I live in Portland with my family (as in, I've raised kids here, all my and my husband's extended family live in or around Pdx), always lived here. The pinot may be great, but the bums aint drinking it. Well, they certainly WOULD if offered.
You've got multiple little worlds here in Portland (neighborhoods, sorta, but mostly street by street), and you can certainly keep yourself MOSTLY away from the bad parts, the unsavory visuals, if you really try. And the fancy wine aficionados REALLY TRY. Although, if you go downtown, you can only miss it through willful ignorance (steps over body, "wow, they need to get these sidewalks fixed, the concrete is buckling").
But we live among otherwise reasonable people who pretend that rv's leaking sewage, filled to the utter brim with garbage, spilling out onto the sidewalks next to parks where children actively play and soccer games regularly occur, is somehow not so much an urgent problem. It can be backgrounded for them. It's somehow "capitalism", "unsolvable", "end of the Roman Empire," or other learned helplessness notions. They remain indoors or walk in curated areas. They don't engage with ideas, alternatives, reason.
The worst part, to me, is the fact that they tell themselves they are being kind, giving completely incapacitated drug addicts old RV's (to drive around?!), ignoring the mental illness and massive drug use, forgetting all about the people trying to keep their kids safe, healthy, mentally well. And if you are poor, lower middle class (the "raising kids" class), or have to go out into the world to shop, work, or otherwise engage with reality, you are simply unable to ignore it. People continue to throw away their votes, knee jerk, on useless heart string tuggers and things don't just stay the same, they get worse. They get normalized.
Most people I know simply live with the cognitive dissonance and lean even more into luxury beliefs and progressive ideology. Here's where I mention I used to be democrat myself. It's the downhill direction and it's easier, safer politically. The people in charge who are supposed to fix this literal shit are not living anywhere near it and would lose all sweet sweet power if they so much as acknowledged there was a problem. So, Kotek, looking like Woody Allen with a haircut, says things that make no sense to anyone paying attention but calms the nerves of the politically sensitive.
We soldier on, because there's so much to love about Portland, really, it's just beautiful here. All our family is here, and where the heck are we gonna go anyway. Too expensive to move, jobs are location specific, and our kids have friends and jobs and school here. It can be done, we aren’t floating in toxic waste, but it gets lonely. Hard to find friends that you can be open and honest with. I’ll take a democrat who just likes to argue at this point. They don’t want to, they just want to ignore and pretend. Wow. Must be nice.
Not at all. You come across as a person of strength and character. It’s a shame that you, and others like you, can’t speak up without being vilified. It’s good to hear the perspective of someone who actually lives there!
I want to “like” your comment but it makes me so sad “liking” it just doesn’t fit. I hope you can take solace in the fact that there is a whole community out here that you can talk to. I hope things get better for you. How it can, when the ostriches won’t pull their heads out and look around, is beyond me. Take care.
You're nice to say so. I hope I didn't come across too woe is me. I'm fortunate. Great family, I own a home that we keep nice despite the (improving!) neighborhood. It's the lack of interest in solving things that can at least be drastically improved that gets to me, and the fact that people who think like me really must stay low profile lest we be publicly scorned. lol. I read stuff about Portland all the time and this is my first time chiming in. Just one person's perspective.
Your ‘chiming’ will resonate far and wide. I know it feels at times like we are speaking into a vast void, that doesn’t care or even wants to listen. I know I feel it and I live down in Southern Commifornia, on the US/Mexico Border. 💗🙏🏼😏
I can't bring myself to click "like" here, Babs. I just wanted to reach across to you and your family. What you describe is isomeric with much of my and my late darling's experience here in the southernmost outskirts of Pugetopolis.
We were courted to move to Portland in 2001 (darling's work). Something else came up; we did that instead. We stopped visiting the city regularly around 2010. (Same for Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia circa 2014.)
For me the creepiest element was the effort expended by the "political sensitives" we knew to pretend that people in their own community weren't suffering terribly. And the suffering then wasn't as nearly widespread as now.
Chris's grab of Kristof's comment--I saw it yesterday, and had to step away from the keyboard. It really shook me. I ended up hauling firewood and firelogs and mowing an area that didn't need it. Then prepping 12 lbs of peppers for the dehydrator. Then working out.
I could see people saying something like that in, say Silicon Prairie (Beaverton etc) in June 2001...but Portland per se in 2025? Good God. "Everything's dandy, because of the alcohol."
Which makes me wonder, Babs, what role in all this is played by the turn toward Intoxication Culture in the 1950s.
Alcohol and caffeine and nicotine and marijuana and SSRIs for everybody; coke and heroin and potent hallucinogens for the edgy and hip; opioids and fent and krokodil for the losers. This all became normalized long ago, and IME Portlanders, like Pugetopolans, cannot see outside of it. Their reaction to questioning of Intoxication Culture is of the same quality as the reaction of most religious people when you question their theology. Except the Intoxication Cultists have more power locally, being ensconced in every institution and organization of power.
I can tell you from experience that the most dangerous thing to be, socially speaking, is a total square where intoxication is concerned. The normalization of behavior modification through a consumer panoply of chemicals is the background culture. It cannot ever be examined or questioned, at all. Because IME if you question that for opioids and fent, it has to eventually be questioned for coke and heroin, and from there LSD and "shrooms," and from there pot and SSRIs, then alcohol, then caffeine, and by god in the PNW you don't dare suggest that maybe, just maybe, everybody needs to detox at this point, after this 80-year bender that has been so lucrative for all the wrong people.
Because we're at the point where Nicholas Kristof can say that people dying of fent on the streets isn't a problem because one of his luxury drugs of choice is so good.
Babs, this is the behavior of addicts, not of people thinking clearly.
And of course media addiction plays into it as well. But let me not digress there. Everybody has an opinion on that; that's not a forbidden topic.
> I’ll take a democrat who just likes to argue at this point. They don’t want to, they just want to ignore and pretend.
We have that in Pugetopolis as well. The lack of adult engagement and give-and-take--which in the larger sense indicates a common destiny and values, however one views the proper political tools to achieve that.
But that is part of the addictive pattern: walking on eggshells is one of the primary sufferings in a addictive family. Constant fear of triggering out-lashing, shunning, or worse. Most of the "boomers" I know are stoned pretty much 24/7. They all resemble each other more than they resemble the people I knew them to be 25 years ago. There has been a sort of...chemical leveling...of people, en masse. It's like the drugged kids in classrooms.
Even more and worse than that is knowing that these people are capable of looking at ANYONE's suffering, no matter how profound, with this studied, ensiloed, avoidance. There is a background/constantly floating sense of threat in that.
I saw that aplenty during "covid." There was a sort of simmering, backgrounded Stasi-culture quality to it. "Do it to Julia, not to me." I was stunned by the number of people in my own circles--of ALL political inclinations--who simply knee-jerk sided with Tony Fauci and Jay Inslee and didn't want to hear otherwise. The fear porn claimed them body, mind, and soul. And then the virtue porn took over.
From the organic Christians who think their body is a temple and won't let a crumb of GMO pass their lips, but lined up for the mRNA shots and demanded others do, to the "my body my choice" secular lefties for whom abortion is a sacrament, but felt Pharma should be able to use government to force potions into people's bloodstreams................and everything in between. The libertarians who supported concentration camps for vaxx dissenters. The "socialists" who hate goverment but want more of it. Etc.
Forgive me for blogposting here...but I know there are more people like us in the coastal PNW. I just wanted you to hear from one, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your words. Three candles will be lighted tonight in the rainforest for you and your family.
Like you, I live in the South Puget Sound. Been here over 25 years, watching Seattle and Olympia vie for Most Homeless Drug User Friendly City, while poor Tacoma gets whipsawed between them and deals with gangbangers. These days you can get a contact buzz just by driving on Highway 16 over all the pot processing warehouses in Tacoma. Small wonder that a lot of my work at one of our 24/7 trauma hospitals is dealing with the aftermath of stoned/intoxicated/mentally ill bad behavior.
I’d love to get one of those lovely Oregon Pinot Noirs and shove it where the sun don’t shine on Nicholas Kristhof.
Thank you for your comment. My son lives in Eugene, his wife in law school, they are talking about moving to Portland when she is done. Now they will make good money so they can afford to live in a nice part I guess, but I read this stuff and it scares me! Oregon is so beautiful, but their leftist policies are awful
Plenty of places left that haven't been overtaken. Lake Oswego looked great last time I was there, and the SW hills. Go up and out when seeking a home, and a lawyer outta be able to keep the good parts of the city and avoid the bad. Hope he remembers us lowlanders when he votes. lol
My family and I left Portland in 2021, after seeing things that, to this day, we cannot describe without being met with skepticism and denial.
What was most striking to me was the organized and deliberate nature of the violence and decline. People treated these problems as inevitable when they were actually solvable or, even worse, when they were put in place deliberately. To this day, the hypocrisy and deception rankles; I can’t believe any of these people are still in power.
Fellow Portlander, here. Certainly feels like living in an alternate crazy-making reality where almost everyone has drank the kool-aid, and you just have to play along to get by or have any friends at all. Having an ounce of common sense or simply seeing things as they are feels like enough to get you branded as some flavor of bigot. The homelessness, drugs, mentally ill running rampant is depressing enough. But having to tread so carefully to seek people you can be open and honest with, and to avoid offense, is the worst part. I feel like we need a support group.
I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around this. On Tuesday my wife and I walked from 5th and Clay to Burnside in Portland and saw absolutely none of what you describe. We walked past city hall so I would imagine this was downtown. Five years ago I did see what you are talking about, it was horrible. And we were in this same area. But we just didn’t see any of it this time. We talked to our neighbor who was in Portland the next day and had the same experience we did, no homeless, no drugs, no crime. I can’t understand how the “realities” can be so different.
It's because they shuffle them around without actually solving any problems. So they're not downtown right now, they're off in, say, Gresham. "See we've solved it" they tell the people downtown, and in Gresham "we're actively working on it!"
Later they will flush them out of Gresham and they'll be off to SE Portland, and they'll brag to Gresham about what a great job they did. And then eventually they'll cycle around downtown again, and they'll pretend it's a brand new problem they're still coming to grips with. On and on it goes, the cycle of gaslighting and virtue signaling.
Oh and meanwhile trantifa and associates are busy harassing ICE, or so I've heard, so they haven't been trashing their usual haunts lately. But they're still there and will eventually come up with some new reason to go try to burn down the courthouse or blockade the roads or whatever. Because the city only ever plays catch and release with them until they murder somebody.
So yes, downtown might be habitable now. But zombie season will come around again, and again, forever, for as long as the Good Liberals of Portland keep electing their fellow Good Liberals and pretending everything is fine.
To be as fair as I can to them, I should add the caveat that they *have* chased some out... to other parts of the state. Notably the Deschutes Forest right on the other side of the Cascades, which they've been burning down bit by bit.
The pols say this is the fault of "climate change" or "campers". At least 9 times out of 10 the real story is they lit a trash fire or somesuch during wildfire season, but the pols don't want to attribute it to the "unhomed" because that would make their lack of action look really bad, since Oregonians don't like seeing our forests burning down.
