Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Playin’ the Quatar in the quicksand
Past few weeks I have been overwhelmed with the fast pace of everything, including my work, and just let the last blog post stand as the latest word on things: America is badly divided, really like two different countries at this point. President Trump is about to declare the Insurrection Act in effect, something this blog advocated back in 2020. Lawless judges continue to try to play policy pro with legal cases that require a simple Yes or No ruling. It has been amazing to watch the “Blue” states and jurisdictions demand that the Feds stay out of their crime waves. They like their crime, and by God, they are gonna keep it…forgetting tha we Americans have a right to go anywhere in America without fear of being beaten to death.
Then again, the 1940s-1950s Democrat-run South was like this: Lawless, violent, in open revolt against the federal government’s effort to integrate public schools.
But President Trump stole the show with his effort to bring peace of some sort to Gaza and Israel. This looks like languidly playing a Quatar-guitar while also sinking into the Middle East quicksand. Because the people supposedly facilitating this momentary conclusion of hostilities with Trump are the very same people who have been stoking the same conflict for the past seventy years, including on our own American college campuses: Qatar.
For decades, Qatar has dumped billions of dollars into American college campuses to buy entire programs filled with far-Left Marxist pseudo professors who preach hatred of America, Christianity, Capitalism, Israel, and Western Civilization. Qatar is a tiny postage stamp of a country with more oil money than it can use at home, so it is very effectively using it to eat into America’s foundation with jihadism and faux journalism.
Maybe Trump is playing Qatar here, but it sure openly looks like Qatar is playing Trump, luring him in with unrealistic promises meant to further weaken America and Israel, bog down America in the Middle East quicksand, and stop the anti-jihad momentum that Israel and America have been successfully implementing the past six months.
For example, now American troops are supposedly going to be stationed in Gaza to enforce the ceasefire….a stupider idea cannot be invented, but here it is. Our own troops will be at the mercy of Hamas, and will serve as a block on Israel being able to get Hamas back in the genie bottle. Anything that happens to our troops will be blamed on Israel. A wedge will be further inserted between these two great natural allies, America and Israel, and the only people benefiting are the jihadis of Qatar, Hamas, Turkey, and Iran.
Maybe it will hold, and it will all work out great. I am no pessimist, but I am a realist. I admire President Trump’s willingness to take big chances for the right reasons, but I also worry that he tends to see everything in the world narrowly through his own lens of golf courses, resorts, and money-solves-all-problems. Including the flea-infested quicksands of the Middle East, which have historically eaten up and spit out the bones of many different great civilizations. Sometimes reality just has to be accepted, no matter how frustrating or painful: appeasement is not peace, and appeasing the jihadis only encourages them to do more damage.
America is not too big to fail in Gaza, and a lot is riding on the line. Good luck to America and Israel and to our entire Western Civilization.
A Tale of Two Men, Two Peoples
We have in the past couple weeks been able to observe the best and worst of human behavior in America. Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the outpouring of grief and love on the one side, and the mockery, cruelty and evil on the other, has stratified Americans like few other events.
Even the George Floyd response (before the resulting burning, looting, and murdering riots) had some basis in widespread earnest initial belief that Floyd had been unfairly killed by a policeman, which crossed all political and ideological boundaries.
Not the Charlie Kirk assassination.
Starting the day of his assassination until just a few days ago, I have spent a good deal of time with mainstream liberal Americans at different events, and I can tell you there is no sensitivity there, that I can detect. No sorrow, and no open animosity, either. Indifference mostly, as far as I can tell. Unless we scratch the surface…
Last week, at a mostly liberal soiree in a special place, a nice looking older woman approached me and chatted with me. Her name tag said she was from New Jersey, so I made some humorous quip about the unfavorable Pennsylvania view of New Jersey’s polluted environment and its erratic drivers.
“Oh no, I live in the center of the state, near Princeton,” the nice lady replied. “Though I have to admit I also live near HIS golf course, if you know what I mean. The TRUMP golf course.”
Her eyebrows arched up and down with implied meaning. Apparently rotten-to-the-core Princeton is just fine, but a pretty golf course has all sorts of problems for her.
Said I, using one of my standard golf-related quips, “I do not play golf, I hunt. Because there is not a golf course anywhere on this planet with sufficient liability insurance to allow me to pick up a club. I am safer to be around with a shotgun chasing after geese in the water hazards than swinging at a ball.”
