In which Lord Downer, the bromancer and the Major are all on parade, which is a big help with the numbers ...

 

A hapless pond, surrounded by fuzz against junk, and besieged by rain, at the Tarcutta terminus, where EVs go to wait and perhaps to die ...

After that narrow escape, the pond pressed on to Melbourne, only to be surrounded by leftists on Smith street.

But nothing could stop the fearless pond reporting on the reptiles, early this day in full lizard Oz war monger mode ...

It was a big day and the pond searched in vain for news of King Donald's splendid parade, and the astonishing crowds ... and so went elsewhere ...

Trump Flack Defies Empty Bleachers With Wild Parade Estimate
MATH NOT MATH-ING
The White House director of communications seems to be having trouble with basic arithmetic (*archive link)

President Donald Trump’s director of communications has prompted ridicule with spurious claims over the size of the crowd at a Washington, D.C. military parade.
“Amazing. Despite the threat of rain, over 250,000 patriots showed up to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the @USArmy,” Steven Cheung posted to X on Saturday night. “God Bless the USA!”
MSNBC was quick to pour water on the claim.
“That’s just not accurate, that’s not even close to accurate,” reporter Vaughn Hillyard, who was present at the event, told hosts of MSNBC’s The Weekend on Sunday.
“Just the eye of any individual who is here on the ground or looking at images or video knows that there were not 250,000 people, but that can be the White House’s position here,” he added.
Users on X eviscerated Cheung in the comments section and in reposts of his original claim. Many of them compared him to former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who was called out in 2017 for grossly inflating the number of people who’d attended the president’s first inauguration.
“Steven Cheung in his ‘Sean Spicer’ moment declared FALSELY 250K people attended Trump’s vanity parade yesterday!!” one user put it. “The lying and delusion from this Trump administration never stops!!”
“Steven Cheung has no concept of the principles of empirical induction predicated from proven observation,” another chimed in. “Steven Cheung has no ability to use inference from established facticity. Steven Cheung is a deluded fantasist with no concept of actual reality.”
A third person simply wrote: “Trump’s nutsackhead is lying again.”
A fourth person said: “Yeah right dude, and Steven Cheung is skinny too.”
“The sad spin starts,” as another described it. “The highest reasonable total is only 10-20K attending.”

Oh yes, and there were some compelling snaps of King Donald, Melania and champers Pete looking glum and bored, but what about the terrifying doggies?

Apparently there was a real one too, but trust Grok to be a grokking bummer ...

Even Grok, X’s in-house AI factchecking tool, found it hard to wrangle any logic from Cheung’s post. “Claims of over 250,000 attendees at the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary parade in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 2025, appear exaggerated,” the program responded to a tag in the comments.
“Official permits allowed for up to 200,000 for the parade and 50,000 for the festival, but news reports suggest actual attendance was lower than expected,” it went on. “No official figures confirm the 250,000 claim, and sources like PBS and KTLA indicate turnout fell short of 200,000. Exact numbers remain unverified as of now.”

The pond searched high and low for news of the huuuge crowd, but over on the extreme far right there was only reptiles in war monger mode, and even worse no cratering Caterist in sight ...

Crusader Niall led the charge in full war monger mode with a cry worthy of those most excellent medieval warriors ...

Netanyahu’s strike against Iran marks the West’s first win of Cold War II
Those who have criticised President Trump for his erratic trade policy – myself included – must admit our misjudgment. The trade war has turned out to be a phony war. This is the real thing.
By Niall Ferguson

The pond did its best not to channel Russell Morris singing "the real thing" and sampled the climax:

