I can.

Three, in fact.

But I’ll save them for the end. Meanwhile, yesterday’s mass scream of frustration was about as futile and useless as a protest can be. Let’s review the Ethics Alarms Protest Ethics Check List:

1. Is this protest just and necessary?

2. Is the primary motive for the protest unclear, personal, selfish, too broad, or narrow?

3. Is the means of protest appropriate to the objective?

4. Is there a significant chance that it will achieve an ethical objective or contribute to doing so?

5. What will this protest cost, and who will have to pay the bill?

6. Will the individuals or organizations that are the targets of the protest also be the ones who will most powerfully feel its effects?

7. Will innocent people be adversely affected by this action? (If so, how many?)

8. Is there a significant possibility that anyone will be hurt or harmed? (if so, how seriously? How many people?)

9. Are the protesters prepared to take full responsibility for the consequences of the protest?

10. Would an objective person feel that the protest is fair, reasonable, and proportional to its goal?

11. What is the likelihood that the protest will be remembered as important, coherent, useful, effective and influential?

12. Could the same resources, energy and time be more productively used toward achieving the same goals, or better ones?

The cumulative clear answers show a protest that is even sillier than the usual ones. We don’t have a king, and Donald Trump doesn’t act like one. If he did (or could), all the obstructionist, partisan judges we have seen over-reaching to block his legitimate policies would be in prison, without heads, or on the lam. The anti-democratic citizens (and illegals) demonstrating yesterday are not the supporters of our elected President and our system that elected him, but those who still refuse to accept that election (or his first one, for that matte).

They were also carrying signs like this (in Boston, at least):

Yes, this guy’s a moron.

“Number of kings holding steady at zero,” one conservative wag tweeted.

“The No Kings protests appear to be a massive success,” wrote long-time Trump Derangement victim Jonathan Chait. Success at what? Meanwhile, con-artist Elizabeth Warren tweeted, ‘Today, I stand with the millions of Americans making clear this country doesn’t belong to a king. It’s a democracy, and it belongs to the people.”

And the people voted for Trump over the undemocratically-nominated DEI hack your party gave them as an alternative, after four years of using a shell of a man as a puppet POTUS.

Trump is as much a king as Warren is a Native American.

I see three positive results of the protests. First, they were entirely peaceful, reminding everyone smart enough to be reminded but dumb enough not to have figured it out themselves. The events produced what constitutional protests are supposed to look like, and they were exactly what the anti-ICE riots in L.A. are not. Second, the protests illustrated why the Democratic Party is so unpopular and in danger of crumbling, just like its representatives in Congress showed us when they acted like second-graders to protest Trump’s State of the Union speech a few months ago. The protests contained a mess of varied far-Left obsessions, illustrated by Pride flags, pro-Hamas displays, call-outs for illegal immigrants, and advocacy for socialism and Communism.

Mostly, however, the protests were a nice safety valve release for the Trump Deranged like the sad, once-intelligent seniors on my Facebook feed, who sounded like they were going to the senior prom.

Vance Luther Boelter, the man being sought for the murder of two Minnesota state legislators, was appointed by Democratic Governor Tim Walz to a state board in 2019. Boelter also had flyers for today’s anti-Trump “No Kings” protests in his car along with a manifesto and a list of 70 political targets.

Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman and her husband were fatally shot in their home, and state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife barely survived the assassin’s attack on them. Hortman had received a lot of publicity for voting to block state benefits from going to illegal aliens.

Gov. Tim (Knucklehead) Walz said these appeared to be a “targeted act of political violence.” Boy, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to slip something by Tim…

Walz, as you probably know, has been fomenting violence against ICE and the Trump Administration by calling the immigration enforcement agency “the Gustapo.”

And another irresponsible and partisan court ruling is stayed…

Last night, in Newsom v. Trump, Federal District Court Judge Charles Breyer issued a ruling against President Donald Trump’s federalization of some 4000 California National Guard troops without California Governor Newsom’s request to stop the violent protests against ICE deportations in Los Angeles.

Gee, what a surprise: the judge is the brother of retired knee-jerk progressive Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. With amazing speed, Reason had a “Yay team!” essay to post by libertarian legal scholar Ilya Somin, who wrote, “Judge Breyer’s opinion strikes me as impressive and compelling.”

That’s odd: Breyer’s opinion strikes me as “it isn’t what it is” partisan junk, and plainly so. Somin’s defense of it struck me as libertarian junk. Somin:

“As Judge Breyer explains, National Guard troops are normally under the control of their state governments, and can only be federalized in narrowly specified emergency circumstances. The statute Trump relied on to federalize California National Guard troops, 10 U.S.C. Section 12406, can only be used in one of the following situations:

1) the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation;

(2) there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States; or

(3) the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States

The professor then writes that (2), the obvious justification being used by Trump, doesn’t work because “there is no rebellion.” There isn’t? Democratic cities across the country have been refusing to allow illegal aliens to be arrested and deported and openly defying Federal law. Now the “sanctuary cities” are allowing those illegals and their supporters to riot and endanger ICE agents while mayors and governors call the protests “peaceful” (and some governors call the Ice Agents “the Gustapo”…)

Rebelling against Federal law is a rebellion.

Breyer’s opinion did not even mention President Johnson sending in the Guard to Birmingham, Alabama without Governor George Wallace’s assent, the famous precedent for Trump’s action. How convenient.

Then, after Reason’s applause, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paused Breyer’s order A three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit scheduled a hearing in the case five days from now.

