Los angeles

The director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle were found dead in their Los Angeles home yesterday. The couple were discovered with their throats slit open; a knife was found nearby on the premises and their son Nick is being held as a suspect. The nation has been stunned by the brutal circumstances of the Reiners' deaths – though the requisite level of empathy is apparently yet to reach 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The first time I worked alongside the California Highway Patrol’s Dignitary Protection Section was in Beverly Hills in the late 1990s. Think swimming pools and movie stars. The setting could have been a Hollywood caricature of itself: manicured hedges, a mansion where priceless Old World paintings hung in the hallways, and a guest list that ran from President Clinton to Barbara Streisand. The rest is appropriately redacted. I was a new Secret Service agent then still learning the art of protection, but amid the clinking glasses and camera flashes, what struck me most wasn’t the celebrities. It was the calm professionalism of the CHP officers beside me.

In 1976, the Ramirez Pharmacy opened in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Appropriately located on the corner of East Cesar Chavez Ave, the pharmacy is the crowning achievement of my grandfather, Eddie Ramirez, and is in many ways physical evidence of the American dream.  But in today’s Los Angeles, we’ve seen citizens and non-citizens waving Mexican flags while torching cars, attacking police and burning US flags in protest of the Trump administration's immigration raids in the state. Protesters have looted businesses downtown and lit fires, leading to full blocks of the LA commercial district nailing plywood to their storefronts.  “Lately, since all this ruckus started with a protest, we have seen a drop in the business.

Los Angeles has erupted into violence and at the center of it stands a cast of progressive activists and political operatives – some generously bankrolled by California taxpayers. One organization in particular has emerged as a key player: the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA. The LA-based nonprofit has long pushed radical positions on immigration – for example, in 2018, it spearheaded a campaign to abolish ICE. Its stated mission is to “build power, transform public opinion, and change policies” to achieve “full human, civil, and labor rights.” Critics might describe CHIRLA instead as a well-funded political engine for the open-borders left. And taxpayers might question the source of that funding.

Of all the images that emerged from the new administration last week, few were as meaningful and portentous as Melania Trump in oversized aviators and snug black cap in North Carolina with her husband, Friday morning, to inspect the damage remaining from Hurricane Helene back in November.  Mrs. Trump, it seems, had actually wanted to travel to California, where she and the president later landed to perform a similarly styled wellness check on wildfire-ravaged Los Angeles. But Trump insisted North Carolina come first — both to show off his return to presidential posturing as well as to highlight the abandonment many North Carolinans believe they’ve endured at the hands of FEMA and the Biden administration.