Welcome to Los Angeles, where all manner of laws are optional, the slogans are preposterous, and the politicians behave like extras in their own Netflix docudrama.

This week’s moral hallucination? “No one’s illegal on stolen land.”

Yes, that’s now a standard feature of the protest scene in the City of Angels—where civic disorder is a form of self-expression, and slogans are a substitute for intelligent discourse.

A powerful statement—if you’re high on hashtags and low on history. Or just plain high.

Which, judging by the last few decades of California ballot returns, seems to be both a pastime and a prerequisite for public office.

The flashpoint came after ICE agents—cast by the left as medieval villains in a morality play no one asked for—executed a series of lawful immigration enforcement actions, and in response, activists, anarchists, and Antifa cosplayers erupted in protest—chanting absurd incantations to the protest demigods, and offering the usual tribute to that most sacred of rituals: political violence.

By sundown, downtown L.A. looked like a sequel to Escape from—well—L.A., with better lighting and a worse casting director.

Looters liberated iPhones and vape pens from bourgeois retailers. Protesters blocked highways and set dumpsters ablaze—hopefully with no homeless injured in this particular civil disobedience exercise.

The city burned, the slogans echoed, and once again, the Democrat establishment found itself struggling to tell the difference between civil disobedience and felony arson.

President Trump, unimpressed with California’s usual cocktail of shilly-shallying and moral preening, invoked Title 10 and deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles.

In any event, the federal government acted while California’s leadership issued statements telling America to ignore its lying eyes.

No Los Angeles riot scene is complete without a cameo from Congresswoman Maxine Waters, the perennial flame-thrower who long ago confused volume with virtue.

Waters first denied that there was any violence. “No one was shot. No one was killed,” she declared, as flaming barricades lit up the skyline and journalists staggered away from tear gas with bleeding faces—live on cable news.

Then again, Maxine Waters has been........

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