Portland is experiencing a well-earned walk of shame. The city doesn’t quite know how those burn marks got there. The fishnets are ripped and the lipstick’s smeared. The city has placed its cupped hand over its nose and gotten a whiff — and comes now the sickening realization: this has been a helluva bender. Where’s my wallet?
Two-plus years after armed Black Lives Matter and Antifa incited riots, burned the federal building, set the cop union on fire, beat up cops, threatened drivers with guns at armed checkpoints who dared drive on the city streets, and became the darling of the moronic mavens who run the Washington Post style section, Portland got a look at its reflection in a leftover shard of glass in an abandoned downtown business. Staring back was a fraud with smeared mascara.
And now everyone knows it. Because finally — finally — someone asked the question, and Portland wasn’t afraid to answer without being called a Nazi, racist, or fake white nationalist.
Antifa’s White Boy Summer with its BLM beards is over, and a poll shows that 81% of Portlanders aren’t happy that they got stuck mopping up the vomit and picking up the red solo cups.
Though The Oregonian’s reporter Zane Sparling can’t bring himself to call the 2020 nightly riots riots — a term reserved for January 6 paraders — at least the paper asked the question of whether more than 100 days of “raucous melees” did harm to Portland’s image.
OK, here’s the actual question a local polling firm asked. “In 2020, there were more than 100 days of protests in Portland. All things considered, do you think these protests did more good or more harm to Portland’s reputation?”
A whopping 81% said they’d done far more harm than good. Six percent said they’d done more good, and the “I don’t know” 4% were still trying to find a hairbrush.
It’s taken Portland more than two years to get the answer right.
Up to now, Portland was too busy inhaling its own armpits to realize where the real stink is coming from.
There was an 80% drop in business in the downtown area where revolutionaries executed the riots without a cause, where Antifa assassinated a Trump supporter, engaged in a street shoot-out, assaulted multiple reporters (and attempted worse), and torched businesses.
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This is the same area where the clubby Benson Hotel is howling over lost business because its customers don’t want to die, where Louis Vuitton refuses to pay its 2020 city and county taxes for services NOT rendered, and where normal people are scared to death of setting one toe in downtown Portland.
Cops are scarce, and murders are at record highs. Portland has become a meme — and not in a good way.
Portland used to be the kind of place that all those young #VanLife Instagram influencers wanted to come to, but guess what? Those spots along Marine Drive next to the Columbia River are now fentanyl flats occupied by people who came to town in their RVs to empty their toilet tanks and take advantage of a city that has no rules. Does anyone want to buy a catalytic converter for cheap?
Even people with limited funds and no life plan knew that Antifa and the city’s lack of leadership turned the City of Roses into a dead end for baked has-beens, full of people who claim to be woke for woke’s sake while looking for a place to fence their stolen Louis Vuitton bag.
The city didn’t care. But it turns out the majority of Portlanders did. The sad fact is that nobody knew it because they’d never been asked before.
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