It’s hard to get excited over the insurrection in Washington D.C. after a year when rioting became acceptable in the U.S.
If it’s OK to go on a rampage in service to Black Lives Matter, why can’t a QAnon freak like Jake Angeli roam the Senate floor showing off his bare chest, painted face and horned hat? Maybe he’s indigenous.
That’s how it is now in some American cities. In Portland, declare yourself BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) and you don’t have to pay your mortgage. If deputies come to evict you, throw up some barricades, bring in some armed Antifa, demand reparations and watch the cops flee – while the mayor and local newspaper editor urge compromise.
This is how civilization comes undone.
In Portland, we’re getting used to things falling apart. Is this to be the future of the U.S.? If so, that should be the concern now – not forcing President Donald Trump out of office when he is already practically out the door.
In 2020, Portland had more than 100 nights of rioting. There is still occasional looting and violence anytime something in the news causes offense.
The day before the Capitol riot, a mob of roughly 60 people gathered outside the Portland Police Bureau’s North Precinct office and started fires and blocked streets because a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin shot and wounded Jacob Blake, an armed black man who resisted arrest.
The night after the Capitol riot, Portland protesters gathered at a familiar spot near the federal courthouse and marched to the police bureau’s Central Precinct and later to the new Multnomah County courthouse, doing what they usually do – break windows, spray graffiti, attack downtown storefronts. There were no arrests.
Earlier in the evening, a band of Antifa thugs surrounded Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and a friend who were having a dinner at one of the city’s restaurants struggling to stay in business. The Antifas insulted him and swatted at him, until he requested a takeout box and left. The victors gleefully posted the video online. No arrests.
The scene at the Capitol building was just Portland (or Seattle or Minneapolis) writ large. Yet national media like NPR or The New York Times seemed aghast. Haven’t they been following the news for the last year? Or the past decade? Maybe they should dig into their archives and revisit one story after another that they have done on criminal justice reform.
It’s all about no consequences. No arrests. No bail. No prosecution. No punishment. It’s not fair to judge someone by the worst thing they have done. A criminal record can make it hard to get a job, find housing, have a family. Let’s see how many of those excuses are trotted out to defend right-wing rioters.
Of the more than 1,000 persons arrested in Portland protests, 91 percent are not being prosecuted, courtesy of Multnomah County District Mike Schmidt, a self-described progressive.
In the immediate post-mortem on the Capitol rioting, the media quickly blamed Trump, Republicans and police – everyone but the individual rioters.
Had the vote tally in the Trump-Biden race been exactly flipped, and had Trump been the victor, we could have seen a very different Capitol riot on Jan. 6 with Antifa militants and Black Lives Matter supporters busting into the House and Senate chambers. How would the media have covered that?
I can almost hear the weary sympathy in Mary Louise Kelly’s voice on NPR’s “All Things Considered” as she would explain it away in the context of historic and systemic racism. The protesters – and she would have called them protesters – just couldn’t help themselves.
One of the lies the media have allowed to be repeated is that Black Lives Matter protesters are treated more brutally than the Capitol rioters. That is flatly untrue, especially in Portland and Seattle. While five people died in the Capitol riot – including one shot by police – law enforcement officers in Portland have killed no protesters. In Seattle’s infamous autonomous zone where a police precinct was seized and destroyed by rioters, there were two killings and a rape – not by police but by gang affiliates and a civilian “security detail” established by anarchists.
Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Dave Miller expressed outrage in an interview with Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) that the congressman had to huddle with his staff using a baseball bat for protection. Yet Miller routinely has guests on his show, “Think Out Loud,” pushing for weaker and weaker sentences for serious crimes. Anything that smacks of punishment is considered cruel and vindictive.
Why shouldn’t a congressman or state legislator know fear? Doesn’t a family in the most humble dwelling feel a commensurate fear when they find their home has been broken into? Burglaries, which used to be considered serious felonies, are now commonplace. Most go unresolved. No arrests.
