On the menu today: After days of insisting that local law enforcement could keep order in the streets of Los Angeles and that any National Guard deployment was a wild overreaction, Mayor Karen Bass declared a curfew in the city, just the third time in four decades that L.A. has required one. Meanwhile, the city council of Los Angeles demands that the Los Angeles Police Department tell them about any upcoming ICE raids, a proposal that the chief patiently explained would amount to obstruction of justice. Meanwhile, the U.S. director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, chooses to appear on her personal YouTube page to declare, “we stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.” Last, responding to objections to yesterday’s newsletter about foreign students on college campuses.
Caifornia Democrats Are Still Struggling with Basic Facts Around the Riot
The Los Angeles Times, June 8: “The protests arrived as word spread on social media of a raid at Home Depot or at a meatpacking place. There was never a raid at Home Depot, but dozens of Border Patrol agents and other federal agencies were inside a gated industrial office park, where an initial crowd had gathered.” [emphasis added]
According to the Department of Homeland Security, ICE agents staged in an area near the Home Depot but there was no “raid” on that business. The mayor of Paramount, Calif., concurred.
However, Paramount’s mayor Peggy Lemons said agents were staging in front of a Department of Homeland Security office, not conducting a raid.
“This is not something that city officials were aware of, that some type of raid might happen. It is my understanding that this was just a situation of staging and that it actually wasn’t a raid,” said Lemons. “The offices that they were at, we have known about for some time, but we’ve known them as the homeland security office that mainly dealt with the port authority.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, at 11:37 p.m. local time last night: “The Trump administration told us they were going after violent criminals, gang members, and drug dealers. But they went after a Home Depot.” She made similar remarks Monday. [emphasis added]
One of the reasons Los Angelenos erroneously believe that ICE caused this conflict by raiding a Home Depot is that elected officials keep referring to a raid that didn’t happen.
Now, as Rich Lowry points out, mayors cannot declare Home Depots or any other business off-limits to federal law enforcement. The same federal immigration laws that exist everywhere else in the country don’t suddenly stop the moment you’re on Home Depot property. It’s not the Continental Hotel in the John Wick universe.
If ICE has reason to believe that those in the country illegally are congregating outside a Home Depot or are working inside, they have every right to enforce the law there.
Last night, Bass “issued a curfew starting tonight at 8 pm for Downtown Los Angeles to stop bad actors who are taking advantage of the President’s chaotic escalation.”
(Relax, Hollywood, she means the other kind of bad actors.) This comes two days after Bass insisted in an interview with NPR, “what was happening in terms of the protest and all was well under control by the police department.”
Do California elected officials realize how ridiculous they sound when they spend several days insisting that “local law enforcement had it handled,” “the streets were quiet,” and “local law enforcement resources are sufficient to maintain order,” and then a day or two later, the mayor is forced to declare a curfew?
As far as I can determine, this is only the third time in four decades the city has declared a curfew; the other times were the Rodney King verdict riots and the George Floyd protests-turned-riots.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles city council members want LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell to give them advance notice of any ICE raids, a request that McDonnell explained would violate the law.
In the testiest exchange of the afternoon, Councilmember Imelda Padilla asked the chief if the LAPD would consider warning city officials if it heard from federal law enforcement that immigration raids were coming.
“You’re asking me to warn you about an enforcement action being taken by another agency before it happens? We can’t do that,” McDonnell responded, noting that such a warning would amount to obstruction of justice.
“That would be completely inappropriate and illegal,” he said.
City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he disagreed with the chief on referring to agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as “law enforcement partners.”
“If we know somebody is coming here to do warrant-less abductions of the residents of this city, those are not our partners,” he said. “I don’t care what badge they have on or whose orders they’re under. They’re not our partners.”
It is too much to ask that the people who are elected to craft the law in a city be familiar with the basics of criminal law? Or is that setting the bar too high?
Tulsi Gabbard Is Bored with the Actual Job of Being DNI
I told you Tulsi Gabbard was going to hate the job of Director of National Intelligence.
Do you remember ever seeing any other director of national intelligence releasing a video weighing in on U.S. foreign policy on his or her still-active personal social media account? I suspect that you barely remember hearing at all from Avril Haines, John Ratcliffe, Dan Coats, Dennis Blair, etc. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be, because the director of national intelligence isn’t a public-facing job, and the person in it isn’t supposed to be a celebrity.
And yet, Tuesday afternoon, Gabbard felt the need to announce to the American people, “We stand here today closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”
Really? I was halfway through my research when I found Noah Rothman had beaten me to it:
Are we really closer to the “brink of nuclear annihilation” today than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Are we closer than we were on November 9, 1979, when a malfunction indicated to NORAD that a massive nuclear attack on the U.S. was underway? Is it worse than June 3, 1980, when a similar false alarm proved so convincing that Zbigniew Brzezinski resolved to not wake his wife so she would be vaporized painlessly in her sleep? Is the geopolitical situation more unstable than it was in September 1983, when the Soviets experienced their own false alarm — a persistent one that continued despite rebooting the system — in which one Soviet missile officer’s discretion alone averted unimaginable disaster?