She smiled wanly, un-used to meeting anyone at a posh soiree who does not at least pretend to like golf. When our pregnant quiet moment was at its ripest, I followed up with “Besides, I am a huge Trump fan. And I don’t think we should all be shooting at each other over these differences, because we are all Americans and can work out our differences with our words.”
What she said surprised the hell out of me: “No, we shouldn’t.” And then she was gone, a scowl on her attractive visage. As if anyone on the Trump side of things has been shooting anyone, anywhere. Or maybe she meant that we shouldn’t be using our words…?
There are two different peoples here right now, inhabiting our country. Each one orbiting two different men, Christian activist Charlie Kirk, on the one hand, and once-humorist pagan Hollywooder Jimmy Kimmel, now fired and late of late night TV, on the other hand.
While some Americans oppose Charlie Kirk’s policy preferences on intellectual grounds, I guess, a lot of them also seem to be seething with hatred or animosity about him and anyone associated with him. This is strange to me, because Charlie Kirk never hurt anyone. He was a gentle person, civil, generous, a listener, he asked questions. He did politics the right way: He talked. What on earth about him would make people filled with hate?
Yes, he had some strong opinions based on his Biblical values, the same values that founded America. And….guess what? His political opponents also have strong views, based on God only knows what, because I do not know. Does having strong opinions simply make a person a bad person? If so, then the hate should flow both ways. But it does not.
It appears that the ever-angry, lying, mis-informing, wildly partisan Jimmy Kimmel is fully representative of the political Left and the Democrat Party partisans right now. When faced with consequences for his poor behavior (mocking the assassination of Kirk and lying about who did it), Kimmel is defiant and petulant. People losing their TV and radio shows in the cancel culture war was fine for Kimmel when they had different opinions than he. However, when the shoe is on his foot, and his words fail in the marketplace, suddenly he is aggrieved, and foot stomping, and like a spoiled child demanding demanding demanding.
Never mind that Kimmel was in essence telling leftists that they could murder their political opponents for disagreeing, and that TV personalities would cover for them. Kimmel was violating the basic conditions on which his employer, ABC, had been granted an FCC public broadcast license decades ago. We can debate whether the FCC should even exist, but it does right now, and if one has a broadcast license from the FCC right now, then one must meet its “public benefit” requirement, or let go of it. Kimmel’s lies placed his employer’s FCC license at risk, and so his employer cut him loose and with him the liability.
When we compare and contrast Kirk vs Kimmel, we see two totally opposite men, and totally opposite ways of conducting one’s self in public and in private. Charlie Kirk’s assassination has brought out a lot of good people, and also a lot of troubled people. We now have a tale of two different men, and the two very different peoples surrounding them.
I hope you, dear reader, choose the gentle one. America needs this, not the hate.
Memes
War is hell
To best understand the world around us, we employ the science of math. And not just any math, but statistics and graphs. Using even just a little bit of good data, we can accurately plot on the basic X-Y graph the trajectory of a national economy, the sales of cars, or the increase in public violence. Well should we do the last first, because all the rest rely upon its resolution.
Today is 9-11, the September 11, 2001 modern day of infamy, when Muslim terrorists hijacked American planes and used them as guided missiles to destroy or damage important symbols of American success. Curiously, 20-some years later, America has more problems associated with more Muslim problem makers than we did in 2001. Almost as if we have failed to learn a lesson from that day, which we will call our first data point.
Yesterday, gentle, kind, civil Charlie Kirk was murdered while he engaged in peaceful dialogue about political issues of the day in America. His killer appears to be a “trans” person or “trans” ally, or maybe a foreign hitman. Whatever, the act is representative of a catch-all of ever increasing political violence committed by far-left allies of West-hating Muslims, including many who actually live here, as naturalized citizens, no less. So, with Charlie’s murder we have data point number two.
Now, let’s connect these two data points by drawing a line on the graph. We see a nice straight line going straight up, showing that as time has gone forward from 2001 to 2025, domestic acts of political violence against Americans and America have increased. A lot. Sure looks like we are headed toward a war, because with a climb that steep who knows what else it could indicate?
Bigger numbers!