Of the 55 people killed in Portland in 2020 – the highest number of homicides since 1994 – did their last moments of terror matter any less because they weren’t members of Congress? Will their killers, if they are caught, catch a break on sentencing because of criminal justice reform passed by lawmakers who live in secure neighborhoods?
I don’t worry about rioters staging a coup and taking over our government. I worry about politicians who want to sacrifice the personal safety of ordinary people so they can feel good about their politics – so they can appease black criminals, who want the police to leave them alone.
One of the best lessons Portland can learn from the Capitol riot is how unrealistic it is to expect police to handle an unruly mob without resorting to some force. Portland police were denounced for using tear gas against protesters who started fires, shined lasers in officers’ eyes, threw Molotov cocktails and other objects.
Police critics – particularly Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty – wanted officers to wade into the mob and arrest individual protesters who were causing trouble and leave the other “peaceful” protesters alone. Those “peaceful” protesters are complicit in the violence around them. Their presence emboldens and protects the nonpeaceful actors.
We saw what happened to one Capitol police officer who was surrounded by rioters and tried to engage them. Officer Brian D. Sicknick is believed to have been struck with a fire extinguisher in the chaos. He died later in the hospital. That’s what can happen to an officer who is badly outnumbered by people willing to do violence. You’re outgunned — even if you’re armed — when you’ve been ordered to exercise restraint while surrounded by chaos. Defend your life, and you risk public and media condemnation for police brutality.
Since the end of 2020 and the start of the New Year there has been an optimistic assumption that 2021 will be better. As the old year ran down, many people seemed ready to breathe a sigh of relief in the usual end-of-year stories offered by the media – particularly since we now have a “new” administration in Washington D.C.
I only sent out two Happy New Year cards. One said. “Happy Fucking New Year,” and the other said “What Could Go Wrong?”
Think of the possibilities.
COVID-19 could mutate into something much worse. The lock-downs could continue indefinitely. The national debt could reach a quadrillion.
More predictably, though, Derek Chauvin will likely stand trial for the murder of George Floyd. Should the verdict be guilty for anything less than murder – say, negligent homicide – expect certain American cities to explode.
And since police have been castigated for going soft on the “white” rioters in the Capitol, those cities will just have to burn.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
There is going to be civil war. there had better be.
That is a comment being expressed on a lot of conversation threads from The Portland Tribune to The New York Times.
If we have another civil war, it will be very different from the last one. More guns, more races, more ethnicities, more genders, more identity groups. If we all started wearing T-shirts that said, “This is what BIPOC looks like,” maybe that would help.
We’re all people of color, and we’re all indigenous to some place.
On war:
Violence is ugly. War, real war, is something that no one would wish upon anyone who has actually witnessed it.
I spent a year in Afghanistan in the early years. I’ve fought one type of war while being proxy to a civil war. I’ve fought hand to hand with death on the line and, thankfully, always won. This has given me the the experience and wisdom to know these victories were due to luck and superior systems as often as they were to any individual skill or superior will on my part.
Violence IS a necessary part of civilization, but that definition of civilization is necessitated by the government having a monopoly on violence. Anything else is Anarchy (which many in Portland naively claim they want)
I believe this society is heading in the wrong direction. I believe our society is over privileged to the point that we think we will always be safe and that civilization has somehow advanced beyond violence.
I do not, however, so badly wish to “own” those who hold these naive beliefs that I wantonly call for a civil war in a nation that possesses thousands of nuclear weapons with enough power to destroy everyone thousands of times over.
If you haven’t at least been punched in the face recently, please shut the hell up about war.
Matt, I know from previous comments he has posted on this website that Larry has been more than punched in the face. He has worked in front-line security.
You’re right that American privilege sets us apart, much more so than “white privilege.” Many of us are very naive about violence. I’m troubled by the current efforts to dismantle what is left of Measure 11, which are being led by felons and their friends and family; criminal defense attorneys; Black Lives Matter and social justice activists and their friends in the media.
It’s as if punishment is bad and serves no useful purpose in dealing with violence.