...This war has become existential. My next essay may have to be “Iran after the Islamic Republic”.
Will it achieve the transition to a free society that so many Iranian people crave? Or, as in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, will the downfall of an authoritarian regime be followed by civil strife, creating new opportunities for jihadists to establish their Islamic State, as envisioned nearly 20 years ago by Abu Bakr Naji in The Management of Savagery? We do not yet know.
What we can say confidently is that the theocracy in Tehran badly miscalculated, believing Trump would restrain Netanyahu. The Iranians may also have believed their membership of the Axis entitled them to some protection from their Russian and Chinese confederates. But they were wrong on both scores. As we have seen more than once in the past year, Bibi Does Not Chicken Out. And that means that, whether it was intended or not, the US and its principal Middle Eastern ally have now taken a vital first step toward restoring the credibility of the West.
Of course, the final outcome of Cold War II will not be decided at Natanz and Fordow, any more than it will be decided at Pokrovsk and Novopavlivka, where fighting has been raging between Russian and Ukrainian forces this week. The decisive battle will be fought – or not – over Taiwan. The ultimate verdict on the grand strategy of Donald Trump, if such a thing exists, will therefore depend on how successfully he contends with the Chinese challenge to American primacy.
For now, however, those who have criticised the President for his erratic trade policy – myself included – must admit our misjudgment. The trade war has turned out to be a phony war. This is the real thing. And so far, at least, our side is winning.

That triumphalism was followed by the useless parade of pompous credits...

Sir Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of 16 books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild and Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. This article was first published in The Free Press and was co-authored by Harry Halem, senior fellow at Yorktown Institute, and Marcus Hendriks, head of the National Security Unit at Policy Exchange.

Just what every well-equipped warrior needs for the battlefield.

But still no Caterist, so the pond did a deep dive ...

The elusive Caterist stayed well hidden, but there was a piquant juxtaposition of Rodger and Lord Downer.

Rodger played the part of "diplomatic child" by wondering about regime change ...

Bibi took chance to attack isolated foe, but call for popular rebellion is risky

Iranians have a strong sense of national identity and being bombed by Israel is hardly likely to ignite a popular uprising. In fact the opposite may be the case.

By Rodger Shanahan

ANALYSIS

Just the climax will do, and please, Rodger the pond gently...

...Netanyahu has promoted the idea that the attack can be part of a broader strategy that may lead to regime collapse in Iran. Yet it is difficult to envisage how that occurs. Assassinating regime officials, nuclear scientists and military officers normally has a short-term effect.

Attacking economic targets such as oil refineries and gas fields may impose an economic cost on the population but not to a degree that will compel them to act against the regime. And Iran is equally capable of attacking Israeli economic targets.

The regime is already widely disliked, as evidences by decreasing participation rates in presidential and parliamentary elections. But attacking state infrastructure without being seen to be attacking the country is a hard thing to achieve.

Iranians have a strong sense of national identity and being bombed by Israel is hardly likely to ignite a popular uprising. In fact the opposite may be the case, at least in the short term. Iranians endured eight years of attacks on their cities in the Iran-Iraqi war, so they are resilient.

That’s what makes the end game difficult to predict. If it was intended to force Iran to negotiate with Washington over its nuclear program it will need to be a long-term campaign that would be near impossible to sustain. And Iran is now incentivised to pursue a nuclear weapons program.

If it was designed to force regime change it lacks any political dimension. More likely it represents an opportunity to set back Iran’s nuclear capability temporarily, further degrade its conventional military capability in advance of more military action down the track, and to demonstrate Israel’s willingness to use force has fundamentally changed.

In 2002, while testifying before a congressional committee on the strategic sense it made to invade Iraq, Netanyahu said “the application of power” was the most important thing in winning the War on Terrorism, and “the more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes”. This may well inform his current approach

But the problem with this belief was apparent when he then argued “the first victory in Afghanistan makes the second victory in Iraq that much easier”.

Dr Rodger Shanahan is a Middle East analyst and author.

Luckily Lord Downer, always an excellent crusader, fresh from his victory in Afghanistan, would have none of that claptrap ... and instead offered his own brand of claptrap ...

The header: Only a ‘diplomatic child’ could question Israel’s action against Iran

The Israelis are trying to end the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program. If they’d listened to feckless Western politicians, the war with Iranian proxies would just go on.