Union General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the Confederate South in his “total war” effort. He famously quipped that “War is hell,” and added a lot of other valuable words in various formats and times around that simple phrase, even as he remarked that mangling the bodies of a couple thousand fighting men in a morning was like dashing water against his face. Sherman didn’t balk and he did not back down.
America is back in hell, right now, as a civil war is engulfing us. Sucks to say it, but it is a fact. We did not start it, we have begged for it to stop, but it keeps being brought to us. Might as well be honest about it, say we don’t like it, but by God, the Union is gonna survive and prevail once again.
So, repeat after me… War is hell.
Now let’s win it, and be done with it.
Charlie Kirk
Gentle Christian thought leader Charlie Kirk was assassinated today, in Utah, where he was debating students on a college campus. I will write a lot more about what his murder means, but suffice it to say it is simply about his political opponents censoring him, silencing him, violencing him, because they are incapable of reasoned debate.
Leftists are allergic to reasoned debate, Charlie’s hallmark.
What bothers Charlie’s opponents most was that he skillfully took the national policy debate to college campuses. A place supposedly devoted to learning, teaching, debating, educating, but in reality a place of intolerant ironclad political orthodoxy and Marxist indoctrination. Charlie’s ability to directly challenge that indoctrination in its viper’s nest home enraged leftists.
Looking at online comments and Democrat Party media outlets reveals that his opponents are blaming him, Charlie, first and foremost.
According to these many commenters, Charlie earned being shot in the neck and murdered because his ideas and words were so bad. So, to the Left, “silence is violence” and also “words are violence” simultaneously, but actual bloody violence against conservatives is just the natural consequence of disagreeing with Leftists on politics. So long as Leftists do it, it’s always justified. They say.
No matter what conservatives do or say, or don’t say, the Left justifies using violence against them.
Conservatives can’t speak nor can they also be silent; rather, conservatives must be forcefully compelled to agree and nod along with Leftists. Or else.
Charlie’s opponents are also blaming guns, January 6th, President Trump. Anything but the violence and abundant hateful violent rhetoric coming out of Leftist mouths and printing presses that encourages assassination attempts and street murders. Demonizing and encouraging violence against conservatives is normal, to Leftists, but disagreeing with Leftists is also violence.
Conservatives have no place to exist in the world imagined by the Left. To Leftists, Charlie couldn’t even be allowed to debate students on a college campus. He was un-allowed by the ideological gatekeepers there.
Dunno about the perspective of you, the reader, but when a person or a group of like-minded people constantly call for their political goals to be implemented “by any means necessary,” and they demonize ICE agents and police and concerned school parents and Protestants and Catholics and Jews and conservatives and traditional families and call for violence about everything a president does, we have a serious problem to fix here in America.
America has been here before, back then also dragged debating and talking into solving Democrat Party violence the hard way. Sorry, Charlie, that you had to be martyred. But Americans will not let your murder go unaddressed.
Booth shooting Lincoln
Leftists are disinterested or incapable of self-reflection, they are always a one-way flow of invective. It is the same mindset we have previously seen among Democrats, back in 1860…
Charlie was a husband, a father, represented the best of America’s character
Dogs vs. Drones in deer recovery Part 2
So you hit a deer, with an arrow or a bullet, and it ran, and now you want to find it. As is common, the critter crossed paths with you and your sporting weapon late in the day (deer especially move most at dawn and dusk), and now the sun is setting and daylight is fading. Finding the trail and following it is becoming less and less likely. After ten or fifteen minutes of looking for it, the sun is down and all you know is that you have some blood at the initial point of contact. Yes, the deer jumped high, mule kicked, and tucked its tail as it ran, all of which are good signs of a solid hit. But, you don’t have much of a blood trail and no light to follow one, even if you could find the spoor.
Archery hunters commonly back off at this point, and either wait an hour or two before resuming the search in earnest, using strong lights and extra eyes from friends, or they just leave the site altogether. Returning in the morning provides better light for trailing, and the good likelihood that the deer will have run only a short distance, bedded down because it is wounded and does not feel pressured, and then expired.
But what if you are worried about coyotes eating your prize overnight? And what if you think the hit was really good, and the ground cover is just so thick and difficult that there is a good chance the deer is lying dead just fifty yards away, and yet tough to see from where it was hit? Faced with these prospects, a lot of hunters will go after the deer, good blood trail or not, good visibility, or not.