Meanwhile, this weekend there was a story on the AP wire about a 22-year-old California woman who committed the dastardly crime of wrongly accusing a black teenager of stealing her phone in a New York City hotel lobby. You’ve probably seen the video of the woman grabbing the teen’s phone thinking it was hers. The video was widely distributed. NYPD detectives traveled to California and arrested Miya Ponsetto on charges of “attempted robbery, grand larceny, acting in a manner injurious to a child and two counts of attempted assault.”
I don’t need to tell you about all the violent crimes we have every day in this country. Just this same weekend, there was a shootout in Chicago that left four dead and several critically injured. This same weekend, a man in the Buckman neighborhood in Portland opened fire and randomly shot up an apartment complex before surrendering to police.
But we’re making a national example of a woman who falsely accused a black teenager of theft.
America’s obsession with race — promoted by the media — is making us irrational. It’s as dangerous as rioters rampaging in the Capitol building and killing a police officer.
No wonder there is talk of war.
I am/was wrong to hope for civil war and regret it. I was very angry.
I saw/see those triumph that hate free speech, hate living with and by the law, and so many other necessities and formerly common features of of American society.
And, not simply triumph but begin to to hunt and destroy their enemies and their enemies’, families, children, livelihoods, and all that makes civic life wither sweet or practicable.
In the recent past I have been beat with a pipe and kicked in the teeth, only to be saved by a woman with a gun.
I mention this to illustrate a point: perhaps the civil war is already here, but one side operates only in defense.
I also believe that the most recent election was stolen. At the bey least by the suppression of the truth of Biden criminality.
The first half century of my life did not see the norming of murderous, hypocritical rioting and destruction. Nor public denunciation of honest people so that they have to go to a re-education camp or are dismissed as uneducable so dispensable.
Impunity for criminals (the man who beat me with a pipe and his wife (prostitute?) received no punshihmnet that I know of aside from a car ride in handcuffs.
Have you looked around you. I mean stopped and looked around at the filthy graffitied shithole that is metropolitan Portland?
I received a “survey” on my phone the other day that was really advocacy of decriminalizing most of the crime that we encounter in daily life. Of reducing sentences for felons, of rehab for addicts (I think we’ve been working that one for nearly half a century).
Where does it stop? How does it stop? Our educational system and those that control mass and social media inculcate such lies that Goebbels and Stalin would blush. Yet these lies are taught in schools as truth.
Sanity, civility, shit, adulthood is leaving the station…the nation.
I am reading 4 books on Stalinist communism right now, two by R. Conquest, one by Sebag-Montfiore and the other titled The House of Government.
Those true believers testified against themselves in show trials and were then exiled, imprisoned, or made subjects of state murder. Yet, their children carried on as believers and forgot almost all of their parent’s real character. When parents returned they were so destroyed often no reconnect could be made.
We do not seem so far from that here. A few weeks ago I could not take it anymore and spray painted over the “kill piggies” written at a stop light. Two women rushed out and tried to trap me in my car. They then declared that they had my information, they’d get me. I asked a cop and he said they could and probably would.
They didn’t, but for the poor follow thru of those grubby ignorants I could have had my wife threatened, home damaged (or worse) lost livelihoods. Thugs rule and are aided by the government.
Of course I don’t want civil war. A knock on your door and an assassin shoots you in the face and on and on. But, look at the break down, look at the lies, look at what are apparently the last days of your nation.
I am 65 and really hope to move to a spot in the rural west and hide out from what’s coming, but we both know that wont work. America will not see out my lifetime.
Larry, I am so sorry.
The word war is used so casually by people who haven’t been through what you and Matt have seen. Our schools generally don’t teach the reality of war, especially our own Civil War. It has been reduced to white man evil, black man slave.
That horrible New York Times writer who wants us to believe the U.S. began when the first African slave arrived in 1619, was on NPR this morning talking about the Capitol riot. They brought her on as an authority. Why I’m not sure why. She offered nothing new. She also casually used the word war.
She knows nothing of real war.
It is bad.