The caption for a remarkable collage no one would take credit for, so chalk it up to AI: Ayatollah al Khamenei and Benjamin Netanyahu, two leaders who stand at the precipice of widening war. Illustration: The Australian with agency pictures

The magical incantation: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Lord Downer was fatalistic and yet exultant:

This was inevitable. The determination of the Iranian theocratic leadership to eliminate the Jewish state could only end in one of two ways. Either Ayatollah al Khamenei, the Iranian Supreme Leader, and the hardliners in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps would listen to the advice of moderates in the regime or there would be war.

In the last few months there has been a power struggle between the moderate and hard-line elements of the IRGC and others in senior leadership positions. The moderates wanted to re-establish constructive relations with the West, including a reduction in the rigorous sanctions regime the US and its allies have imposed on Iran. First and foremost, they were in favour of concluding a nuclear agreement with the US.

At this point the reptiles interrupted with a tweet to make sure the Australian Zionist Daily stayed on the same page as the IDF ...

Lord Downer pressed on ...

I was at a conference last month in Beijing with one of the moderates, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who had been, until March this year, the vice president of Iran and was the foreign minister who negotiated for the Iranians the nuclear agreement in 2015.

... but was immediately interrupted again, with reptile news, In Jerusalem, a delegation of Indigenous Australians led by Olympian Nova Peris spent much of the night in two bomb shelters - one on top of the other and joined by a man hole.

Lord Downer insisted he was the one to trust with the news, having been at the coalface, where the coalition loves to be (dinkum clean virginal Oz coal might yet save the planet)...

Zarif is a man of urbane charm and common sense. He also has a sensitivity for where the Iranian public are at on these issues. Zarif thought a nuclear agreement with the Americans was necessary, but that Iran should not give up altogether its enrichment capacity; after all, Iran wanted to maintain the option of developing a civil nuclear program. He had been proposing the enrichment facilities by a consortium of countries, which would include Iran and some of the Gulf States.

This would’ve been a practical outcome which, possibly, the Trump administration could have accepted. The Iranian moderates have also judged that the public are tiring of the expensive support the regime is giving to the so-called Palestinian resistance.

Palestinians are Sunni Muslims and the Iranians Shia. Significant sections of the Iranian public cannot understand why the Shia theocracy is supporting Sunni assaults on Israel. The Iranian moderates have been willing to pull back support for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and several militias in Iraq.

But not the hardliners.

They were determined to press on with the nuclear weapons program, rebuild Iran’s air defences, increase the production of missiles and maintain support for Iranian proxy organisations who form the Palestinian resistance.

Though I can’t prove this I do think the eviction of Zarif from the vice presidency in March was a clear indication that the hardliners were gaining the upper hand.

The reptiles regurgitated Lord Downer's wise words for the caption to the next snap, Former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif meets his Indian counterpart Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in 2019. Zarif is a man of urbane charm and common sense. He also has a sensitivity for where the Iranian public are at on these issues. Picture: AFP

Lord Downer bowed to the infinite wisdom of Benji ...

No doubt the Israelis have watched all this much more closely than we ever could. The Iranian hardliners, led by the supreme leader himself, are dedicated to the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. They are part of the “river to the sea” crowd. As negotiations between the Americans and the Iranians on nuclear weapons stalled, what should Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet do now?

For its very survival, Israel needs to change the status quo. It has to destroy the capacity of its foes to continue to inflict pain and damage.

Ultimately, to achieve that, Israel has to deal with Iran. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and various other extremist organisations would not be able to threaten Israel if they were not backed by Iran. Those organisations are Iranian proxies.

Let’s think about this from the perspective of the Jewish people. Six million of them were killed during the Holocaust in the last century. They continue to be abused and persecuted, including in recent times in Western countries. They are endlessly condemned by resolutions in the UN. And they have a near neighbour who has a nuclear weapons program and a leader who has vowed to destroy Israel. As I often ask people, what would you do in this situation?

Oh please, please, the pond can answer that one, why indulge in mass starvation, ethnic cleansing and genocide and then bung on another do as a most excellent distraction, so that the cleansing can be completed in reasonable privachy ...