Old Town/China town and the train station, really horrible last time I was there about a week ago; Burnside between the bridge and Powell's, always a drugged out person wandering into the road. Every. Time; Outer SE, which is downright overwhelmed in some areas, like 92nd ave. by the Max Line; Further out, on the East side, right up until Gresham. So many spots. Maybe not places one would normally walk around. But I sure have seen it. I don't think it's so hard to wrap your head around--not trying to be rude--but also, how can you know there was "no crime?" There's plenty of crime. It makes the local news often enough, and you can read the SE Portland Bee, for all the crazy stuff going on in various neighborhoods in SE. Arson, drugged out drivers wreaking havoc, among many other avoidable crap. I get it---no fun to seek this stuff out. But if you don't, then you'll just have to trust the people who do see it and talk about it. I have no reason to make stuff up. And if I did want to, for some reason, then you'd have to drive around and see for yourself to prove me wrong. That's where we are in the world of reporting, I suppose. People do lie and exaggerate, for sure. If anything, personally, I'm holding back. I didn't even talk about the THREE DIFFERENT times we (me and my teen daughters) saw someone take a shit right in front of us at the Woodstock Goodwill parking lot/grass strip, which is often swarmed with lunatic homeless, screaming at passers by and relieving themselves at random. It's gross out there. Stay safe.
What you say is true and so well put, and *moderate*, that I wish I could have come up with it.
My wife and I came to PDX from LA in the late 80s. We raised our daughter in the Irvington/Alameda/Grant Park/Beaumont area. The advent of tent camping, with tents/tarps being provided FoC by the county and NGOs changed everything. It did for street homelessness what the leash did for surfing, made the difficult so routine that the sport--or lifestyle--exploded.
And it's a poison pill: any leader suggesting removing tents risks being popularly viewed as a callous brute. See Rene Gonzalez.
To me, the rhetoric of city/county leadership is that all of the energy/money being spent on the homeless problem is to help this relatively small self-destructive minority at the expense of the functioning majority.
All of the official effort is for *them*; the fact that all the rest must work around these irresponsibles--*step* around them downtown, even--while leadership goodheartedly works to find a solution for the life problems for people who are not interested in rejoining the rest of society never seems to be addressed, at all. *We've* got to help *them*. Not "they need to *begin* to conform to common laws and behavioral norms". That never is in the equation, because that's for us; it's too much to ask of them, apparently.
I can remember taking my daughter to Laurelhurst Park, an Olmsted-designed city park space--for the simple joy of feeding the ducks, and maybe playing on the equipment over near the tennis courts. When I drive by now I realize that no responsible parent will want to do this.
The folks you can be open and honest with are in Vancouver (withthe exception of the people that moved there from Portland). It could be changed, if the conservatives in the state banded together, if the voter rolls were cleaned and vote by mail ended.
Thank you for sharing. I moved to Portland in 2006 and despite the beauty of the river, Forest Park, plentiful river rafting, beautiful waterfall hikes, Mt. Hood, New Seasons, and the delicious organic food, and the inexpensive apartment (back then), I cried almost everyday the first year I lived there.
Jogging downtown around tents and sleeping bodies on the side walk was so uncomfortable and that was before 2010! Downtown Portland in Winter felt like a dark, gothic, gloomy, congested place to me that needed to welcome back God.
I was thrilled to escape Portland in 2013. I enjoyed visiting multiple times a year, since Portland was lovely for a big city and it had been home so had become more comfortable since I had gotten used to it. In 2018 I attended a conference in Portland and the city was noticably uncared for, yucky and uncomfortable. Graffiti everywhere, the running loop around the river crossing the steel bridge was awful, tents everywhere. The mixed smell of urine, feces, and marijuana. Haven't wanted to visit Portland since.
Thank goodness I wasn't in Portland in 2020. I can't imagine 2020-2022 locked deep in the totalitarian states of Oregon, Washington, or California.
I hope Portland turns things around. I happily moved to a more conservative area (unfortunately, still in a super lefty liberal state, oh well, can't have everything), which is now rotting under local liberal leadership. More tents, drug overdoses multiple times daily, more homeless, all which I avoid.
I became downwardly mobile halving my salary to escape California and move to a red state to escape this insanity. At the same time I don’t blame you for staying in Portland. It’s beautiful and it’s your home .
We have the exact same class of people over here in Sweden too, and they sound the same, behave the same and suggest the same non-solutions to the same problems.
Not even subjecting them to the immediate consequences of their ideas made policy works; they just sell their house/apartment and move to a new NIMBY-area.
The woman who was in charge of the "Covid data dashboard" for the county that contains Washington State's capitol (Thurston County, Olympia) was moved laterally into another job a couple years ago: harassing rural Thurston County residents for their septic systems.
I only know this because I helped a family settle the estate of someone they lost to the jabs; she mailed the deceased nearly three years after his death and sale of his property to notify him that his rural house's septic system might be a problem, because it existed.
At no time did anyone in that county issue an iota of concern about what Babs describes. Hundreds of tramps camping right next to waterways/lakes, leaving sewage, toxics, etc., by the ton to leak right into groundwater, and drinking water.
You say "wipe them out," but I don't know what you mean. Open season on state, county, and municipal workers is something others have suggested, but I don't see what that will solve. Public sector work--including in the Ed Biz--became the employer of last resort for many people in the PNW, as our economy was handed over to Chyna and India. WA state, e.g., is effectively a resource extraction colony for Asia, and a port/logistics throughput for slave-labor-camp consooooomer goods. Also a place for Asians to launder their ill-gotten money.
And the tramps are people who were sh!tcanned by Reaganismo and its downstream pollution, then handed Americans over to a Globo rentier system while trashing productive communities and sectors in favor of Dutch's voodoonomics. Add the normalization of lucrative Intoxication Culture, marinate in mass media psyops, and you've got people defeated without firing a shot.
Totally disgusted, but not surprised, by the reaction of the local "leaders" to Trump sending troops. The Portland police have not only refused to enforce the law, they call Antifa members as friendly witnesses when they're sued for not enforcing the law. (Result: The Portland police don't have to enforce the law.)
One of the videos was full of 3-second cuts. Oh wow, everything must be great because there's still a store that has all its windows! Cancel the order!
Meanwhile, none of those "leaders" show up around 11 pm at the ICE building -- and neither do the local media stations. If it takes Trump to get the nation to pay attention to what's going on, fine by me.
What's going on in Portland is a CHOICE. The leaders of Portland WANT it to look that way.
But why? How are they benefiting from this? Direct payments from Soros? I mean, I agree it's intentional, I just don't understand. Only the most horrible of people would ruin everything just to sit on a pile of gold.
They get to be the public face of resisting Trump. That comes with all sorts of perks. As an added bonus, it's a distraction from the fact the current leaders have run the city (and the state) into the ground.
Good summary. I would also add that these people are satanists and their big joy in life is to destroy humanity and the things that make us human i.e. compassion, spiritual growth and beliefs, capacity to feel happy and joyous, etc. all the things that make us human. These soulless, psychopathic entities (and I don't say that lightly - SOULLESS psychopaths is exactly what I mean) enjoy hurting and torturing other people. That is what psychopaths most enjoy, making others suffer. They benefit from destroying our wonderful cities by torturing humanity, making our streets completely unsafe and filthy and watching us suffer. They will continue to ruin us until we stop them and that is what Trump/white hats is in the process of doing. I was a therapist for many years with a Master's degree and had to study psychopathic/sociopathic/narcissistic thinking.
In short, they enjoy literally torturing humanity, especially children, and also animals and this is what they do at their satanic rituals. As I said they will not stop until we stop them. That's why Trump is sending military and ICE into these cities. Hope this info is helpful.
Great book. I think it captures so much of our current leadership that Chris describes. They’ve lied to themselves for so long, they’ve come to believe their lies and are living in an alternate reality of their own invention. To think otherwise would have existential consequences for them, so they go on happily living in their dream world, ignoring the pain and suffering that their policies cause, pretending all is awesome because they “care” about all the oppressed and marginalized and they are therefore the “good guys”. Meanwhile, those of us in the real world, seeing the actual harm they cause, can’t begin to understand their carefully crafted delusions and if we try to raise them, we are the mean, hear people who must be cancelled for not believing the “right” way.
> That is what psychopaths most enjoy, making others suffer.
I wish I could share your sense that they even are aware of others' suffering.
They strike me more as stoners/addicts entirely removed from ANY reflection from others...or from themselves. And in the latter--lacking self reflection--they resemble my ancestors' folk tales about vampires (no reflection in the mirror).
Most people who are alcoholics/addicts are not psychopaths or even sociopaths; they are simply lost in the fog of alcohol and/or drugs. I say this as someone who was a therapist who worked with that population for many years. Some are but addiction and psychopathology are 2 different things with different causes. I've seen many, many alcoholics and addicts get clean and sober and become very good people with deep compassion for others who are often helping other people. Many addicts become that way because they had horrendous experiences as children or adults and they are trying to kill the deep pain inside themselves. I also say this as a person with many years of recovery myself from alcohol and the reason I drank was due to a lot of deep pain I experienced from my birth mother and later on from my psychopathic parents who adopted me when I was age 6. That was many years ago and now that I'm in my senior year, I'm a much different person than when I was drinking and I've learned a great deal from my life experience. Psychopaths are an entirely different group, their brains don't work right and are missing something in their brains which makes them have no compassion for others. I also believe they do not have a soul and embrace evil happily. They simply are different from most humans.
Thank you. I’ve been wondering, besides money, what these city “leaders” could possibly gain from not only allowing horrible things to go on, but gleefully touting them. This makes sense.
Money still plays a huge part. They get to dole out huge amounts of cash to their friends, some of which just happens to get donated back to their political campaign...
... and since they control the rigged elections, they don't need to spend most of that on their campaign. Perhaps you've noticed that unused campaign funds are never refunded to the donors, they just get added to the politician's personal fortune.
Yes, money is important to them. The 3 main things that psychopaths love are money, power and control. If they show a great fondness for those 3 things, then they are probably psychopaths.
Absolutely this, Sim. For some reason this kneejerk resistance gains them...something. Membership in the cabal.
> A smart leader (even one on the left) would take this opportunity to use the off-ramp that Trump provides.
This is the thing I find most frustrating. He handles all negotiations like an intelligent, mature man of the world who knows how to drive a hard bargain but always leaves the opposition room to maneuver.
They have no comprehension of this level of adult interaction/behavior/negotiation.
So I have to conclude that there is a sort of studied Perpetual Adolescence about it. Peter Pan Syndrome. This is how incompetent they are. They can do nothing in the real world--build nothing, maintain nothing--but claim to be Administrators Extraordinaire.
But their skills are nothing but I'M AGIN IT. And they drive the general levels of political discourse and social functioning ever deeper into the cesspit.
Democrats are making deportations a red line because they know that without tens of millions illegals padding the census (and voter rolls) they’ll lose a lot of political power. Their unions will also lose a lot of clients they use to suck up federal money.
Anarchy creates fear which is then filled by an authoritarian promising safety.
It's the communist playbook run over and over again. And why they always erase history. To enable the replay without anyone asking - how many more people need to die by repeating this nonsense over and over?
Yup. Those of us old enough remember the scenes of Moscow in the 70’s and 80’s with the alcoholics drinking anti-freeze lying about the park benches and streets.
Then that megalomaniac putin reined in the corruption and improved the economy and now all those sweet, adorable alcoholics are nowhere to be found. Today the orange monster in DC is threatening the same “improvements” here. Obamagod-willing we won’t suffer the same fate.
Looks at the smug sell righteousness in the Press conference. It is hard for conservatives who largely just want to be left alone, to understand, but that is pure orgasm for progressives.
