Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Quote of the Day: How the Left Has Trashed Portland
“Why are Washington and Oregon the home turf of every violent left-wing radical? It seems to be a never-ending cycle of radical lefties burning down Starbucks and moderate lefties upset they can’t get their lattes.” — Milo Yiannopoulos
Portland was once a great little city: clean and neat, full of parks, food trucks that served everything from full Egyptian meals to Salvadoran street food, one of the great Japanese gardens of the world, and of course Powell’s, the U.S.’s largest independent bookstore. The New York Times — enamored of Portland’s urban hipsters, quirky left-wing politics, and, for reasons beyond my understanding, Voodoo Donuts — would run an article on Portland, it seemed every few weeks. To the East Coast sophisticates at The Times, Portland was not only politically correct, but it was also Northwestern cute.
We’ve retained our political correctness but we’ve lost our cuteness. Storefronts are boarded up, bums camp out on the streets, graffiti is everywhere, and trash is strewn on our once clean sidewalks.
The Left has trashed the town. Oregon has a left-wing governor with an authoritarian streak, who has been all too eager, with Covid-19 to back her up, to close up small businesses and restaurants, including outdoor eating areas; which has resulted in deserted storefronts and thousands out of work. Closer to home, Portland has a spineless left-wing mayor, who did nothing when mobs burned and trashed the city night after night. And of course, Portland has mobs of left-wing jackals, mostly young white males, who form a volatile underclass in Portland and who pretend to be working on behalf of social justice as they trash the city.
At one point, looting and rioting went on for a hundred straight nights. That’s right, over three months straight of nighttime destruction by roving groups of young radicals, who have thrown burning flares through the windows of the Oregon Historical Society and smashed church windows. Nothing is sacred.
Here is what the Left’s desire for peace and justice looks like on the Federal Courthouse
I moved out of the city center before all of this happened. I now live in the Portland suburb of Tigard, and even though I read The Oregonian every morning, stories on the broken and trashed condition of Portland have been so rare that I had no idea that Portland looked the way it does.
My wife Marie, who had recently driven into the city on business, told me the city was a mess. I didn’t believe her. It would have covered thoroughly in The Oregonian, wouldn’t it? So she and I took a drive into the city a few days ago.
We started out walking north along the Willamette River, where we were almost the only walkers on this once popular walk. I looked over to Naito Parkway, which runs parallel to the river, and could see nothing but boarded-up storefronts.
We turned left at the Saturday Market Square and walked up to Fourth Street. The bathroom along the way was boarded up. The walk south on Fourth Street was depressing. Something like seventy-five percent of the storefronts were boarded up. There was trash on the sidewalks, graffiti on the plywood. A couple of the food trucks were open but they had no customers. The entrance to Portland’s upscale downtown mall was boarded up, as you see below.
There were encampments of tents, along with their trash, on sidewalks, in alcoves, under bridges, on the slopes that lead to the freeway — anywhere and everywhere. Two statues on the South Park Blocks, Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln have been pulled down off their pedestals and slogans painted on them.
In Chapman Square, there used to be a marvelous statue of a pioneer family. The father, his rifle propped up against a wagon wheel, is pointing out something to his wife and son, perhaps the glorious future that awaits them. Here is that statue:
The woke vandals may have been incensed by the patriarchal nature of the statue, the man’s rifle, or perhaps the Bible in the child’s hand. At any rate, they destroyed part of the pedestal and scrawled some graffiti on the statue. We now have a busted and defaced pedestal to look at. (The vandals sometimes bring sledgehammers with them.)
Below is a couple of Portland’s dimwitted radicals trying to burn the statue pictured above. The statue is bronze, so that didn’t work. The next day the city took down the statue, charred but intact, for safekeeping. The age of the dimwits will pass sooner or later and then the pioneer family can go back up where it belongs.
The biggest story in the history of Portland, the decline of a once livable city into a scary mess, and The Oregonian doesn’t deem it worth their while to go about the city and report and photograph on what has happened. My suspicion is that the story has been largely underreported because it’s the Left that is responsible for the destruction and The Oregonian is accustomed to blaming everything on Trump and his followers. Making too big a deal of the destruction would be like ratting on your lefty buddies.
Here’s more of the new look for Portland. This is the boarded-up Apple store, one block from Courthouse Square.
The left-wing protest/vandalism/looting movement that started with George Floyd has been propped up by lies and hypocrisy. The Portland mayor and city council pretend that rioting is protest. The vandals, who have wrapped themselves in the felicitous language of social justice cliches, pretend that they are improving society as they trash it. And finally, The Oregonian pretends that it is a reputable newspaper.