The loss of civility, which started happening about a decade ago, is a big part. When someone who disagrees with someone else is a “vile racist, bigot, Nazi,” or for that matter, the other direction (“commie, traitor, sissy) is almost as bad.
As Benjamin Franklin said in 1776, coming out of the First Constitutional Convention, to questions from onlookers, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The fact is that companies like Twitter, Facebook, etc. are private. They are not required to follow the Constitution, and they clearly have partisan viewpoints. The fracturing of public discussion, since civil debate is already gone, will be very dangerous.
I have hopes the US I remember will survive, but the danger is the Balkanization and being stuck behind enemy lines.
If you want some hope, look here:
https://1776unites.com/
I appreciate the retd. teacher’s kind words directed to me, but I must underline that I have never been a serving soldier nor marine.
I was briefly at 17 (1973) in the USN but immaturity ensured that I remain a tourist there rather than a sailor in the fleet.
My concern is that I be given respect that I haven’t earned.
I think anyone who puts themself at risk so someone else can feel safe deserves respect. I’ve been very lucky. I never had to work at an inner city school in a place like Philadelphia. I knew someone who did. Going to work required her to be on alert. It reminded me people who live in war zones and feel physically threatened.
@Larry, I agree we all get angry we all say or write things we later regret. I’ve read enough of your comments here to know you’ve directly faced violence in the recent past, and I should not have ended my post as I did. I was wrong and apologize.
If we sat down for beverages, we’d likely agree on a great many things about our current society and the path it is taking. I look around me while in the Portland core almost every day. I spend no small portion of those days discussing the deterioration of our city which is so plainly visible. During those discussions I find that EVERYONE agrees the city is getting worse, but there is a great divide as to why. …and there is the rub.
We live in a world of “personal truth”. Objective Truth is not something that really is of interest. This is true regardless of where you sit. Whether you believe there is a war on Christmas, a war on cops, a genocide of African American men, or a stolen election… it’s always about what the individual believes rather than what objective truth shows. Rugged Individualism practically demands this personal truth as The True American Way. The best of us is the worst of us.
I believe things will get worse. Society, marching under the flag of equity, will bring forth a more equitable but much less desirable society. We will fade. It is the way of things throughout history. What has changed, however, is the destructive power a small group can achieve with the right tools… tools that never existed before. The non-world ending dissolution of the USSR gives me hope. I hope, but doubt, the same will happen for the US.
The final agreement I share with you Larry is that I doubt this nation will survive us. I just don’t feel the need to hurry it along.
Well, Matt, will the nation survive to 2042? That’s supposedly going to be a big year.
From the archives: Fear of Black Men
As you put it, society will be more equitable but much less desirable. I like the way you phrased this: “The non-world ending dissolution of the USSR gives me hope.” So many Americans don’t even know how extraordinary that dissolution was. When I was a kid, I remember my little brother worrying he would never get to grow up because there was going to be a nuclear war. Americans create much of their own misery now.
Powell’s book will only sell Andy Ngo’s antifa book online. An Antifa goon claimed it’s worse than Mein Kampf, which is almost certainly available at Powell’s.
Is everyone intimidated? I read where an elected official who voted against the police defunding has had his house vandalized 7 times.
Terrific betrayal of the nation and congress in jeopardy?
Like the state department fellow who published a a statement reporting that trump was out of office – any juvenility is permitted? Especially violent juvenility.
One of my favorite websites s just went down, too – 2nd City Cop.
This is past crazy. I put the finger on academia and on teacher’s unions. The values of a nation inverted, no small feat.
The new president and his son collaborated with and took money from the Chinese, Pelosi’s Pakistani brotherhood computer guru’s walked off with congressional money and private/secret information. This Salwell fellow was actually banging a Chinese spy and he is a quotable leader on the Crimes of Trump?
Kamala’s love story whit Willie Brown is as squalid as any Clinton, Kennedy, Trump scandal although you can bet their “amours” didn’t vault up the political ladder.
I’ll bet this is much more than any journalist has done:
https://www.powells.com/searchresults?keyword=mein+kampf
Jesus, for Scoop Jackson. Jesus protect me.
