The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Portland Is Now a ‘No-Go Zone’

Posted on | April 20, 2023 | 1 Comment

Antifa rioters in Portland, 2018

“Progressives” ruin everything:

When Antifa besieged downtown in 2020, resulting in months of rioting and millions in property damage, President Trump offered to send in the National Guard. City hall refused the help, and vilified Trump instead. A Trump fan wearing an insignia was murdered by a rabble rouser who laid in wait at a parking garage. The killer was later gunned-down by federal agents in a Washington State apartment complex parking lot.
Downtown hasn’t recovered. Businesses are still fleeing. Slabs of plywood cover many street-level windows. Intractable homelessness besotting block after block and open-air shooting galleries have turned Portland into a no-go zone for thousands of locals and decimated the tourist and convention trade. The pandemic played a part in creating the current malaise, but that’s over, and there’s been little discernible bounce-back.

(Hat-tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) There are two points that need to be made here. First of all, what part did the COVID-19 pandemic play “in creating the current malaise” in Portland. The answer is that, like most other major cities in Democrat-controlled states, Portland sought to impose maximum lockdown conditions — schools, businesses, etc. — and to keep these draconian policies in place as long as possible. It was not the pandemic, per se, that caused this damage, but rather the punitive job-killing policies enacted by Democrats in the guise of “public health.” And part of those anti-business/anti-freedom policies, of course, involved paying people not to work. If you wonder why all those smelly Antifa morons had so much free time to engage in “mostly peaceful” rioting in the summer of 2020, it’s because they were collecting extra unemployment benefits justified as “pandemic relief.”

Nobody wants to talk about this, for some reason. Like, how is it that there was such a dramatic spike in gun violence and drug overdoses in the wake of the pandemic? Oh, it was free money — i.e., “pandemic relief” payments — that many of the recipients used to buy guns and/or drugs. And don’t even bother to notice who it is that’s getting indicted on charges of fraud for illegally swindling “pandemic relief” programs to the tune of billions of dollars. (Hint: Probably not Trump voters.) When the government is giving away “free money,” it is generally not the most honest and productive members of society who benefit.

Laziness and stupidity are bad enough in their own right; but government-subsidized laziness and stupidity are much worse.

The second point, however, involves something that Andy Ngo pointed out about Portland in an interview with City Journal:

I say that Portland is a city where victimhood ideology is mainstreamed and is normalized, and it flows through the ethos and hearts and minds of the denizens here. So I’ve lived in Portland most of my life and it’s a progressive bubble. . . .
[T]hen the other dimension to it is demography as well, which I don’t hear people talk about as much. So Portland is a majority white city and I think I’ve heard it dubbed as one of America’s whitest cities for the size that it is. So with these two factors together, it creates this element of this extreme white guilt, I would say. I’ve witnessed it a lot and it makes the city vulnerable to radical leftist movements that try to exploit white guilt for their own political gain and I think that’s my analysis for why we’ve seen the leadership of the city kind of take a hands-off approach when it comes to political violence from the far left. Because there’s probably certain, perhaps, sympathies as well as a critical mass of constituents who are supportive of these groups.

Hit the nail on the head there, I’d say. Often, when I discuss the problems of crime, drugs, welfare dependency and the general breakdown of civilized norms, readers may think I’m engaging in racism — “RAAAAACISM!” — as if white people are immune to such problems. But go somewhere like Portland, which is certainly “one of America’s whitest cities,” and there are plenty of Caucasians living la vida ghetto.

Progressivism incentivizes “victimhood ideology” — which is to say, it encourages self-pity and envy — no matter the racial composition of the populace. This is why you find so many aggrieved radicals among the students at “elite” private universities. Students at Harvard, Yale, etc., aren’t rioting because they’re oppressed; they’re rioting because they’re privileged, and because their “progressive” faculty teach them that being an angry victim is heroic. Meanwhile, other people’s kids — the ones who are actually working for a living — don’t have time to riot.

You should buy Andy Ngo’s book, Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, and remember I get a commission on Amazon sales, because capitalism is a beautiful thing.



 

 

Category: Oregon, Progressivism

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One Response to “Portland Is Now a ‘No-Go Zone’”

  1. If All You See... - Pirate's Cove » Pirate's Cove
    April 21st, 2023 @ 1:01 pm

    […] blog of the day is The Other McCain, with a post Portland being a no go […]