☕️ FIESTA IN LA ☙ Monday, June 9, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A C&C special edition takes on the LA riots— are they organic revolts against immigration enforcement, or is something else going on? Hint: it's always about the money.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Today we have a C&C Special Edition, exploring what is really fueling the fiery LA riots. It’s time to toss the hot takes aside and fill in some mysterious blanks. Hint: it’s always about the money.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The “Summer of Protest 2025” has officially begun, and if it feels like a sequel, that’s because it is — same script, same chaos, new season. The Wall Street Journal ran one of yesterday’s many stories headlined, “L.A. Protests Stretch Into Third Night After Chaotic Sunday.” Let’s play connect the dots.

On the Lord’s Day yesterday, “peaceful protesters” summoned fleets of confused, driverless Waymos, which they converted into self-driving Molotovs — a use case the engineers never beta tested. Hopefully, the Waymo Corporation has good insurance. Thousands more angry activists launched fireworks at police, threw furniture off overpasses at cop cars, pickaxed chunks of concrete off federal buildings to chuck at law enforcement, and generally made obnoxious nuisances of themselves.

For fairness.

It remained a mystery why the combatants proudly carried flags from their home countries while (allegedly) protesting anyone being deported back to those dangerous hellholes. If your homeland is a flaming trash pile worth fleeing, maybe don’t wave its flag like a tailgate banner while you riot to avoid going back. It sends mixed signals.

So what’s really going on? Let’s follow the money!

🔥 According to a recent New York Post story, one of the ‘LA protest’s’ leading organizers is an NGO called the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). The story reported (while hat-tipping DataRepublican—go, girl!) that —get this— CHIRLA’s annual $34 million budget is nearly completely funded by … the State of California.

Congratulations, Californians! Your tax dollars, hard at work.

And because insanity is a growth industry, California increased CHIRLA’s budget by $12 million this year — a 50% raise for lighting things on fire. Between October 2021 and September 2024, CHIRLA also got about half a million federal tax dollars from DHS grants, which thank DOGE were cut off in March (and about $100K was clawed back).

It’s like giving a kid matches for his birthday, then paying the fire department overtime when he torches the garage.

Look, I don’t want to restate the obvious here, but how on Earth does it make sense to pay radical protest groups to put on protests and then pay for the law enforcement response to, and subsequent healthcare from, the same riots those activists were paid to stage?

More broadly: Americans are paying NGOs to settle illegals here, then paying ICE to deport them. Make it make sense.

The Post’s story also found groups funded by the Chinese CCP and locally-grown communists. Weird. It’s kind of like a progressive “all hands on deck” moment. Besides organic outrage over deporting a few criminal illegal aliens, what else could be behind this?

Just over a week ago —days before the LA riots began— an immigration story quietly broke all over the world, especially in countries supplying most of our illegals. You never heard about a teeny-tiny provision buried in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, but the short paragraph made Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum denounce the United States in a fiery tirade that Evita Perón would have loved. She promptly shipped a team of diplomats to DC (with tacos), to lobby the Senate to stop the bill— a panicked response that the oddly named president never even tried during the tariffs crisis.

Days later, the riots started. What was in the bill that so inflamed Claudia’s Latin temper? Our useless corporate media has never mentioned it, and we’ll get back to that absurd silence soon, believe that.

🔥 Prepare for a little wonkiness. A couple weeks ago, Al Jazeera covered Sheinbaum’s temper tantrum in a story headlined, “Claudia Sheinbaum denounces proposed US remittance tax as ‘unacceptable.’”

Buried deep in Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — in a footnote somewhere between fencing specs and visa quotas — was a real bombshell: a modest 5% tax on remittances, i.e., money shipped out of the U.S. by non-citizens.

In political terms, it was like taxing oxygen.

It was the end of Del Mundo! Denouncing the proposed remittance tax as “unacceptable,” Sheinbaum yelled, "If necessary, we will mobilize! We do not want taxes on remittances from our compatriots!”