The reptiles interrupted again, The Australian's Paige Taylor reports.

Lord Downer emitted a tired sigh at the notion that the mass starvation and ethnic cleasning should be mentioned ...

Right now the Israelis have taken the opportunity to fix this problem once and for all. If they took the advice of feckless Western politicians such as those in our own government then the war with Iranian proxies would go on and on. In Jerusalem, I’m sure they’ve received the advice that they should conclude a two-state agreement with the Palestinians. They’ve heard that 10,000 times.

They also know, however, there is no prospect of achieving a two-state solution when the Palestinian resistance is funded, armed and supported by an Iranian regime that wants to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth. Only a diplomatic child would think it was possible to reach an agreement with such people.

We have to hope that the Israelis have sufficiently damaged Iran’s nuclear program to set it back for years. But let’s expand our hopes a bit further. Let’s hope the hardliners realise that a war with Israel is never going to lead anywhere good.

And beyond that, let’s ask ourselves what the Iranian people as distinct from the leaders of the theocracy think about all of this. I’ve asked several people who have lived in Iran in recent times what the reaction to the Israeli strikes would be. Their answers are surprising. First, they are frightened. Second, those who do not support the regime – and that is most people in Iran – hope that the attacks on the regime will be successful.

For those who stayed too long in the hive mind, the next snap was designed to help identify a villain, Foreign Minister Penny Wong. Picture: Martin Ollman

Lord Downer wrapped up his piece by calling for that new Riviera by the sea, albeit couched in his subtle, ever so diplomatic language ...

More than that, this war between Israel and Iran opens a faint prospect that the regime in Tehran could be overthrown by its own people, fed up with the impact of the sanctions on their living standards, fed up with constant wars, fed up with supporting Sunni Palestinians in a fruitless but bloody attempt to destroy Israel. They want to get on with a quiet and easy life like anybody would.

As Australians, let’s ask ourselves what we would want? We would want to see the end of Iran’s nuclear program, we would want Israel to live in peace within recognised borders, rather than being subject to periodic and often very violent assaults from Palestinian extremists.

For that to happen, we should make it clear to the Iranians that the war should end and they should change tack and be prepared to live in harmony with Israel. By the way, only when Iran recognises Israel’s right to exist will there be any hope of a two-state solution.

So, in future, our government might send that message to the Iranian hardliners instead of always attacking the Israelis.

Alexander Downer was foreign minister from 1996 to 2007 and high commissioner to the UK from 2014 to 2018. He is chair of UK think tank Policy Exchange.

As usual, the pond couldn't let matters rest there, and turned to its infallible guide, the bromancer in full flight ...

The header: Middle East reaches an extremely dangerous moment in Israel-Iran conflict, As Israel widens the scope of its targets to oil and gas facilities, the Iranian regime may very well lash out in ways that are not yet clear.

The caption: Fire and smoke rise into the sky after an Israeli attack on the Shahran oil depot in Tehran, Iran. Picture: Getty Images

The irrelevant incantation: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

The bromancer sounded uncertain about regime change ...

The Middle East conflict has escalated dramatically and dangerously.

Israel has widened the scope of its targets in Iran. Its top priority was and still is hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities, but it also wanted to destroy the remaining Iranian air defence systems, as well as targeting its missile factories and launchers, and its military leadership.

Now, Israel has widened its target set in Iran to include oil and gas facilities. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has also made it clear it may attack Iran’s political leadership.

While not exactly conducting a military campaign designed to produce immediate regime change inside Iran, attacking Tehran’s energy facilities could lead to major disruption of the Iranian economy.

The Iranian leadership and oppressive government system are already intensely unpopular with the majority of Iranians, who, episodically but regularly, take to the streets to protest the regime’s repressive policies. Routinely, brave Iranian protesters are locked up and killed, even for offences as trivial as not wearing the headscarf with sufficient modesty.