Sooner or later, Trump’s move will be ruled ethical, legal and legitimate.

BREAKING: California Democratic Senator @AlexPadilla4CA just crashed DHS Secretary Noem’s press conference in LA and was forcibly removed. pic.twitter.com/Q2sUWiImAM

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 12, 2025

Democrats are whirling like a proverbial dervish to see if shouting and faux outrage can overcome the obvious conclusion that California’s Senator Padilla behaved like a total asshole and thinks he can get away with it. With crazies running amuck in the streets of L.A., Noem’s security had no reason to allow a shouting fool get withing shooting distance of the Secretary. He was, we are told, not wearing the pin that identifies him as a U.S Senator, and he wasn’t behaving like a Senator, but rather as an uncivil activist trying to disrupt a press conference. He shouted a question while Noem was speaking, and was obviously trying to create a scene.

The narrative that Senators should be granted “deference” does not apply when they don’t act like Senators, or even relatively well-mannered plumbers. I’d have Padilla thrown out of D.C. Bar CLE ethics presentation if he barged in like that.

Democratic Party leaders are fomenting violence by behaving this way and trying to justify it.

If Fox News isn’t going to insist on accurate terminology over Axis propaganda and false narratives in our broadcast news, who will?

I just watched a Fox report from Los Angeles in which the reporter repeatedly referred to ICE arresting “immigrants” and “migrants.” Whoever it was should be disciplined, and, ideally, fired. I regard the use of those cover-words as deliberate complicity with the Axis media’s disinformation campaign, not only to demonize ICE, but to confuse the dimmer members of the public regarding what is happening and why it needs to happen.

This rhetorical sloppiness plays into the hands of partisan liars and open border activists like the disgusting Becky Pringle, featured in the previous post. It is also undermining the President’s immigration policies and law enforcement efforts. The current polls suggest that a clear majority of the public oppose the President’s deployment of the Marines to riot-torn Los Angeles, and that is the direct result of news media bias and public ignorance reinforced by incompetent or dishonest journalism.

Fox News, to be blunt, is barely a tolerable news source because its biases somewhat counter-balance the flagrant biases of the rest of our so-called “journalists.” It is equally lazy, imprecise, misleading and unprofessional as the rest, and in some respects more so: anyone who can watch ten minutes of “Fox and Friends” without their brain requesting permission to leave the room is a prime candidate to work as an intern at a bait shop. Fox New allowing its reporters to follow the progressive-dictated script to confound the issues in the Illegal Immigration Ethics Train Wreck is unethical and unforgivable.

These are illegal immigrants. They have no right to be in the country. They did not build the United States, and they are not being “scapegoated.” It their families suffer when they finally have to face the metaphorical music, that is their fault, not the fault of law enforcement. The reason that ICE has to employ draconian methods is 75% the responsibility of the Biden Administration for refusing to enforce the law for four years, with the rest of the blame lying with previous administrations and greedy members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who want to keep exploiting illegals to keep their costs artificially low.

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Yikes.

This is a propitious time to state, for the record, that the Ethics Alarms criticism, indeed condemnation, of what the 21st Century American Left and the Democratic Party has mutated into is not a partisan activity but an objective, non-partisan, and ethical one. I would take the exact same position regarding any party (I am a registered Independent) that jumped the Ethics Shark to the extent that Democrats have since at least 2012.

Readers of long-standing here will recall that I vociferously wrote though almost all of 2015 and 2016 that I would debase myself by voting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Presidential election until it became obvious that her party was cheating, manipulating the nomination process and media coverage to an extent that showed its contempt for democracy and the American people. I announced that an unethical party was at least as great a threat to the nation as an unethical, unqualified President (that was Donald Trump). I did not vote for either. By 2020 and of course 2024, he was no longer unqualified, and that the Democratic party was corrupt and untrustworthy was beyond debate.

The conduct of the Axis of Unethical Conduct (the resistance, Democrats and the news media) following Trump’s upset election only reinforced my belief, which has since become certainty. It has now been almost a decade of escalating totalitarian objectives and tactics emanating from the Axis. Its conduct and rhetoric revealed by the Los Angeles riots appears to be the apotheosis of its stunning ethics rot. I have written in previous posts that there is only one ethical side to the issue in LA, and that those who are incapable of seeing that fact are almost clinically deranged, frighteningly indoctrinated or unfixably stupid. Every day, indeed almost every hour, since the rioting started four days ago has supported my analysis.

Res ipsa loquitur means, “The thing speaks for itself.” The items I am listing and discussing below should speak for themselves, but I’m going to do a little speaking for them anyway.

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EA’s master of the long form comment has been scarce of late, but he has returned with another gem, this an analysis of the dynamic in play in LA and the White House. Here is Steve-O-in NJ’s Comment of the Day on the post, “More Thoughts and Observations on the LA Pro-Illegal Immigration Riots”:

***

I think what is happening here could be a bridge too far. What happened in 2020 were protests against an injustice that were quickly exploited and made to get out of hand. There was also a pandemic in place that doctors conveniently said required lockdowns except for protests against racial injustice. The president wants no part of another summer 2020, and has chosen to take action.

The difference here is that people who have no authority to do so are actively interfering with federal law enforcement doing their jobs, and making attacks on federal agents. For whatever reason, the authorities in California are a bit smarter than those in Portland 5 years ago and have decided they are not going to look the other way with regard to assaults on federal agents, probably because they know if a federal agent gets killed it’s going to be like the Marines have landed on their doorstep.

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