Off the Publisher’s Desk 6-18-25

Trump did the right thing!

President Donald Trump did the right thing for the country and especially for Los Angeles to bring law and order to the streets of this country’s second largest city with 3.8 million citizens.

I will call it a riot because when law enforcement people get fireworks, rocks, concrete and “Molotov Cocktails” thrown at them, and property is damaged and local small businesses are looted and destroyed, that’s a riot.

Trump did the right thing to restore law and order. We all should remember riots in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd that did more than $500 million in damaged to some 1500 properties and killed two people. Trump’s action saved a lot of costs and damages.

Unlike, Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, who sat by and let Minneapolis burn back in June of 2020.

How many of us remember the “Little Rock Nine”? Back on September 4, 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the State’s National Guard to block nine black students from entering Little Rock’s all white Central High School.

Then, Little Rock’s Mayor, Woodrow Wilson Mann, asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce integration and protect the nine students. On September 24th Eisenhower invoked the insurrection Act of 1807 to enable troops to perform domestic law enforcement.

Eisenhower sent 1,000 federal troops from the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to insure the safety of the Little Rock Nine and with that the ruling of the Supreme Court was upheld. The court had ruled that segregation by race in public schools was unconstitutional three years earlier.

Riots apparently were not a new thing in our great USA. Back during the Civil War there were the New York Riots, when the protest turned into a race riot against African Americans by Irish American rioters.

Congress had passed the Enrollment Act that established the draft (during the civil war) for the first time. New citizens learned that they were expected to register for the draft to fight for their new country. Black men were excluded from the draft as they were largely not considered a citizen, and wealthier white men could pay for a substitute.

The riot started on July 11, 1863 and was put down by federal troops five days later. Lincoln brought these federal troops directly from the Gettysburg battlefield.

But, even before we were a nation there was the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773 a protest about the Tea Tax levied without representation in the British Parliament and against the monopoly of the East India Company where about 92,000 pounds of tea were dumped into the Boston Harbor by Colonists dressed as Indians who took control of a couple of ships load with tea.

Don’t riot, but make your mark on the ballot and we can all live together in peace.

Thanks for reading!     ~Carlton