The fact that Israeli intelligence has so comprehensively penetrated Iranian society as well as Iranian government and military structures is also almost certainly a sign of the simmering dislike so many Iranians have of their government.

It is seemingly not very difficult for Israel to find Iranians willing to work against the ruling regime.

The reptiles then interrupted with a repeat offering with that weird thumb image, The Australian's Paige Taylor reports.

Like Lord Downer, the brave bromancer pressed on and expanded the conflict...

At the same time, it is now much more difficult for the Iranian rulers to argue that although they have impoverished their people and stolen their freedom, at least they are advancing the revolution or furthering any geo-strategic cause.

Nonetheless, this is an extremely dangerous moment in the Middle East. The Iranian regime, pushed to desperation, may very well lash out in ways that are not yet clear. Some of Iran’s missiles are finding targets in Israel. And if it holds on to power, Iran’s regime will surely try to reconstitute its nuclear program and race towards weapons.

Its three effective allies, China, Russia and North Korea, are all nuclear weapons states themselves. China and North Korea have a considerable record of nuclear proliferation. The Pakistanis got their original nuclear technology from Beijing. North Korea provided the know how for Syria to construct a nuclear reactor which Israel destroyed in 2007.

A strong and hostile Iran hurts Israel, but it also hurts the US. In that sense, it is in the strategic interests of Beijing, Moscow and Pyongyang. So even if the Israeli military campaign is successful in destroying much or even most of Iran’s nuclear program, the likelihood is that this will be reconstituted in time, not least with the help of the axis of autocracy.

That axis of autocracy is very different from the axis of monarchists, what with King Donald I at the the helm as the reptiles interrupted with Missiles fired from Iran seen over Jerusalem. Picture: AFP

Inspired, the bromancer moved on to the G7...

As the military campaign has gone on, US support for Israel’s actions has become clearer. The Israelis would be disappointed that the Americans did not participate in its military strikes in Iran. Any effective attack on the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow, buried inside a mountain, probably needs American bunker buster bombs and perhaps American planes as well.

But while the US did not participate in the attacks on Iran it certainly knew about them and did not prevent them from taking place. More than that, the US military has been helping Jerusalem intercept Iranian drones and missiles fired at Israel.

As the campaign has gone on, and the Israelis have been militarily successful, Donald Trump has become more explicitly pro-Israel in his public remarks. He doesn’t want the US to be directly involved in this conflict, but if the Iranians carry through with their threat to target US bases and personnel in the Middle East they can expect decisive American military retaliation.

It’s in this heightened geo-strategic context that Anthony Albanese will meet Trump at the G7 in Canada.

The reptiles decided to interrupt with another bit of recycling, always aware that the hive mind loves mindless repetition, In Jerusalem, a delegation of Indigenous Australians led by Olympian Nova Peris spent much of the night in two bomb shelters - one on top of the other and joined by a man hole.

Just like Sir Niall, the bromancer was ready to fry bigger fish, play the bigger game, AUKUS and the war with China by Xmas ...

The context of this approaching meeting probably explains Penny Wong’s more robust than usual remarks about Iran on the ABC’s Insiders program. Sensibly, and remarkably, she also refrained from directly criticising Israel’s attack on Iran.

One question is: will Albanese have anything at all remotely worthwhile to say on Australia’s behalf to Trump and his administration?

US tariffs on Australian goods are a very minor issue with very minor economic impact. Is Albanese capable of a serious contribution at the level of global geo-strategic issues? Previous Prime Ministers would have taken Australia’s excellent relationship with Israel as an asset into a meeting with the US president at a time of critical conflict in the Middle East. But the Albanese government has effectively destroyed Australia’s relationship with Israel, chiefly in the interests of domestic political management.

On AUKUS, it’s such a good deal for the US that it’s very difficult to imagine Trump just cancelling it. But Australia’s ludicrously low defence spending level is unsustainable, not remotely adequate to Australia’s needs and not credible for an ally of the United States which relies so heavily on Washington for its security.