The hardest lesson to understand is that we have communism, because so many people WANT to be communists. It is not just pushed from Soros et al, it is a push and pull from a significant minority at all levels.
If Tina and the Karens have a dial, where they could double the communism,
Double the homelessness
double the crime
but double the self righteousness, the would dial it up.
Which is what they're doing, and not dialing it back
And communists love to torture the rest of us - literally. I was in Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine in 1977 and saw it up close and personal. I was with a group traveling through Europe and all of us started drinking heavily by the time we got to Soviet Union. It was heartbreaking and terrifying.
I was watching a right leaning live streamer who rode his bike into the antifa crowd outside the federal\ICE building last night. He rolled up on a fairly normal looking younger blonde girl (out of place with the cluster B weirdos that go down to the ICE building every night) and asked her who she was. She said she was from Corvalis, and drove into Portland that night. Her words: "I saw Trump on TV and it made me real mad, so I came out." And that's it. That's all it took. She drove 85 miles because Trump was on TV and it made her "mad." The media keeps spinning these people up, and it's overwhelmingly women, or dudes who think they are women, or some other deep mental illness falling for it.
People used to say, "TV is like heroin." And I'd say NO, it's not LIKE heroin, it IS heroin.
Mass media psywar is designed to tap into and exploit the exact same brain centers that drugs do. The combination of Intoxication Culture and Media Addiction has claimed the vast majority of people's consciousness.
This woman you note is a prime example of what the psywar industries aim to create. She obviously has nothing better to do on the home front--no home, no farm with animals to care for, no children or spouse. She has a media stream, constantly looking for the next thing to get "spun up" over.
There are so many walking wounded women in this society, it's staggering. But the assault on our women has been by design, and we need to be careful not to be coached to side with the malefactors who harmed them.
I knew it was bad, but I didn't know how bad till Jan. of 2017 and that "women's march" in DC. The one where women who demanded not to be objectified dressed up as female genitals, enraged that a tall, handsome, successful, admired, blond haired, blue eyed man was getting sworn in as POTUS. They effectively demanded that he take them as war trophies for vanquishing their Queen ("Grab this!" "Choose me, not guns!" Etc.). Never in my life did I see such a massive tsunami of psychological pain...and close to nobody saw it clearly.
Well, there ya go. "Only the most horrible of people would ruin everything just to sit on a pile of gold." What part of your own sentence do you not understand? That these people are actually "horrible?" That they want to "ruin everything" to get that pile of gold? What?
TDS is a large part of this. Retaining power is another. They also don't know the massive manipulation at play. The financial incentives are a little murky but i know they're there.
You're right SC, it is a choice, but it isn't just the leaders...the choice is made by the voters each and every time there's an election. It's the same up here in Washington, and the same down there in California.
Sorry Chris, but the majority of voters in your state think Messrs. Wiener, Swalwell, Schiff, and Mmes. Bass, Waters, Harris, et al are doing a bang up job. They and their ilk will continue to get elected until the majority of voters come across their very own dead bodies lying in the street or their very own "housing challenged" campers living on their front lawns. Only then "might" things change, only then might they begin to question the importance of having a decent Pinot.
Yes. Yes. You put it exactly right. Over and over I ask myself if this is really what people (real honest-to-goodness people) are voting for. Do we really know?
The elections in CA are rigged and have been for many election cycles. Not all people in Commifornia voted for those scumbags listed above. Quite the contrary, they didn’t vote for them. But if you pad the voting rolls, then rig the voting machines, and have the ability to ‘vote by mail’ for over a month prior to the election, that formula leads to a corrupt and rigged election.
We need to vote on a designated ‘election day’, people get off work, businesses & liquor stores are closed, with paper ballots and the ‘count’ is done in 1 Day. That would be a ‘free and fair election’!
This is great, so glad to see it. Would only add that even worse, those who have gone deep into election cheating have shown us that mail-in ballots are sent to empty lots and non-addresses --- in piles meant for quick pickup by bad actors ---- found on already-bloated voter rolls, and filled out to make up the gap and win elections for the Dem (leftist) candidate (or proposition, or whatever) of their choice. The ballot marking is likely done by highly motivated people (public employee unions such as SEIU), who are also likely paid. Once the ballot is separated from the envelope it can't be traced. And that's only one of the schemes employed.
P.S. Be sure to see Chris' "UPDATE" on his original article. It's at the end. Hilarious.
That's how it was in California until Covid. I was a polling inspector for years, up until I moved in 2017, and I was honestly proud of how clean my precinct's elections were. Every single ballot cast in my precinct was accounted for and verified, and I personally picked up the sealed blank ballots the day before an election, had several poll workers verify the seals and then then counting process, and delivered the verified sealed bags of voted ballots to law enforcement at the end of the day. Long before midnight we knew the results except in the case of very close elections. The process worked. That's why they got rid of it.
You know, it’s bad enough that “democracy” has been commandeered, perverted, and twisted into a concept that is universally and exclusively believed to mean POLITICAL democracy, which necessarily requires a corresponding universal belief in the fallacy that “government” NECESSARILY equals “the political state”—that is, a societal structure based on arbitrary political laws enforced by legalized coercion or the threat thereof. But OK…that’s the prevailing system under the religion of politics; it is what it is…
…but that’s the worst part. It isn’t even that. An electoral system without integrity isn’t even a passable counterfeit of real government. It upends and inverts even the fundamental premise of political democracy—namely, the unspoken sacred-cow belief that tyranny by the majority over the minority is acceptable—and replaces it with tyranny by the minority (the political elite who defrauded their way into power and rigged the system to keep them in power) over the majority.
The founders of the American republic knew that such dangers are characteristic of political democracy, which is why they tried to mitigate the problem by establishing a republic. Alas, they still believed that “government = political state”, and there went the ball game.
Still, the rules of legalized coercion were not yet established after the founding of the republic, and while the politicians were arguing about what rules to impose on a free people, the nation of people who had unprecedented freedom used it to create unprecedented prosperity. Unfortunately, legislators legislate, and over the past two-and-a-half centuries, the corpus of political law has ballooned into “government ON the people”.
The upshot is that the broken nature of political democracy—already struggling to maintain the illusion that it actually provides the service of real government—is now being seen as the inherently unstable system that it is. We were never going to be able to vote ourselves out of the problems that result from such a system. But add to that the vastly more destabilizing corruption of an electoral system devoid of integrity, and the recipe for accelerated civilizational decline is complete.
Our hellhole cities (and states) are collapsing in lawlessness, madness, chaos, and anarchy, but our elections are clean and voters have a choice in the matter? Not so sure about that............
Andy Ngo, who had to leave the country because Antifa in Portland terrorized him, beat him to a brain bleed and doxxed him, just went to a kangaroo court in Portland to prosecute these people. The jury sided with Antifa because they were threatened. And the judge didn’t throw the case out because they sided with Antifa. Portland's lost. Totally.
Antifa/anarchists are the soldiers, paid thugs, of money powers who delight in taking advantage of chaos, violence, fear, and confusion. The politicos, judges, police, the whole system that protects the thugs are consequently prostitutes of those who benefit from the rot.
Yes. And I think there is a hierarchy here, where the ground shock troops are composed of the mentally ill, drug addicts, and petty criminals. They are sometimes joined by bored middle class university students who like to cosplay Marxist revolutionaries on the weekends. And then there are the university professors who give intellectual legitimacy to all the moral/logical inversions (but never actually get their own feet wet). And then there is the law enforcement industrial complex of officers, lawyers, and judges who are in it for the bribes and potential political power. And then there are the politicians themselves- stone cold sociopaths who are selected as the top local administrators of this demonic psyop. This is what sits in actual place of the idealistic belief that local governments are democratically elected and represent the interests of the community. In actual fact, no one voted this into being and no one is voting themselves out of this.
It would be under Court Order if local police were violating or not uphold Federal rights. Usually deals with civil rights violations. That’s where they got LAPD after Rodney King.
The “choice” part is key here. The city’s leaders want violence, disorder, and misery. It’s hard to wrap your mind around this, but when you see it often enough it becomes the only explanation that makes any sense.
I have seen half a dozen references in local (there) media, people saying "There's no problems here, they're just protesting, the only people it bothers is the local residents."
Oh, OK, it's only bothering residents. That makes it dandy.
Yes, they enable. In San Francisco the NGOs are a multi billion dollar industry funded by taxpayers and the just prolong and enable homelessness. It's just graft, the same old story!!
Seems odd that it never occurs to them to actually try to do a better job than Trump. To beat him to the punch. Or even express an alternative.
Instead, they put themselves in a very difficult position: "No, we don't need you to fix this stuff that we have decided to fix by tolerating it instead of fixing it. We are Portland. We are the resistance. We have good Pinot noir."
Reminds me of the old saying that the best revenge is to live well. Maybe they never heard that one. Of course, fixing things would require some actual thinking--can they still manage that--and a lot of effort.
I'm just glad you managed to bring in Godwin's Law. Can't have a discussion without referring to a German political party of nearly 100 years ago, after all.
JFC bro, keep your eye on the ball, it's 2025, not 1930. So effing sick of you boomers and your "nazi" chants.
“It’s time to shove these people onto a barge and tow them out to sea.”
Perhaps, we can commission Musk to build a spaceship that they can use to escape the giant space goat, you know, the one that will be devouring the Earth next month?
I've noticed a new rhetorical strategy embraced by our progressive aristocracy here in Trump 2.0. Now along with pristine morality and enlightened wisdom, they've also credited themselves with the power of mind-reading:
Thus when Trump cracks down on academia because of its shameless capitulation to Jew hate, he's only doing it because he hates intellectuals and scholarship—only fools believe he would want to hold these places accountable for civil rights violations. And when he cracks down on illegal immigration, it's not because of the corrosive effects this has had on our country, but because of how much he hates brown people. The issue is never the issue!
And now they've come to the best trick of all: Epstein files! These have been magically transformed by the power of media alchemy from last year's wacky conspiracy theory to this year's all-purpose explanation. It's only right-wing bigots who notice that most of our cities have become apocalyptic wastelands filled with fentanyl zombies—it's really all about Epstein, who is more useful in death than in life.
Trump owns the brains and souls of his enemies much more than he does of his supporters. Trump voters will move on, but what will Team Social Justice do when he's gone? He is the center of their universe and they've devoted the last decade of their lives to moving him inside their heads to claim total ownership. If the choice is between constant hysterical hatred of Donnie or taking a single clear honest look at reality, the former wins every time. Perhaps they're the ones projecting? Nahh, impossible! ;)
I see your point and remember when DeSantis became Emmanuel Goldstein for his heresies, including not treating Covid like the Black Death and not allowing small children to get sex changes. For this, the MSM will never forgive him.
But I don't think anyone can dominate a brain like Donnie, he is the incarnation and manifestation of all progressive fears and hatreds. Also, no one draws attention like Trump aka President Don Rickles, he grabs every eyeball in a way that may be unprecedented for a modern politician. (I think only Teddy Roosevelt compares in this regard.)
But yes of course, every conservative today is now cast as Hitler's understudy, ready to step into the role once they gain national stature.
You really summed up my experience with these “lefties” who in my world are mostly older, white, privileged, progressive lefty types. Who all have got the C*V* D Jabs and Boosters!
