‘There’s No Riot Outside’: Variety of Hollywood Celebrities Contradict Trump
Comedians, others point out manufactured crisis to justify military in Los Angeles
While Donald Trump and his allies try to claim that downtown Los Angeles, Calif, has become engulfed in violent rioting, a number of popular Hollywood stars are going directly into Americans’ living rooms to say otherwise.
Trump and his allies on the right are portraying the protests against his policies of mass deportations as violent and dangerously widespread across the city.
They’re doing so — often deceptively — in order to justify Trump’s nearly unprecedented deployment of the US military in LA.
Trump ordered federalized National Guard troops and active-duty Marines into Los Angeles to quell protests against his policies of detention and deportation of migrants by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
Republican Sen Ted Cruz, of Texas, and even the federal government’s own social media accounts have been found spreading misinformation and deceptive imagery in an effort to portray Los Angeles as hopelessly violent.
Celebrities that Americans know and love are telling a different story, however.
“We have a full house, as we always do, here at our studio in Hollywood. Which might be surprising for those of you in other parts of the country who have been watching cable news and believe the city is some kind of totalitarian hellscape right now,” ABC late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel quipped as he opened his Tuesday evening program. “It most certainly is not. In fact, let’s take a look at outside because I want you to see what it’s like in Hollywood right now.”
Kimmel cut to peaceful streetscapes outside his studio.
“You won’t see this elsewhere on television. Not only is it not an apocalypse, they’re having a Disney/Pixar movie premiere for Elio, a movie about aliens. Don’t tell Trump. He’ll send in the Green Berets, too,” Kimmel cracked. “But I just want to say, ‘Thank God for President Trump and the heroes at ICE for protecting us from these bloodthirsty fruit stand vendors spreading their dangerous pineapple chunks and mangos with a squirt of lime all over the city.“
Kimmel got more serious when he said, “I’m very angry, I have to say. I cannot believe what’s going on. I knew it was going to be bad, I did not know it was going to be this bad. People who have lived here their whole lives, people who have been in this city longer than I have, the vast majority of whom have never done anything wrong, are being abducted — which is the correct word to use — by agents in masks, hiding their identities, grabbing people off the street and at work, sending people to detention centers.
“And to protest that — which is not only our right as Americans, it’s our responsibility —Los Angelenos gathered to demonstrate and, with very few exceptions, peacefully demonstrate to voice their opposition to this disgusting and unnecessary abuse of power instigated by our mentally ill president, who is dead-set on exacerbating this, who actually wants conflict, who is intentionally inflaming and lying to make it seem like there’s a war going on,” he added. “He wants there to be a war going on here and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in it. There’s no riot outside. We have more so-called ‘unrest’ here when one of our teams wins a championship.“
The hosts of the popular chat show, The View, said much the same thing as Kimmel.
“But are people getting a much different view of what’s going on in L.A. depending on where they’re watching this play out? Because it’s — it’s quite different when you’re talking to people in L.A. —“ began co-host Whoopi Goldberg.
Co-host Sunny Hostin agreed, “Yeah,” before Goldberg continued, “— And very different than what you’re seeing on the news.”
Hostin said that the anti-ICE protests were largely orderly and occurred in about a “four-block radius.”
And CNN host Erin Burnett confirmed the same thing reporting from the scene. She was interviewing Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who also said that the protests were limited and not out-of-control, when Burnett added, “And that is certainly what we have seen and experienced with our own eyes.”
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