Comes the question, what is the best way to find this wounded and probably dead deer: Should you stagger about in thick thorns in the dark, losing half your own blood and clothing in the process? Or should you call in the cavalry?
Today, calling in the cavalry means either getting a deer tracking dog (www.unitedbloodtrackers.org here in central PA), or getting a drone operator. Using either dogs or drones is not necessarily permitted in all states. After a ton of political wrangling over a twenty or thirty year period, Pennsylvania only got search dogs for finding wounded deer less than ten years ago, while for hundreds of years many southern states still use dogs to chase deer to hunters. So one state is worried about disturbing the hunting woods at all, while another state is OK with basically setting the woods on fire… for hunting.
Today, using drones to find wounded or expired deer in Pennsylvania is unsettled business. In fact, it is a mess. Here, too. Here is the final word from the drone operator, whose PGC charges were dismissed by the court.
That is because the PA Game Commission worries about the misuse of drones for unethically looking for wildlife to hunt (gaining an artificial advantage), for herding and moving wildlife, etc. Fair enough, but what about the states that do allow drone recovery? Are those states just made up of unethical slobs who could never do a good job hunting or managing wild game?
And what about all of the cool videos online that show guys using drones to successfully find expired deer in the most improbable places that would have never occurred to even the most experienced band of searchers, or that would not have been accessible to a dog and its handler?
No question about it, recovery drones are both cool new shiny technology, and largely successful. PGC’s past recent behavior about drone deer recovery has been lackluster (see links above), sadly, and even lawless. We hunters expect much better from our wildlife agency.
Deer dogs have their noses and the guidance of their experienced owners, while drones have infrared and thermal cameras that can go over a lot of territory quickly, at night, and often see a warm carcass through cover while the hunter simply stands and watches the video feed. Drones can often do the hours of work of a tracking dog in just a few minutes. On the other hand, dogs can pick up a two day old scent and follow it to the long-cold carcass, something a drone cannot do, unless the carcass is out in the open. In which case it will be but a pile of fresh bones.
But there are real concerns about drones, like spooking and pushing out an entire herd of deer, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, or looking too soon and unnecessarily pushing off the wounded animal to even farther distances, maybe over property lines. Some drone operators mount big flat screen TVs in their vehicles, so the drone search becomes less about recovery and more about entertainment and snooping on trophy deer at night. Some states require that the hunter who wounded the animal not be able to see the drone search results, to eliminate a possible inducement to cheat (like going after another, bigger, animal in the dark).
Of course, in places with big swamps, pythons, and alligators, a drone might be preferred!
One suggestion that Central Pennsylvania tracking dog handler Vicky Church has: Get deer/ game animal recovery drone operators certified. Not just by the FAA, but also by the PGC. Make sure that drone recovery operators are behaving ethically and legally. It is hard to argue with some version of this, even though I am philosophically opposed to any more regulation on our already far overburdened society.
Vicky says the deer dog people had to do it, so the drone people should, too. Hard to argue with her.
Hunting is supposed to be fun, and no wounded wild game animal should be abandoned to the coyotes just because search options were artificially limited by over-anxious regulators. My opinion is drones should be allowed for finding wounded wild game. But let’s face it, it is a lot more fun to watch a dog work the scent and the field.
Nothing beats the happy look of a smiling dog, or the people with it.
Wild Game recovery dog handler, Vicky Church. Photo by Tom, a hunter who benefited from Vicky’s help
Vicky and her dog trailing a wounded buck. Photo by Tom
No way a human is going to do this easily or well. Oh, many of us have tried it, without success. A drone might achieve this, if the cover is not too thick
Memes, memes, memes
Traitor Tehran Tucker Carlson Gleefully Leaps Off Cliff
Tucker Carlson has been a fixture on the political middle and right for about six or seven years. For years he slowly built a real following while he was at FOX News, where he did journalism stuff. He earned his following because he asked good questions, he dug into people’s political backgrounds and background information on political and cultural issues of the day. He challenged all kinds of political blind spots and taboos and unhealthy “bipartisan” spaces where taxpayers and American citizens always seem to lose and corrupt political careerists always seem to make out incredibly well.