Team Social Justice will declare that Trump wasn’t so bad compared to this new guy who is definitely Hitler. They’ve been doing it for decades, and the troops fall in line every time.
You're probably right. Hitler and the Nazis are too useful to ever retire them, but I wish people would learn some new historical analogies. Maybe the next Republican Prez can be Franco? Pinochet? Genghis Khan?
100 years after the fall of Berlin will everyone you don't like still be Hitler!? Probably.
Holocaustianity is our modern secular religion. They can’t learn any other historical analogies because their power flows from pity from The Worst Thing That Ever Happened, and any other analogy would detract from their power.
It's the new (late 20th c) Foundation Myth for the west. From elsewhere (not mine):
How do you recognise a foundation myth? It fulfils three functions.
1) It explains the origin and structure of the world (and society).
2) It defines ultimate good and evil (and from those definitions are derived the values that are used to justify the holding of power).
3) It determines what is held sacred in that society.
For modern Westerners the story of WWII has become their foundation myth. It fulfils all three functions.
1) We live in the ‘Post-War World’. The lines on the map, the institutions, the sense of what era we live in, all arise from the starting point of WWII.
2) Ultimate evil is Nazis. Ultimate good is opposing Nazis. The values derived from these definitions are anti-racism, equality, diversity, anti-nationalism and so on.
3) The only thing that is held sacred, that cannot be denied or mocked in the contemporary West, is the Holocaust.
The problem is that all three functions are backwards or negative.
Instead of the origin event being one of fertility and new life, it was a conflagration of death and destruction.
Instead of ultimate good taking the central position in the story that slot is occupied by ultimate evil. Everyone knows that Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil, holds the centre point of the WWII story.
Instead of that which is held sacred being something mysterious and sublime it (the Holocaust) is an obscenity.
Having a negative foundation myth means the tree of life for Westerners is poisoned.
Yeah. Portland is a fucking hellhole. Do not believe any bullshit claiming otherwise.
On any given day, driving around in the sunlight, it may look like a paradise, at least as far as cities go. Then you drive by the same place another day, when the zombie horde has migrated there (having been kicked out of the last place they were infesting). You see it in another light.
Eventually you see all, or most, of it in that light. The swarm moves from place to place, and every place has seasons of "this is what this city should be" and seasons of "keep moving and don't make eye contact."
Except the neighborhoods where the rich libs live, which miraculously don't have these problems. Because they're very responsive when they see a Person in Need(tm). They send the zombie to a place where it can be "helped" which is: anywhere but their neighborhood, out of sight and out of mind.
There it will occupy a park, or a bridge, or the side of a railroad track during the day, and range freely at night setting things on fire, screeching incoherently, or walking into traffic. Sometimes it finds a nice cozy place to die behind a grocery store and is discovered days later because of the smell.
And that's just the zombies. Nevermind the mutant retards who, fully conscious if not sapient, actively work to destroy things. As has been well documented. They're not very good at it, but they are persistent in their efforts.
It will be a lot of work to render Portland inhabitable by sane people again. Meanwhile, there are various flavors of insanity. That is all.
This is precisely what Los Angeles is like. Our wonderful unhoused neighbors, who we adore, need to stay in their designated areas, or our private armed security will be forced to assist them.
I don't have a link anymore but maybe a year or two ago somebody went and interviewed some middle/upper-middle class boomers when the tents started showing up in their lawns. It was hilarious and sad at the same time. "We want to help, but they can't just do this here" or something like that was typical of their befuddled responses.
Needless to say *their* neighborhood was straightened out quick. *Mine* got another wave a week or two later, wherein they took over the park my kid used to play for a second time and just about every other empty lot for a mile around.
All anecdotes in earlier post from personal experience, btw, not just "things I heard."
At one point, not far from where we lived, one of them ate another one's face at a train station (both, apparently, were pedophiles, so that's a nice touch). You might have heard that story, because it got national attention for a blip.
Clearly, all Portland needs to do to be the paradise that our betters claim is for more of its people to embrace Kristof's advice and switch from using Xylazine to imbibing those delightful Pinots. Problem solved.
I'm alternating between almost crying and wanting to scream, and it's not even on my continent.
In my late teens, I lost six friends to drug use. When I say lost, I mean they died. During those years, I saw the reality of drug use as close as you can and still walk away from it.
I wish, I want to say something profound or helpful or hopeful but I just can't.
I've been trying and trying to make the words work but I can't. It's too vile, it's too incomprehensible.
I reach over to your loss, I share similar of my own, I can never know what you experienced, but I can join palms and bow heads from at least related experience.
The rise and ubiquity of Intoxication Culture has been warfare.
Most people--especially in the US PNW, and hip cities like Portland and Seattle--don't recognize it.
The issue isn't Karen Bass or any other useful fool of her kind. The problem resides with the jackasses that vote for this madness, over and over. It's your neighbor who is the problem. We need to fight this with ridicule and ferocity. Unfortunately, it appears that rational folks have been polite and agreeable for far too long. It's time for house to house, coffee shop confrontation. It's time to call a spade a spade. If you see something... say something!
Kristof gets the Joseph Goebells award., and someone please tell Kristoff that the primary evidence that a leader is authoritarian is a desire to disarm his citizens.
These five rules of propaganda have been known for a long time, and they are certainly not original with myself. They can be found on the internet through searches, but I don't think that the powerful really like them being known. Please send them around so that more people will be aware of them. Ideally get them posted in school classrooms. Thank You.
The Five Rules of Propaganda
1. The rule of simplification - reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
2. The rule of disfiguration - discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion - manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity - presenting one's viewpoint as if it were unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure , and by 'psychological contagion'.
5. The rule of orchestration - endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
What a fine mind you have, viewing 2025 social issues in the US through a 1930s German political party lens. Maybe you'd like to also tell us how 18th century British Whigs and Tories fit in here? So very useful!
Portland… these are not homeless people. These are free range ADDICTS.
Mixed in with a bunch of people who probably should be hospitalized for mental health because they are a danger to themselves and or the community in California it’s a section 5150
The leaders should be hospitalized as well or jailed for their wanton and grotesque malfeasance
I get the feeling there are at least two, possibly 3 different timelines that are in the process of separating; and the one being referred to here as "anchored reality" is one that most of this stack's readership aligns with energetically (is anchored to). The others have their people just as anchored to them, but they're becoming so energetically divergent that they appear to be "un-anchored" / "unhinged" to us. As they should. And no doubt we look and feel just as "unhinged" to them. As we should :)
At some point, rather soon, it feels like - there will be some sort of big energetic snap or breakage point - and then it will be interesting to see how the other timelines go about separating completely from the one we are on, and how we will experience the absence of their residents - if we do at all. Maybe it will just be another weird Mandela effect situation, with only a tiny few ever even being able to remember the old, shared timeline when there really were a lot of dead junkies scattered around the streets of big cities, like pieces of litter that never got disposed of properly...
One viewpoint: respond to reality as it is. Change what you can (and should) change. Some things should not (or can't) be changed.
The opposite behaves as if the wished-for utopia is upon us (or near) & by acting aspirationally will manifest it into existence. This is why leaders on the Left will always say "we've made a lot of progress, but there's still a lot of work to be done". It can't be "done", or else they're out of work.
Even if we were to pretend and wish REAL HARD that Oregon Gov Tina Kotek is not the same rotting soul inside --- with a different face outside ---- as our own Gov Gavin Newsom or our own L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, what's as true and real as a drug-addicted almost-dead zombie stretched across a Portland or L.A. sidewalk is that such people as Kotek, Newsom, and Bass (just to name three) have poured gasoline on and set fire to their OWN credibility to such an extent in recent years that they can never EVER be believed or taken seriously AGAIN, and that is THEIR OWN FAULT. Not Trump's, and not ours.
I walked all around downtown Portland back in March. I stayed near Pioneer Courthouse Square--that part was mostly good, except for the lone crazy guy in the square screaming at invisible people.
But Old Town was a total shitshow. People living in tents on the sidewalks, crap everywhere, surprisingly young sick and hopeless filthy people sitting around, lying on the pavement. Lots of closed storefronts. I truly pity anyone who is (was) living there, working there, or trying to operate a business there. I guess the city just said, fuck you, we're not concerned.
When I lived in Eugene 30 years ago, all of downtown Portland was fantastic. Not anymore.
I live in Portland with my family (as in, I've raised kids here, all my and my husband's extended family live in or around Pdx), always lived here. The pinot may be great, but the bums aint drinking it. Well, they certainly WOULD if offered.
You've got multiple little worlds here in Portland (neighborhoods, sorta, but mostly street by street), and you can certainly keep yourself MOSTLY away from the bad parts, the unsavory visuals, if you really try. And the fancy wine aficionados REALLY TRY. Although, if you go downtown, you can only miss it through willful ignorance (steps over body, "wow, they need to get these sidewalks fixed, the concrete is buckling").
But we live among otherwise reasonable people who pretend that rv's leaking sewage, filled to the utter brim with garbage, spilling out onto the sidewalks next to parks where children actively play and soccer games regularly occur, is somehow not so much an urgent problem. It can be backgrounded for them. It's somehow "capitalism", "unsolvable", "end of the Roman Empire," or other learned helplessness notions. They remain indoors or walk in curated areas. They don't engage with ideas, alternatives, reason.
The worst part, to me, is the fact that they tell themselves they are being kind, giving completely incapacitated drug addicts old RV's (to drive around?!), ignoring the mental illness and massive drug use, forgetting all about the people trying to keep their kids safe, healthy, mentally well. And if you are poor, lower middle class (the "raising kids" class), or have to go out into the world to shop, work, or otherwise engage with reality, you are simply unable to ignore it. People continue to throw away their votes, knee jerk, on useless heart string tuggers and things don't just stay the same, they get worse. They get normalized.
Most people I know simply live with the cognitive dissonance and lean even more into luxury beliefs and progressive ideology. Here's where I mention I used to be democrat myself. It's the downhill direction and it's easier, safer politically. The people in charge who are supposed to fix this literal shit are not living anywhere near it and would lose all sweet sweet power if they so much as acknowledged there was a problem. So, Kotek, looking like Woody Allen with a haircut, says things that make no sense to anyone paying attention but calms the nerves of the politically sensitive.
We soldier on, because there's so much to love about Portland, really, it's just beautiful here. All our family is here, and where the heck are we gonna go anyway. Too expensive to move, jobs are location specific, and our kids have friends and jobs and school here. It can be done, we aren’t floating in toxic waste, but it gets lonely. Hard to find friends that you can be open and honest with. I’ll take a democrat who just likes to argue at this point. They don’t want to, they just want to ignore and pretend. Wow. Must be nice.
Not at all. You come across as a person of strength and character. It’s a shame that you, and others like you, can’t speak up without being vilified. It’s good to hear the perspective of someone who actually lives there!
I want to “like” your comment but it makes me so sad “liking” it just doesn’t fit. I hope you can take solace in the fact that there is a whole community out here that you can talk to. I hope things get better for you. How it can, when the ostriches won’t pull their heads out and look around, is beyond me. Take care.
You're nice to say so. I hope I didn't come across too woe is me. I'm fortunate. Great family, I own a home that we keep nice despite the (improving!) neighborhood. It's the lack of interest in solving things that can at least be drastically improved that gets to me, and the fact that people who think like me really must stay low profile lest we be publicly scorned. lol. I read stuff about Portland all the time and this is my first time chiming in. Just one person's perspective.