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. You can find similar suspicions around the media, but only tucked into Twitter’s corners:

Specifically, starting back on May 16th, Claudia called for illegals in the US to mobilize, at that time calling only for a letter-writing campaign. Headline from Expansión (translated):

Expansión reported that remittances from the United States are one of Mexico’s largest single income sources, more than cars, food, or oil. In 2024, the total swelled to $64.7 billion— 3.5% of Mexico’s entire GDP. That’s just Mexico. Remittances to India exceed $165 billion.

For context, in both cases (Mexico and India), the amount of remittance revenue exceeds those nations’ entire trade surplus with the US.

It is always about the money.

Take a good look at this chart from the Inter-American Development Bank. In 2023 alone, over $155 billion was wired from the U.S. to Latin America and the Caribbean alone — a 9.5% spike from the year before. Mexico hoovered up $64 billion of it — more than the GDP of some small countries. Guatemala pulled in nearly $20 billion. Colombia and the Dominican Republic each got over $10 billion.

These aren’t pocket-change wire transfers to Grandma.

This is foreign aid without congressional approval, tax-free, off-budget, and off-the-books. A quiet economic lifeline— funded by us.

The most delicious irony is that many of the same countries throwing tantrums over Trump’s modest 5% remittance tax already tax those same remittances when they arrive. Mexico, for instance, has a value-added tax (VAT) system that snags remittance spending on entry with taxes up to 16%, plus banking fees and local transfer taxes on top of that.

In other words, Mexico taxes the money and calls it “revenue.” But if the U.S. dares take a slice before it leaves the country, suddenly, it’s a crime against humanity.

So to recap: we’re paying migrants to settle here, paying NGOs to rally them into street warfare, paying the cops to clean up the mess, paying hospitals for protest-related injuries, and we’ve been giving their home countries hundreds of billions in tax-free remittances to boot.

But sure, let’s keep pretending this is a completely organic, grassroots movement about “human rights,” and not about billion-dollar paychecks.

🔥 Why can’t corporate media connect the dots that a whiskey-soaked barstool philosopher could trace with a crayon? Why does the New York Times play as dumb as a 5th grader at a carnival ring-toss booth?

The reason is that remittances are one of the biggest grifts on Earth.

Democrats in “sanctuary” strongholds rely on mass immigration for demographic leverage and a ready supply of NGO brown shirts. The unspoken deal is simple: we’ll let you stay and work under the table, you keep wiring money home, and we’ll all pretend it’s compassion. Meanwhile, the cartels rake it in on both ends—first smuggling bodies, then skimming their remittances through extortion and “protection” rackets that prey on families back home.

Foreign governments love it. Remittances are a direct revenue source and a pressure-release valve for their own broken economies. Let the poor leave, collect free income from the U.S., and avoid the messy business of governance. No need to build infrastructure, fix education, or fund healthcare— American suckers will do it for you.

Every dollar sent abroad is a dollar not spent in the U.S.— not invested in local businesses, not saved in American banks, not taxed to fix our potholes. We are underwriting failed socialist states by exporting our own paychecks.

To the extent you can find any comment on the proposed remittance tax in corporate media, it’s exactly what you’d expect. Their reaction was as allergic to remittance taxation as it was toward tariffs. Headline from Barrons, four days ago (one day before the riots started):

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed about flagging trust in institutions (not even about the protests) wryly observed, “Thanks to things like the Russian collusion and ‘mostly peaceful protests,’ media trust hit a record low of 31% in 2024— a self-inflicted wound.”

Ignore the corporate media.

🔥 You might think 5% is nothing, less than sales tax. And you might think foreign governments wouldn’t care, since the money flows directly to their “poorest” families. You might wonder why remittance taxes instantly became the Mexican presidentress’ top priority.

