The Left’s Riot Playbook — And Trump’s Biggest Test With Heather MacDonald

_THE INTERVIEW_

Ari: When I first got into politics, it was around when the BLM protests, the riots, all of those “mostly peaceful” things were going on. Your journalism and reporting were probably the most consequential journalism at the time.

The way that you were able to break down all of the myths was really incredible to watch, and it changed the way a lot of us young people looked at politics after that.

Right now, it seems we're also in a similar period. There are riots in Los Angeles, and now they're popping up all over the country. Could you break down what is happening? You wrote a fantastic piece on it today. Help us think about the way we should be looking at it.

Heather: I'm asking the question, how many riots are too many, and how much is just right? I'm amazed by the efforts of Democratic politicians and immigrant activists to dismiss the outrageous, barbaric violence in Los Angeles as protests. It's the same tropes, but there's something deeper.

Even when they acknowledge that there was some violence, we're told that this is not a big deal. My view at this point is very simple. One burned car is too many.

The fact that that is going on is an important step on the road to undoing what makes civilized life possible, which is respect for the law and the ability of law enforcement to contain these frenzied narcissistic outbreaks of irrational, purely nihilistic violence.

We have to decide in this country, are we willing to tolerate a certain amount of violence against other people's property, who are absolutely innocent, against police officers, law enforcement?

Are we willing to tolerate concrete blocks being thrown off freeway overpasses onto California Highway Patrol cars? It was only by good luck that nobody was killed during that attempt to murder California Highway Patrol Officers.

This idea of normalizing violence, if it's in the name of a good progressive left-wing cause, has been going on for a long time. It's a sickness. We saw it most appallingly with the beatification of Luigi Mangioni for assassinating a UnitedHealthcare CEO. It goes on when the attacks on judges or [Pennsylvania Governor] Josh Shapiro's home are swept under the rug.

Now, I have to anticipate the inevitable liberal left-wing response, which is, Don't tell me that you support law enforcement or that Trump supports law enforcement when he pardoned across the board, all of the J6 rioters and people who were wreaking havoc that day in the Capitol.

I will acknowledge that was a very bad move on his part. He initially intended not to pardon the people who were convicted of assaults on officers. But at the last minute, he was peaked at something. He decided to issue a blanket pardon.

That really set us back in arguing the law and order cause because it allows the left to dismiss everything that we're saying about the importance of law and order on the basis of that one ill-advised action.

Ari: In the past few years, it's been steadily building up. You mentioned that we had Luigi Mangione recently, then right after October 7, we had all of these mass protests where people were stopping traffic, not letting anybody go through.

We started the conversation about the BLM riots. I remember watching at that time, I think it was when the riots in Washington, DC. There was overhead footage of the whole city on fire.

I think the Trump response was that he went into the White House bunker, and then the next day, there were different forces that cleared out the riots. I remember thinking — did he really handle it properly? Because the protests kept coming back.

Do you think the BLM protests were handled as they should have been? And do you think the current riots happening across the country are being handled correctly?

Heather: Clearly, Ari, the BLM race riots were not handled properly. Again, one broken window and one act of looting are too much. We cannot define deviance down. We cannot normalize this mob attack against people, property, or officers. We cannot.

And the fact that the rioting lasted in Minneapolis for three, four days, the awful burning down of the third precinct, which is the police precinct that was in the vicinity or the jurisdiction of the George Floyd death. That is completely unacceptable, and it spread.

One needs a — and this is a phrase that is contested even by conservatives — a zero tolerance approach to civic violence. None of it is acceptable. It has to be put out immediately with force, because if you don't do that, you send the message that you're going to be able to get away with a certain degree of looting, of chaos.

For Karen Bass to describe what's going on as protests, which she continued to do — that Trump reacted — and the LA Times continues to do — the headlines — and The New York Times continued to do: Trump sent in troops in response to protests.

No, he didn't. He sent them in because of the violence. If you are a jewelry store owner, it is not acceptable that you have been plundered.

I remember the excuses [Rep. Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez made during the BLM race hysteria. Which is to say, well, it's no big deal if CVS gets looted because they have insurance. This is so profoundly ignorant. Even if they have insurance, they should not have to use it.

And to allow that, to dismiss that, and to somehow glorify or excuse the people that are causing that vandalism is a slippery slope towards anarchy, and civilization is fragile. You cannot tell people that if, because there's income inequality or alleged injustice, they have a right to go marauding.