After Tucker Carlson left FOX, he seemed emboldened to break even more artificial constraints, to ask even tougher questions, and to promote more individual freedom in the face of an increasingly constitutionally questionable government apparatus. He was the quintessential “independent investigative journalist” that Americans want so badly.
Without question, the Biden Administration was his foil in his new independent role, and also probably his brightest time. With so much brazen Biden family corruption, protected and enforced by a brazenly weaponized federal bureaucracy, and so much more related stuff to chase down, Tucker Carlson found himself ever more squaring off against the entire estabalishment media enterprise. This “mainstream media” conglomerate made then and very openly today makes no bones about being completely aligned and in bed with just one political party.
So this was the boxing ring in which Tucker Carlson found himself. He then got a ton of money from Iranian businessman Omeed Malik, and if the Foreign Agent Registration Act documents dug up by ace investigative reporter Laura Loomer are true, Tucker also got substantial money from Qatar. And then he bought himself a classic hunting and fishing ranch in Montana, and started interviewing people in his flyfishing man cave.
Bit by bit, aspects of Tucker Carlson’s raging hatred began to seep through, then shine through, and then eventually poured out in these interviews. Probably due to open pressure to at least try to appear not to hate all Jews, Tucker hosted an interesting guy named Bret Weinstein. And throughout the entire interview, Tucker’s hostile face set barely changed an iota. Despite receiving fascinating new information from Weinstein that corroborated a great deal of conclusions that Tucker had come to on certain political issues, he never smiled or showed any warmth toward his guest.
Check out the photo below that I screenshotted from that otherwise excellent interview.
Contrast Tucker’s demeanor towards fellow Israel hater Rep. Thomas Massie, where they are all chummy, laughing, easy going during that interview. Which is also a fascinating interview, and were Massie not a hater of Israel and Jews, and not such a theoretician and purist, I could then see why his presence in Congress was so useful.
Anyhow, Tucker started racking up interviews with professional Jew haters, for whom publicly breaking this Western taboo is a source of professional income. People like US Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor, and history-dabbler Darryl Cooper, neither of whom have anyting positive to say about Jews or Israel, and who make a living saying nonsense about them. Not even the Nobel prize winners, the leaders in economic, medical, or technological areas. Nothing good to say, period, which indicates they have a problem.
In his many hours interviewing them, and others like an Arab Christian in Israel, Tucker never challenges them. He does not ask them to more fully explain their questionable ideas. Rather, Tucker just lets them say whatever they want about Jews, the European Holocaust, and Israel, and then after encouraging them, agreeing with them, he moves on to the next thing.
And then Tucker himself became an open antagonist towards Jews and Israel. He recently sat interview-style across from US Senator Ted Cruz with cameras running, and instead of an interview, Tucker went on the attack, including the bizarre assertion that the Jews of today are unrelated to the Jews of the Bible and ancient Israel.
As an aside, if today’s Jews are not descended from the ancient Jews, then why does their DNA show them to be from the Near East, despite at least a thousand years living in white Europe? Why are they the only people on Earth who speak Hebrew, study Scripture in Hebrew and Aramaic, and practice Judaism? If not them, then who and where the heck are the Jews? Tucker does not bother to answer this simple question, as casting doubt on Jews is his only goal.
The final straw for a lot of former Tucker Carlson admirers like me just happened, days ago. If you thought the man had an atom of Christian belief, human decency, American loyalty, or even just some integrity inside of him, Tucker Carlson has aggressively, even wantonly, dispelled that notion. Tucker conducted a ridiculous, puffball questions, friendly “interview” with one of the most evil, violent, cruelly despotic autocrats on Earth today.
Yes, from his Montana man cave, Tucker Carlson interviewed the hand puppet “president” of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, who reports directly to Ayatollah Khameini, the “Supreme Leader” of Iran, on July 4th, American Independence Day. In his time with Pezeshkian, a true monster, Tucker has no interest in asking real questions, like can we go inside Evin Prison and interview some of the women your forces are raping and torturing right now. Nor did Tucker go to Iran and do a “man on the street” tour, where the journalist just asks random citizens their opinions on things. Of course, Iran is oppressive and is run like North Korea, where one small mis-step costs you your family, your home, your wife, your life, so even if Tucker would insist, he would encounter stone faces.
