One of the week’s most inaccurate and biased statements was “there is no vicious and violent mob in Los Angeles.” This claim did not come from some fringe angry online social media user, but was pushed by MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday night’s broadcast of The Last Word. Clearly, this take was not only just extremely out of touch with reality, but a bald-faced lie.
But far be it from those at MSNBC to care about factual reporting. Their agenda was to push anti-conservative rhetoric and excuse the massive illegal immigration problem. Many of O’Donnell’s claims were certifiably false at best, and intentional inflammatory rhetoric at worst.
O’Donnell began his LA tirade by attempting to garner sympathy for illegal immigrants who worked on construction sites:
Those immigrants outside the Home Depots in Los Angeles are there to help. They are there to work. They are there hoping that someone doing a home project of some kind will need their help and hire them, and people do that every day in the parking lot of Home Depots in Los Angeles. Every day. People have decided from experience that they can trust those men, those workers, some of whom show up at the Home Depot every day and are known by sight to all of us going in and out of those Home Depots in Los Angeles, they're there to try to support their families by making life easier for us.
But that wasn’t even O’Donnell’s most absurd take of the segment.
“Donald Trump wants to torture them.” He stated confidently, almost proud of himself for coming up with the line. O’Donnell believes that Donald Trump wants to torture illegal immigrants. He provided no examples or proof to back up his claim, but did have the audacity to say that Trump supporters are “fact free.”
But the icing on O’Donnell’s cake of lies was yet to come. The host continued to tell viewers that President Trump lied about Los Angeles, saying that “there is no vicious and violent mob in Los Angeles.”
The entire country’s attention is fixated on the violence that has ravaged through LA over the past several days, and to state confidently that there is “no violent mob in Los Angeles” is an embarrassing take from O’Donnell and MSNBC. He also told his viewers that there were no riots on Tuesday, which completely contradicts what was said by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass in a press conference on Tuesday night, where the violence had gotten so difficult to control, that Bass had to implement a curfew that very night.
O’Donnell continued his rant, saying that California belonged to Mexico before the United States had “waged war” to secure it, so “when you take land by force in war, as this country did, to add California to our country, don't be surprised if from time to time you see the flag of the country that was there before you on that very same land, that was Mexican land until we took it away.”
What O’Donnell left out of his spun historical account was that the population of the entire territory ceded to the U.S. was only about 80,000 people. He also omitted that the U.S. gained California as a state during the Mexican-American War, which was fought largely because Mexico refused to recognize the independence of Texas, which also was previously a Mexican territory. Texas had sought independence from Mexico because the Mexican government had imposed unfair taxes and assimilation laws on Texans, and Mexican troops fired on American troops in disputed territory after Texas became a state.
He also left out that parts of California used to be part of Russia, but O’Donnell would probably have a different reaction if he saw people rioting while waving Russian flags.
“American” has never been a race, but a unique philosophy that goes far beyond race and ethnicity, based on the principles of unalienable rights. O’Donnell has failed to understand this, and has implied that whatever your ethnicity is, that is the heritage you should uphold over your identity as an American– which is inherently antithetical to the reason why so many immigrated here in the first place: the American Dream.
The entire transcript is below. Click "expand" to read.
MSNBC’s The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell
June 10, 2025
10:13:18 PM ESTLAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Those immigrants outside the Home Depots in Los Angeles are there to help. They are there to work. They are there hoping that someone doing a home project of some kind will need their help and hire them, and people do that every day in the parking lot of Home Depots in Los Angeles. Every day. People have decided from experience that they can trust those men, those workers, some of whom show up at the Home Depot every day and are known by sight to all of us going in and out of those Home Depots in Los Angeles. They're there to try to support their families by making life easier for us. And Donald Trump wants to torture them.
They're not drug dealers. They're not gang members. They have not been released from any mental institutions. And Donald Trump has never produced a single person who was released from a mental institution and sent into this country by a foreign government, which he claims happens every single day and is an invented, demented dreamscape of Donald Trump's, believable only to Donald Trump's most fact-free supporters. Donald Trump lied about Los Angeles again today.
[SCREEN WIPE]
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [SPEECH AT FT. BRAGG]: I want to say a few words about the situation in Los Angeles, California, have you heard of the place? Where I've deployed thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines to protect federal law enforcement from the attacks of a vicious and violent mob.
O’DONNELL: There is no vicious and violent mob in Los Angeles. The National Guard troops are doing absolutely nothing. The Marines are invisible and obviously doing absolutely nothing. And peaceful protesters have been peacefully submitting to arrests in small numbers to make their point of protest against what Donald Trump is trying to do in their city. Donald Trump repeatedly today referred to, “rioters bearing foreign flags.”
There were no rioters today, none. But there were Mexican flags in a place that was Mexico long before it became part of the United States, as a result of a war the United States chose to wage on Mexico in order to obtain that territory.
Mexico, and Spain before it, have forced Donald Trump to speak Spanish very much against his will. But he's, of course too stupid to even realize that he's doing that when he names the city where he has sent his troops to do nothing.
Spain was the first colonizer of the place we now call California. Spain established the missions in California, named after saints in Spanish, that every California public school student learns about in elementary school. And Donald Trump knows nothing about. He doesn't know that Los Angeles means the angels. He doesn't know that Spanish was the only non-tribal language spoken in Los Angeles long before New York even existed, long before New York was first settled by the Dutch.
And so, yes, when you take land by force in war, as this country did, to add California to our country, don't be surprised if from time to time you see the flag of the country that was there before you on that very same land, that was Mexican land until we took it away.
(...)