The idea that any of this is caused by poverty or want is ludicrous. Ari — ludicrous. None of these people doing the torching, none of these people doing the looting, are poor, period. No one in America is poor. All these people have smartphones.

My definition is if you have a smartphone, don't tell me about poverty. You are not poor. That is the height of consumer culture. It's an expensive object. Not only in terms of economic resources, you're not poor in terms of having a Promethean power over reality. The ability to summon forth all of knowledge on your phone — that puts you in the top billionth of all human beings over human history.

These are all excuses by our elites who don't give a damn about Western civilization and take for granted how fragile respect for property is. They don't understand the need not to cultivate a victim mentality.

Ari: I don't know if you have seen this clip going around from the riots in Los Angeles, but there were some rioters blocking traffic, and there was a black woman trying to get to work. There was a white male. He was essentially telling her, Why do you have to go to work? This is much more important.

It turns out he actually got a settlement from the BLM riots because he was assaulted by a police officer. He ended up making some money off of that. Something like $115,000. I'll put in the link later.

These people rioting are pretty much out of touch with the vast majority of Americans who, first of all, want to go to work, and want to live a normal life. They are also impacted by the whole topic that's causing this, which is mass immigration.

When we were talking about the BLM riots, when they were happening, the clear way a lot of people were trying to fight that was to look at the statistics and look at the reality of policing. What you are going out there to riot for is not even true. You're living in an alternate reality that the media has given to you.

I haven't seen the same response in terms of immigration. There are so many facets of life that have been totally negatively impacted by immigration since the border was left open.

Do you think that's a mistake that people are making right now? Why do you think that's happening?

Heather: That's a very interesting observation, Ari. The Trump administration, the Republican, the conservative safe zone for talking about this is always to talk about illegal alien criminals. That's the cordon sanitaire, which once only allowed even among immigration restrictionists, of which I am one, to focus on the crimes committed by illegal aliens and to pretend that that is universal.

Trump makes a mistake that way. He doesn't want to say that being in the country illegally itself is grounds for deportation and that there shouldn't be any safe harbor for people who are in the country illegally. It is legitimate deportation. It is the lawful response to illegal entry and illegal presence.

Is Trump — are the restrictionists reading the public mood correctly in focusing exclusively on criminals? In so doing, they are frankly bending reality.

There's some dispute about this. The elite establishment — when we were having these debates before, four, six, 10 years ago — would always assert that immigrants are more law-abiding than Americans and therefore there's no right, no grounds, for deporting illegal immigrants. I would say that's a non-sequitur. Just because you're not committing a domestic crime doesn't mean you're not eligible for a lawful deportation.

The fact that they assert is possibly true in one respect. The numbers are hard to get because you need to know what the level of criminality is among illegal aliens. You need better data than we've got. You need to know whether the inmates in every jail and prison are illegal or legal.

I don't think that data is forthcoming. The data that we do have would suggest that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than the American average. But the issue is the average. They commit a lot more crime than whites. They commit fewer crimes than blacks. So the effect of illegal immigration on any given community depends on the demographic that it's replacing.

If you have illegal aliens, mostly Mexican and Central American, moving into a largely white or Asian community, crime is going to go up. Gang crime will go up. If you have illegal aliens moving into what was a predominantly black community, say Compton, South Central Los Angeles, crime is going to go down because they're displacing a black population that has even higher rates of crime.

It's a difficult issue to talk about. I would like to see our leaders have the guts to stop relying on the illegal alien criminal meme because it exaggerates the problem. Trump, when he's using these sweeping terms that sometimes imply that the 20 million illegal aliens here are all criminals, that doesn't help the cause because it's clearly wrong.

Ideally, it's a question of whether Americans have the stomach for it. We do have to bite the bullet and say that we're going to have to deport people who have not committed crimes. That's part of the narrative that's being used now in Los Angeles. It's somehow illegitimate if the ICE agents are picking up people who are standing around, milling around in the parking lot of a Home Depot because the ICE agents don't know if they have a criminal record.

If they're so-called “merely here in the country illegally,” you can't deport them. That's a question. Americans are going to have to decide that. Do we want to have a total safe harbor for every illegal alien who has not got a further criminal record? Or do we want to say everybody is a legitimate target?

We won't be able to deport everybody because of resource limitations. But the hope is self-deportation. If you make it clear that there is a significant chance that if you stay in this country illegally, you will be picked up, you'll decide it's not worth it and go back to your country of origin.