Your ‘chiming’ will resonate far and wide. I know it feels at times like we are speaking into a vast void, that doesn’t care or even wants to listen. I know I feel it and I live down in Southern Commifornia, on the US/Mexico Border. 💗🙏🏼😏
I can't bring myself to click "like" here, Babs. I just wanted to reach across to you and your family. What you describe is isomeric with much of my and my late darling's experience here in the southernmost outskirts of Pugetopolis.
We were courted to move to Portland in 2001 (darling's work). Something else came up; we did that instead. We stopped visiting the city regularly around 2010. (Same for Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia circa 2014.)
For me the creepiest element was the effort expended by the "political sensitives" we knew to pretend that people in their own community weren't suffering terribly. And the suffering then wasn't as nearly widespread as now.
Chris's grab of Kristof's comment--I saw it yesterday, and had to step away from the keyboard. It really shook me. I ended up hauling firewood and firelogs and mowing an area that didn't need it. Then prepping 12 lbs of peppers for the dehydrator. Then working out.
I could see people saying something like that in, say Silicon Prairie (Beaverton etc) in June 2001...but Portland per se in 2025? Good God. "Everything's dandy, because of the alcohol."
Which makes me wonder, Babs, what role in all this is played by the turn toward Intoxication Culture in the 1950s.
Alcohol and caffeine and nicotine and marijuana and SSRIs for everybody; coke and heroin and potent hallucinogens for the edgy and hip; opioids and fent and krokodil for the losers. This all became normalized long ago, and IME Portlanders, like Pugetopolans, cannot see outside of it. Their reaction to questioning of Intoxication Culture is of the same quality as the reaction of most religious people when you question their theology. Except the Intoxication Cultists have more power locally, being ensconced in every institution and organization of power.
I can tell you from experience that the most dangerous thing to be, socially speaking, is a total square where intoxication is concerned. The normalization of behavior modification through a consumer panoply of chemicals is the background culture. It cannot ever be examined or questioned, at all. Because IME if you question that for opioids and fent, it has to eventually be questioned for coke and heroin, and from there LSD and "shrooms," and from there pot and SSRIs, then alcohol, then caffeine, and by god in the PNW you don't dare suggest that maybe, just maybe, everybody needs to detox at this point, after this 80-year bender that has been so lucrative for all the wrong people.
Because we're at the point where Nicholas Kristof can say that people dying of fent on the streets isn't a problem because one of his luxury drugs of choice is so good.
Babs, this is the behavior of addicts, not of people thinking clearly.
And of course media addiction plays into it as well. But let me not digress there. Everybody has an opinion on that; that's not a forbidden topic.
> I’ll take a democrat who just likes to argue at this point. They don’t want to, they just want to ignore and pretend.
We have that in Pugetopolis as well. The lack of adult engagement and give-and-take--which in the larger sense indicates a common destiny and values, however one views the proper political tools to achieve that.
But that is part of the addictive pattern: walking on eggshells is one of the primary sufferings in a addictive family. Constant fear of triggering out-lashing, shunning, or worse. Most of the "boomers" I know are stoned pretty much 24/7. They all resemble each other more than they resemble the people I knew them to be 25 years ago. There has been a sort of...chemical leveling...of people, en masse. It's like the drugged kids in classrooms.
Even more and worse than that is knowing that these people are capable of looking at ANYONE's suffering, no matter how profound, with this studied, ensiloed, avoidance. There is a background/constantly floating sense of threat in that.
I saw that aplenty during "covid." There was a sort of simmering, backgrounded Stasi-culture quality to it. "Do it to Julia, not to me." I was stunned by the number of people in my own circles--of ALL political inclinations--who simply knee-jerk sided with Tony Fauci and Jay Inslee and didn't want to hear otherwise. The fear porn claimed them body, mind, and soul. And then the virtue porn took over.
From the organic Christians who think their body is a temple and won't let a crumb of GMO pass their lips, but lined up for the mRNA shots and demanded others do, to the "my body my choice" secular lefties for whom abortion is a sacrament, but felt Pharma should be able to use government to force potions into people's bloodstreams................and everything in between. The libertarians who supported concentration camps for vaxx dissenters. The "socialists" who hate goverment but want more of it. Etc.
Forgive me for blogposting here...but I know there are more people like us in the coastal PNW. I just wanted you to hear from one, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your words. Three candles will be lighted tonight in the rainforest for you and your family.
Like you, I live in the South Puget Sound. Been here over 25 years, watching Seattle and Olympia vie for Most Homeless Drug User Friendly City, while poor Tacoma gets whipsawed between them and deals with gangbangers. These days you can get a contact buzz just by driving on Highway 16 over all the pot processing warehouses in Tacoma. Small wonder that a lot of my work at one of our 24/7 trauma hospitals is dealing with the aftermath of stoned/intoxicated/mentally ill bad behavior.
I’d love to get one of those lovely Oregon Pinot Noirs and shove it where the sun don’t shine on Nicholas Kristhof.
Thank you for your comment. My son lives in Eugene, his wife in law school, they are talking about moving to Portland when she is done. Now they will make good money so they can afford to live in a nice part I guess, but I read this stuff and it scares me! Oregon is so beautiful, but their leftist policies are awful
Plenty of places left that haven't been overtaken. Lake Oswego looked great last time I was there, and the SW hills. Go up and out when seeking a home, and a lawyer outta be able to keep the good parts of the city and avoid the bad. Hope he remembers us lowlanders when he votes. lol
My family and I left Portland in 2021, after seeing things that, to this day, we cannot describe without being met with skepticism and denial.
What was most striking to me was the organized and deliberate nature of the violence and decline. People treated these problems as inevitable when they were actually solvable or, even worse, when they were put in place deliberately. To this day, the hypocrisy and deception rankles; I can’t believe any of these people are still in power.
I bet it’s lonely there! Keep your head up!
Great Comment! Thank You!
Fellow Portlander, here. Certainly feels like living in an alternate crazy-making reality where almost everyone has drank the kool-aid, and you just have to play along to get by or have any friends at all. Having an ounce of common sense or simply seeing things as they are feels like enough to get you branded as some flavor of bigot. The homelessness, drugs, mentally ill running rampant is depressing enough. But having to tread so carefully to seek people you can be open and honest with, and to avoid offense, is the worst part. I feel like we need a support group.
I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around this. On Tuesday my wife and I walked from 5th and Clay to Burnside in Portland and saw absolutely none of what you describe. We walked past city hall so I would imagine this was downtown. Five years ago I did see what you are talking about, it was horrible. And we were in this same area. But we just didn’t see any of it this time. We talked to our neighbor who was in Portland the next day and had the same experience we did, no homeless, no drugs, no crime. I can’t understand how the “realities” can be so different.
It's because they shuffle them around without actually solving any problems. So they're not downtown right now, they're off in, say, Gresham. "See we've solved it" they tell the people downtown, and in Gresham "we're actively working on it!"
Later they will flush them out of Gresham and they'll be off to SE Portland, and they'll brag to Gresham about what a great job they did. And then eventually they'll cycle around downtown again, and they'll pretend it's a brand new problem they're still coming to grips with. On and on it goes, the cycle of gaslighting and virtue signaling.
Oh and meanwhile trantifa and associates are busy harassing ICE, or so I've heard, so they haven't been trashing their usual haunts lately. But they're still there and will eventually come up with some new reason to go try to burn down the courthouse or blockade the roads or whatever. Because the city only ever plays catch and release with them until they murder somebody.
So yes, downtown might be habitable now. But zombie season will come around again, and again, forever, for as long as the Good Liberals of Portland keep electing their fellow Good Liberals and pretending everything is fine.
Another piece of the puzzle. Wow. Thank you.
To be as fair as I can to them, I should add the caveat that they *have* chased some out... to other parts of the state. Notably the Deschutes Forest right on the other side of the Cascades, which they've been burning down bit by bit.
The pols say this is the fault of "climate change" or "campers". At least 9 times out of 10 the real story is they lit a trash fire or somesuch during wildfire season, but the pols don't want to attribute it to the "unhomed" because that would make their lack of action look really bad, since Oregonians don't like seeing our forests burning down.
See for more info https://truthonthestreets.substack.com/p/oregon-progressive-policies-just, from a local.
That takes me back. Sleeping out in the open by one of the ice caves... no worries except bears and sabertooth cats! Like another planet....
What takes me aback is how easily the Compassionate Ones TM have betrayed the forest they were once so keen on protecting.
Yup. Scratch Sisters and Bend off the retirement list.
It's a shame. Bend was great 10 years ago if you liked the dry weather. I do not so would not live there, but I enjoyed visiting.
Old Town/China town and the train station, really horrible last time I was there about a week ago; Burnside between the bridge and Powell's, always a drugged out person wandering into the road. Every. Time; Outer SE, which is downright overwhelmed in some areas, like 92nd ave. by the Max Line; Further out, on the East side, right up until Gresham. So many spots. Maybe not places one would normally walk around. But I sure have seen it. I don't think it's so hard to wrap your head around--not trying to be rude--but also, how can you know there was "no crime?" There's plenty of crime. It makes the local news often enough, and you can read the SE Portland Bee, for all the crazy stuff going on in various neighborhoods in SE. Arson, drugged out drivers wreaking havoc, among many other avoidable crap. I get it---no fun to seek this stuff out. But if you don't, then you'll just have to trust the people who do see it and talk about it. I have no reason to make stuff up. And if I did want to, for some reason, then you'd have to drive around and see for yourself to prove me wrong. That's where we are in the world of reporting, I suppose. People do lie and exaggerate, for sure. If anything, personally, I'm holding back. I didn't even talk about the THREE DIFFERENT times we (me and my teen daughters) saw someone take a shit right in front of us at the Woodstock Goodwill parking lot/grass strip, which is often swarmed with lunatic homeless, screaming at passers by and relieving themselves at random. It's gross out there. Stay safe.
What you say is true and so well put, and *moderate*, that I wish I could have come up with it.
My wife and I came to PDX from LA in the late 80s. We raised our daughter in the Irvington/Alameda/Grant Park/Beaumont area. The advent of tent camping, with tents/tarps being provided FoC by the county and NGOs changed everything. It did for street homelessness what the leash did for surfing, made the difficult so routine that the sport--or lifestyle--exploded.
And it's a poison pill: any leader suggesting removing tents risks being popularly viewed as a callous brute. See Rene Gonzalez.
To me, the rhetoric of city/county leadership is that all of the energy/money being spent on the homeless problem is to help this relatively small self-destructive minority at the expense of the functioning majority.
All of the official effort is for *them*; the fact that all the rest must work around these irresponsibles--*step* around them downtown, even--while leadership goodheartedly works to find a solution for the life problems for people who are not interested in rejoining the rest of society never seems to be addressed, at all. *We've* got to help *them*. Not "they need to *begin* to conform to common laws and behavioral norms". That never is in the equation, because that's for us; it's too much to ask of them, apparently.
I can remember taking my daughter to Laurelhurst Park, an Olmsted-designed city park space--for the simple joy of feeding the ducks, and maybe playing on the equipment over near the tennis courts. When I drive by now I realize that no responsible parent will want to do this.
Our loss...
The folks you can be open and honest with are in Vancouver (withthe exception of the people that moved there from Portland). It could be changed, if the conservatives in the state banded together, if the voter rolls were cleaned and vote by mail ended.
