Even feckless Mayor Karen Bass was more diplomatic.

Before it’s memory-holed, let’s recall that Gavin Newsom (and his loose-lipped, fast-fingered press staff) also fueled the rioting that continues to plague Los Angeles. Even as the city’s police chief declared that rioters had “overwhelmed” his officers, Newsom discounted the violence and set the parameters for a revolutionary response to federal authority.

On June 6, as federal agents began high-profile arrests in Los Angeles, Newsom held up California’s state and local sanctuary laws as an impenetrable Maginot Line against federal enforcement. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, reminded California officials, including Newsom himself: “It’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.” Newsom responded with a dare. “That kind of bloviating is exhausting,” he said in a moment of just obvious Freudian projection. “So, Tom, arrest me. Let’s go.” (Even feckless L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was more diplomatic: “I am the mayor of the city; the last thing in the world I’m going to do is get into a brawl with the federal government.”)

Again and again, Newsom was like this — lawless when he ought to have been law-abiding, provocative when he might have been diplomatic. He called Trump’s enforcement of federal law “an unmistakable step toward authoritarianism.” In a June 10 speech carried live by major networks (including CNN, MSNBC, and PBS), the governor seemed to set the conditions for rebellion. “Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived,” he declared. The president is “not opposed to lawlessness and violence as long as it serves him.” Rallying the resistance, he said, “What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty. Your silence, to be complicit in this moment. . . Do not give in to him.” Turning the law upside down, he said federal enforcement of constitutional order “sends fear and chills up the spines of law-abiding citizens,” and described “a red line crossed” and “a serious and profound moment in American history.” Trump’s federal enforcement “is theater, it’s madness, it’s unconstitutional, it’s immoral,” he told the New York Times. “It puts people’s lives at risk.” He accused the Department of Defense of “spreading fake images—from old protests—to justify Trump’s illegal militarization of Los Angeles. This isn’t just disinformation. It’s a propaganda campaign from the Pentagon.” Even Newsom’s allies in the media declared that claim false.

In short, Newsom used every tool at hand to create space for violence. This week, a South Los Angeles County city official took the next logical step. In a June 24 TikTok post, Cynthia Gonzalez, the vice mayor of Cudahy, seemed to call on local gangs to confront federal immigration officials. In the since-deleted video, she said:

I wanna know where all the cholos at in Los Angeles. 18th Street, Florencia. Where’s the leadership at? . . . Now that your hood is being invaded by the biggest gang there is, there isn’t a peep out of you. Don’t be trying to claim no block . . . if you’re not showing up right now trying to help out and organize.

Gonzalez followed up — this time on Facebook — to say that the FBI had come to her home: “I need a lawyer . . . I believe this is a First Amendment rights issue.”

You might say that Gonzalez ought to know better. She is, after all, a graduate of the once-prestigious University of California system — a BA from UC Santa Barbara, with not just one but two master’s degrees (in education) from UCLA, a UCLA doctorate in education, and administrative credentials from both UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley. In all of that educating, she apparently never grasped the actual meaning of the First Amendment.

Nor, like many other state and local officials in California, does she understand the rest of the Constitution — including the bit in Article I that gives the federal government authority over international borders and immigration and naturalization. These days, that kind of ignorance is on brand for a California education.