Donald Trump to the White House in 2016.

The 2020 anti-police riots that lingered in Minneapolis, Seattle and other places for months on end later helped give Republicans control of the White House and both houses of Congress last year, returning Trump to the White House with a stronger hand than his first term.

And if the polls are to be believed, the law and order issue has had a substantial role in Hispanic and black voters moving from the Democratic Party to the Republican.

People in poor neighborhoods — and unfortunately, blacks and Hispanics remain statistically more likely to live in poor neighborhoods — want more police protection, not less.

“Defund the police” — of which “Defund ICE” is a part of — only sounds good on elite university campuses, white-majority gated communities, and coastal newsrooms.

For those who actually have to live with the results of underfunded police departments, the result is more crime and a decidedly lower standard of living.

Which brings us to this last week, when immigration authorities were repeatedly attacked by bystanders in a handful of Democratic-controlled cities — and local police did nothing to help secure the scenes.

There used to be a code among cops that when a fellow officer was attacked, it was all hands on deck. Local police departments, county sheriffs, state highway patrol, federal FBI, immigration and Secret Service would ALL rush to the scene. Often these arrangements were written up as “mutual aid” agreements. But even when not, the point was cops looked out for one another.

Only now, due to so-called “sanctuary laws” some jurisdictions have either cancelled their mutual aid agreements with the feds, or simply ignore them. San Diego and Los Angeles police stood by last week as federal cops were attacked for enforcing legally issued arrest warrants. (Notably when immigration arrests are made in places like Texas and Florida, local cops are there to assist and things don’t spiral out of control.)

In Los Angeles, full-on riots broke out — with stores being vandalized and burglarized, and cars set afire — and LAPD was nowhere to be found according to local news reports.

For Newsom then to announce that the protests were “peaceful” was laughable.

Has he learned nothing from the gaslighting about President Biden’t mental condition, the Russian collusion hoax, or the 2020 “mostly peaceful” riots?

American trust in the national media is at an all-time low, with fewer than one in five believing the media to be trustworthy. Given the above examples, its a well-earned scorn.

Trust in the Democratic Party is equally historically bad.

So when we watch supposed “protests” on television, see the burning storefronts, but have the reporter stand there and try to convince us that this chaos is “mostly peaceful” — well, we’re not buying what they’re selling.

Newsom declined to do anything to restore order in L.A. — and now expresses shock that President Trump has federalized the California National Guard and deployed it to restore order.

The national media is reporting that this is an “unprecedented” move — only like most everything else the national media reports as “unprecedented,” it really isn’t.

President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard in 1957 when Gov. Orval Faubus refused to protect black students during the integration of Little Rock public schools. And President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard in 1963 when local and state officials refused to protect black students attempting to attend the University of Alabama. Two years later, President Johnson again federalized the Alabama National Guard when Gov. George Wallace refused to have state or local police protect the rights of black civil rights marchers.

So for three administrations in a row, a state National Guard was federalized when the governor refused to protect public safety — choosing to chase votes instead of fulfilling their duty.

Despite Newsom’s dishonest claim that the California National Guard is being deployed “against” American citizens, the Guard is being deployed to protect businesses and bystanders from the ongoing riots.

Rather than perhaps learning from past mistakes, California Democrats are doubling down with a message apparently tailored to their increasingly white, affluent voter rolls.

L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has promised that her city government “will not stand for this” - i.e., the arrest of illegal immigrants on federal warrants.

Well, actually, yes she will.

The Supreme Court decided in 1842 in Prigg v Pennsylvania that under the U.S. Constitution, states cannot interfere in the enforcement of federal law within their borders. Pennsylvania had passed a law that attempted to overrule the federal Fugitive Slaw Law, and arrested a slavecatcher by the name of Edward Prigg, who was in Pennsylvania — a free state — trying to find escaped slaves to take back to their “owners” in the South.

While the Civil War and the resultant 13th Amendment blessedly made the Fugitive Slave Law irrelevant, the Prigg principle stands: States cannot interfere with federal law enforcement.

Which is bad news for Bass — and other Democrats who have been caught across the country trying to shield illegal immigrants from federal authorities. No sanctuary law on earth can overrule federal immigration law.

If you don’t like the law, try to change it — except voters (including a clear majority of Hispanics) want more immigration enforcement, not less.

So nationally it’s a losing proposition.

(The upside for sanctuary jurisdictions is that Prigg also decided that Washington cannot require a state to enforce federal law on behalf of the feds. So when cities, counties and states decide that their local cops will not arrest people for immigration violations, that’s just as constitutionally valid as the federal law enforcement operations within their borders.)

It’s hard to see how the Democrats turn this into a win. They’re already seen as the party that’s soft on border security and hostile to law enforcement. They do have the legacy media cheering them on, but nobody much believes the legacy media any longer.

Newsom may have thought he needed to shore up his bona fides with the party base as rumors continue to swirl of other Democrats considering a presidential run.

But by picking at a sore the Democrats would best let scab over, he likely cost himself the votes of independent and centrist voters — and the working class folks whose support any Democrat simply must have in order to win national office.

-30-