Without Order, No Justice: L.A. and the Problem of Protest, Planning, and Burning Cars

The Homo sapiens locusts feast on protests without organization. Likewise, disorderly protest movements consume attention, goodwill, and public sympathy without yielding lasting change. Going from L.A. Protests to L.A. Riots II can happen faster than you think.

The most successful civil rights campaigns of the 1940s to 1960s took weeks and months to plan and were led by organizations with leaderships and hierarchies. Groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) coordinated with legal teams, churches, and local leaders. They held meetings, trained participants in nonviolence, and carefully selected sites for maximum moral and political effect. They understood that strategy, not spontaneity, moves power, in their case the power of public opinion. The idea for a march on Washington to protest discrimination went back to the 1940s. A. Philip Randolph was the architect behind the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) back in 1941 as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was gearing the country up for war. As president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph was already the man in organizing Black labor, he knew what he was doing. His organizing made him be taken seriously, and he extracted concessions from FDR that were later built on.

Without organization and internal policing, locusts arrive to ruin the harvest of justice. They don’t build. They consume. Spontaneous crowds with no direction invite confusion, and in the absence of leadership, the loudest voices or most destructive actors set the tone. That is not performative civil disobedience, that is just disorder and eventually blatant crime. Can you not protest one entity, ICE, a federal one, without throwing rocks at another entity, your local cops? They are not the same thing and attacking local and state police who are not responsible for federal actions destroys sympathy.

Vandals, looters, and agents of chaos thrive in the gray area between civil disobedience and disorganized protest. They step into the vacuum left by a lack of structure, diverting attention from the cause and giving opponents easy justification to dismiss the movement. That is not their intent, looters just want loot. But they do not care about the harm they cause so you do not give them the opportunity. After Mohamed Sabry Soliman’s brutal burning of Jewish marchers who were campaigning for freeing the Gaza hostages, you would think people were smart enough to not want to be associated with throwing Molotov cocktails. Soliman is an illegal alien who committed an anti-Jewish terrorist attack in America in response to a foreign conflict. This fact means any protest about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), must be disciplined and not criminal. Why would you want anyone to associate anti-ICE protests with the Egyptian illegal alien Soliman and his terrorism against Jewish Americans? Searching for Molotov cocktail attacks will return several results for Soliman and his immigration status before getting to L.A. and its protestors. More reason to keep everything clear and ordered.

Regular folks in Los Angeles did not sign up to have their morning commute blocked by protesters. It is necessary to be blunt: there is no constitutional right of protest that permits you to use physical force, which is what your body impeding someone’s forward movement is, to prevent another citizen or resident from using the public roads. And it is especially a bad idea to do it in ways that do not cause problems for the authority you are challenging but for regular folks trying to get to work and survive. Torching taxis and creating the image of burning vehicles helps neither the supposed cause nor the environment.

No favors were done to the cause of police reform by creating scenes that could be credibly called Black Lives Matter Riots. I have issues with BLM as a “group.” Despite capturing massive public attention, the Black Lives Matter movement ultimately failed to achieve meaningful structural reform. Federal legislation stalled, local efforts to reimagine policing were short-lived or quietly reversed, and the broader “defund” narrative quickly alienated public support. Most Black Americans opposed BLM’s defund slogan. Without a disciplined organizational structure, BLM lacked strategic focus and coherence. Internal controversies, particularly around financial mismanagement, eroded credibility and diverted energy from reform. In the end, the movement stirred emotions but did not build institutions or lasting policy change. In short, it was a waste.

Part of the African American Civil Rights campaign’s discipline and order was branding and image protection. Respectability politics refers to a strategy adopted by many African American leaders, particularly during the late 19th and 20th centuries to directly counter racist stereotypes of dirty and uncouth “coloreds” and demonstrating the respectable personal behavior in dress, speech, and morality deemed normal by majority white American society. It worked because it undermined the argument that white society was being protected from minority degeneracy by Jim Crow and white supremacy. In fact the violence against “respectable” African Americans proved the depravity of Southern white politics.

It has become fashionable in so-called leftist circles to dismiss respectability politics, but the reality is that if you want respect, it helps to be respectable. Being respectable is a signal of belonging and lack of threat. Flags are also symbols, literally emblems of governments and nations.

Waving a foreign flag at a protest against the US government undermines the credibility and purpose of a demonstration that should intend to show solidarity and belonging with the American people. Waving a Mexican flag particularizes the concern with ICE overreach, which has targeted many people especially Asians and multiethnic families, to one country, Mexico, a country that Americans have mixed feelings about, at best. In 2024, Pew found that 60% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Mexico, that is not just a MAGA problem. Waving Mexican flags to show “solidarity” with the country to the South when your movement’s success requires feelings of solidarity with Americans on the other side of the country is self-defeating. It is an act which alienates the broad exhausted middle of the American public who may otherwise be open to persuasion.

Historically, successful American reform movements centered their demands in the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, not in foreign symbolism. But what is happening in L.A. is disorganized, and unbranded. Which means in the click-bait media times we live in Mexican flag-waving - and Burkina Faso flag waving for some reason - destruction of cars and robotaxis becomes the brand. When people have real family members being wrongfully detained and snatched, disorganized protests providing a cover for vandalism is unacceptable. Furthermore Mexico is a terrible and hypocritical model on this issue.

Historically Mexico’s immigration law had included a “demographic safeguard” clause that explicitly permitted restrictions on foreign entry and expelling foreigners to preserve “national demographics”. Do the protesters waving the Mexican flags want that language in US immigration law? Since the 2010 Tea Party days, the American right has been educating its adherents on Mexican immigration policy and hypocrisy. In those circles Mexico is both disdained and held up as a model of what the US should do. Before 2011, the year after Republicans started quoting it publicly and it got at least one mention from the floor of the US House of Representatives, Article 37, Section II of Mexico’s Ley General de Población (General Population Law) was explicit. The Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación) could deny entry or change of migratory status of a foreigner if “lo exija el equilibrio demográfico nacional,” which was translated as “it is required by the national demographic balance.” That language was repealed in 2011 during the modernization of Mexican immigration law to comply more with international standards, and after the American right seized on it. Nevertheless, right-wing Americans have not forgotten, and Mexican hypocrisy only made them seethe. A decade of resentment has built up. And Mexican opinion remains harsh on illegal immigrants. Polls have found majorities of Mexicans want to deport illegal aliens from Central America who remain in Mexico. And that they favor using the Mexican National Guard to do it. The Mexican flag represents Mexico, and Mexico is not a global avatar of tolerance and justice. A flag is a country’s identity woven into cloth, and not every country is identified with justice or mercy, nor aspires to be. If you want that symbolism you wave the American flag, and only that. If the directionless Democrats need a slogan it should be “Don’t Invade Canada, Don’t Be Mexico.”

Without order, protests become a haven for opportunistic criminals and thrill-seekers, subverting the entire intent of otherwise sympathetic movements. Justice requires discipline. Without it, nothing endures.