On Tuesday of this week, there was a gathering of leftists in front of the iconic Old Orange County Courthouse in Santa Ana. Organized by Orange County Supervisor Vince Sarmiento, a cohort of Left-progressive local elected officials stood in ranks on the courthouse steps and took turns at the microphone denouncing ICE, Trump and basically the idea that anyone ought to be deported for any reason.
Listening to their harangues were about a hundred left-wing political activists, NGO operatives and some Sarmiento staffers. Many of them were familiar faces, fixtures of the OC progressive political scene.
Despite being a “news conference,” there was nothing really newsworthy about it. Sarmientio; Santa Ana Councilmembers Ben Vazquz, Jessie Lopez and Johnathan Hernandez; SAUSD’s callow Trustees Hector Bustos, Valerie Magdelano and Katelyn Brazer Acevez; Garden Grove USD Trustee Walter Muneton; etc. Did anyone expect they wouldn’t indiscriminately oppose deporting illegal immigrants?
In fact, the news conference was just…boring. Standing in ranks on the courthouse steps, taking turns repeating the same trite catchphrases and slogans – like a radical progressive Borg: biologically distinct individuals fused in a collective ideological consciousness.
Some of the electeds who spoke, however, deserve special mention for the stupidity and outright hypocrisy of their overwrought declamations.
Not surprisingly, Councilman Johnathan Hernandez excelled in that regard. It’s pretty obvious Hernandez looooves all this chaos and turmoil because it’s an opportunity for revolutionary role-play.
As it is, he has to make do with painting the half-dozen bored Guardsman in front of the Reagan Federal Building as an occupying army.
“Over the last couple of days, we have seen violence terrorize our community,” Hernandez thundered.
Now, he wasn’t referring to rioters in Los Angeles and Santa Ana taking over streets, attacking law enforcement or engaging in vandalism. In Councilman Hernandez’s mind, it is law enforcement that is doing the terrorizing.
“We don’t need militarized police forces brutalizing people protesting,” Hernandez droned. “We don’t need the National Guard to come down to our communities and brutalize our neighbors.”
Brutalizing? Santa Ana police arrested about a dozen people during the rioting the night before, with charges varying from assault on a police officer, vandalism, failure to disperse, possessing dangerous items. Who was brutalizing whom?
Here are the National Guardsman whom Hernandez gratuitously accuses of “brutalizing” the people of Santa Ana (photos taken shortly after the press conference):
No one looks “brutalized” or even nervous in these photos. The Guardsmen stood there impassively while the Keffiyeh Girl in the middle photo kept calling them killers and murderers.
However, the Oscar for overwrought, self-aggrandizing rhetoric goes to SAUSD Trustee Hector Bustos, the twenty-something Tides Center staffer who was elected in 2022 from Area 5 because there were no other candidates.
“Santa students recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, a pledge that declares we are a republic that stands for liberty and justice for all. But where is that liberty?” Bustos asked the crowd. It was not only a rhetorical question but a hypocritical one, since Bustos refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
“The protests were peaceful, until militarized police forces have made violence upon us, until the National Guard border into our neighborhoods by a federal administration hell bent on stroking fear rolled in with their tanks and their armored vehicles,” Bustos bombastically claimed. “We do not need militarized personnel and tanks rolling down our streets like an occupied warzone.”
What’s with Bustos claiming tanks are rolling down Santa Ana streets? Does Bustos even know what a tank is?
This is a tank:
If one of these was “rolling” down Santa Ana Boulevard, somebody would have noticed.
It’s this kind of ignorant demagooguery that makes it impossible to take leftists like Bustos seriously. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Bustos and Hernandez and their ilk welcome this unrest, seeing it as an opportunity to role-play as world-historical martyrs riding the dialectical arc of History.
“We will not be silenced!” Bustos and others bellowed.. Progressive elected officials love to say that – as if anyone is actually trying to do that. It’s a conceit, a hallmark trait of left-wing activists to see themselves as targets of powerful malevolent forces hellbent on silencing them!
“Performative” succinctly sums up the parade of rote speechifying by Bustos, Hernandez and the rest of the progressive crew at Tuesday’s press conference. They all took turns saying the same thing, and then went home. For all their posturing about “militarizing” neighborhoods and demanding the National Guard leave Santa Ana, not a single one of them walked the three blocks to tell that menacing handful of Guardsman in front of the Reagan Building to stop brutalizing “our communities” and get out of town. Need- they had already performed before their activist peers and filled their progressive dance cards for the night.
Performative. And worse than useless.