Ari: That's a great point. I'm in New York City, and the statistics and polls coming out of the city showing how many people support Trump's mass deportations were overwhelming.

People see that the healthcare systems are overwhelmed. They see that the schools and the teachers can't handle the massive influx of illegal immigrants. So many people probably hear the stories about the criminal elements tied to different gangs from people who have crossed the border. Living daily life has become so different.

I hear from doctors who also complain — especially coming from the narrative during the pandemic — that unvaccinated people were overwhelming the healthcare systems, and now the same exact thing is coming from illegal immigration.

There are so many of these points that could be hit on to show people that — the way you're saying — it's not that there’s criminality going on here, but really our society cannot handle it and cannot function that way. What are your thoughts on that?

Heather: You are so right to bring up the hospitals, the emergency care, the burden of educating peasants who don't even speak Spanish. We hear about this a lot, the indigenous that speak some Indian language.

It's weird, Ari, because I don't remember the exact era, but we used to talk about those things. When there was some previous effort, either at enforcement or non-enforcement, the issue of the cost, at least in California, used to come up a lot, and now it doesn't.

Right now, it's all about Trump's actions. Now, I would respectfully take issue with the phrase you threw out in passing. I'm sure it rolls so easily off the tongue because we're surrounded by this language. But you referred to Trump's current “mass deportations.” Mass? What set off two, three days of vicious anarchy in Los Angeles was the lawful arrest of 44 illegal aliens.

California's illegal alien population is well above 2 million. There's probably a million, at least, more in the Los Angeles County Basin. And so 44 arrests are not mass. We are not coming close to mass. The reason it appears mass to people in the media is the assumption that nobody should be deported if they don't have a criminal record.

As I say, that's a decision the public has to make. I'm not necessarily optimistic that Americans are willing to have the agricultural workers deported. I don't believe, contrary to the most hard-line restrictionists, that if we raise the labor wages in the fields of Salinas, Americans will do those jobs.

I think that we're not willing to put up with that discomfort. But we used to hear about, again, in the previous round of these debates, What about your nanny? Do you want your nanny? Is it okay to deport her? And the response that would always come is, No, don't touch my nanny! And that's an issue.

I'm surprised you said polls show majority support for what Trump is doing. I was not aware of that. The polls are all over the map, perhaps. Maybe I'm not aware of them.

Ari: Before we get back into the riots, I want to ask if you have been thinking about this trend that's happening with artificial intelligence. There are so many big tech CEOs who think that over the next few years, 20 percent of the entry-level workforce is going to be totally automated. That's a totally novel thing that is about to happen in America.

When you have illegal immigration at the rates we do, you have to imagine that many of the people who are going to get hit by artificial intelligence are probably going to be citizens.

There's going to be a really big problem in terms of where they will go to work and how illegal immigration plays into that, when the illegal immigrants might be doing these jobs right now.

Maybe people don't want to do them, but maybe in the next few years, if we have such a big change, maybe they will. Have you thought about that at all, or have any observations or thoughts on that?

Heather: I would assume that what AI jeopardizes is more the cognitive occupations, not the physical ones. So my instinct would be that it is the illegal alien manual laborers are safest from AI.

Unless AI is coupled with robots, but AI is not going to help you pick strawberries. Machines might. Those should be developed ASAP. But AI is also not going to be a hotel cleaning person. To me, those are different realms.

I certainly am very concerned about AI and human autonomy. I'm a pessimist by nature, so I'm not persuaded by people who say AI is never going to be able to become autonomous and self-programming. I think it will. I think we're moving inexorably towards a sort of terrifying cliff here. The issue of illegal alien labor is that it’s very unskilled. That's not touched by AI.

Ari: Elon Musk has these humanoid robots he's preparing to launch in the next few years. Maybe they will start picking different fruits and working on the land. It's unclear.

I want to go back to the riots. I want to lay out the way I see it — and you can push back on some of the perspectives I have here. When I look at the riots, and then also look at them over the past years, it seems an incredibly powerful tool to use, especially in politics, where the first thing that happens is you go out there and riot.

A natural instinct that people have — they might not be paying attention — is, well, they're rioting. There must be something really bad going on, and they might have a really good reason.

You can even look at Israel in the Middle East. Whenever Palestinians attack Israel, a lot of the world is sympathetic to that: Well, they are really going through a serious plight. Maybe we have to help them.

