Up until a few years ago, I’d spent most of my life in California. I miss fog and good Chinese food but, otherwise, I’m grateful not to be there anymore. Still, California lives in my memory, which is why I’ve had a strong “déjà vu all over again” feeling listening to Nancy Pelosi speak and watching Gavin Newsom work his career. Democrats aren’t breaking new ground here; it’s the same old, same old.
First, Nancy Pelosi joined the choir of Democrats downplaying the violence in Los Angeles. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing sinister about mobs of people attacking ICE agents and police in the performance of their duties. Instead, she said, it is just a bunch of wholesome people responding to the “exuberance of the moment.”
PELOSI: “Be careful when you see a burned car or a broken window, it may be the exuberance of the moment!”pic.twitter.com/zXqeRtVI2q
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) June 10, 2025
Wow! Instant flashback to 1992, the last time mobs went on a major rampage in Los Angeles. During that riot, Reginald Denny, a construction worker, while delivering a load of sand, innocently made what proved to be a disastrous decision.
He got off the rush-hour-choked freeway and went onto a city road. A rampaging mob forced him to stop, dragged him out of his car, and four members of the mob proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him, leaving him with serious and permanent injuries. The entire thing was caught on camera by a local news helicopter circling overhead.
The four men caught on camera were identified as Damian Williams, Henry Watson, Antoine Miller, and Gary Williams, suspected gang members. The charges against Miller and Gary Williams were swiftly handled, resulting in fairly minimal prison sentences.
Meanwhile, Damian Williams and Henry Watson had a full, well-publicized trial. Watson was convicted of a single misdemeanor assault, while Williams was convicted of four misdemeanors and simple mayhem. However, because Denny wasn’t the only person Damian Williams assaulted, he was sentenced to ten years in prison. He got out just five years later, ending up in prison for life when he was convicted of murdering a drug dealer.
The general tenor of the defense is that Williams really could not be held responsible for what he was doing, a notion Williams himself summed up in an interview quoted in a 1993 New York Times article:
In an interview with the Wave Newspaper Group, a newspaper chain that mainly serves a black readership, Mr. Williams said of the riots, “People were just out of control like a pack of rats running after cheese.” He added, “I was just caught up in the rapture.”
Rapture. Exuberance. You say to-may-to and I say to-mah-to. At least Williams, unlike Pelosi, went on to add, “What I did was wrong... It was unjustified...” Pelosi doesn’t seem to see things that way.
Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom is also taking a page out of an old playbook to elevate his political profile. This time around, he’s obviously positioning himself to be the Democrats’ chosen candidate in 2028. Last time, when he was the lowly mayor of San Francisco, he had his sights on the governor’s mansion.
In 2004, he used the same technique he’s using now: Flouting the law to set himself up as a hero of the leftist resistance. Then, the resistance was framed as gay marriage, not fighting for illegal immigration. So it was that Newsom directed the clerk for the City and County of San Francisco to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples.
That was Gavin’s moment. As Wikipedia says, although the Supreme Court swiftly nullified all those licenses, “Newsom's unexpected move brought national attention to the issue of same-sex marriage, solidifying political support for him in San Francisco and in the LGBTQ+ community.” Seven years later, Newsom was California’s lieutenant governor, and in 2019, he was governor of the most populous state in America. His plan worked, and he’s working the plan again.
The Bible tells us that there is nothing new under the sun, and popular wisdom often reminds us that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. No wonder, then, that Democrats are turning to tried and true tropes and tactics. It’s to be hoped, though, that this time around, the facts on the ground and the president in the White House are sufficiently different that these tropes and tactics yield (for Democrats) unpleasant outcomes.
Image created using ChatGPT.