Category: Riots
Preparedness isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.
A certain smug comfort belongs to people who have never stood between a riot line and a camera, never smelled accelerant on the wind, never watched their phones lose signal while fire chewed through an entire neighborhood. They talk about “heated rhetoric” and “charged atmospheres” as if danger were theoretical. For women reporters on the ground, it isn’t.
The front line is not a metaphor. It is a place. And it is getting more dangerous by the year.
This is not a gadget story. It is a survival story.
I have covered Antifa riots where the mob knew my name before I reached the sidewalk. I have been screamed at, followed, and threatened by people who publicly denounce violence while privately practicing it. I have watched law enforcement stand down under progressive policies that place the comfort of agitators above the safety of citizens. And I have learned, the hard way, that when cities become unlivable, women pay first.
The left loves to talk about “lived experience.” Here is mine: Democrat governance has made America’s major cities objectively less safe, and being a female independent journalist in them now requires the mindset of a survivalist.
That became brutally clear during the Los Angeles wildfires of 2025.
I was there when the sky turned orange and evacuation orders contradicted one another. Cell towers failed. Emergency lines were overwhelmed. Friends and family lost homes — not hypothetically, not statistically, but completely. In that chaos, the only reason I was able to coordinate help, locate people, and call for assistance was a satellite phone. While 911 systems collapsed, that device worked. No signal dependency. No excuses.
That is not a gadget story. It is a survival story.
The same lesson repeats itself elsewhere. In Washington, D.C., shootings now occur in places that once felt immune — near offices, events, and corridors of power. I was at Butler. I have been steps away from moments that could have gone very differently. Anyone insisting that “these things don’t happen here” is either lying or sheltered by privilege.
When whistleblowers reach out to me, they do not do it over casual cell calls. They use secure satellite communications, because they understand something our leaders prefer not to acknowledge: privacy is safety. Satellite phones are resistant to interception, independent of fragile infrastructure, and immune to spam and shutdowns. When people have something dangerous to say, they choose tools that help keep them alive.
This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
People have died hiking because there was no signal. Boaters have vanished because help could not be reached. Hurricanes do not care about ideology. Fires do not check voter registration. Yet one party consistently opposes disaster preparedness, energy independence, and resilient infrastructure — while demanding blind trust in systems that fail precisely when they are needed most.
Preparedness is not extremism. It is common sense.
Redundancy in communication is not political. Neither are solar-powered backups or hardened devices. Nor is concern about electromagnetic vulnerabilities when our lives run through centralized, fragile networks. Thinking ahead does not make you radical. It makes you female in a country that keeps telling women to be brave while stripping away the tools that make bravery survivable.
And yes, it matters who builds those tools.
If I am calling for help, I want American customer service — American voices, American-owned companies. Safety should not come with a foreign accent and a hold button. Trust is part of security.
This is why satellite phones, solar chargers, emergency kits, and hardened cases are no longer niche products. They are rational responses to an increasingly unstable political and physical environment. They are also meaningful gifts — because nothing says you care like giving someone a way to come home alive.
RELATED: A nation without trust is a nation on borrowed time
Photo by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images
Which brings us to 2026.
Around President Trump, TPUSA events, or Republican members of Congress, the threat environment is asymmetric. The left has normalized political violence while denying it exists. Media figures excuse it. Politicians minimize it. Prosecutors decline to prosecute it. And women journalists who refuse to conform are expected to absorb the consequences quietly.
I won’t.
The question voters should ask heading into the midterms is not which party sounds kinder on cable news. It is which party acknowledges reality — and equips Americans, especially women, to survive it.
One side treats chaos as a political tool. The other treats safety as the foundation of freedom.
I know which one kept me connected when the fires closed in. I know which one refuses to pretend riots are “mostly peaceful.” And I know which one understands that strong borders, strong policing, resilient infrastructure, and personal preparedness are not luxuries in dangerous times.
The front line is expanding. It runs through our cities, our forests, our streets, and our inboxes. Women are already on it — whether policymakers realize it or not.
The only question left is whether America will choose leaders who take our safety seriously or continue sacrificing us to ideology.
Because the danger is real. And pretending otherwise is the most reckless policy of all.