You too small to worry about or are they eventually going to get round to killing this blog, too?
I read the final post on Martin Prieb’s Second City blog. Maybe after a break, he will decide to come back. Situations change, especially when it comes to politics. It wasn’t that long ago that Jennifer Williamson (D-Portland) was the House Majority Leader and planning a run for Secretary of State, which would have positioned her for governor. She was very ambitious. Then it turned out she was misusing campaign funds. I wonder how she feels when she sees Shemia Fagan’s rising star.
A friend of mine, who used to work in the state Capitol, remembers when John Kitzhaber set all the ladies’ heads turning whenever he strode into the building in his cowboy boots and tight Levis.
I hope Andy Ngo sells a lot of books in response to the banning. I’ve already preordered two at Powell’s. The hard-core Portland anarchists don’t just hate Ngo; they can’t stand Biden, either. The PNW Youth Liberation Front has a poster out calling for action on Jan. 20, the day Biden is inaugurated: “May he be the last.”
I was a daily reader of Second City Cop as well. I tended to skim the more “in the weeds” portions of Chicago politics, but even those were informative as a contrarian view of local politics that could be extrapolated. The view from beyond the thin blue line will likely be be considered a primary source for future historians… if we’re lucky enough to have historians willing to speak truth to power.
That said, the blog’s demise was always imminent and its longevity a pretty amazing accomplishment in spycraft. It is concerning that Google might have contributed to the blog’s demise by threatening to reveal the identity of its client, especially considering the client was never anything more than a classic muckraker. If that turns out to be the case, then we are all in a very dangerous place.
Perhaps the best military blog and certainly the best USN blog:
http://cdrsalamander.blogspot.com/2021/01/diversity-thursday.html
Thanks for the link, Larry.
Excellent point: “(T)he most divisive thing you can do to a diverse republic is to set up a spoils system based on race, creed, color or national origin have not been fighting hard enough. Too many of those who should be our natural allies have surrendered high ground after high ground because they convinced themselves that, ‘it isn’t worth fighting for.’ As a result, the commissariat holds most of the high ground, and those in our camp are surrounded.
“If we do not take each person as an individual, and instead drive people in to sectarian camps, all we will have is strife and division.”
This is where a brave mainstream media could make a difference. Instead, they just play along.
Christopher Lasch’s book Culture of Narcissism has been much on my mind lately. So, I was happy to see that it has been on Matt Taibbi’s as well.I learned of Taibbi’s reflection on Lasch through Schniederman below.
http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/
The article itself is behind a paywall but you can gain entry through a 5 dollar monthly subscription. I think it worth the bother. It is good to have some plausible observations concerning how we got here.
I could explain why I think it important to be aware of the CDR Salamander blog, but I’ll error on the side of mercy and let you come to your own conclusions -but regular reading will give a better understanding of American culture as seen through the eyes of those who maintain its perimeter.
Thank you for the link, Jason. The only writer/thinker there with who I am familiar is McWhorter, a very easy man to respect and who would keep good company.
Just glimpsed on the television what seemed like an advertisement for a new biopic of Huey Newton. That’ll bring us together.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-22-op-coleman22-story.html
Our local legacy of those times:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba_Ford
There is no way all this unity talk will last four years. Americans are easily bored, the media even more so. Eventually Biden will slip up and say something to offend BIPOC nation.
For some serious absurdity, did you see where San Francisco is renaming 44 schools? Among them are schools named for George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Dianne Feinstein, Junipero Serra, John Muir, etc.
https://www.sfgate.com/education/amp/San-Francisco-to-rename-44-schools-washington-15901689.php
Towards the bottom of the story it mentions that UC Berkeley is already removing the signage for a school named in honor of an anthropologist named Koerber. People who know better said it turns out he wasn’t nice to the indigenous. Koerber was Ursula LeGuin’s father. I wonder if this will cost her the stamp the U.S. Postal Service was going to release in her honor.
Every time a new body lands on this pile, it adds to the hatred.
I think that the emollient effects of reparations will really spread the love.