The answer is because it’s not really charity. It’s revenue. Those remittances get spent, deposited, and heavily taxed— both on arrival and when what’s left gets spent. They prop up shaky banking systems, inflate local currencies, and keep whole rural economies just stable enough to avoid revolt. In many countries, they’re a top national income source — bigger than tourism, oil, or trade surpluses. Mexico alone pulled in nearly $65 billion last year, more than it made exporting cars or oil.

So when Trump proposes to shave a tiny sliver off the top, Claudia’s concern is not really about fairness — she’s fretting about a direct threat to the global grift’s business model. That 5% isn’t a tax on American kindness. It’s a toll booth on a multi-billion dollar pipeline that corrupt elites and cartels count on to keep the scam running.

Corporate media are AWOL because they know this is another losing issue for progressives. The optics are awful: violent protests, foreign flags, taxpayer-funded NGOs organizing chaos, and now a foreign president openly meddling in U.S. legislation— all to keep the remittance gravy train flowing.

So instead, reporters play dumb, wail about hurting the American economy, and pretend the burning Waymos are just a spontaneous burst of humanitarian passion — not a multinational racket with billions at stake. But we see them.

How awful is corporate media? You literally can’t make this stuff up. One ABC reporter actually told viewers that it might be “unwise to send in law enforcement” because the L.A. riots were “just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn.” That’s a direct quote, not satire. It came from an actual newscast aired on a major American network while fires lit up the sky behind them.

CLIP: ABC unironically describes LA riots as “people having fun watching cars burn” (0:17).

It’s just good old-fashioned Mexican divertido. Just another fiesta in the barrio.

🔥 Get ready for the next wave of “spontaneous outrage,” set to spread across the country just like the totally organic George Floyd protests did in 2020 — with pre-printed signs, coordinated messaging, and matching bail funds.

Yesterday, LAPD’s police chief said activists are now using lethal force against officers. "The violence is escalating... It's getting increasingly worse and more violent ... there’s no limit to what they are doing to our officers … we are overwhelmed,” he said.

CLIP: LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell says rioters are now using weapons that can kill his officers (2:28).

It’s not just commercial-grade fireworks. The rioters, Chief McDonnell explained, have cinder blocks in their backpacks, breaking them up with hammers and throwing chunks at police.

It’ll be interesting to see how this “organic uprising” plays out nationwide. The rules have changed in many places. Post-2020, we now have uncensored social media to blast through corporate media filters. And after 2020’s summer of “mostly peaceful” arson, many states — including Florida — passed tough anti-rioting laws.

Here in the Sunshine State, since 2021 it’s now perfectly legal to keep driving if protestors decide to turn I-95 into a drum circle. Block a highway, become roadkill. “Rioting” is now a felony here, with a five-year prison sentence and mandatory overnight incarceration without bail.

Other red states have passed anti-rioting laws and more are flirting with them. One suspects that national ICE protests might prompt more legislators to get off the fence. Thanks to DOGE, a lot of federal cash has been trimmed from NGO budgets.

And let us never forget: while Americans were being fined for paddleboarding alone or burying their parents with more than ten mourners, “protests” were magically exempt from lockdowns. Maskless crowds chanting shoulder-to-shoulder were declared essential — as long as they were shouting the right slogans.

That double standard has not been forgotten. The public’s appetite for elite-sanctioned nonsense is dwindling fast. The mood has shifted. What once passed for righteous outrage now looks a lot more like organized extortion. And voters — especially in red and purple states — aren’t in the mood to play along.

Blue states will be hardest hit.

🔥 At the end of the day, LA is probably just the warmup act. But the legal landscape and the public’s tolerance for political riots have dramatically changed. In the meantime, we need to keep our eyes on the remittance ball, which is what this unholy color revolution is really all about.

Have a marvelous Monday! C&C will return tomorrow morning, to connect more dots and round up the rest of the nation’s fiery essential news coupled with keen commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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