Albanese’s recently acquired disdain for defence spending targets is absurd and hypocritical. He campaigned in 2022 on the basis that he would always spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence. And that he would go above that if necessary. He had not trouble with GDP percentage targets for defence then. The gravely deteriorating strategic circumstances Australia faces, evident today in Iran but clear in Ukraine, the Chinese military build-up and so much else, plus the extravagant cost of acquiring nuclear submarines, means that much more than 2 per cent is now required. Yet we are stuck at 2 per cent, the same percentage of GDP defence spending occupied when Albanese came to power.

Far from deprecating such targets, Defence Minister Richard Marles once explained that the best way to think of the cost of the AUKUS subs was that they would always represent an more or less constant percentage of GDP in their own right.

Albanese goes into his meeting with Trump with almost nothing to offer and nothing to say. He should aim at the very least at establishing some kind of personal relationship with Trump, who is going to be president for another three and a half years whether folks like it or not.

A relationship with the US president is a strategic asset in itself, which many former Australian prime ministers have enjoyed.

Given the wretched state of our own defences, the feeble performance of the economy, and the lack of any serious strategic or economic agenda from the government, we need every available asset we can possibly conjure up.

Indeed, indeed, perhaps nationalise The Australian and send the reptiles off to enlist?

Just a thought, as the pond wrapped up a busy day by turning to the Major, in top wedgie form ...

The pond always appreciates the Major sauntering in from the links to give fellow reptiles advice on how to discover Order of Lenin medals, this time in Journalism 101 was a casualty of LA riots, For those listening to ABC Radio it was hard to find out what was actually happening on LA’s streets for the first few days, so heavy was the anti-Trump, pro-California Governor rhetoric.

The caption: California Governor Gavin Newsom has said the protests were largely peaceful.

The meaningless advice: This article contains features which are only available in the web version, Take me there

Forget the most excellent parade, the Major was stuck back in a small portion of LA, beating the drum, and never you mind talk of that actual attempt at an insurrection on 6th January ...

Too much media coverage of last week’s LA riots – especially on our ABC – glossed over the violence before plunging into quoted criticisms of US President Donald Trump for calling in the National Guard.

Bari Weiss’s excellent Free Press website made the point specifically – its daily email to subscribers on June 10 asked: “who are the LA rioters, really?”

“The first questions journalists must answer, no matter the story, are who, what, when and where. Those basic questions have become so much more urgent given the collapse of trust – and trustworthiness – in the media.

“And so it is with the disorder in LA. The left says peaceful protests! And the right says Antifa! Mexican nationalists!”

For those listening to ABC Radio’s reports, it was hard to find out what was actually happening on LA’s streets for the first few days, so heavy was the anti-Trump, pro-California Governor Gavin Newsom rhetoric being quoted by a parade of Democrats, LA officials and politicians.

The experienced David Speers, standing in as host of ABC TV’s 7.30, could not get much past the Democrat lines. He started on Monday night with “sanctuary state” politician for California, former senator Kevin de Leon.

Speers bowled up some very easy and loaded questions: “Why do you think the President wants to orchestrate this crisis?’’ Later he asked: “Is what we’re witnessing now likely to be a darker, more violent chapter in the divisions that we’ve been witnessing politically in the United States?”

He did delve into de Leon’s role in LA’s “sanctuary cities” legislation and how it fitted with Trump’s clear November mandate to fix illegal immigration. Not much was discussed about actual violence on LA’s streets or the fact federal immigration officials were merely executing court warrants before the protests started.

Yet there was so much violence that LA mayor Karen Bass, who attributes all blame to Trump, was forced to impose a night time curfew downtown on Wednesday, Australian time.

Game set and match to the Major at least in his mind, as the reptiles offered an exciting snap, Police in riot gear block off an on ramp that leads to the 101 freeway in downtown Los Angeles. Picture: Getty Images

The Major did his very best to lather up hysteria and outrage and turned to impeccable sources of the barking mad Taibbi kind.

The pond stood back and well clear, and let the Major have at it ...

By Thursday morning (AEST), 385 protesters had been arrested.