Instead, Tucker Carlson willingly, and occasionally with outbursts of that weird fake glee he has, served as an airbrushed mouthpiece for the mullahs who rule Iran with a brutal and unjust fist, and who threaten the world with their genocidal, homicidal death cult. Tucker makes excuses for them, he aided and abetted them, he gave aid and comfort to them, he put lipstock on their pig faces, he made common cause with them.
One utterly contemptible example: “Has Iran tried to assassinate President Trump?” To which Pezeshkian answers that this is an Israeli lie meant to rope America into forever wars. And Tucker Carlson simply nods in agreement and moves on! No second question, no aw c’mon ya can’t blame everything on Israel.
Apparently Tucker Carlson really meant it when he wrote in 2020 that he never liked Trump anyhow. Yeah, no kidding. You won’t even challenge this bold faced lie by your Iranian buddy.
They, the Iran of “Death to America!” since their 1979 revolution. They of at least a thousand Americans killed through Iranian terrorism in Lebanon, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, elsewhere. They of known attempted assassinations against President Trump and election hacking in 2020, documented by the FBI.
There is speculation that Tucker Carlson must have been paid a lot of Iranian money to do this, and that seems reasonable. Whether Tucker just sold out America for the symbolic thirty silver Shekels, or whether he was paid directly into a Swiss bank account, or whether he gets some syndication rights income from this, any way we cut this last horrendous act, “Tehran Tucker” Carlson is a traitor to America.
Interviewing Bret Weinstein on Covid policy vs Covid science
Bret Weinstein maintained his composure despite Carlson’s open hostility on a subject Carlson would normally be animated about
His face hardly changed from this unfriendly grimace the entire interview. Tucker just does not like Jews, not even Dr. Bret Weinstein, a conservative and risk-taking researcher willing to help Carlson
How much money was Carlson paid to be the airbrusher mouthpiece foreign agent for the evil Iranian empire that seeks to nuke America? What a traitor
Best tattoo, ever
I am not a tattoo person. No one in my family had or has tattoos, including me, same for my wife. The rural people I grew up with occasionally had tattoos, all associated with their military service. When this current tattoo craze took off, what, fifteen years ago, I admit to being surprised. Some of the choices I have seen are… curious. When I ask the wearer why this particular tattoo, I usually get back an indifferent shrug and something like “I was feeling especially whimsical that moment.”
My various sports coaches all taught me one important lesson: Your body is your temple, and you must respect it. I am not judging anyone, but please think a little harder or look at some pictures of pretty flowers, before deciding to forever alter the body God gave you at birth with some of these tattoos. Yes, the Maori warriors have some gorgeous tattoos representative of their culture as head hunters and cannibals. But your culture is mid-America white girl and white boy, not savage warrior, nor tough about anything, really.
Because I work with a lot of rural loggers and machine operators, who are the epitome of tough as hell and who in my book earn the right to even culturally appropriative self expression, I do get a pretty dandy gander at tats running from hand to neck, and, I am told, in other more “remote” body locations. I admire the ones that had a lot of thought, deep symbolic meaning, planning, and careful execution put into them.
Starting decades ago in the military services, which until Marxist in Chief Obama and China’s Man in DC Joe Biden was largely populated by rural Americans, tattoos are no longer just a military or rural fad, as the entire country became enamored of the self expression and inevitable interesting interpretations of sagging aged flesh sure to come with time. Even demure, serious soccer moms have Playboy Bunny on their ankles. I have even seen effete feminine urbanite Marxist hipsters with their own tattoos (I wish I was rich enough to be a socialist like them), as well as the myriad blue and pink haired far left, Antifa, even conservative patriot bikers, too.
Well, today I got to see the best tattoo ever, in the history of tattoos. It wins all the awards for creativity, simplicity, symbolism, etc. The owner is covered feet to neck in tats, and when I asked her if she had any regretted old boyfriend names lurking anywhere among the visual mayhem, she said “just the initials of my ex husband, now artfully incorporated into and erased by a tattoo of the toxic waste symbol”. She then showed me. It is small, easily lost among the rest of the colorful inks, and not particularly artistic or flowing or eye catching, but I swear, it is the best tattoo ever.
Memes, memes, memes
EDS NOTE: OBSCENITY A flash bomb explodes on the 101 Freeway near the metropolitan detention center of downtown Los Angeles, Sunday, June 8, 2025, following last night’s immigration raid protest. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer)