Thank you for sharing. I moved to Portland in 2006 and despite the beauty of the river, Forest Park, plentiful river rafting, beautiful waterfall hikes, Mt. Hood, New Seasons, and the delicious organic food, and the inexpensive apartment (back then), I cried almost everyday the first year I lived there.
Jogging downtown around tents and sleeping bodies on the side walk was so uncomfortable and that was before 2010! Downtown Portland in Winter felt like a dark, gothic, gloomy, congested place to me that needed to welcome back God.
I was thrilled to escape Portland in 2013. I enjoyed visiting multiple times a year, since Portland was lovely for a big city and it had been home so had become more comfortable since I had gotten used to it. In 2018 I attended a conference in Portland and the city was noticably uncared for, yucky and uncomfortable. Graffiti everywhere, the running loop around the river crossing the steel bridge was awful, tents everywhere. The mixed smell of urine, feces, and marijuana. Haven't wanted to visit Portland since.
Thank goodness I wasn't in Portland in 2020. I can't imagine 2020-2022 locked deep in the totalitarian states of Oregon, Washington, or California.
I hope Portland turns things around. I happily moved to a more conservative area (unfortunately, still in a super lefty liberal state, oh well, can't have everything), which is now rotting under local liberal leadership. More tents, drug overdoses multiple times daily, more homeless, all which I avoid.
I became downwardly mobile halving my salary to escape California and move to a red state to escape this insanity. At the same time I don’t blame you for staying in Portland. It’s beautiful and it’s your home .
Great comment, and it is universally applicable.
We have the exact same class of people over here in Sweden too, and they sound the same, behave the same and suggest the same non-solutions to the same problems.
Not even subjecting them to the immediate consequences of their ideas made policy works; they just sell their house/apartment and move to a new NIMBY-area.
🙌
The woman who was in charge of the "Covid data dashboard" for the county that contains Washington State's capitol (Thurston County, Olympia) was moved laterally into another job a couple years ago: harassing rural Thurston County residents for their septic systems.
I only know this because I helped a family settle the estate of someone they lost to the jabs; she mailed the deceased nearly three years after his death and sale of his property to notify him that his rural house's septic system might be a problem, because it existed.
At no time did anyone in that county issue an iota of concern about what Babs describes. Hundreds of tramps camping right next to waterways/lakes, leaving sewage, toxics, etc., by the ton to leak right into groundwater, and drinking water.
You say "wipe them out," but I don't know what you mean. Open season on state, county, and municipal workers is something others have suggested, but I don't see what that will solve. Public sector work--including in the Ed Biz--became the employer of last resort for many people in the PNW, as our economy was handed over to Chyna and India. WA state, e.g., is effectively a resource extraction colony for Asia, and a port/logistics throughput for slave-labor-camp consooooomer goods. Also a place for Asians to launder their ill-gotten money.
And the tramps are people who were sh!tcanned by Reaganismo and its downstream pollution, then handed Americans over to a Globo rentier system while trashing productive communities and sectors in favor of Dutch's voodoonomics. Add the normalization of lucrative Intoxication Culture, marinate in mass media psyops, and you've got people defeated without firing a shot.
Totally disgusted, but not surprised, by the reaction of the local "leaders" to Trump sending troops. The Portland police have not only refused to enforce the law, they call Antifa members as friendly witnesses when they're sued for not enforcing the law. (Result: The Portland police don't have to enforce the law.)
One of the videos was full of 3-second cuts. Oh wow, everything must be great because there's still a store that has all its windows! Cancel the order!
Meanwhile, none of those "leaders" show up around 11 pm at the ICE building -- and neither do the local media stations. If it takes Trump to get the nation to pay attention to what's going on, fine by me.
What's going on in Portland is a CHOICE. The leaders of Portland WANT it to look that way.
But why? How are they benefiting from this? Direct payments from Soros? I mean, I agree it's intentional, I just don't understand. Only the most horrible of people would ruin everything just to sit on a pile of gold.
They get to be the public face of resisting Trump. That comes with all sorts of perks. As an added bonus, it's a distraction from the fact the current leaders have run the city (and the state) into the ground.
A smart leader (even one on the left) would take this opportunity to use the off-ramp that Trump provides. The same is true of recent homelessness rules, which I wrote about last month: https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/new-federal-rules-hit-homeless-where
Good summary. I would also add that these people are satanists and their big joy in life is to destroy humanity and the things that make us human i.e. compassion, spiritual growth and beliefs, capacity to feel happy and joyous, etc. all the things that make us human. These soulless, psychopathic entities (and I don't say that lightly - SOULLESS psychopaths is exactly what I mean) enjoy hurting and torturing other people. That is what psychopaths most enjoy, making others suffer. They benefit from destroying our wonderful cities by torturing humanity, making our streets completely unsafe and filthy and watching us suffer. They will continue to ruin us until we stop them and that is what Trump/white hats is in the process of doing. I was a therapist for many years with a Master's degree and had to study psychopathic/sociopathic/narcissistic thinking.
In short, they enjoy literally torturing humanity, especially children, and also animals and this is what they do at their satanic rituals. As I said they will not stop until we stop them. That's why Trump is sending military and ICE into these cities. Hope this info is helpful.
Thank you for this comment! I am currently reading M. Scott Peck’s 1980s book People of the Lie. It ties in perfectly.
Glad you found my comment helpful. People of the Lie book is an excellent book, everyone should read it IMO. It absolutely describes evil so well.
Great book. I think it captures so much of our current leadership that Chris describes. They’ve lied to themselves for so long, they’ve come to believe their lies and are living in an alternate reality of their own invention. To think otherwise would have existential consequences for them, so they go on happily living in their dream world, ignoring the pain and suffering that their policies cause, pretending all is awesome because they “care” about all the oppressed and marginalized and they are therefore the “good guys”. Meanwhile, those of us in the real world, seeing the actual harm they cause, can’t begin to understand their carefully crafted delusions and if we try to raise them, we are the mean, hear people who must be cancelled for not believing the “right” way.
Also read it with "1984""
We are in dire straits ..
> That is what psychopaths most enjoy, making others suffer.
I wish I could share your sense that they even are aware of others' suffering.
They strike me more as stoners/addicts entirely removed from ANY reflection from others...or from themselves. And in the latter--lacking self reflection--they resemble my ancestors' folk tales about vampires (no reflection in the mirror).
Most people who are alcoholics/addicts are not psychopaths or even sociopaths; they are simply lost in the fog of alcohol and/or drugs. I say this as someone who was a therapist who worked with that population for many years. Some are but addiction and psychopathology are 2 different things with different causes. I've seen many, many alcoholics and addicts get clean and sober and become very good people with deep compassion for others who are often helping other people. Many addicts become that way because they had horrendous experiences as children or adults and they are trying to kill the deep pain inside themselves. I also say this as a person with many years of recovery myself from alcohol and the reason I drank was due to a lot of deep pain I experienced from my birth mother and later on from my psychopathic parents who adopted me when I was age 6. That was many years ago and now that I'm in my senior year, I'm a much different person than when I was drinking and I've learned a great deal from my life experience. Psychopaths are an entirely different group, their brains don't work right and are missing something in their brains which makes them have no compassion for others. I also believe they do not have a soul and embrace evil happily. They simply are different from most humans.
Thank you. I’ve been wondering, besides money, what these city “leaders” could possibly gain from not only allowing horrible things to go on, but gleefully touting them. This makes sense.
Money still plays a huge part. They get to dole out huge amounts of cash to their friends, some of which just happens to get donated back to their political campaign...
... and since they control the rigged elections, they don't need to spend most of that on their campaign. Perhaps you've noticed that unused campaign funds are never refunded to the donors, they just get added to the politician's personal fortune.
See my comment re San Francisco. It's a billion dollar NGO graft factory funded by your tax dollars to pay political friends
Yes, money is important to them. The 3 main things that psychopaths love are money, power and control. If they show a great fondness for those 3 things, then they are probably psychopaths.
You may want to see my comment just below.
Absolutely this, Sim. For some reason this kneejerk resistance gains them...something. Membership in the cabal.
> A smart leader (even one on the left) would take this opportunity to use the off-ramp that Trump provides.
This is the thing I find most frustrating. He handles all negotiations like an intelligent, mature man of the world who knows how to drive a hard bargain but always leaves the opposition room to maneuver.
They have no comprehension of this level of adult interaction/behavior/negotiation.
So I have to conclude that there is a sort of studied Perpetual Adolescence about it. Peter Pan Syndrome. This is how incompetent they are. They can do nothing in the real world--build nothing, maintain nothing--but claim to be Administrators Extraordinaire.
But their skills are nothing but I'M AGIN IT. And they drive the general levels of political discourse and social functioning ever deeper into the cesspit.
Democrats are making deportations a red line because they know that without tens of millions illegals padding the census (and voter rolls) they’ll lose a lot of political power. Their unions will also lose a lot of clients they use to suck up federal money.
They've built a whole ecosystem out of NGO funding for services and whatnot, and they reap nearly all the benefits of that ecosystem.
Kill NGOs. They are NOT non-governmental.
Truth.
Anarchy creates fear which is then filled by an authoritarian promising safety.
It's the communist playbook run over and over again. And why they always erase history. To enable the replay without anyone asking - how many more people need to die by repeating this nonsense over and over?
Anarcho-tyranny.
Yup. Those of us old enough remember the scenes of Moscow in the 70’s and 80’s with the alcoholics drinking anti-freeze lying about the park benches and streets.
Then that megalomaniac putin reined in the corruption and improved the economy and now all those sweet, adorable alcoholics are nowhere to be found. Today the orange monster in DC is threatening the same “improvements” here. Obamagod-willing we won’t suffer the same fate.
Looks at the smug sell righteousness in the Press conference. It is hard for conservatives who largely just want to be left alone, to understand, but that is pure orgasm for progressives.
In all of these ops
The powerful get more power
The rich get more money
The rank and file get to feel smug and superior.
everyone gets paid (or stolen from)
The hardest lesson to understand is that we have communism, because so many people WANT to be communists. It is not just pushed from Soros et al, it is a push and pull from a significant minority at all levels.
If Tina and the Karens have a dial, where they could double the communism,
Double the homelessness
double the crime
but double the self righteousness, the would dial it up.
Which is what they're doing, and not dialing it back
Everyone who loves communism actually thinks they will be the ones making the decisions.
And communists love to torture the rest of us - literally. I was in Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine in 1977 and saw it up close and personal. I was with a group traveling through Europe and all of us started drinking heavily by the time we got to Soviet Union. It was heartbreaking and terrifying.
interesting, tell us more
I was born in and lived under communism. There were no homeless, and crime was low (apart from the crime done by the politicians themselves). :-)
But of course, those were the old days when even the commies had some old fashioned common sense.
big problems equals big funding.
The important thing to them is to "sit on top." They don't care if it's a pile of gold or a pile of shit.
Or in Ilhan Omars case, her brother.
That´s pretty evil, but funny.
I was watching a right leaning live streamer who rode his bike into the antifa crowd outside the federal\ICE building last night. He rolled up on a fairly normal looking younger blonde girl (out of place with the cluster B weirdos that go down to the ICE building every night) and asked her who she was. She said she was from Corvalis, and drove into Portland that night. Her words: "I saw Trump on TV and it made me real mad, so I came out." And that's it. That's all it took. She drove 85 miles because Trump was on TV and it made her "mad." The media keeps spinning these people up, and it's overwhelmingly women, or dudes who think they are women, or some other deep mental illness falling for it.
