Pallywood in Los Angeles

In war, the first casualty is the truth. — Aeschylus

Los Angeles, and soon every Blue city in America, is a war zone.  

Not nearly as bad a war zone as Gaza or Kyiv, but a war zone nonetheless. In this case, the violence is mostly a backdrop of a propaganda war, but then again, much of the violence we see in Gaza is performative as well. For every video of some truly horrible thing happening, there are several that are entirely manufactured or manipulated in order to create a false impression. 

There are so many videos of “Mr FAFO” in Gaza that it became a joke. He has been a journalist, a doctor, a grieving father, and died so many times at the hands of perfidious Israeli goons that he must have slept at a Holiday Inn Express. 

There is only one person who can bring real change, and it’s not Donald Trump.
I believe in Mr. FAFO. pic.twitter.com/HaMzjosIPJ

— GAZAWOOD – the PALLYWOOD saga (@GAZAWOOD1) March 7, 2025

Remember the “Ghost of Kyiv?” While it is undoubtedly true that many heroic pilots faced death and overcame the odds while fighting the Russians in the air during the first days of the war, the Ghost of Kyiv was a myth concocted to boost morale. The COVID hysteria was a master class in successful propaganda.

Amidst the ashes, he finds light — and it’s always in the form of a pristine baby. pic.twitter.com/8fGDlTWgEO

— GAZAWOOD – the PALLYWOOD saga (@GAZAWOOD1) June 11, 2025

Color revolution stuff–in fact, the people who pushed the color revolutions of the 2010s used the same tactics here, funded by USAID and other government agencies. 

We are seeing a lot of propaganda videos and photographs coming out of Los Angeles as well, given that the riots are all about creating fodder for a propaganda campaign against Trump and ICE. We have seen photos of babies teargassed by cruel policemen (who brings a child to a riot?), and videos such as this:

This video — tearfully claiming that ICE had raided a Los Angeles elementary school graduation — has over 7 million views.

Turns out it’s totally false. https://t.co/nAOAF8UH2F https://t.co/fcLENRzvoW

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) June 11, 2025

The event, of course, never happened, and it always had the credibility of an actor being attacked in Chicago by white supremacists screaming, “This is MAGA country!” or a NASCAR driver being threatened with a noose. Yet when it appeared on social media, it was viewed 10 million times on Instagram alone and spread rapidly across other social media platforms. 

Did ICE raid a school graduation?

In a tearful Instagram video Friday, user @heymrhowie said he heard that parents were fleeing a graduation ceremony at Gratts Elementary and leaving their children behind upon hearing of ICE presence because “they didn’t have papers and leave their kids because they do.”

“And the kids are freaking grabbing teachers and crying on their legs because they don’t know if they’re about to see their parents when they get home,” @heymrhowie stated in the video. “What the f— is this?”

Fact check: On Monday, Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Alberto Carvalho said there was no confirmed threat to the Friday culmination at Gratts Elementary, located just west of downtown.

“We’ve investigated it,” Carvalho said during a news conference, “and all the reports that came back was that no such event happened.”

This video is only one example of the kind of propaganda we are being subjected to, and hardly the most important. That honor goes to the media folks pretending that rioters are just “having fun,” or politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Hakeem Jeffries, Maxine Waters, and Karen Bass, all assuring us that there are no riots, and if there were, it is all Donald Trump’s fault anyway. 

No doubt, there is propaganda coming from the other side, but it matters much less because the reality before us is bad enough for the Democrats. 

Propaganda is so pervasive in politics because, outside of wars of extermination, morale is the real target of the fighting. Wars rarely end with the destruction of a military; they usually end when one side or the other cries “Uncle.” Not every war is the fight against the Nazis in World War II. This can be equally true in less kinetic political battles, where one side or the other wins a propaganda battle. 

Not all propaganda is based on lies, although all of it frames an issue in a preferred direction. Some of it is based on hoaxes, while others are simply spun. For instance, you could argue that the 2020 protests were “mostly peaceful,” just as you could argue that the vast majority of the flight time in the raids on Hawaii was completely nonviolent. Any B-2 attack is characterized by countless hours of boring flight time punctuated by only a few minutes of destruction. 

Nicholas Sandmann really did smile nervously at a “Native American elder,” and that made for fine theater until you saw the context. Propaganda. 

And then there are the complete hoaxes, of which we see many these days, and often spread by the Pravda Media or social media influencers. 

I praised X to the skies this morning, but I should reiterate a warning: a lot of what you see is junk, complete bovine excrement. And sometimes it takes a day or three to sort out the wheat from the chaff–as we try to do here at Hot Air. 

It’s a bad idea to trust anything that is “too on the nose.” If it fits neatly into somebody’s narrative, it is likely wildly spun or entirely created out of whole cloth. 

Editor’s Note: President Trump will not allow lawlessness to reign in America. We will not have a repeat of 2020’s “Summer of Love.”

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