Never mind her likely unfamiliarity with the history of the subject, if you’re going to ominously declare that we’re “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” with an Angelo Badalamenti–esque ominous soundtrack playing in the background, shouldn’t you . . . explain how we’re so close to a nuclear exchange? Was she referring to Russia? India and Pakistan? North Korea?
We are not today “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before,” because if we were, we would be hearing it from the president, not from the DNI on her YouTube account in a slickly produced video with a soundtrack.
Gabbard continued: “Political elite [sic] and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers.”
Who? How? Where and when? You know, if the stakes are literally Armageddon, I think it’s time to name names and get specific.
Gabbard declared, “It’s up to us, the people, to speak up and demand an end to this madness. We must reject this path to nuclear war.”
Who is she talking to? Why is she telling us this? The only person in the United States who can launch a nuclear attack is the president of the United States. Gabbard has the ear of the president and can speak to him anytime she needs. Anytime the director of national intelligence says, “I need to talk to the president, and it’s about nuclear weapons,” they’re going to get her in front of the president pronto.
Noah theorizes this video is a reflection that Gabbard is losing some internal argument within the administration — that she wants a more conciliatory line towards the Russians and Iranians, and is losing out to the hawks in some way.
I would note that this video was very much in the style of someone who was communicating as a candidate, not as a DNI. This is a campaign speech from someone who already has a day job and who appears to have gotten bored with it after 118 days.
There are a lot of times when Louisiana Senator John Kennedy (R.) is funny, but his quip of Gabbard — “she obviously needs to change her meds” — is a sign that she really isn’t a good fit for that job and those duties.
The Business of Foreign Students on American Campuses, Part Two
Taking on the objections to yesterday’s newsletter about foreign students on college campuses, in reverse order:
“”Having the children of China’s high-level leaders educated at American universities, or having those China’s high-level leaders themselves educated at American universities, increases the odds of those high-level leaders having positive attitudes towards Americans.”
I realize that’s how it’s supposed to work. But do you feel like Xi Jinping has been kinder and gentler towards the United States since his daughter graduated from Harvard in 2014? Twenty percent of the CCP’s Central Committee members have some foreign education, but has that made Chinese foreign policy less bellicose, hostile, or aggressive?
If the tripling of Chinese students studying at U.S. campuses starting in the 2010s was an investment in a better relationship with Beijing, when do we start to see dividends?
As a reminder, the recurring theme from Chinese state-run media is that America is “broken” and a failing state, incapable of governing itself or solving its own problems, and that all of our social ills are a reflection that democracy, elections, the U.S. Constitution, free speech, separation of powers, and checks and balances are surefire path to anarchy and despair. Oddly, they never pause to add, “but the college campuses are nice, and we had a great experience there.”
Yesterday’s newsletter was accused of anti-Chinese racism, even though I pointed out that no one worries about Taiwanese spy rings on American campuses.
“Not every Chinese student is a spy!”
Of course not, and I’m sure many of them are fine people. But just about all of them are a potential target for the Chinese Ministry of State Security to strongarm or blackmail into becoming a spy. That risk does not exist for foreign students from countries without hostile governments, as well as a well-established history of using “nontraditional collectors” for espionage.
“Foreign students pay full freight, which enables the lower cost for in-state students.”
Sure, but out-of-state students pay full freight, too, and you don’t see anybody objecting to students from Wyoming or Louisiana enrolling at the University of California. We can also fairly wonder if all that money coming in from foreign students is really going towards the education of less-privileged American students. If you’re reading NR, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with the administrative bloat on campus: “Between 1976 and 2018, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by 92 percent, during which time total student enrollment increased by 78 percent. During this same period, however, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164 percent and 452 percent, respectively.”
I don’t know what the “right” percentage of foreign students on college campuses is, but I will bet the current highs — 23 percent at five public schools, 51 percent at Illinois Tech, etc. — are higher than most Americans thought.
“Foreign students are a higher share of graduate students than undergraduate students, and there’s a huge difference between undergraduate and graduate students!”
Is there? If you want to focus on graduate students, the percentages are even higher. Should New Jersey Institute of Technology, slated to receive $52.8 million in direct state operating aid from the state government, have a graduate student body that is 81 percent foreign students? The University of Maryland Baltimore County, received $210 million from the state, and it has a graduate student body that is 75 percent foreign students. At the University of Texas Dallas, receiving a bit more than $16 million from the state, 71 percent of graduate students are from overseas.
At the Missouri University of Science and Technology, which received $66 million from the state last year, 67 percent of graduate students are foreign students.
How much state taxpayer money should go to an institution where two-thirds or more of the student body is foreign citizens?
Thirteen U.S. schools have more than half their graduate students from overseas.
ADDENDUM: A brutal conclusion in the NR editorial about Greta Thunberg’s not-so-excellent voyage:
Then, there’s her explanation of her goal with the Freedom Flotilla: “It was a mission to tell the Palestinians — we see you and we are not ready to accept what is happening.” This resoundingly empty justification reveals Thunberg’s true politics to be those of the hollow, self-gratifying gesture. (No Gazans were interviewed to determine the caloric value of “being seen.”) Thunberg inadvertently reveals a truth lurking within so much of modern publicity-seeking activism on the left. The “issue” is oftentimes not even really the issue for these people, so much as the attention and the posturing are. [emphasis added]