Riot, repeat: How America’s unrest became a bad rerun
History doesn’t just move forward — it echoes. Karl Marx once said history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, second as farce.” He meant it as a jab at 19th-century France, where Napoleon’s nephew attempted to replicate his uncle’s revolutionary drama not on the battlefield but rather through bureaucratic spectacle. Nevertheless, Marx’s insight fits modern America. Our cycles of unrest and outrage have become predictable theater — each act beginning with moral panic and ending in absurdity.
The summer of 2020 was a national trauma. The killing of George Floyd was a tragedy that radicals turned into revolution. Riots swept through more than 2,000 cities, torching businesses, destroying neighborhoods, and leaving dozens dead. Egged on by the race-baiting activists at Black Lives Matter, mobs looted stores, assaulted police, and terrorized communities.
The line between tragedy and farce is thinner than ever — and this time, we can’t afford to play the fool.
Media outlets downplayed the carnage as “fiery but mostly peaceful.” Political leaders joined the chorus, afraid to confront the mob. Corporate America rushed to signal its virtue by taking the knee, pouring billions into “racial equity” schemes that enriched activists but divided the country.
The real tragedy wasn’t just the damage — it was the betrayal. Spineless mayors and governors surrendered their cities. Police were handcuffed, budgets gutted, and criminals emboldened. The riots hollowed out public trust, replacing civic order with cultural resentment. America’s guardians became scapegoats, and justice itself became negotiable.
From riot to parody
Five years on, the rebellion has devolved into a pathetic sideshow. Antifa’s latest “resistance” — a handful of masked agitators harassing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as they carry out long-overdue deportations — feels less like revolution and more like performance art.
Their vandalism is designed for TikTok, not for change: laser pointers at officers, graffiti on walls, choreographed scuffles for social media. It’s a boutique insurgency — staged in deep-blue enclaves, broadcast for dopamine hits, and forgotten the next day.
The chaos of 2020 burned cities. The tantrums of 2025 barely dent a precinct wall. The tragedy has become farce.
Still, both movements spring from the same poisoned root: a left-wing ideology that despises America’s foundations. BLM targeted police as enforcers of “white supremacy.” Antifa brands border agents as fascists for upholding immigration law.
Both rely on the same tactics — decentralized mobs, anonymous online organizing, and emotional manipulation amplified by social media. Both seek power through grievance, not through persuasion. And both reveal how progressive rage, unmoored from reality, becomes self-parody.
In 2020, rioters burned precincts and seized city blocks. They demanded “defund the police” and got it — along with record crime rates and broken neighborhoods. In 2025, their heirs spray-paint slogans and livestream tantrums. Their only victory is visibility.
The digital theater of rage
Social media turned riots into content. In 2020, doctored clips of “police brutality” fueled nationwide hysteria, empowered anti-cop lunatics, and enriched grifters. Today, the same algorithms push Antifa’s posturing, turning vandalism into viral spectacle.
These platforms profit from outrage. They amplify emotion, suppress context, and reward hysteria. The result is a feedback loop of performative politics — activism as cosplay.
After years of indulgence, government crackdowns have finally returned. ICE operates under firm executive backing. Local police departments no longer hesitate to enforce the law. The radicals, once protected, now find themselves exposed and outmatched.
But even as law enforcement regains its footing, the left’s playbook remains unchanged. The grievances are repackaged, the slogans recycled, the media coverage predictable. It’s cultural Marxism with a TikTok filter — ideology as entertainment.
Farce doesn’t mean harmless. Every protest turned stunt still corrodes civic life. Each viral act of defiance feeds distrust in law, borders, and the rule of order itself.
The radicals thrive on illusion: fake oppression, fake urgency, fake rebellion. Meanwhile, real Americans bear the cost — higher crime, divided communities, and institutions too timid to defend themselves.
RELATED: The left’s costume party: Virtue signaling as performance art
Photo by serazetdinov via Getty Images
The lesson we refuse to learn
The tragedy of 2020 proved that surrendering to the mob invites ruin. The farce of 2025 shows that ridicule alone isn’t enough to defeat it. Both demand resolve — the courage to confront lies, restore order, and defend the institutions that safeguard freedom.
History doesn’t stop repeating itself; it stops being repeated. Whether America ends this cycle depends on whether its citizens choose firmness over fear, enforcement over appeasement, and truth over spectacle.
Enough with the doctored outrage porn. The burning question is whether we’ll tolerate this clown show recycling into catastrophe or crush it with resolve that honors real American values.
The line between tragedy and farce is thinner than ever — and this time, we can’t afford to play the fool.