That's one thing. The second is when they go riot and cause violence, they're also creating an expectation that the government's probably going to try to clamp down on it. They're going to try to restore peace. If they overdo that, that's going to be bad for whoever is in power.

How does Trump navigate that situation? How do you put an end to this stuff without more and more people thinking that Trump is abusing his power?

Heather: The first point I understand, and it's a great one, which I want to address. But your second point is that rioting creates the expectation of a response, and therefore, what?

Ari: It may not look great if there are mass arrests. Or if there's police brutality involved in quelling the violence. There are a lot of videos that go around that portray the government as the villains.

Heather: The issue of whether to explain violence and whether explaining violence inevitably entails understanding it and, therefore, possibly even justifying it is a huge one. It involves the usual reversal of principles, depending on whose side is being gored or is involved.

With the anti-order riots, the conservatives who believe in law and order will say that they’re not going to talk about what is causing this. I don't want to hear it. It doesn't matter. It's never, ever a legitimate response to a political grievance to destroy people's property. If we were to start to say that the BLM riots, well, it was caused by police brutality, blah, blah, blah.

Putting aside the fact that, as you've mentioned earlier, Ari, that meme about police being the biggest threat to black males is completely phony. It has nothing to do with the reality of why blacks die of homicide at such a higher rate. Putting that aside, this is not the time to discuss that. We're not going to explain this because that risks justifying it.

But if the Right does something nasty and disruptive, the conservative pundits are going to sort of have the same instinct of, well, let's explain what's going on. People are angry. For instance, there have been anti-immigrant riots in Britain.

There was one, over the last year, that the government seized upon to show that white Britons are all racist. It's happening again in Northern Ireland. You always have to read through the end of the article to see that the guy who — I can't remember if he killed some children. They never talk about the nationality of the suspect at all, except to notice that he's speaking through a translator. That's all you get.

In those instances, conservatives are going to be a little more prone to say, yes, that's really terrible. But let's understand what's driving this. People do not want to see the great replacement happening around them. They feel they have lost control of their country.

They have lost their sovereignty, and their political leaders are not paying attention to their clear mandate with regards to immigration. The question of whether you explain or do not, and whether rioting serves to further your cause or not, is a big one.

You're certainly right that there will always be the media. We've seen this in LA, where the media has put up some of the images of the burning cars and whatnot because it's visually arresting, and people are going to look at that.

But they've been making a big deal about the arrest of a labor organizer, which was a legitimate arrest. They do want to change the topic to police brutality. Every side is opportunistic in what it chooses to seize upon. What's background, what's foreground, and I don't know if we'll ever manage to transcend our own partisan spin on the world to apply neutral principles fairly, no matter who serves to gain from them and who doesn't.

Ari: I remember when we were in the heat of the summer of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter riots were happening. I thought there was no way Trump could lose because of how obviously terrible everything happening was. The Democrats were supporting it.

Then, despite all the problems with the election and the censorship, Trump did lose. I was shocked. Looking back on it, these types of mass riots helped Democrats. Looking at the way Democrats are talking about it right now in California, they clearly think it's going to benefit them. But the midterm elections are coming pretty soon. Do you think this is possibly going to help them?

Heather: Oh, I so agree. This is very worrisome, Ari. We cannot accept one riot. We cannot accept one burning car. But the fact that the public was willing to overlook that.

This was going on in mostly democratic cities, primed by decades of democratic winking at lawlessness because of disparate impact, because of the fact that if you enforce the law, you will have a disparate impact on black criminals because the rates of crime are so high.

Therefore, we shouldn't enforce the law. The rioting is always preceded by decades of normalizing violence. I couldn't agree more. This should have been a slam dunk.

Yet, Americans have bought the idea that there's a right amount of rioting. A certain amount is okay. Over the line? Maybe not. But we can live with a certain amount. No, we can't. So I agree with you.

I would disagree that it's the riots per se that are helping Democrats. It gets to the point you bring up, which is that the response to them will then be seized on opportunistically to try and discredit the law and order cause.

Here in California, the rhetoric is hyperbolic. Rhetoric about Trump, the authoritarian dictator, is constant. The No Kings protest resonates with a lot of people, and unfortunately, Trump has given some fodder to that view.

I'm of the sort of scaredy-cat mentality that I think we have to follow the law scrupulously and not give even the hint of a legitimate affirmation of the Left's predominantly irrational characterization of Trump as a dictator.

When he punishes law firms because he doesn't like their clients or the fact that they had partners that litigated against him, when he punishes them by denying them access to federal buildings, I think that is an abuse of power and should be of concern.