What do you think: a lump sum payment or a lifetime stipend? Will it come with health care for all for life? By all I mean the all important 13% whose lives really, really matter.
Our mayor cares so much that today he hired the old mayor to help him out. You remember the old mayor? The drunk who was caught fingering his jail-bait mentee in the city hall toilet. That guy’s back and here to helps us. Again.
Here’s what is really sad: The old mayor almost looks like an improvement on the current mayor. Sam Adams is now older, grayer, possibly wiser — or not. But I don’t remember him being at the mercy of the mob.
Until the lockdown, I used to occasionally attend City Council meetings. At least Adams didn’t have protesters over-running the council chambers. Almost immediately after Ted Wheeler took office, the rabble moved in. I guess they smelled Wheeler’s rich, white boy guilt. They knew how to work him.
On a related note, I’m sad to say that Powell’s books has partially bowed to Antifa. The book store is still selling Andy Ngo’s “Unmasked,” but I received notice yesterday that I cannot pick it up. They will only ship it. I live about 12 minutes from Powell’s. Seems ridiculous to have it shipped.
Even Ngo has said he can understand why Powell’s is concerned about Antifa destroying their store. But I would like to see Powell’s try something different. The store is still a popular symbol in Portland. Why not enlist their loyal customers to stand up for freedom of thought and serve as a volunteer security force? I would sign up for multiple tours of that duty.
Remember the Wall of Moms? And the Naked Athena? OK, ladies. Let’s see what you can really do.
Just to move things along:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html?referringSource=articleShare
https://twitter.com/KEEMSTAR/status/1356921821644419073
Perhaps a whisp of an antidote
https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/1356014504543277058:
How could the answer to this question possibly be known:
https://www.koin.com/news/protests/wyden-again-demands-answers-for-feds-use-of-tear-gas-in-portland/
Our political class, which we elected, aspires to the idiotic and contemplable. Next thing you know they’ll be abrogating immigration treaties with Central American nations and opening our borders to maintain high wages and civil order.
Read where Portland’s Wall of Moms got a hat tip at the Super Bowl last eve.
My loathing for what that has become prevented me from watching, so I only have the media’s word.
So the Wall of Moms gets a shout-out, and Ron Wyden is making the world safer for rioters. Meanwhile, the war on cops continues in Oregon. The Oregon House Judiciary Subcommittee on Equitable Policing met Monday and discussed banning tear gas, changing the law so police cannot declare an unlawful assembly and forbidding law enforcement agencies from accepting free, surplus military equipment.
I can understand concerns about police obtaining grenade launchers, but as the Polk County sheriff explained to this subcommittee (chaired by Rep. Janelle Bynum of the newly formed BIPOC Caucus) some of the equipment his agency has received has been used to save civilian lives. For example, a light-armored vehicle was used in an active shooter/hostage incident as well as to rescue civilians trapped by a flood. The vehicle cost $700,000-$800,000. There’s no way most law enforcement agencies in Oregon could afford that.
I don’t understand the obsession about tear gas. I went out this past summer and observed some of the protests. The cops warn people to disperse before they use tear gas. It’s understood that going to these events carries a risk. Don’t go, or bring a gas mask if you’re afraid of getting tear gassed. The aforementioned Bynum has complained about even using water hoses on rioters.
Just the name of this subcommittee — Equitable Policing — is misguided. How do you make policing equitable when one person is causing harm to another?
Lest we forget:
https://mynorthwest.com/2547006/rantz-washington-federal-covid-relief-to-radical-political-groups-race/
At least the state of Washington doled the money out to a broader base — BIPOC — as opposed to what Oregon did by restricting the largesse ($62 million) to only black people.
I watched a week’s worth of House Conduct Committee hearings into the alleged misbehavior of Rep. Diego Hernandez (R-Portland). I’m working on a piece about the progressive bullies and bigots in Salem and Portland who are turning on one another. It would be a beautiful sight except for the fact that there are many real problems facing the state. Whether Hernandez bullied Ana del Rocio, or she bullied him is not a pressing issue for most people.