MPS20 Comparison for the June 2025 LA Riots

Military deployment discrepancies are evidence of Kayfabe

Only after touching down late last night at Hartsfield Jackson Intergalactic Space Port and Nail Salon and journeying through the expanses of Metro Atlanta to Waffle House and home, did I become aware of this past weekend’s Los Angeles immigration riot. Today I didn’t bother to even check the media reaction, because I already know what I’ll see:

1. “Direct Action” by experienced and funded progressive (formerly BLM) agitators to create “Decision Dilemmas" for cops which turn into great media fodder,

2. Empowered TRT juicing cops without the overall cloud of 2020 media fear completely falling for the dupe and behaving poorly on camera with rubber bullets, tear gas, or whatever other new toy they’ve been shining up the past two years,

3. Blue media using the Decision Dilemma camera fodder to farm for sympathy/outrage clicks and Red Media farming clicks by bitching about the Blue Media doing it,

4. Trump grandstanding and trying to feed his own desperate need for attention,

5. Someone looting an Apple store under the cover of anarchy,

6. Nobody anywhere trying to frame the riot from a mathematical perspective.

When I do the last thing that nobody else does, it leads me to the conclusion that the whole thing is being faked up as an attention economy play, and if you’re not a subscriber there’s a good chance you’re reading this article because you too fell for it. Let’s begin.

Riot Quantification

After the dust settled on the Mostly Peaceful 2020 Summer of Love, HWFO proposed a quantification system to truly establish how horribly bad or relatively inconsequential a given protest, riot, or civil insurrection actually was, and developed a mathematical scale for them. We call this the “MPS20.”

You can follow the link to the methodology if you like, which is of course arbitrary like all indexes are, but I’ll summarize briefly. Using 2020 behavior as our benchmark index of relatively bad things we state that a protest with 5000 demonstrations, 20 million protesters, 20 deaths, 14,000 arrests, two billion dollars in insured damages, and an average of $100 worth of insured damages per protest participant, scores a “100” on the MPS20 scale. From this we can say the 2020 BLM protests scored “100,” the Rodney King riots scored a “91,” the January 6th “insurrection”(?) scored a “3,” the Troubles in Ireland scored a “3673,” and Hurricane Sally scored an “89.” We even developed an online calculator, which you can find here:

If I run last weekend’s LA thing into the calculator, based on the best estimates I can make from multiple media sources, these are the results:

Damages per protester are pretty high, owing to the new creatively lazy tactic of summoning an automated vehicle to your location and burning it instead of spending the effort walking around to find something to burn, but nothing else on the list remotely approaches 2020. The net score of 0.2 on the MPS20 scale is so low you’d need five hundred of these in a row to match 2020, and Trump was President then. Which brings up an interesting point.

National Guard Mexican Futbol

The political use of the National Guard has been all over the place the last half decade, so it’s worth going through a review. I detailed how a president or governor could use the National Guard in an enforcement action for Open Source Defense in early 2020 here, in an article about Virginia’s failed threats to seize guns in their state:

https://opensourcedefense.com/blog/collateral-damage-race-and-the-virginia-gun-control-bill

Let's be clear, this is not going to happen for several reasons. But first let’s look at the case that it could. This is the case as I understand it:

If a soldier in the Guard refused to follow orders, they’d be likely subject to Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) action and would face court-martial, dishonorable discharge, and suspension of benefits. Everyone in the National Guard leadership up to and including the state Adjutant General is a commissioned officer and subject to similar UCMJ action. The Adjutant General reports to both the Governor and the Secretary of Defense. I am very unclear on what he’s supposed to do if he gets conflicting orders.

As I understand it, the Adjutant General of the California National Guard doesn’t just report to Hegseth, he reports in equal measure to Hegseth and Newsom. So how does that work exactly?

Under Title 32 control, which is how the National Guard normally works, governors issue orders to the Guard that get rubber stamped by the Secretary of Defense. In a difference of opinion, the Secretary of Defense can assert Title 10 control and override the governor, which people like to call “federalizing the Guard.” The National Guard has been variously used, threatened, misused, or intentionally not used when they arguably should have been used, quite a lot in the past half decade. Here’s a timeline.

• January 2020 - Virginia state representatives threaten to use Title 32 to seize guns from around 100,000 Virginia citizens, but the ban law tanks after a peaceful and clean 50,000 person protest which the anti-gun media calls “terrorism.”

• May 2020 - Tim Walz waits three days and eventually uses Title 32 to stop the Minneapolis Floyd riots after half a billion dollars of “mostly peaceful” riot damage.

• 2020 Summer of Love - Other states activate it variously using Title 32 but in mostly a symbolic role, and never for riot control. Cuomo in New York opted not to use Title 32 despite $115 million worth of damage, which makes some sense because NYPD actually outnumbers the entire New York National Guard by about 2:1. Other states used it for the security equivalent of distributing sugar free juice boxes to the cops.

• 2020 Summer of Love - Trump chooses not to use Title 10 for any of it.

• January 2024 - Governor Abbot of Texas uses Title 34 to close the border to illegal immigrants with Operation Lone Star.

• January 2024 - The Biden Intern Brigade with support from various Democrat leaders threatens to use Title 10 to open the Texas border to more illegal immigrants by seizing control from Abbot and opening the border back up.

• January 2024 - Twenty five other states use and/or threaten to use Title 34 to send their own National Guard to the Texas border to help keep the border closed.

• January 2024 - The Biden Intern Brigade backs off.

• June 2025 - Trump jumps straight to Title 10 during the LA anti-immigration riots after Newsom opts not to use them.

Using Title 10 is very unusual. Threatening to use Title 10 it is not. Using Title 34 is not. Threatening to use Title 34 is not. We’ve even seen groups of states use Title 34 to scare the Feds away from using Title 10 to override another state using Title 34. And notably, we’ve seen several states choose not to use Title 34 for riot control even when portions of their cities laid siege to federal buildings for months on end or declared independence from the United States.

There’s no objective rhyme or reason for it, as near as any third party could surmise, other than simply going for whatever the echo chamber might cheer at the moment. It does seem, however, that the National Guard will probably be used repeatedly in the future by politicians of various stripes to enforce their various thing they want to variously do.

Kayfabe

Kayfabe is the practice in scripted “sports” such as Professional Wrestling of building a narrative of conflict for entertainment purposes that isn’t actually true. Growing up in the 1980s in rural North Carolina, I can assure you that the modern understanding that the WWE (then WWF) is all scripted was not dominant then. We believed it, or at least some of us did, while swapping WWF trading cards in the baseball dugout. The public slowly became aware it was all made up the more absurd things got.

I believe the US is in that 1980s phase now with our politics, where we’re wondering if it’s real or not, and the details of this weekend riot provide good evidence of the latter.

It’s clear in the mathematics that the relative size of a protest has no bearing on whether the National Guard gets activated. Oregon and Washington State in 2020 gained share in the attention economy by not using them. Walz in Minnesota would have caught local hell at the time for using it when it mattered, but caught hell later in the national election for not using it until too late. Trump didn’t use Title 10 in Portland or Seattle in 2020 for the same reason he is using Title 10 now. Not using it then gave him ways to gain share of the attention economy, but using Title 10 now gains him share. And so forth.

They’re all just using the Applause Meter, without any objective threshold for how and when to use or not use military riot control. And when you’re a master of manipulating the attention economy by being a paid actor in a conflict, the applause meter is all that matters. Just listen to the crowd.