Alejandro Villanueva – Harbinger of the Hispanic Right
The top sheriff in Los Angeles County, Alex Villanueva, has had it with woke insanity. He has become openly critical of the feckless LA Mayor Eric Garcetti, and he is supporting the recall of the crime-friendly LA County District Attorney George Gascon. And yet Villanueva is a Democrat.
As the Los Angeles Times recently put it, “he has gone to war with the liberal forces that played a major hand in electing him.”
Reality can do that to a person. Reality is doing that to an increasing number of Democrats in California, who have realized that downgrading drug and property crimes to the level of a traffic ticket has consequences. California’s fair weather and crime friendly laws have incentivized an invasion of not just people down on their luck, but partiers, predators, and derelicts. By the tens of thousands, they have set up camp and taken control of entire coastal cities.
Villanueva’s social media pronouncements are consistently as provocative as they are true. A typical Facebook entry (August 15):
“The woke elites that did not grow up in LA do not understand the history of gang violence and murder in Southern California. It is dangerous (to the rest of us) for them to sit in their nice home offices, in their nice and safe communities, and scream defund the police. For them it is a slogan, but for the victims of murder and gang violence it is totally irresponsible. But since they are not the victims of violence or crime they use racial politics as a veil to hide their own privilege and power.”
Here is a man that checks all the boxes that woke progressives presume to own: He is a Latino and he is a Democrat. Both of those presumptions are destined to be swept away in the coming months and years. Alex Villanueva is a DINO, a Democrat in Name Only. Or, then again, perhaps Alex Villanueva is a new type of Democrat, destined to completely redefine what it means to be a Democrat.
When that happens, the tide will turn. Woke culture may dominate every major institution in the United States. But when Democrats themselves reject the premises of woke progressivism, they may just all like dominoes.
* * *