James Freeman in The Wall Street Journal on June 10 was explicit.

“Sadly it’s still fashionable in the media industry to downplay looting and vandalism when reporters and editors agree with the underlying political agenda,” he wrote.

He singled out the headline and sub head in The Washington Post: ‘He’s waging a war on us’: As Trump escalates Angelinos defend their city.

The Post piece claimed: “Across this vast metropolis, residents denounce what they consider an attack on the very fabric of their city.” The piece took 26 paragraphs before quoting a single resident who supported the reimposition of law and order.

Peter Hartcher, international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, and Emma Shortis, from the left-wing Australia Institute, managed to load up the SMH’s opinion pages with one-sided warnings about the rise of authoritarianism in the US.

Ignoring all the evidence of US intelligence agency collusion against Trump in his first term – evidence confirmed by the Twitter files revelations addressed in this column on January 23, 2023 – Shortis insisted Trump was busy erecting a US surveillance state to match that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Hartcher could see nothing but dire consequences as Trump displayed “enthusiasm verging on bloodlust”. In fact, most analysts in the US admit the National Guard has so far been low key.

The usually Trump-deranged The New York Times was occasionally politically sophisticated, seeing the dangers for Democrats in Trump’s use of law and order.

In a June 10 podcast, NY Times opinion writer David French said it was impossible to understand Trump’s actions in LA without considering the President’s regrets about not calling out the National Guard under his command during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests when the guards were largely under the command of local governors.

French and fellow Times opinionista Tressie McMillan Cottom agreed Trump’s behaviour last week was performative. The President was “keenly attuned to the power of political spectacle,” Cottom said.

On Substack, both Michael Shellenberger’s Public and Matt Taibbi’s Racket News saw big dangers for the Democrats in Newsom’s insistence the protests were largely peaceful and Trump was a threat to democracy.

Both pointed out Democrat governors had often maintained the peaceful nature of BLM protests in 2020 which ended in deaths and violent looting.

Taibbi wrote on June 11: “The Summer of (George) Floyd introduced the phenomenon of elite inspired violence.

“This is the critical part of every Trump news cycle. Instead of accepting political reality (Trump got elected …) press and elected opposition rally behind protests that are encouraged to spread everywhere, not so subtly pining for an Administration-toppling disorder event.”

Readers would do well to seek out Shellenberger’s excellent June 9 essay and video, The Reason The Left Loves Riots Is Because It Hates Civilisation.

This is where Newsom is damaging his prospects of a Presidential run.

“Democrats (have) increasingly viewed laws against illegal camping, open air drug dealing, shoplifting, burglary, arson and unlawful border crossing not as tools for protecting neighbourhoods … but as tools for putting poor people and racial minorities in prison,” Shellenberger says.

Shellenberger ran for California governor as a Democrat in 2018, finishing ninth of 27 candidates.

In this column’s opinion, The Wall Street Journal is the most thoughtful and balanced of the US daily mastheads. It is hard not to agree with the view put forward by the WSJ’s regular opinion writer, Jason Riley, on June 10.

“Mr Trump had no trouble vilifying troublemakers who were out in force following George Floyd’s murder. But he praised and ultimately pardoned virtually all the January 6 rioters who assaulted police officers, smashed windows and left faeces in the Capitol’s corridors,” Riley wrote.

“Democrats are no less guilty of selective outrage. They rightly condemned the attack on the Capitol, yet made excuses … for everything from violence against Jews … to arson and looting at BLM demonstrations.”

Something else the media ignores about the LA violence is the unspoken racism of low expectations on show. The law would never allow such protests in Beverly Hills. As during the BLM marches, it is in poor, largely black neighbourhoods where the violence and looting occurs.

Phew, clearly the reptiles decided it was best not to interrupt the Major because only then came a snap of a terrifying sight, Protesters confront a row of police officers during demonstrations at Lafayette square. Picture: AFP

What does it all mean? Well if the Major could only give up his regular game of golf he might still hold down a top spot at Faux Noise...

