Blue State Blues: Karen Bass Fights Harder for Illegals than She Ever Did for Residents
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass looked doomed, politically, after the Palisades Fire. But she is attempting a comeback by championing the cause of the rioters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Bass has been a whirlwind of activity ever since black-clad anarchists started throwing bottles at police two weeks ago over ICE raids on criminals who are illegally in the U.S.. Some of the people ICE is picking up in L.A. are hard-core murderers. But the rioters want ICE abolished, and Bass wants the raids to stop.
If she had fought this hard for homeowners in the Pacific Palisades, perhaps more people would be rebuilding by now.
It is surreal to watch Bass and other Democratic politicians unite behind the riots — excuse me, “mostly peaceful protests” — as if they had not lost the last election partly because of their mishandling of the border.
Their agenda is reflected in media coverage, which is obsessed with stories about ICE — many of them false.
On Thursday, Bass promoted a fake news story — one of several hysterical rumors pushed by Democrats — that ICE agents had shown up at Dodger Stadium.
After the story fell apart, she was pressed by anchor Elex Michaelson of local Fox affiliate KTTV to explain what had happened. Instead of correcting the record, Bass blamed President Donald Trump for the confusion, accusing him, many times, of causing “chaos” in L.A.
Bass claimed she had “absolutely no tolerance” for violence against police officers and vandalism of public buildings. Yet she echoed the rioters in claiming the violence would only end once the ICE raids ended.
“This chaos needs to stop — and it can only stop out of the White House,” Bass told Michaelson, abdicating responsibility for law and order in her city, while also repeating the ultimatum of the rioters on the streets.
The mayor and the local media have spun the story that people are afraid to come to downtown L.A. because they are afraid of being arrested by ICE agents.
No — people are afraid to go downtown, or even down the block, because L.A. has been overrun by homeless people; because city streets no longer look like America, but rather like a Third World country; because crime has become so bad that even “safe” areas are not.
Earlier this month, I was at a stop light in Beverlywood, near our temporary home, with my kids in the car, when a homeless man came up to my window and started pounding on it.
The only reason we were in Beverlywood was that we had been displaced by the fire — the fire that erupted when Bass was overseas; the fire that destroyed even the best part of town because there were no firefighters deployed, no water in the hydrants, no police to guide evacuations.
The homeless problem has swallowed L.A. The city spends more on services for the homeless than it does on firefighting — and many of the fires are started by the homeless. Bass has barely made a dent in the problem.
What the homeless situation and the ICE controversy have in common is that in both cases, Bass and the Democrats are primarily concerned with caring for people who have no legal right to live in the city, at least the way they have chosen to live in it.
As residents of the Palisades learned the hard way, the last people who matter are legal residents, especially homeowners, who sweat to afford their mortgages and taxes and then receive almost nothing in return, when it counts.
But perhaps the L.A. electorate has a short memory. The Palisades Fire is something that happened to “rich” people, after all, and the ICE agents represent Trump, who is still a piñata for elected Democrats.
Bass, Governor Newsom, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) have decided that “resisting” Trump is better for their political fortunes than working with him — never mind the state’s staggering budget deficit, or the $40 billion it needs in fire relief.
Newsom has been telling anyone who will listen that Trump’s decision to federalize the California National Guard to suppress the riots, when he and Bass would not, was “illegal.”
The fact that a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit just shot down his arguments in a unanimous opinion will not change his tune. Already, Newsom is blaming Trump for the spread of wildfires across the state, deflecting from his own failures.
Bass has adopted a similar strategy, using the riots, and her opposition to Trump, to hide her failures, and the fact that America’s most beautiful city has become unlivable.
Judging from the attention she is receiving, her strategy is working. She is still running for reelection next year, and — bizarrely — she may win.
Meanwhile, amid the ruins, and the riots, L.A. is still supposed to host the 2028 Olympics. Don’t ask the mayor how that is coming along. I’m sure it’s Trump’s fault somehow.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of Trump 2.0: The Most Dramatic ‘First 100 Days’ in Presidential History, available for Amazon Kindle. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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