The problem is, what are our background assumptions? If you're a conservative who basically backs Trump, you're going to say, Ah, don't take it seriously. I have enough faith that Trump is not sophisticated enough to have a big plan to take things over.

Yes, it's bad, but it's not a sign of things to come. Whereas if you're an anti-Trump person, you're going to see his law firm actions as simply confirming a pattern because you already know that he is a dictator and wants to destroy the Constitution and take over America and destroy the intersectional lobby.

We read things according to what we background know. You're absolutely right to reject what is undoubtedly a powerful right-wing meme, which is that these images will help Trump. Now they should, the video that you mentioned about the guy with the man bun berating or scoffing at the black woman trying to get to work, that's a great image, and all the violent images are.

The Democrats fume and get all mad and say, How dare you use those images? That's really unfair. It happened. Unless you allege that this is artificial intelligence and these are photoshopped, these happened. Sorry. It's fair game.

One would like to think that would cause such revulsion at the breakdown of law and order, but it might not. It's completely up in the air how this will play.

Ari: This time around, Trump’s response to the Los Angeles riots was to send in more police, the National Guard, and the Marines. Do you think that was too much, not enough, or just right?

What does it look like if Trump has to go in to make sure there's no violence at all, to even stop it before it happens? The people organizing the riots — we're going to litigate and see what we can do there. How does that play out? What does your vision of what Trump should do look like?

Heather: Again, living through this, I've decided that one act of lawlessness is too many. These are all different issues. Litigation, that's clearly within the federal prosecutor's right to litigate and prosecute federal crimes.

But the question of sending in the National Guard is very complicated. We have a ruling today from a judge, a district court judge in San Francisco, saying that Trump violated the statute by invoking to activate the National Guard. It's gone into an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has stayed the injunction.

The issue there is that Trump is invoking a statute that says the president can call up the National Guard if he cannot execute federal law. That would clearly cover this because the efforts to obstruct ICE agents from executing federal law has been going on. There's always a question of degree.

If there's one effort to block one ICE agent, do you invoke the National Guard? These are tough line drawing issues, but categorically, he does. The problem is, the statute has another clause that was added subsequently that says the call-up shall happen through the governors.

That's what's at stake in this case. Since he did not ask California Governor Gavin Newsom to do the activation, but did it himself. Does that mean he is violating the statute and the trial? The district court judge said yes. We'll see how that plays out. The legal basis for this is uncertain.

As a prudential matter, though, leaving aside the legal questions, I'm undoubtedly too hard-line on this. It cannot be the case that every time there's mass looting, you call up the National Guard. But at this point, I would rather err on the side of over-response than under-response because we clearly have not sent a strong enough message that this is unacceptable.

Ari: I grew up in Baltimore, and I was in high school during the Freddie Gray riots. I went to a school that was about a few hundred feet outside of the city line. There were a lot of kids who I went to school with who lived in the city.

I remember on the eve of the riots in Baltimore — the famous ones with the CVS burning — it was a bunch of kids I was in school with who were sharing these flyers. They were all saying, We're going to go tonight. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're gonna wreak havoc. I think the majority of the rioters, now it's pretty well known, were high school students.

They were there because it was a fun thing to do. It had been a few years since the end of the no-tolerance policies in schools, where kids could get in trouble. They saw this as another opportunity where, tonight, we're going to go out there and have a lot of fun, maybe steal some things, burn some things, throw some bricks at police.

I don't remember seeing any social justice infographics going around with the Freddie Gray stuff. It was a bunch of kids looking to have fun. There's probably a lot of those folks involved here, too.

Heather: Absolutely. I'm all in favor of men and think that with their cancellation, we will lose civilization. But one does have to acknowledge that there are actual, real instances of toxic masculinity. It seems to be a rite of passage for many males to shoplift or to commit certain types of vandalism, or to destroy windows.

I deplore all of that. But there's something about male aggression that comes out in that respect. That has to be very carefully kept in check. That is exactly what's going on, and the fun thing to do. We have so many instances of that.

It sounds like Chicago, where under the previous mayor, Lori Lightfoot, you would have, and still do, these marauding teens who would come in from the south and west side.

There’s a demographic associated with that that would wreak havoc down the Magnificent Mile, Michigan Avenue, and downtown Chicago, for the sake of the power. It gives you power over the hated white person. And we remember flash mobs, the knockout game.