When Marie and I got back to Tigard after our eye-opening walk around Portland, I saw the scattered Black Lives Matter signs in my white, upper-middle-class neighborhood in a new light. These signs only make sense if a second sign is added: Imbeciles Live Here.
Published in General
The tragedy that has been foisted upon us by the institutionalized news apparatuses across this country can only be summed up best by Trump.
They ARE the enemy of the people. They have buried the truth from the majority of the American public who has turned around and, if truly legitimate, elected the very party responsible for this destruction.
This was supposed to be the year they were soundly beaten for their destructive policies, but the media buried that destruction under heaps of lies. One thing absolutely necessary in this country is for us to raise up a new culture of reporting and journalism from the ground. Cultivate a conservative culture of asking questions, pushing for truth, writing it and sending it into our neighborhoods, our towns, our cities, and to the country.
Man, that really is something. What the left is doing to this country is a great tragedy.
This is the Quote of the Day, an ongoing project to help get more voices on the site. It can be the easiest way to start a conversation on Ricochet. (Some people do put in a lot more effort, of course.) Our sign-up sheet for December is here and waiting for you. We welcome new participants and new members to Ricochet to share their favorite quotations.
Another ongoing project to encourage new voices is our Group Writing Project. December’s theme is ‘Tis the Season. If you’re looking to share your own thoughts rather than those of others and have some ideas about the holiday(s) season we are entering, why not sign up there?
Stina, one wonders what they teach in journalism schools these days. I started out as a journalism major, and objectivity and fairness were drummed into us. I suspect that’s not the case these days.
They teach political activism and Marxist ideology.
One of the interesting things about the New York City liberal voters mindset over really the past century is the ability to remain in denial over the consequences of their past votes for a long, long time, which may be the same phenomenon we’re seeing in Portland right now.
New York voters have historically been willing to accept declining quality of life over an extended period until they can no longer deny the consequences of their actions, which in their case has meant not only are Democrats running City Hall, but they’re also running the governor’s office, the White House and both houses of Congress. When the quality of life continues in free-fall and there’s not a Republican in sight with any position of power they can blame all the city’s problems on, that’s the only time just enough Democratic voters finally give in to reality and will pull the lever for a Republican to try and turn things around. Happened with Giuliani in 1993 and 60 years earlier with LaGuardia.
Trump’s presence up until now have given Portlandiers, and other progressives around the country easy outs for their local quality-of-life free falls. They could convince themselves that everything going wrong in their city or state is the fault of the guy in the White House. That changes next month, and if the Democrats win both GA runoffs, they’re not even going to have Mitch McConnell to pin all their local problems on.
So if Biden’s in office, Democrats run Congress, both the mayor and the governor are hardcore progressives, and Antifa not only doesn’t stop rioting, but expands their acts of violence because they know the elected pols won’t do anything to stop them, how do voters in Portland react then, and what do they do next election time, when there’s no Republican in sight to make into their new Emanuel Goldstein? Go the past NYC route, bite the bullet and try something else, or just keep voting for a declining quality-of-life?
‘Cept-it hasn’t worked out that way when other totalitarians have taken over elsewhere. I’d bet nyc/state residents either stop voting or move elsewhere and repeat the process. From the standpoint of NH – fill in other states – that’s going on now.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
Ken – we have two BLM signs at the entrance of our neighborhood – colorful fists in the air – you know that Commie symbol – that says Love Your Neighbor – Black Lives Matter. The election is over (sort of) but they are still there. I’m tempted to pull them out, but we have to live with other opinions. We have nice neighbors, so I know they haven’t read your post to understand my reaction.
On that note, thank you very much for your post and pictures. You and Marie are doing the job the reporters are not doing. Post often and I hope others around the country, like NY and LA will continue to do the same. It is important to call it out – real people are suffering, and its not the BLM crowd. We are looking like Venezuela and Cuba………..
Douglas Murray wrote a powerful article about the destruction of Portland last month in the spectator. If it was happening in some city in the third world it would still be appalling but that it’s allowed go on in the US just defies all comprehension. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-week-with-the-baying-antifa-mob
And as we are seeing now, there are no consequences to any of this. Sad.
Put up an “Unborn Black Lives Matter” sign next to them. Just for grins.
Portland is a truly beautiful city. About ten years ago, my son went to the University of Montana and my daughter and her husband lived in Missoula for three years. The three of them went to Portland a couple of times. They loved it.
One of the reasons it is so beautiful is that it was laid out to be as beautiful as it could be, to take advantage and highlight its considerable collection of natural features. The 1903 plan for the city was developed by Frederick, Jr., and John Olmsted, the sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in New York and the Emerald Necklace parks in Boston (as well as the entire Boston suburb of Brookline).
