“There is nothing tougher than a tough Mexican, just as there is nothing gentler than a gentle Mexican, nothing more honest than an honest Mexican, and above all nothing sadder than a sad Mexican,” Raymond Chandler famously wrote in The Long Goodbye.
In her crazy political career that’s unpredictably spurted from San Fernando to school board to LA City Council, former LA City Council President Nury Martinez has already been every kind of Mexican that Chandler could imagine.
Nobody needs a recap of the weekend’s events. They’re all too sensationalized, too tailor-made for the scapegoating, cancel-culture Internet, and too easily repackaged as an opportunity for leftists to end the elected terms of a remaining bloc of even more moderate Latino Democrats, without the nuisance of waiting for elections.
Of course, as we’ve seen across the country throughout these past two-and-a-half years, leftists always need a crisis to validate seizing more power. And now in LA too, they’ve now successfully manufactured one, one that diverts attention from all other real problems that the leftists are failing to solve.
Via the Nury basement tapes, LA’s not-so-innocent citizenry got a chance to dive into the hardest core of the city’s hardcore redistricting process – which is always all about race and tribe, the top key drivers of the way the majority of our citizens vote. Every ten years, new districts are drawn up by Council and proxies, with the full knowledge that most blacks will vote for blacks, most Jews for Jews, most Latinos for Latinos, most gays for gays, most Koreans for Koreans, and most straight whites for Joe Buscaino. This is why so many Latino candidates add diacritical marks to their names on the ballots; this is why, when the city finally published its new district maps, it also published the racial demographics of each new district as well.
As the demographics and the results they forge easily demonstrate, blacks are still over-represented on LA City Council, and Latinos vastly under-represented. (The black demographic wonks counter that none of LA’s black districts host clearcut black majorities – it’s just that Latinos in those communities aren’t as likely to vote at all as blacks are, they note.) This has been a very sore spot for Latinos, especially traditional and practicing Catholic Latinos, through the past decade, as Mayor Villaraigosa had successfully gamed the redistricting process for a complete Latino hegemony in 2010-2011, actually calling in someone from the Latino organization NALEO to head the commission. Desptie Villaraigosa’s work-arounds, too many Latino candidates subsequently faultered in districts the gerrymanderers put them in contention to win.
By the numbers, LA is 8.8% black, but blacks occupy three Council seats – which is a full 20% of them. Conversely, LA is 48.1% Latino, but there are only four Latinos on City Council – which is only 26.7% of the seats. (It has long been a contention of this scribe that there are far too few City Council seats for a city of four million – and it’s the lack of adequate representation for all of us that is most responsible for producing all the redistricting friction.)
The ensuing chaos from taking an hour-plus of racial realpolitik taken from the heat of the redistricting moment in a wobbly 2021 and disclosing it to the hothouse public of an overcharged election season in 2022 has culminated with Nury taking a leave of absence that seems certain to end in capitulation to the party forces pushing her out, and Kevin de Leon taking a long break from City Council, and Gil Cedillo, already pushed out by socialist Eunessis Hernandez via the old fashioned method of fair election, wondering if any of this might impact his future lobbyist career.
The chaos spilled into the local crew’s next City Council meeting, where the same old neo-Bolshevik LAMC 41.18 protestors that Bonin has ingratied himself to in order to mask the staggering failures he’s had in addressing the multitudinous dangerous homeless encampments in his own district, came out in full voice, which makes for great television, abundant social media clicks, and no real dialog about representation, or homelessness, or the equally vicious instacancel culture of the leftist Democrats. The accused Latino Councilmembers were constantly portrayed as among “the most powerful Latino legislators in the State” – which was a tricky way of ducking the fact that these same purportedly powerful politicans had lost almost every redistricting battle they enjoined, even as they were helpless to prevent media from publishing the salacious comments and more privileged leftwing Democrats from piling on.
The chaos also brushed the mayoral campaigns of Karen Bass and Rick Caruso, who both appeared initially soft on Nury and the others, but then came around to media pressure and demanded resignations as everyone else did.
There’s good reason for both mayoral candidates to tiptoe around the imbroglio as best the can without naming names: each candidate has to calculate how much Nury Martinez and Kevin de Leon actually do represent what tens of thousands of unaffiliated, unwoke Latinos who are fed up with under-representation in a city with rosary beads on its Great Seal might be thinking. It’s easy for anyone who’s ever been to a construction site, a taco truck, a crowded mass, or a pro soccer game in town to imagine what so many Latinos (and so many others) might honestly think of a gay, highly entitled, low-functioning manic depressive from Harvard with an adopted a black child who keeps throwing sabots into the City’s already failing homeless housing skunkworks.