Those are all instances of sadism based on racial grievance and hatred for white people. But yes, a sense of, well, this is fun. We have the street takeovers in Los Angeles, and they're across the country, but they're very prevalent in Los Angeles, where a bunch of young people commandeer an intersection and race cars around it and do fancy stunts. And then they usually follow up with a raid on the nearby 7-Eleven.

Unless we send a very clear message about that, that this is not acceptable, it'll keep happening. Mayor Brandon Johnson in Chicago, who's now the mayor — and has a very low approval rating — but while he was running for office and since then, he has always made excuses, and it's race-based.

He always says, Oh, well, these teens lack opportunity. So what do you expect? Again, that is such BS. What they lack is social training. They lack the capacity to discipline their impulses. If they were able to be good workers and not blow up at their boss, there would be opportunities to work.

And again, all these teens that engage in these flash mobs, they all have smartphones because they coordinate them on social media. It is my rule of thumb. You've got a smartphone. Sorry. You don't get to claim the poverty excuse.

Ari: I want to ask you one last question. We're still incredibly early in the Trump administration, and there are so many promises that he still has to work on that will be pretty big and pretty controversial. I assume there will probably be more rioting and more protesting.

Are you optimistic that the Trump administration this time around is going to, firstly be able to quell the riots and make sure we don't have a loss of law and order, and second, cross the threshold to where he is really confidently running the government such that people are not going out to riot anymore?

Heather: Oh man. Is Trump going to be able to quell the riots? That is such a crucial question, and I don't know. I think they will spread, and he's primed to have a very strong response.

If he gets a ruling that goes all the way to the Supreme Court that says you cannot call out the National Guard without state involvement, I would hope he follows that.

I do not think he should ever defy the law. That again plays into the Left's hands. Things could escalate, and if they do, I am going to be rooting for the side of law and order. There's also this incredible narrative going on in LA.

Karen Bass repeats this all the time, that things were really great on Friday, there was no violence, everything was great, and then the Trump administration came in and he made everybody upset, so they started rioting.

No, that's not the chronology, Karen. We had the riots, and then Trump responded. If you don't want Trump to call out the National Guard in your neighborhood, in your city, do not allow these riots to happen. It's very simple. He's reactive. He's not proactive there.

It could grow, and it could get more inflamed. He should do whatever it takes to put them down.

I go back and forth. The first six weeks of the administration up until the Liberation Day I was taking heart and the EOs were coming out fast and furious and taking on things that I regard as absolutely poisonous, especially with regards to racial victimology — and I thought, God, maybe he's going to beat this thing back and allow myself to be optimistic for once.

But one cannot underestimate the extent to which the Left is entrenched in institutions — and they can possibly wait him out. He continues to need to make the case against racial victimology against any entitlement to wreak havoc and violence when the politics are not going your way.

I'm going to completely punt on that and throw the question back to you. Do you think he's going to be successful over four years in making the case for law and order and both be able to maintain it and seize the unambiguous moral high ground in maintaining law and order?

Ari: I have no idea. I also want to punt it.

I look at the people who are around Trump. I look at someone like Stephen Miller. He's someone who seems like he tries to put his confidence in quelling things like that, and being very stern to Trump. He tries to give him the okay, in that way, where you should do this and you should trust me.

Naturally, Trump in the first administration was probably a little bit uneasy with putting too much strength in those kinds of things.

I hope they're able to figure out a way to stop the riots. It might take them a long time. Maybe Palantir will somehow get involved. They're going to be able to track all of the radical underground groups, and where they're getting funding from, and maybe choke them off that way.

That would certainly be one way they can solve it, considering so many of these riots are astroturfed with different groups which are getting funding from different networks. We will see that over the next few years.

Heather: One can over-exaggerate this, that it’s all planned and it's all George Soros. Conservatives have a tendency to do that. I don't know why, but I would say a lot of it is spontaneous as well. And opportunistic. I'm sure you're right, but the looting for sure is opportunistic. It's an interesting thought experiment or maybe real life experiment.

If you take out the any possible organization, would this still be going on? It might, although there's a strong argument about the union involvement in Los Angeles, the public sector unions, managing to turn people out.

I'm glad you're as indecisive as I am because that's my nature. But things change on a daily basis. I like to bet, but I don't know if I'd have a bet on this one. It would have to be very precisely formulated, obviously, of what it means to ultimately control or end the riots because there's always the next day.

It's a big question for the future of our civilization.