This weekend’s immigration protests in LA showed every element in American politics at its absolute worst. The right was rabidly xenophobic, President Trump belligerent and authoritarian. Democratic leadership clueless, unfocused, weak and in denial – and the left manipulative and deliberately violent. Anyone with a whit of sense stayed as far away from the proceedings as possible.
The right does no one any favours when they discuss America’s immigration problems as a war for the future of civilisation. Maybe in the case of the Egyptian national who torched elderly Jewish people in Boulder last weekend, they have a point, but not when it comes to the quotidian ICE immigration operation that just went down in LA.
It’s just such ludicrous protest kabuki
But opposing that operation isn’t exactly something on which the left should hang its balaclava either. Judging from the vociferous weekend-long passion play we saw unfold, you’d think that ICE had loaded the residents of an orphanage or a nunnery into a van, gouged out their eyes, and sent them to a windowless dungeon.
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