The Olmsteds recognized the importance of parks to people living in the industrialized, gritty, too densely populated cities that were miserable to live in and that concentrated poverty and the ill health that went with it. Portland and also Raleigh were two cities that were planned out to be beautiful at critical moments in their growth history. It was not a haphazard growth that usually occurs in most other cities. There was a plan from the start. The planners created a tapestry of color–green space, blue skies and water, homes, street lights, parks, human scale buildings–and private developers arranged their construction projects within the plan.
Those pictures you took show a great tragedy. It took a hundred years for the city plan to be built and a year to destroy it. The destruction of hopes and dreams that I see in those pictures is just devastating.
What is interesting is the largely unreported migration that the pandemic and the riots have brought about across the entire country. I live on Cape Cod, a quiet peninsula on the East Coast. A house on my unimpressive middle-class street was for sale for all of 48 hours last week. The cars of interested masked buyers were coming and going at the house all last weekend. The housing inventory isn’t new construction. The buyers are too impatient to build houses. They want to move here right now, so the homes they are buying have been the sellers’ second homes, and the sellers are cashing in those investments in their second homes.
My husband’s friend is a local real estate broker who told him this uptick in the suburban real estate is nationwide. It is the result of the middle class moving out of the cities. That’s not good. Cities have to have a middle class. Wealthy people do not make a city a nice place to live. It’s the middle-class residents who do that. Middle-class families know the meaning of time, which is to say that they will move to places where they can work and raise their families without having to spend all their spare time on urban renewal projects.
This should be on a billboard or something.
@marcin we are intrigued by the real estate frenzy, mostly because there are also big buyers IN the cities. Prices stable and not crashing as we expected. Someone is buying. At the high end too.
That’s the best news I’ve heard all week. Wow. I did not know that. Wonderful. I wonder who is buying them up. I hope it’s not foreign investors.
This is why I have subscribed to the Epoch Times and given a gift subscription. I feel that it is a start. I wonder how long it will take for YouTube to start taking down their ads.
True. Running away from the problem your votes created, not learning your lesson, and voting for the same types of bad pols in your new home is a growing problem. But the ones who stay either have to accept the decline or vote for change.
It’s not the average middle class homeowner. There is buying at all levels.
It actually makes some sense if it’s investors with deep pockets. There’s an old adage in the stock market that says investors should steel themselves to go against the crowd, to buy when everyone else is selling and sell when everyone else is buying.
So these urban properties are less expensive now than they were two years ago, and these investors are betting that this deconstruction mood and market will pass and the cities will revive, and when they do, the investors will make a bundle.
Or maybe it was someone donating to the riots all along to depress real estate values and grab up choice lots?
And, not or. Seize the opportunity, no matter how it arrives.
That would be truly diabolical. I hope it’s not the case, but at this point, it seems plausible.
I happen to know of at least one person who has made a lot of money by causing chaos and benefiting from knowing it was coming.
I love the reports by locals on the ground at Ricochet! I helped my brother move to a suburb of Portland in May (the one where Intel has a fab plant). In our rented moving truck we could see the “homeless” encampments sprawled along and under the freeways that are obscured to the lower cars. I am from California so I know bums, but this was of a whole different scale. “This will not work out well”, I thought. A week later we took a bike ride through downtown Portland and had a Covid outdoor lunch at a struggling restaurant that was so happy for our business. Things were mostly quiet and locked down, but I was very impressed with the city except for the intrusions of the elevated freeways, the noise of which was hard to escape. And the bums! That evening was the first night of the BLM riots, but I saw none of it because I left town early the next morning.
I think Portland has elected to commit suicide. It is too stupid to survive. It has not just “given voice” to a miserable, unhealthy, ignorant and mean subculture, it has ceded control. There will be no accommodation of these people, they will destroy until there is nothing left to destroy. My hope is that the rest of the country watches this tragedy carefully and learns from it.
Man, I hope you’re wrong. I keep thinking that sanity will return. We’ll see.
Oof.
Excellent post Kent. Living in Washington County spares me from the nonsense that takes place in Portland. The sad thing is Portland is located in a beautiful area. Crime is rising in Portland, and the Portland Police Bureau is understaffed, which is the goal of a dysfunctional city government.
The television series Portlandia was a documentary, not a comedy.
That’s because “cuteness” is bourgeois. It had to go.
Same where I live:
https://ricochet.com/838312/seattle-committing-slow-suicide/
I saw a statistic yesterday that out of 247 arrests for rioting, the City Attorney charged exactly eight people. No consequences. And the City Council is seriously considering a “poverty defense” for misdemeanor crimes. All you have to say is “I am poor and need stuff” to get your case dismissed.
That is so stupid it hurts.