The media ARE mental illness, my friend.
People used to say, "TV is like heroin." And I'd say NO, it's not LIKE heroin, it IS heroin.
Mass media psywar is designed to tap into and exploit the exact same brain centers that drugs do. The combination of Intoxication Culture and Media Addiction has claimed the vast majority of people's consciousness.
This woman you note is a prime example of what the psywar industries aim to create. She obviously has nothing better to do on the home front--no home, no farm with animals to care for, no children or spouse. She has a media stream, constantly looking for the next thing to get "spun up" over.
There are so many walking wounded women in this society, it's staggering. But the assault on our women has been by design, and we need to be careful not to be coached to side with the malefactors who harmed them.
I knew it was bad, but I didn't know how bad till Jan. of 2017 and that "women's march" in DC. The one where women who demanded not to be objectified dressed up as female genitals, enraged that a tall, handsome, successful, admired, blond haired, blue eyed man was getting sworn in as POTUS. They effectively demanded that he take them as war trophies for vanquishing their Queen ("Grab this!" "Choose me, not guns!" Etc.). Never in my life did I see such a massive tsunami of psychological pain...and close to nobody saw it clearly.
we need to fight them there, so we don't have to fight them here.
Chaos is a main goal of Marxism. When the chaos is bad enough, totalitarianism will look good.
So is torturing the rest of us. Just look at what Chinese rulers are doing to their own people.
you answered your own question.
Well, there ya go. "Only the most horrible of people would ruin everything just to sit on a pile of gold." What part of your own sentence do you not understand? That these people are actually "horrible?" That they want to "ruin everything" to get that pile of gold? What?
TDS is a large part of this. Retaining power is another. They also don't know the massive manipulation at play. The financial incentives are a little murky but i know they're there.
The benefit to acting this way is that the people who have your komoromat don’t expose it to the world.
You're right SC, it is a choice, but it isn't just the leaders...the choice is made by the voters each and every time there's an election. It's the same up here in Washington, and the same down there in California.
Sorry Chris, but the majority of voters in your state think Messrs. Wiener, Swalwell, Schiff, and Mmes. Bass, Waters, Harris, et al are doing a bang up job. They and their ilk will continue to get elected until the majority of voters come across their very own dead bodies lying in the street or their very own "housing challenged" campers living on their front lawns. Only then "might" things change, only then might they begin to question the importance of having a decent Pinot.
Well, that's the problem with mail-in ballots...we don't really know what the voters think, we just know what the ballots say.
And a mail in ballot period that lasts for WEEKS prior to Election Day…GOT FRAUD? 🥸😣
And after, in Washington.
Or, perhaps too many are also enjoying that Pinot Noir.
Yes. Yes. You put it exactly right. Over and over I ask myself if this is really what people (real honest-to-goodness people) are voting for. Do we really know?
Or what Smartmatic says.
💯
The elections in CA are rigged and have been for many election cycles. Not all people in Commifornia voted for those scumbags listed above. Quite the contrary, they didn’t vote for them. But if you pad the voting rolls, then rig the voting machines, and have the ability to ‘vote by mail’ for over a month prior to the election, that formula leads to a corrupt and rigged election.
We need to vote on a designated ‘election day’, people get off work, businesses & liquor stores are closed, with paper ballots and the ‘count’ is done in 1 Day. That would be a ‘free and fair election’!
This is great, so glad to see it. Would only add that even worse, those who have gone deep into election cheating have shown us that mail-in ballots are sent to empty lots and non-addresses --- in piles meant for quick pickup by bad actors ---- found on already-bloated voter rolls, and filled out to make up the gap and win elections for the Dem (leftist) candidate (or proposition, or whatever) of their choice. The ballot marking is likely done by highly motivated people (public employee unions such as SEIU), who are also likely paid. Once the ballot is separated from the envelope it can't be traced. And that's only one of the schemes employed.
P.S. Be sure to see Chris' "UPDATE" on his original article. It's at the end. Hilarious.
That's how it was in California until Covid. I was a polling inspector for years, up until I moved in 2017, and I was honestly proud of how clean my precinct's elections were. Every single ballot cast in my precinct was accounted for and verified, and I personally picked up the sealed blank ballots the day before an election, had several poll workers verify the seals and then then counting process, and delivered the verified sealed bags of voted ballots to law enforcement at the end of the day. Long before midnight we knew the results except in the case of very close elections. The process worked. That's why they got rid of it.
You know, it’s bad enough that “democracy” has been commandeered, perverted, and twisted into a concept that is universally and exclusively believed to mean POLITICAL democracy, which necessarily requires a corresponding universal belief in the fallacy that “government” NECESSARILY equals “the political state”—that is, a societal structure based on arbitrary political laws enforced by legalized coercion or the threat thereof. But OK…that’s the prevailing system under the religion of politics; it is what it is…
…but that’s the worst part. It isn’t even that. An electoral system without integrity isn’t even a passable counterfeit of real government. It upends and inverts even the fundamental premise of political democracy—namely, the unspoken sacred-cow belief that tyranny by the majority over the minority is acceptable—and replaces it with tyranny by the minority (the political elite who defrauded their way into power and rigged the system to keep them in power) over the majority.
The founders of the American republic knew that such dangers are characteristic of political democracy, which is why they tried to mitigate the problem by establishing a republic. Alas, they still believed that “government = political state”, and there went the ball game.
Still, the rules of legalized coercion were not yet established after the founding of the republic, and while the politicians were arguing about what rules to impose on a free people, the nation of people who had unprecedented freedom used it to create unprecedented prosperity. Unfortunately, legislators legislate, and over the past two-and-a-half centuries, the corpus of political law has ballooned into “government ON the people”.
The upshot is that the broken nature of political democracy—already struggling to maintain the illusion that it actually provides the service of real government—is now being seen as the inherently unstable system that it is. We were never going to be able to vote ourselves out of the problems that result from such a system. But add to that the vastly more destabilizing corruption of an electoral system devoid of integrity, and the recipe for accelerated civilizational decline is complete.
Democrat voters could witness mad Maxine, Cortex, or Gruesome shoot their neighbour and still ask "why did Trump do this"?
Our hellhole cities (and states) are collapsing in lawlessness, madness, chaos, and anarchy, but our elections are clean and voters have a choice in the matter? Not so sure about that............
Sorry, no, elections have been stolen for decades. The leaders are psychopaths and psychopaths love to torture decent people.
Voters? Oh my goodness.
https://x.com/BevHarrisWrites/status/1854408541957972081
Andy Ngo, who had to leave the country because Antifa in Portland terrorized him, beat him to a brain bleed and doxxed him, just went to a kangaroo court in Portland to prosecute these people. The jury sided with Antifa because they were threatened. And the judge didn’t throw the case out because they sided with Antifa. Portland's lost. Totally.
I wrote about that when it happened. Also of note -- journalist Katie Daviscourt was covering the trial and got her rental car all smashed up.
https://simulationcommander.substack.com/p/portland-takes-a-step-back-with-ngo
Antifa/anarchists are the soldiers, paid thugs, of money powers who delight in taking advantage of chaos, violence, fear, and confusion. The politicos, judges, police, the whole system that protects the thugs are consequently prostitutes of those who benefit from the rot.
Yes. And I think there is a hierarchy here, where the ground shock troops are composed of the mentally ill, drug addicts, and petty criminals. They are sometimes joined by bored middle class university students who like to cosplay Marxist revolutionaries on the weekends. And then there are the university professors who give intellectual legitimacy to all the moral/logical inversions (but never actually get their own feet wet). And then there is the law enforcement industrial complex of officers, lawyers, and judges who are in it for the bribes and potential political power. And then there are the politicians themselves- stone cold sociopaths who are selected as the top local administrators of this demonic psyop. This is what sits in actual place of the idealistic belief that local governments are democratically elected and represent the interests of the community. In actual fact, no one voted this into being and no one is voting themselves out of this.
What’s the deal where police departments are placed under control of DOJ? Normal Portlanders would applaud
I haven't heard anything about that. The focus (like 2020) is on protecting federal property.
Yeah but wasn’t the LAPD under the control of DOJ after Rodney King. I want to say other departments have been as well.
I don't know anything about that but wouldn't be surprised to learn it. My guess is that in those cases the locals probably consented?
I would think that can happen only in DC, states rights and all that.
It would be under Court Order if local police were violating or not uphold Federal rights. Usually deals with civil rights violations. That’s where they got LAPD after Rodney King.
Oh civil rights violations. Yep, that’s about the only recourse that Federal oversight (NOT control) is possible.
The “choice” part is key here. The city’s leaders want violence, disorder, and misery. It’s hard to wrap your mind around this, but when you see it often enough it becomes the only explanation that makes any sense.
I have seen half a dozen references in local (there) media, people saying "There's no problems here, they're just protesting, the only people it bothers is the local residents."
Oh, OK, it's only bothering residents. That makes it dandy.
Yes, they enable. In San Francisco the NGOs are a multi billion dollar industry funded by taxpayers and the just prolong and enable homelessness. It's just graft, the same old story!!
this is true
Kent State them.
They never engage on the actual issues -- that's how you know they are con artists.
--"Why don't you help the homeless people dying on the street!?"
--"What homeless? What street? What?"
Maybe you can explain it to me again how it benefits these people to act insane? Are they directly on the take for Dr. Evil?
Many of them have to pretend not to understand things because if they don't, they'll be thrown out of all their social circles.
Remember when they had to pretend fire alarms are confusing?
Though in his case, it was totally believable.
Seems odd that it never occurs to them to actually try to do a better job than Trump. To beat him to the punch. Or even express an alternative.
Instead, they put themselves in a very difficult position: "No, we don't need you to fix this stuff that we have decided to fix by tolerating it instead of fixing it. We are Portland. We are the resistance. We have good Pinot noir."
Reminds me of the old saying that the best revenge is to live well. Maybe they never heard that one. Of course, fixing things would require some actual thinking--can they still manage that--and a lot of effort.
Because if the politicians turn on the crazies they'll eventually engrave bullets with messages for them.
This is self preservation.
Or self-pussification. 😄
Exactly. This country needs a de-pussification program, on the order of post war2 de-nazification, after the advent of participation trophies.
I'm just glad you managed to bring in Godwin's Law. Can't have a discussion without referring to a German political party of nearly 100 years ago, after all.
JFC bro, keep your eye on the ball, it's 2025, not 1930. So effing sick of you boomers and your "nazi" chants.
Hey dishpit im genX.
🤪😂
There's enough actual true believers as well as truly mental that not all of them have to act insane.
"Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven."
“It’s time to shove these people onto a barge and tow them out to sea.”
Perhaps, we can commission Musk to build a spaceship that they can use to escape the giant space goat, you know, the one that will be devouring the Earth next month?
I've noticed a new rhetorical strategy embraced by our progressive aristocracy here in Trump 2.0. Now along with pristine morality and enlightened wisdom, they've also credited themselves with the power of mind-reading:
Thus when Trump cracks down on academia because of its shameless capitulation to Jew hate, he's only doing it because he hates intellectuals and scholarship—only fools believe he would want to hold these places accountable for civil rights violations. And when he cracks down on illegal immigration, it's not because of the corrosive effects this has had on our country, but because of how much he hates brown people. The issue is never the issue!