It is not certain, as it has been in LA mayoral elections stretching back to 2005, that whomever wins the Latino vote will win this mayoral election. The racially-charged and hyper-indignant muddle that played out in media, as usual, has not bothered to question whether rank-and-file trad Catholic Latinos find more than the usual political disappointment with the things Nury said, and may even wonder what the larger fuss is all about. (It is recalled that that other notable priveledged LGBTQ Ivy Leaguer with adopted children in city government, Eric Garcetti, backed Nury’s opponent when Nury first ran for office.) In fact, while Nury will remain political poison to all at least through the November election, seeing one mayoral candidate or the other going too hard against Nury at this time may turn trad Latino voters who might not have ordinarily come to the melee at all; whether or not that happens, the candidates’ responses to the melee certainly move very few mayoral votes that are already pledged.
Castro acolyte Karen Bass had already had a bad week, especially with Latinos. At yet another debate, she blurted out “How much did you pay them?” when Caruso touted his endorsement from the Latino group Avance. She later had to apologize to the important group for suggesting its endorsement could be bought. She also had a bad week releasing data about her past: her “application” to USC for the freebie Masters she received there was an obvious cut-and-paste job, which actually disclosed her college GPA as a “B??” – and the question marks were hers. There was no signature on the document, which didn’t wrap correctly, and no USC form control number on it.
Of course, with LA media being what they are, chasing after every race-baiting story and gladly throwing gas on all raging fires while ignoring the substantive issues, the Bass flubs were quickly brushed aside. Nor have LA media bothered to ponder the timing of the release of the Nury and Kevin recordings, which have been on someone’s shelf for a year and kicking around Reddit for nearly a month. Times reporter and auxiliary local news scandal-chaser Benjamin Oreskes has suggested to our local Fox affiliate that he knows more than he’s willing to say about the identity of the leaker.
But all through all the frothing, foaming, finger-wagging and posturing that the Times so gladly stirred up, adults in Los Angeles City and County would do well while calling for heads to roll to recall that we citizens are already teetering on the brink of a highly non-representative, insider-appointed, persistently failing government. Three Councilmembers have departed Council before their terms ended in recent years. The County’s board of supervisors may face a broad criminal investigation, in a contract scandal that appears to be widening, and the County Clerk is being sued for allegedly improper disqualifications in a recall attempt of the unpopular DA, who may yet face another recall effort. (Meanwhile, the top software executive of LA’s poll-worker software provider was arrested last week for allowing sensitive poll-worker information to be stored on servers in China.) The County Sheriff faces a County measure that would enable his recall by the board he serves, placing the will of the five-member board above the will of the electorate. (The fact that at the time the Nury basement tapes were made, Mayor Garcetti’s own chief of staff, top moneyman, and longtime top advisor resigned in disgrace, apparently thwarting Garcetti’s own ambition to take leave of the city and the country for India, has long been forgotten.) It goes on and on.
This sticks-and-stones scandal, weaponized by media, would be more routine, and more routinely dispensed with, were it not for this larger slouching-towards-catastrophe context. Everywhere in LA County, hard-left socialist Democrats, whose policies have already failed and failed again, and their fellow-travelers in LGBT-hustling media, have, post-Covid, worked harder than ever to usurp power even from moderate Democrats rather than to solve problems, even when moderates have been lawfully elected. The lawfully elected may turn out to be, for all their hot-mike failures, more truly representative of their communities than the crisis manufactures and all those fellow-travelers in media might guess.
Nobody would dispute that the accused have persistently angled for the best degree of representation for their communities. And most of all, they have been extremely frustrated by being under-represented through the past decade and now locked into the this one. Local media, thrilled by the prospect of any messy battle involving race and tribe, and failing to question the timing or the motive of the moment, have been the leftists’ bliging fellow travelers at every step of the way, glad to hand their megaphone once again to those who have been constantly shrieking, but not solving, for so long.
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J. Carroll Clark is the nom de plume of a California motorist, painter of watercolors, and, in this incarnation, longtime LA political and cultural scribe you used to read when legacy media were readable.
Thank you for putting words to this mess. My brother and I were talking about it yesterday (brought up in desegregation schooling in inner city Pittsburgh) and all we see everywhere are race hustlers and cancel culture when it comes to real life. These people can’t wait to create more carnage instead of actually working on the real issues affecting us all, regardless of skin color.