Dirty Business up in Portland

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Below is Mark Steyn’s take on the Antifa-generated street violence in Portland last weekend. He includes a useful portmanteau word to describe the self-appointed arbiters of public ideology: “Klantifa”. I looked the neologism up, and it was evidently coined sometime last summer, but I’d never heard it before.

The Antifa groups (which were all but non-existent in the USA before the election of Donald Trump) are the enforcers of the Democrat party line in major American cities. The cities are run by the Democrat political establishment, which approves of Antifa’s choice of targets. The police stand down because the mayors order them to stand down and let their pet street thugs bash the fash. The Antifa bully boys are ostensibly independent of any party or government or political organization, which provides the plausible deniability that the pols require. The city fathers can then wring their hands and deplore the “violence”, as if it were a natural disaster, like a flood or a tornado:

Portlantifa

My 2014 book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn includes this prescient quotation from a decade earlier:

‘The lofty idea of ‘the war on racism’ is gradually turning into a hideously false ideology,’ the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut said in 2005. ‘And this anti-racism will be for the 21st century what Communism was for the 20th century: a source of violence.’

Indeed. One is also mindful of a famous aperçu by Ennio Flaiano, the Italian screenwriter who gave us La Dolce Vita and Nights of Cabiria:

In Italia i fascisti si dividono in due categorie : i fascisti e gli antifascisti

.
“In Italy the fascists are divided into two categories: the fascists and the anti-fascists.” In America the division is a little more lop-sided: There is no organized fascist movement except for the so-called anti-fascist movement: Antifa wear uniforms and masks on the streets of American cities and perpetrate violence with the support and connivance of powerful Democrat politicians and their hideously politicized police departments.

The consent of the latter is especially important: in the Democrats’ northern fiefdoms the cops increasingly behave as they did in the party’s old southern fiefdoms — they’re there not to keep the peace but to ensure that their buddies in the Klan — whoops, sorry, I mean Klantifa — get to give the designated “troublemakers” a bloody good hiding. Thus in Portland, Oregon the police stood by and let Antifa beat the crap out of reporter Andy Ngo, steal thousands of dollars’ worth of his equipment, and put him in hospital with a brain hemorrhage. But that’s just policing as usual in a corrupt municipality increasingly without the law. As Democrat Mayor and Police Commissioner Ted Wheeler put it last year, after his officers again sat back and watched as Antifa blocked streets and threatened and intimidated drivers:

I was appalled by what I saw in the video, but I support the Portland Police Bureau’s decision not to intervene.

They’re getting so good at “not intervening” it might be easier for the city simply to lay them off and contract out all “law enforcement” to Antifa.

The other advantage Klantifa enjoy is the enthusiastic support of Blue-Check Twitter, who were out in force celebrating Mr Ngo’s hospitalization. Charlotte Clymer, communications honcho for the LGBTQWERTY “Human Rights Campaign” gloated:

Being attacked today on video taken by an actual journalist (because Ngo is definitely not) is the greatest thing that could have happened to his career.

You know it. I know it. He knows it. We all know it.

Well, I don’t know whether I do know it. Mr Ngo is a contributor to the American website of my old chums at The Spectator, which is the oldest continuously published English-language magazine on the planet — it will celebrate its two hundredth birthday in 2028. So it would seem to be at least as much of an actual journalistic venture as The Huffington Beast or whatever. The rationales for violence made by the likes of Ms Clymer are getting cruder by the day. Identity politics isn’t even about identity: Andy Ngo is a gay Asian, but because he’s a gay Asian who disagrees with the gay enforcers of the Human Rights Campaign he’s a “white supremacist”. There’s nothing sophisticated about this: To Ms Clymer, it’s us and them. And, if you’re part of the them, then you deserve that brain hemorrhage.

Insofar as I understand it, the old Portland, Oregon was that seen in the alleged telly hit “Portlandia”. By the end of its run, the creators had fallen out with the feminist bookstore where part of the show was filmed, with the store owners denouncing the TV guys because “the show doesn’t reflect the diversity of the Portland area and contributes to gentrification”.

