Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) has finally acknowledged reality: The protests in his city are violent and, in many cases, the actions the “mostly peaceful” protesters are taking amount to attempted murder. As my colleague Tyler O’Neil notes:
On Thursday, after the 68th consecutive night of violent riots in Portland, Mayor Ted Wheeler (D-Portland) finally urged activists who seriously desire police reform not to join the murderous and destructive antifa mob wreaking havoc in his city. Better late than never? While Wheeler finally issued a full-throated condemnation of the violence, he also warned rioters that they are “creating the B-roll film” for the campaign to reelect President Donald Trump.
The rioters are going to star in Trump’s ads, but who’s fault is that? Theirs, obviously, but mayors like Wheeler could have denounced the violence before it made their cities war zones for going on 70 straight nights. Wheeler is also at fault, quite directly, for joining the mob. Remember this?
Rioters threw Molotov cocktails and other incendiary devices at the courthouse, setting part of it on fire. Federal law enforcement responded by trying to break up the crowd, using tear gas and hitting Wheeler himself with tear gas twice. Asked about the confrontation afterward, Wheeler said he was “p**sed off” and claimed that he saw “nothing that provoked this response.”
According to Portland Police, more than one thousand people gathered outside the Justice Center and the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, blocking traffic for several hours. At around 9:15 p.m., Wheeler spoke to the crowd. While he spoke, rioters chanted and set off fireworks.
That was back in late July. By then, Wheeler’s city was already in chaos night after night and had been for weeks. Wheeler could have appealed to the rioters for peace then. He could have appealed to what was left of the peaceful protesters, which wasn’t much by that time, to root out the rioters. He didn’t. Instead, he denied reality, sided with the rioters, denounced the federal presence, slammed Trump, and made his city far worse.
Because he’s an idiot. The mob rewarded Wheeler for his “good puppy” behavior by screaming at him. Because they’re so tolerant and loving. Offstage whisper: They’re Marxists. They follow the ideology with the largest body count in human history.
Not to be outdone, Mayor Jenny Durkan is a grade-A idiot. That mayor let rioters take over several downtown blocks, and even after violence had erupted in the CHOP, declared her hope that it would become a hippy-dippy “summer of love.” Where do cities find idiots like this?
Even the actual “summer of love” — 1967 — was marred by terrible riots in Detriot. Did she not know this? Does no one in office know anything about history anymore?
They won’t if a collection of Democrats in Illinois get their way. These Democrats want the teaching of history itself done away with — until they can come up with a curriculum that’s woke enough. Which is a joke, because one can never be woke enough for the woke mob.
At a news conference, State Rep. LaShawn K. Ford said current history teachings lead to a racist society and overlook the contributions of women and minorities.
Before the event Sunday, Rep. Ford’s office distributed a news release “Rep. Ford Today in Evanston to Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools,” in which Ford asked the ISBOE and school districts to immediately remove history curriculum and books that “unfairly communicate” history “until a suitable alternative is developed.”
It does seem that village idiots Wheeler and Durkan have at least learned…something. Durkan ordered the CHOP cut up when the rioters showed up on her doorstep. Wheeler sees the political impact of his choice to side with rioters and envisions four more years of Trump. City councils around the country apparently haven’t learned a thing. Many of them are still hellbent on defunding police, despite the fact that every sane person knows this is a terrible idea.
The mayor and city council in Austin, Texas, have been watching the riots in Portland and Seattle with envy. I kid you not.
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Weeks of violence and arson in Portland are partly the result of terrible local decisions, all made by Democrats, to undermine and demoralize police and to give their streets over to the rioters.
Austin City Council member Jimmy Flannigan looks on and says, “I want some of that!” Check out what he said in a city council meeting earlier this week.
“We’re seeing decisions being made about protests occurring in a public street and the department deciding that now, this moment, arbitrarily, they can’t be in the street anymore. In the middle of a pandemic, where there’s no traffic, let them protest in the street. This is the First Amendment and it’s public property,” Flannigan said.
Someone should clue “Downtown Jimmy” Flannigan that there is always traffic in downtown Austin. That traffic tends to be people trying to make a living. The rioters stop them, illegally, when they can, simply because they can. If you allow more of this, you will get more of this. See: Portland.
Flannigan seems to be utterly unaware of this. Perhaps he can also be informed that when rioters are allowed to surround vehicles, bad things happen — either to the car, to the driver, or to rioters who challenge the driver in their car.
But one suspects that Flannigan knows all this. He just doesn’t care. He’s also calling for the abolition of the Austin police’s mounted unit. After the city council banned the use of several non-lethal methods of controlling unruly crowds, APD has successfully used its mounted officers to break up crowds and prevent violence. That’s exactly what APD did last week when antifa was threatening to destroy police headquarters and do unto Austin when they did unto Seattle.
But Flannigan wants them gone. He doesn’t see them as “useful.”
“One well-trained officer on a well-trained horse is equal to 10 officers on foot in a crowd control situation. And we can do that in such a deescalating way. So we can go in and move a crowd, because they can see us when we are eight feet high in the air,” (APD Sgt. Julie) Payne said.
Councilmember Jimmy Flannigan, District 6, one of three council members who included either eliminating or restructuring the mounted unit in their budget proposals, said he isn’t sure it’s worth the cost.
“The videos and the experiences that I’m hearing from the public, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly valuable or useful tool, it seems to more incite confrontation than prevent it,” Flannigan said.
Yeah, that’s the opposite of reality. APD’s mounted officers pretty much saved the city last weekend. Flannigan wants them gone by this weekend.
Because Austin, like so many large cities across America, has elected its idiots to all of its positions of power.
And I haven’t even mentioned New York’s Mayor de Blasio yet. With murder spiking in direct response to his decision to disband the NYPD anti-crime unit, de Blasio has chosen both to defund police by about $1 billion and at the same time, stretch the police thinner by setting up COVID checkpoints to keep the virus his city spread to the rest of America from coming back to the city he mis-leads.
Is failing an intelligence test now required before one can run for office in most of our major cities? Do they all live in bubbles like the French kings once did in Versailles? Does anyone on any city council in any major city even understand any part of the previous sentence, and how that worked out?
A reeling nation would like to know.
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