And now they've come to the best trick of all: Epstein files! These have been magically transformed by the power of media alchemy from last year's wacky conspiracy theory to this year's all-purpose explanation. It's only right-wing bigots who notice that most of our cities have become apocalyptic wastelands filled with fentanyl zombies—it's really all about Epstein, who is more useful in death than in life.
Trump owns the brains and souls of his enemies much more than he does of his supporters. Trump voters will move on, but what will Team Social Justice do when he's gone? He is the center of their universe and they've devoted the last decade of their lives to moving him inside their heads to claim total ownership. If the choice is between constant hysterical hatred of Donnie or taking a single clear honest look at reality, the former wins every time. Perhaps they're the ones projecting? Nahh, impossible! ;)
Trump will be replaced instantly, when the time comes to replace him. They practice.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/why-ron-desantis-more-dangerous-trump-n1276142
I see your point and remember when DeSantis became Emmanuel Goldstein for his heresies, including not treating Covid like the Black Death and not allowing small children to get sex changes. For this, the MSM will never forgive him.
But I don't think anyone can dominate a brain like Donnie, he is the incarnation and manifestation of all progressive fears and hatreds. Also, no one draws attention like Trump aka President Don Rickles, he grabs every eyeball in a way that may be unprecedented for a modern politician. (I think only Teddy Roosevelt compares in this regard.)
But yes of course, every conservative today is now cast as Hitler's understudy, ready to step into the role once they gain national stature.
You really summed up my experience with these “lefties” who in my world are mostly older, white, privileged, progressive lefty types. Who all have got the C*V* D Jabs and Boosters!
You are clever, Clever Pseudonym.😉
lol thanks i try ;)
Team Social Justice will declare that Trump wasn’t so bad compared to this new guy who is definitely Hitler. They’ve been doing it for decades, and the troops fall in line every time.
You're probably right. Hitler and the Nazis are too useful to ever retire them, but I wish people would learn some new historical analogies. Maybe the next Republican Prez can be Franco? Pinochet? Genghis Khan?
100 years after the fall of Berlin will everyone you don't like still be Hitler!? Probably.
Holocaustianity is our modern secular religion. They can’t learn any other historical analogies because their power flows from pity from The Worst Thing That Ever Happened, and any other analogy would detract from their power.
It's the new (late 20th c) Foundation Myth for the west. From elsewhere (not mine):
How do you recognise a foundation myth? It fulfils three functions.
1) It explains the origin and structure of the world (and society).
2) It defines ultimate good and evil (and from those definitions are derived the values that are used to justify the holding of power).
3) It determines what is held sacred in that society.
For modern Westerners the story of WWII has become their foundation myth. It fulfils all three functions.
1) We live in the ‘Post-War World’. The lines on the map, the institutions, the sense of what era we live in, all arise from the starting point of WWII.
2) Ultimate evil is Nazis. Ultimate good is opposing Nazis. The values derived from these definitions are anti-racism, equality, diversity, anti-nationalism and so on.
3) The only thing that is held sacred, that cannot be denied or mocked in the contemporary West, is the Holocaust.
The problem is that all three functions are backwards or negative.
Instead of the origin event being one of fertility and new life, it was a conflagration of death and destruction.
Instead of ultimate good taking the central position in the story that slot is occupied by ultimate evil. Everyone knows that Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil, holds the centre point of the WWII story.
Instead of that which is held sacred being something mysterious and sublime it (the Holocaust) is an obscenity.
Having a negative foundation myth means the tree of life for Westerners is poisoned.
This is by design.
Also he hates science
The same people who can detect microaggressions and the subtle influences of “systemic racism” somehow can’t see crime and disorder on city streets.
Yeah. Portland is a fucking hellhole. Do not believe any bullshit claiming otherwise.
On any given day, driving around in the sunlight, it may look like a paradise, at least as far as cities go. Then you drive by the same place another day, when the zombie horde has migrated there (having been kicked out of the last place they were infesting). You see it in another light.
Eventually you see all, or most, of it in that light. The swarm moves from place to place, and every place has seasons of "this is what this city should be" and seasons of "keep moving and don't make eye contact."
Except the neighborhoods where the rich libs live, which miraculously don't have these problems. Because they're very responsive when they see a Person in Need(tm). They send the zombie to a place where it can be "helped" which is: anywhere but their neighborhood, out of sight and out of mind.
There it will occupy a park, or a bridge, or the side of a railroad track during the day, and range freely at night setting things on fire, screeching incoherently, or walking into traffic. Sometimes it finds a nice cozy place to die behind a grocery store and is discovered days later because of the smell.
And that's just the zombies. Nevermind the mutant retards who, fully conscious if not sapient, actively work to destroy things. As has been well documented. They're not very good at it, but they are persistent in their efforts.
It will be a lot of work to render Portland inhabitable by sane people again. Meanwhile, there are various flavors of insanity. That is all.
This is precisely what Los Angeles is like. Our wonderful unhoused neighbors, who we adore, need to stay in their designated areas, or our private armed security will be forced to assist them.
Don't forget Martha's Vineyard; those Karens have an Undesirables Removal System™ that is ruthlessly efficient.
I don't have a link anymore but maybe a year or two ago somebody went and interviewed some middle/upper-middle class boomers when the tents started showing up in their lawns. It was hilarious and sad at the same time. "We want to help, but they can't just do this here" or something like that was typical of their befuddled responses.
Needless to say *their* neighborhood was straightened out quick. *Mine* got another wave a week or two later, wherein they took over the park my kid used to play for a second time and just about every other empty lot for a mile around.
All anecdotes in earlier post from personal experience, btw, not just "things I heard."
At one point, not far from where we lived, one of them ate another one's face at a train station (both, apparently, were pedophiles, so that's a nice touch). You might have heard that story, because it got national attention for a blip.
And Craigslist has ads for activists. They are paid to riot.
So does NoKings.org and Indivisible.org. They recruit ‘volunteer activists’ to be ‘event coordinators’.
On my Mac, I can get the ™ superscript with option + 2. I use it a lot, for my favorite catchphrase Good White People™.
Our country is being destroyed by GWP™. I'll bet Portland government is run by GWP™.
Overwhelmed with them. Substack auto-formats (tm) to ™... but only on Notes, not on comments. Ugh. I am lazy.
Clearly, all Portland needs to do to be the paradise that our betters claim is for more of its people to embrace Kristof's advice and switch from using Xylazine to imbibing those delightful Pinots. Problem solved.
I'm alternating between almost crying and wanting to scream, and it's not even on my continent.
In my late teens, I lost six friends to drug use. When I say lost, I mean they died. During those years, I saw the reality of drug use as close as you can and still walk away from it.
I wish, I want to say something profound or helpful or hopeful but I just can't.
I've been trying and trying to make the words work but I can't. It's too vile, it's too incomprehensible.
There must be a reckoning.
I reach over to your loss, I share similar of my own, I can never know what you experienced, but I can join palms and bow heads from at least related experience.
The rise and ubiquity of Intoxication Culture has been warfare.
Most people--especially in the US PNW, and hip cities like Portland and Seattle--don't recognize it.
Thank you.
The issue isn't Karen Bass or any other useful fool of her kind. The problem resides with the jackasses that vote for this madness, over and over. It's your neighbor who is the problem. We need to fight this with ridicule and ferocity. Unfortunately, it appears that rational folks have been polite and agreeable for far too long. It's time for house to house, coffee shop confrontation. It's time to call a spade a spade. If you see something... say something!
Kristof gets the Joseph Goebells award., and someone please tell Kristoff that the primary evidence that a leader is authoritarian is a desire to disarm his citizens.
These five rules of propaganda have been known for a long time, and they are certainly not original with myself. They can be found on the internet through searches, but I don't think that the powerful really like them being known. Please send them around so that more people will be aware of them. Ideally get them posted in school classrooms. Thank You.
The Five Rules of Propaganda
1. The rule of simplification - reducing all data to a simple confrontation between 'Good and Bad', 'Friend and Foe'.
2. The rule of disfiguration - discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.
3. The rule of transfusion - manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one's own ends.
4. The rule of unanimity - presenting one's viewpoint as if it were unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: draining the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure , and by 'psychological contagion'.
5. The rule of orchestration - endlessly repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.
https://drp314.substack.com/p/copy-propaganda-thoughts
I'm just glad you dragged Goebbels into it.
What a fine mind you have, viewing 2025 social issues in the US through a 1930s German political party lens. Maybe you'd like to also tell us how 18th century British Whigs and Tories fit in here? So very useful!
Portland… these are not homeless people. These are free range ADDICTS.
Mixed in with a bunch of people who probably should be hospitalized for mental health because they are a danger to themselves and or the community in California it’s a section 5150
The leaders should be hospitalized as well or jailed for their wanton and grotesque malfeasance
MAGA = Make Asylums Great Again
> they are addicts
Cuo bono?
Did you mean CUI BONO?
"Anchored reality." That's the term I've been looking for!
I get the feeling there are at least two, possibly 3 different timelines that are in the process of separating; and the one being referred to here as "anchored reality" is one that most of this stack's readership aligns with energetically (is anchored to). The others have their people just as anchored to them, but they're becoming so energetically divergent that they appear to be "un-anchored" / "unhinged" to us. As they should. And no doubt we look and feel just as "unhinged" to them. As we should :)
At some point, rather soon, it feels like - there will be some sort of big energetic snap or breakage point - and then it will be interesting to see how the other timelines go about separating completely from the one we are on, and how we will experience the absence of their residents - if we do at all. Maybe it will just be another weird Mandela effect situation, with only a tiny few ever even being able to remember the old, shared timeline when there really were a lot of dead junkies scattered around the streets of big cities, like pieces of litter that never got disposed of properly...
It went with the arrival of the floating decimal.
A barge is too kind.
Make them swim. I hear Portugal has amazing wine.
I like that idea- have them swim to Portugal!
One viewpoint: respond to reality as it is. Change what you can (and should) change. Some things should not (or can't) be changed.
The opposite behaves as if the wished-for utopia is upon us (or near) & by acting aspirationally will manifest it into existence. This is why leaders on the Left will always say "we've made a lot of progress, but there's still a lot of work to be done". It can't be "done", or else they're out of work.
Yes—manifesting. How many of these people really, truly believe they can wish everything into existence?
Yes 💯. The magic utopia that "ought" to be!
Even if we were to pretend and wish REAL HARD that Oregon Gov Tina Kotek is not the same rotting soul inside --- with a different face outside ---- as our own Gov Gavin Newsom or our own L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, what's as true and real as a drug-addicted almost-dead zombie stretched across a Portland or L.A. sidewalk is that such people as Kotek, Newsom, and Bass (just to name three) have poured gasoline on and set fire to their OWN credibility to such an extent in recent years that they can never EVER be believed or taken seriously AGAIN, and that is THEIR OWN FAULT. Not Trump's, and not ours.
I walked all around downtown Portland back in March. I stayed near Pioneer Courthouse Square--that part was mostly good, except for the lone crazy guy in the square screaming at invisible people.
But Old Town was a total shitshow. People living in tents on the sidewalks, crap everywhere, surprisingly young sick and hopeless filthy people sitting around, lying on the pavement. Lots of closed storefronts. I truly pity anyone who is (was) living there, working there, or trying to operate a business there. I guess the city just said, fuck you, we're not concerned.
When I lived in Eugene 30 years ago, all of downtown Portland was fantastic. Not anymore.