Why Don't The Democrats Have A Smarter Strategy?

In yesterday's post, I referred to an interview with Kyle Shideler, who said he was expecting the Democrats opposed to Trump's deportations to game out an effective counter-strategy to his deployment of the National Guard to stop anti-ICE riots. The interview was published this past Monday. but it probably took place earlier -- the upshot is that whatever their strategy may have been when the riots started Friday, it doesn't seem to have changed, and that strategy hasn't been effective.

Trump's strategy, on the other hand, has been to undertake what his cabinet prevented him from doing in 2020 with the George Floyd riots and on January 6, 2021, which was to deploy the National Guard. This in turn appears to have forced Mayor Bass and the LAPD to declare a curfew in downtown Los Angeles and make significant numbers of arrests. The result over the course of the week has been a gradual restoration of calm. As of last night,

Roughly 45 minutes after the curfew took effect, downtown LA appears fairly quiet, a departure from the last few evenings.

There are no signs of Marines or National Guard members.

In fact, the left's plan for this coming weekend appears to be an attempt to nationalize the Los Angeles outbreak, which itself was a more ambitious version of a May 9 protest in Newark, NJ, in which Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested (charges were subsequently dropped) and Rep Lamonica McIver was later indicted for assaulting federal officers. This turned out to be little more than a vehicle for self-promotion on the part of local politicians, while the bad visuals of the LA riot appear only to be putting Mayor Bass and Gov Newsom on the wrong side of public opinion.

Mark Mitchell of Rasmussen Reports suggests that the plans for "No Kings Day" this coming Saturday are more of the same:

Now, first, the messaging and branding here is just totally retarded. No kings? This is almost as bad as TACO, Trump always chickens out. Remember the video where all the congressional representatives on the Democrat side were pretending they were like, fighters in the Street Fighter trailer. or something like that? Everything they do is cringe. And this is just more of it. But where this money is coming from is Christy Walton, the Walmart heiress worth $20 billion.

In fact, there's a consensus that demonstrations that may hopefully metastasize into BLM-style riots are funded by a wide coalition of leftist donors:

Entrepreneur and political commentator Patrick Bet-David (PBD) dropped a truth bomb that Democrats and their NGO allies are reportedly planning over 1,500 coordinated protests across all 50 states—a setup, he warns, designed to sabotage President Trump and ignite another wave of nationwide unrest heading into the midterm election.

According to PBD, this isn’t grassroots activism—it’s astroturfed chaos, funded by a shadowy coalition of over 100 progressive organizations, wealthy elites, and Democrat-aligned NGOs, including those reportedly tied to billionaire and Walmart heiress Christy Walton, whose name surfaced in a New York Times exposé on the sprawling protest network.

The administration is fully aware of this plan, it appears that it will implement the strategy of deploying the National Guard where necessary and aggressively prosecuting rioters, while, despite Kyle Shideler's concerns, it looks like the left is simply going to repeat its 2020 strategy, which succeeded only because Trump's cabinet resisted deploying the National Guard at that time.

Why is the left reverting to same old-same old cringe? I think the answer is that when you talk about "a shadowy coalition of over 100 progressive organizations, wealthy elites, and Democrat-aligned NGOs", you're actually talking about Nancy Pelosi. According to Wikipedia,

Early in her political career, Pelosi established herself as a prominent fundraiser in the party. She was one of the party's most prolific fundraisers, transferring significant funds to committees for other candidates.

The secret to her rise was the ability to raise funds from liberal donors and use those funds to control the Democrat party, promoting leftist candidates and privileging leftists in the House. The people who are funding the latest attempt at national riots include Christy Walton, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Alex Soros, all of them billionaire rentiers, and all of them apparently following Pelosi's lead.

Pelosi seems to have slowed down since her broken hip last December, and she's only recently taken the public stage over the anti-ICE riots, only to make the counterfactual claim that Trump denied her request to send the National Guard on January 6, 2021:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) claim that President Donald Trump is being hypocritical in calling up the National Guard to back Los Angeles police when he wouldn’t on Jan. 6, 2021, was just ripped by the former chief of the U.S. Capitol Police on the day of the riots.

Steven Sund said that contrary to Pelosi’s claim on Tuesday that Trump “would not do it” when asked for National Guard troops to protect the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, it was the former House speaker who ignored his request for troops.

But over the LA riots, she's allowed Rep Maxine Waters to take the lead:

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California claimed Wednesday President Donald Trump “started” five days of riots in Los Angeles after previously claiming no violence was occurring in the city.

. . . “There had been no violence where anybody that was protesting hit anybody, shot anybody, threatened anybody,” Waters told “The Situation Room” co-hosts Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown. “Nothing had happened. And so he doesn’t know what to do, probably, because this is a sanctuary city, and the police don’t have the authority. All that he’s got to do is work with the governor.”

It's pretty plain that there's no new strategy because Pelosi is still in de facto control of the Democrats. This is because she still controls the donors and the donations, which is how she was the decisive voice in getting Joe to withdraw from the 2024 campaign. If the existing strategy is retarded and cringe, it's because every Democrat except Sen Fetterman is terrified of her -- but nobody's sure if Fetterman is quite right anyhow.