It’s about 25 miles, as the crow flies, from a particular street corner in Thousands Oaks, California, to Congregation Adas Torah in Los Angeles.

Another way of saying that: It’s about 25 miles, as the crow flies, from where Paul Kessler was killed by a Palestinian protester in November to where Palestinian protesters showed up en masse to physically prevent Jews from entering a synagogue on Sunday.

The violence was planned and scheduled and thus preventable. One video appeared to show the mob beating a Jewish woman to the ground. (The mob’s defenders say it might actually have been a man with long hair they were beating outside a shul. To repeat: These are the defenders of the mob.)

The LAPD, according to those on the ground who actually had to enter the synagogue, ceded the area in front of the entrance to the pro-Hamas protesters, prohibiting Jews from using the main entrance.

The city of Los Angeles cannot say it didn’t know what was about to go down. It cannot say it didn’t know the intentions of the mob. And—being within spitting distance of Kessler’s homicide—it cannot say it didn’t know how easily and how quickly it could all go wrong. Mayor Karen Bass cannot say any of these things. Whether her dereliction is out of neglect or malign intent, I have no idea. Nor at this point does it matter much.

Here’s another fun fact about LA and Thousand Oaks and the surrounding area: The LA media market is the second-largest in the country and the only one anywhere close to the size of New York’s media market—that is, it’s second only to the “media capital of the world.”

But if you saw the scenes that developed and continued throughout the day Sunday—weapon-wielding psychos in keffiyehs stalked Jewish neighborhoods chasing Jews in the area as well, not content with keeping their riot confined to the Jewish house of worship—you almost certainly saw them from citizen journalists and alternative media and eyewitnesses taking video. Not, that is, from the major media.

Again, the event was scheduled, and once things turned violent there was plenty of time to catch up. I assure you the West Coast press knows how to get to Pico Boulevard.

We have often compared the current outbreak of anti-Jewish riots to the Charlottesville hate rally in 2017, but that might not be strong enough. After all, the second Charlottesville march attracted almost nobody on the white supremacist side but thousands of counter-protesters. The thirty Unite the Right participants were surely outnumbered by media alone. These pro-Hamas demonstrations, many of which turn violent, are planned openly and publicly and now are a common feature of life in America.

Media coverage may have something to do with why Charlottesville was a one-and-done and the Hamas protests became a movement that shook down the Democratic Party’s leadership and won concessions from the president himself. But it is only a part of the story. The reason the media participation likely outnumbered skinheads at the second rally is because of the urgency of burying such a rally before it can grow arms and legs. That urgency applied equally to the Hamas protests, but it was not politically convenient to do the right thing in this case. The political and media establishment is capable of squashing these burgeoning hate movements but simply chose not to do so. That’s it—that’s the story.

The continuation of the left-wing Cossack-wannabe movement is a choice. It is a choice by the media to treat it with kid gloves. It is a choice by universities to kowtow to it. It is a choice by congressional anti-Semites to egg it on. And it is certainly a choice by the president of the United States to join such figures at political events and praise them to the heavens.

The leadership of America’s political, media, and academic institutions have chosen this path. No one’s participation in any of this is unintentional. And very few hands are clean.