In a movement that started with a tweet from President Trump about “rat and rodent infested” Baltimore, a group of pro-Trump activists took to the trash-strewn streets of Los Angeles to continue what they’d begun on the East Coast: help clean up Democrat-controlled cities. By the end of the effort, they’d cleaned up a stunning 50 tons of garbage and uncovered hoards of rats carrying who-knows-what diseases.
A new video from Austen Fletcher (“Fleccas”) documents the latest clean-up effort led by Scott Presler, a pro-Trump activist who organized the first such project last month in Baltimore. Presler and a group of volunteers, which Fletcher describes as consisting of “mostly Trump supporters,” managed to clean up a jaw-dropping 50 tons of trash in the San Fernando Valley, which, Fletcher notes, is the district for which Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff is responsible.
As The Daily Wire has chronicled, largely as a result of progressive policies, Los Angeles is increasingly plagued by homelessness, which has resulted in rampant drug abuse, the spreading of diseases, and the accumulation of garbage in many areas. The problem has also increasingly inspired residents to begin to call out elected officials for failing to keep neighborhoods safe.
In a 10-minute documentary on the L.A. clean-up effort, Fletcher features residents expressing their disgust with the current situation in the county.
“Even though I live in L.A. — and I see these homeless encampments every day — this is so much worse than I expected,” says one volunteer. “In fact, there’s a rat that just ran past your shoulder there on the left. The smell is horrific. It’s dangerous. And it’s frustrating because we pay among the highest taxes here. We shouldn’t have to come out here and clean.”
“We had to get the [shopping] carts out first. So we pulled all the carts out, and then we had to start getting the trash out,” says another volunteer. “That’s when all the rats came.”
“We started to haul away the trash, and there’s literally dead rats everywhere,” says another.
“You have typhus, bubonic plague that are coming back in LA for the first time in the United States in I don’t know how many years,” notes a volunteer.
Asked if things have changed in the city, one guy who says he grew up in the area says, “It’s unexplainable.”
Asked if the city has tried to reach out and help the group, a volunteer says no. Another notes that last year, the city spent nearly $650 million on homelessness, yet because of misuse of the funds, the problem has only gotten worse.
“We have to look at how our money is being allocated,” says a female volunteer. “My impression is that my congressman, Adam Schiff, is not really paying attention for a few reasons. One, he doesn’t live here. And, B, he’s very focused on his hyper-partisan anti-Trump, Republican vs. Democrat thing.”
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The “rat infested” city clean-up projects were prompted by Trump tweeting about conditions in Rep. Elijah Cummings’ Baltimore in late July.
Rep. Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA,” Trump tweeted. “As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded. Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”
Like many of his tweets, Trump’s post sparked a massive controversy, with Democrats decrying his comments as “racist” while Trump supporters pointed to Democrats’ own past comments about Baltimore which admitted that parts of the city are indeed a “rat and rodent infested mess.”