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Organized, Not Organic: The Los Angeles unrest is described as a calculated civil terrorism movement, not a spontaneous protest.
Symbolic Gear: The prevalent use of keffiyehs and identical gear suggests coordination among the participants.
Logistical Support: The large quantity of gas masks and coordinated acts of violence like rock-throwing and arson point to organization and planning.
Globalization of Intifada: Connections to groups like Students for Justice in Palestine suggest the unrest is linked to a broader anti-Western agenda.
Misleading Media: Some media outlets are accused of mischaracterizing the events as peaceful protests rather than acts of lawlessness.
Strategic Intimidation: The author posits that these organized acts of violence aim to make immigration law enforcement a contentious issue.
Tal Fortgang
Nothing About the L.A. “Protest” Is Organic
How did the rioters know to show up covering their faces with the same symbolic gear?
Jun 11 2025
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The new dominant form of organized crime has shown its face in Los Angeles in recent days. Though it comes under the banner of “protest” and is whitewashed in the media as “mostly peaceful” and presumed spontaneous, a close observer can see that it is none of these things. It is in fact the result of a calculated civil terrorism movement taking advantage of Americans’ reluctance to treat criminals as criminals.
Images and videos from the riots give the game away. Why are there keffiyehs everywhere? What does Palestinianism have to do with preventing the federal government from enforcing immigration law, and how did the rioters know to show up covering their faces with the same symbolic gear? Who brought gas masks by the truckload? Who managed to convince hundreds of people to take up rock-throwing, Molotov cocktail-dropping, and arson at seemingly arbitrary places and times? Who laid the groundwork for street violence by training people in the tactics that prevent law enforcement from ending it promptly? As domestic-extremism expert Kyle Shideler puts it, this violence is “not black magic, it’s just hard work.”
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But just as it is not black magic—not orchestrated down to fine details by mob bosses—neither is it grassroots. Nothing about this “protest” is organic. It is organized, activated, and AstroTurfed—and it has a hard time sticking to script. When Students for Justice in Palestine chimes in to say that “from the barrios of LA to the refugee camps of Bethlehem, we will globalize the intifada,” it makes the unrest look less like an expression of outrage against immigration policy than a lashing out against the rule of law itself.
It will still cloak itself in the language of law and democracy. It gets significant help from credulous media reporting, like CNN’s claim that “protests in and around Los Angeles erupted on Friday after federal immigration agents arrested at least 44 people.” A protest is when people peaceably assemble for a redress of grievances. What has transpired in Los Angeles is wanton property destruction, assaults on cops, and exuberant lawlessness.
None of this stands any chance of showing the American people that the government’s actions are wrong and the “protesters” are right. All it can do is show that the rioters are loose cannons, and that Americans ought to be afraid of what they might do. It is the opposite of democratic.
Strategically deployed acts of intimidation are the mechanism by which civil terror groups—themselves strategic, organized, well-funded, and cleverer than they look—seek to advance their anti-Western cause. One would have to be naive, at this point, not to suspect that they want to make immigration law enforcement a third rail in American politics.
For those who openly seek to “globalize the intifada”—the guerrilla campaign against civilians in the “Little Satan,” Israel—lax immigration standards provide an excellent way to amass manpower for the burgeoning struggle against the “Great Satan,” America. While no hard evidence demonstrates Iran’s involvement in fomenting this organized chaos, civil terror groups do use Tehran’s terms and those of its proxies for other acts of terror. All appear to view the two nations in the same way.
Is the mass criminal activity we’re seeing in cities a foreign-funded effort to destabilize our politics, intimidate Americans to subvert the democratic process, and prevent the federal government from carrying out entirely justifiable immigration law enforcement? It’s hard to say definitively without further investigation. So long as these miscreants continue to act lawlessly, however, states and the federal government will have ample cause to open those investigations—to identify who is laying the groundwork for violence, which large nonprofits should face massive asset forfeitures for bankrolling civil terrorism, and which individuals should be facing prison time for bringing the new wave of organized crime to American streets.
Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Top Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
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