Having grown up in Los Angeles, I was as shocked as anyone when the city fell to riots in 1992 after the Rodney King trial. It was the first occurrence in my lifetime of the abject failure of law enforcement to protect law and order on a broad scale in Los Angeles. Businesses were looted and burned. Residents were assaulted and killed. Family-owned businesses relied on “rooftop Koreans” wielding AR-15s to intimidate would-be looters into taking their criminality elsewhere. Afterwards, everyone, including the police, said “Never again.”

And yet the rioting returned. After a long period of relative calm, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 brought it all back. Unlike the 1992 riots where “racism” was used as the pretext to rape and pillage, this time it was “fascism.” Local police were told to stand down by the Democrat politicians, which emboldened the criminals, and the contagion spread. This became the new blueprint for left-wing rioting, and every year since we have suffered some form of it, great or small, whether from environmentalists, pro-Hamas activists, open immigration fanatics, or George Floyd apologists. Like earthquakes, riots in Los Angeles are now simply accepted as a part of life.

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