Say what you like about Ted Wheeler, the Portland Police Bureau and Klantifa, but at least they’re not contributing to gentrification.

12 thoughts on “Dirty Business up in Portland”

  1. Since Portland was the location of the six-season television drama Grimm and I was a fan of that series, I venture into fantasy to inquire of the various parties, ,,Was fur ein Wesen bist Du?”
    Antifa: Reiningen and Scalingecks.
    Portland Police: The opposite of a Grimm.

    Any other Grimm fans reading this? Contribute your ideas.

  2. Anti-racism as a source of 21st century violence akin to what communism was for 20th century violence?

    Indeed, it seems that the West is rapidly heading that way. The forced importation of anyone from the Third World into the West fits into this scheme quite well. The official narrative seems to be that the more obviously non-white and incompatible a cultural, educational and religious background a particular group of invaders are, the more deserving they are of being admitted into western nations and imposed upon the native population. And the more strident the denunciations are of anyone who dares oppose such invasion as being strictly for racist beliefs.

    Indeed, every time I see a photo of a horde of barefooted, shirtless young african toughs sitting on some grossly overloaded inflatable dinghy, or scaling border fences like they were straight out of Mordor, I cannot help but wonder if the choice of invader nationalities is deliberate for precisely that reason; any reasoned opposition is easily countered with charges of racism. Maybe it is time to own the title and proudly accept the accusation of being a racist if it means that to declare oneself a racist means that one owes their allegience and support to ones own kith and kin. By proudly owning the accusation of being a racist, this would effectively disarm the antifa thugs and their media presstitutes of their strongest weapon against us.

    • It’s not really. People in other nearby parts of the world aren’t as keen on leaving home.

  3. Antifa is identical to Hitler’s brown shirts in the thirties. Nazis. Where is Trump,? He should send the Justice Dept after them. This has been going on too long. And he should demand Dem radicals denounce Antifa or themselves be open to the charge of Nazism. Give it back. Same tactics.

    • The most basic obligations of any sovereign are defend the realm and maintain the king’s peace. But Trump is clueless and will do nothing at all. His most visceral insight is that “deals” should be fair and advantageous to all parties. God bless him for that but it is our misfortune to have as our bulwark against pathological leftism, resentful minorities, and foreign invasion a man who utterly lacks political vision or constitutional understanding.

      Well, he will do something. He’ll say, as though he strayed into the Oval Office after becoming separated from his fellow tourists, “Someone should do something about this.”

      • Possibly at the risk of bogging down every other advance he is making. In politics one must choose one’s battles.

  5. This is a list of Andy Ngo’s media outlets for his writing: The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, National Review, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Wire, The Western Journal, The American Spectator, City Journal, RealClearPolicy, PSU Vanguard

    THATS the resume of someone who’s not a real journalist? Do any of these left-wing nut jobs have ANY brains?

  6. This trend will surely not end well. The more I hear and see the more I understand the total incompatibility of the left and right. I trust most people can see where this is going and it isn’t to Disneyland.

    If I find myself surrounded by masked goons with baseball bats and tire irons there will be some violence. Since I’m packing I leave it to the reader to fill in the rest.

    • Unfortunately, if you are placed in the position of having to defend yourself with a gun, you can look forward to being investigated and prosecuted by local or federal law enforcement. The Proud Boys, who simply protect public figures threatened by organized mob violence, are being investigated for criminal activity.

      Briefly, street mobs are used by globalists, socialists and communists to dissolve the bonds of civilization and social order so that the totalitarian control of the superstate can be instituted to “protect order”. The mobs provide deniability to the government officials encouraging chaos, although I have to admit the deniability part is getting very thin.

      I would advise the armed citizen to not be caught in a public situation where he can be attacked in the open by masked thugs. Stay in the alleys and out of sight. A few of the braver ones may follow you to hunt you down, which is when your self-protection capabilities will be to your advantage.

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