At Bezos' WaPo, where democracy dies in a billionaire's pockets? 

Not so much ...The real siege of Los Angeles, ICE raids are shredding the city’s social fabric of immigrant lives. (* archive link)

And so on ...

...It’s no coincidence that ICE started its ugly work in downtown L.A.’s fashion district, where members of the Hispanic community gather every day. It’s even less of a coincidence that agents descended on the parking lots of Home Depot, targeting day laborers just trying to earn an honest living — the most vulnerable of the vulnerable.

Since then, ICE has continued to target the spaces at the heart of everyday immigrant and Hispanic life: schools, churches, gas stations and even the fields of Oxnard, where farmworkers — essential during the pandemic and still essential today — keep California’s agricultural engine running, feeding the entire country.

On Tuesday, I visited a shopping center in East L.A., a cornerstone of the local Hispanic community filled with clothing stalls, spices and small restaurants. Normally it would be packed at lunchtime. This time, it was empty. In my 15 years reporting in Los Angeles, I’d never encountered what I saw there: people asking not to be identified, even requesting that I not name the place itself. The atmosphere was one of being under siege.

A butcher who has run his shop for over two decades told me that if business didn’t recover soon, he might have to shut down.

“It’s because of the raids,” he said. “There are rumors all around. People say Immigration is here. People get scared, afraid their relatives will be taken.”

The biggest fear among his customers, he said, is that the person who provides for the household will be deported.

“We all live day-to-day,” he said.

A young vendor told me she wakes up every day in fear. Her children are begging her not to go to work, to avoid the risk.

“I pray that Immigration doesn’t catch me. But I need to work. For rent and for food. I can’t afford to stop working,” she said.

I asked her about her future. All she wanted was to make sure her children went to college.

“I want them to study, not end up like me, working. I want them to have what I couldn’t.”

At the end of my visit, a woman who owns a clothing stand stopped me. She wanted to say something to Donald Trump. The president of the United States, she said, needed to take a closer look at whom he was targeting.

“There are a lot of hardworking people — those are the ones he’s going after,” she told me.

The protests will eventually fade. All protests do. What will remain are the stories of broken families, of immigrant lives destroyed, of deepening roots suddenly torn out from American soil by an aggressive nativist administration.

A recent Post poll found the public is split. There are approximately as many Americans who buy the government’s narrative — that Los Angeles is facing “mostly violent” protests and that the National Guard and Marine Corps were needed to restore normalcy — as there are those who think the administration is tearing apart communities and inventing a security crisis to justify a military presence among civilians.

That even divide should worry us. But many have not yet made up their mind. Only a clear, sustained focus on the reality of what is happening can possibly tip the balance toward truth.

Say what?

In the vast expanse that is Los Angeles County, the rallies barely register as a blip. The protests are confined to a very small area of downtown.

Wrong, Mr Krauze, very wrong. They occupy a vast area of Major Mitchell's Faux Noise ossified heart, indifferent to the lives of others.

And so to a final word from the Major, doing his best to help out with the fucking of the United States, as ably performed by Faux Noise in support of King Donald ...

Australian journalists have ignored the damage Newsom has done to California, where jobs are being destroyed and personal taxes are soaring.

While he is using the LA riots to position himself as an unofficial opposition leader to Trump, the media focus in any eventual presidential push will be Newsom’s decision to shut oil refineries, pushing up California petrol prices.

In The Free Press on Friday, American journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote a piece headlined: Why Gavin Newsom Will Never Be President. She pointed out California relies on illegal immigrants for 7 per cent of all low-paid manual work.

The argument “advanced by rich progressives that we need … illegal labour to do jobs that are too crappy for Americans is ground zero for how the Democrats lost the working class,” she argued, correctly.

How else to end than with the immortal Rowe, celebrating that huuge parade, so deplorably ignored by the reptiles this day ...

It's always in the detail, and what a fine detail this trio made, as Captain Bonespur saluted Vietnam vets without any sign of irony and Benji lured him off to war ...