The Left’s Martyr-Making Machine In Overdrive— Murderers, Rapists, Pedos, Child Traffickers

Victor Davis Hanson’s scathing essay on the party of criminals.

The Rogue’s New Gallery of Left-Wing Scoundrels

The left’s martyr-making machine is in overdrive—recasting criminals, rioters, and radicals as victims, even as the public demands law, order, and sanity.

By Victor Davis Hanson, June 12, 2025

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The entire career of race-baiter Al Sharpton was founded on falsehoods about the Tawana Brawley scam.

Nearly everything the left told us about the Trayvon Martin fight was false.

The “hands up, don’t shoot” Ferguson fable and the Covington Kids myth were quickly exposed.

The Duke Lacrosse and Jussie Smollett melodramas were laughable.

Russian “collusion,” “laptop” disinformation, and Joe Biden “fit as a fiddle” gaslighting were utter lies.

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But more recently, the hard left lost its mind championing a host of violent, unsavory characters.

The illegal alien and El Salvadorian national, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was portrayed as a victim of unfair deportation in the left’s larger, losing war for open borders.

The Duke Lacrosse and Jussie Smollett melodramas were laughable.

Russian “collusion,” “laptop” disinformation, and Joe Biden “fit as a fiddle” gaslighting were utter lies.

But more recently, the hard left lost its mind championing a host of violent, unsavory characters.

The illegal alien and El Salvadorian national, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was portrayed as a victim of unfair deportation in the left’s larger, losing war for open borders.

“Maryland Man”: a supposed poor victim of Trump overreach.

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He was constructed as a family man engaged in construction to feed his family, who somehow forgot to become “documented” and was deported.

In truth, Garcia is now facing felony indictments for human trafficking. He was a likely MS-13 gang member, a violent and bullying woman-beater, and rarely employed gainfully in construction.

Luigi Mangione was a rich, spoiled kid who dabbled in Jacobin politics.

Posing as a revolutionary, Mangione ambushed Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. He murdered him in cold blood near a New York hotel.

Instantly, some on the left embraced Mangione as a revolutionary hero who delivered justice to a supposedly greedy corporate capitalist.

Mohamed Soliman, like Garcia, was a violent illegal alien. He bragged about his hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular.

So Soliman made some Molotov cocktails and tried to incinerate Jewish marchers advocating on behalf of Israeli hostages still held by Hamas.

Soliman’s wife and five children, to whom Soliman filmed a video explaining his dedication to violent jihad, were also illegal aliens.

Soliman may well have preferred to burn Jews to remind us of the fires of the Holocaust ovens.

In the mind of the mainstream liberal media, the Soliman family was cruelly detained by the evil Trump administration that was considering returning the illegal aliens to their Middle East homes.

But recently, during the LA riots, the left went completely crazy as the entire Democrat Party and California state officials sided with violent protesters and illegal aliens.

The open border rioters soon got the message that left-wing California officials were on their side.

So, throngs began burning cars. Illegal aliens waved Mexican flags and burned American flags.

Protesters spat on law enforcement and pelted them with rocks, firecrackers, and concrete blocks.

Stores were looted. Critical freeways were swarmed and shut down.
And for what?

To protest the legal efforts of ICE to serve deportation warrants to a few hundred of some 10-12 million illegal aliens who had illegally swarmed into the U.S. during the Biden administration’s four-year destruction of immigration law.

California Governor Gavin Newsom damned the federal immigration efforts as “chaotic” and “reckless” and seemed obsessed only with Trump.

Then Newsom dared ICE to arrest him.

Like some antebellum, neo-Confederate, states’ rights activist, Newsom threatened to withhold California’s federal income taxes from the federal government—a possible felony.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass—recently infamous for junketing in Ghana while Pacific Palisades burned down—warned ICE that “We will not stand for this.”

What did her threat mean? Did she intend to use force to support the street thugs against her fellow American officers?

California Democrat Congresswoman Norma Torres screamed at overwhelmed ICE agents seeking to issue arrest warrants with the obscene threat, “Get the f— out of LA.”

As the mob violence increased and public outrage grew, a desperate and now embarrassed Newsom could only double down on his obsessions with Donald Trump.

What has caused Newsom’s Trump Derangement Syndrome?

Is it because Trump called out the National Guard and Marines to aid an overwhelmed Los Angeles Police Department to stop the violence that left-wing officials and the media had appeased?

In sum, is the left once again trying to commit political suicide?

Polls showed overwhelming public support for deporting those who illegally entered and reside in the US, especially the nearly half a million believed criminals.

Trump’s own most supportive demographic in recent polls has been Hispanics. Like all Americans, they are appalled by violent thugs and illegal aliens waving Mexican flags who have no wish to return to Mexico while burning American flags as they demand illegally to stay in the U.S.

The more the incoherent left claimed the protests were “peaceful” and damned the Trump administration for sending them help, the more the violence continued.

And the more the public was relieved that Trump was trying to stop the riots.

Democrats currently lack sane and effective leaders.

But that is no excuse to swoon over creepy gangbangers, spoiled-brat assassins, anti-Semitic burners of Jews, and illegal aliens breaking the law and damning America—while waving Mexican flags.