Anarchy in Portland

Speaking of America’s blue cities…. Consider the case of Portland, Oregon. A wonderful place to live and, as they all say, to bring up a family. And yet, in this supremely and proudly blue city, anarchy rules the streets.

If, perchance you wish to exercise your constitutional right to protest against ICE and for illegal immigration, the city government has your back. As should rightly be the case. If you wish to cause mayhem and wreak havoc in the streets of Portland, the city government still has your back… if you are on the right side of the immigration issue. If you wish to harass peaceful citizens, to threaten their lives, to besiege a government office, the city government still has your back.

Portland’s Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler has happily embraced the Resistance. He recently refused to allow the city police force to impose order on a violent and anarchic demonstration outside the city’s ICE office.  

As often happens, in these cases, the nation’s media are ignoring the issue. They are in a huff over Donald Trump’s latest tweets.

Anyway, Andy Ngo reports for the Wall Street Journal (via Maggie’s Farm):

Along the trolley tracks behind the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, a biohazard cleanup crew works under police protection. It finds used needles and buckets of human waste simmering in nearly 100-degree heat. The smell of urine and feces fills the block. For more than five weeks, as many as 200 people had occupied the site to demand ICE’s immediate abolition. They’re gone now, but a community is left reeling. Thirty-eight days of government-sanctioned anarchy will do that.

A mob surrounded ICE’s office in Southwest Portland June 19. They barricaded the exits and blocked the driveway. They sent “guards” to patrol the doors, trapping workers inside. At night they laid on the street, stopping traffic at a critical junction near a hospital. Police stayed away. “At this time I am denying your request for additional resources,” the Portland Police Bureau’s deputy chief, Robert Day, wrote to federal officers pleading for help. Hours later, the remaining ICE workers were finally evacuated by a small federal police team. The facility shut down for more than a week.

Yes, indeed… “thirty-eight days of government-sanctioned anarchy.” That’s exactly what it was.

The harassment did not stop at the door of the ICE facility:

Federal workers were defenseless. An ICE officer, who asked that his name not be published, told me one of his colleagues was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp. Later people showed up at his house. Another had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the “Gestapo.”

And also:

The mob set up camp behind the building, where they harassed journalists and banned photography. The open-borders advocates also erected an 8-foot wall around their site. I walked through and saw young children, including infants, in squalid conditions and 90-degree heat. Every American flag was defaced. Anarchist and communist flags were unsoiled.

Stuart Lindquist, the ICE facility’s 79-year-old landlord, visited his property on June 21. “The political powers in the city of Portland have stopped the police from doing what they normally would do,” he told me. When he attempted to drive into the parking lot, occupiers swarmed and pounded his windows. In the commotion, Mr. Lindquist’s car struck someone in the mob, who wasn’t injured. His home address later appeared online, and he says the harassment hasn’t stopped.

Federal police were called in to break the siege:

On June 28 federal police mobilized from out of state finally moved to reopen the office. They arrested a handful of people for refusing to leave the ICE office’s front, but the rest retreated to the camp and focused their vitriol on the officers. They repeatedly called a black officer “traitor” and “house n—.” They shouted that they knew where the officers lived, and published more addresses online.

The same day Mayor Wheeler again pledged not to intervene. In a statement, he whitewashed the lawless behavior: “I join those outraged by ICE actions separating parents from their children, and support peaceful protest to give voice to our collective moral conscience.”

There’s more of this in the rest of Ngo’s article.

Note well that we are not talking about peaceful protests. We are talking about systematic harassment of government officials and everyday citizens. If you wanted to know what fascism looks like, read about what happened in Portland and ask yourself why the story was so poorly reported. And, ask yourself why the mayor of Portland will not suffer any ill-effects for his dereliction.