Like any study, I would take it with a grain of salt without knowing the underlying methodology, which isn’t directly available in the study cited by Axios. For example, at least 20 people lost their lives in the 2020 BLM riots, but the study concluded that there were only 8 “left-wing terrorism” events that year.
The devil is always in the details.
Meanwhile, Democrats continue to falsely call their opponents “fascists”, “Nazis”, and “threats to Democracy” while pretending their brownshirt street thugs Antifa don’t actually exist.
If everyone that disagrees with you is a right wing extremist, then it would make sense that the majority of political violence comes from the opposition, no?
Politics aside, lights-out Blackhawk helicopters circling low over residential areas after the kids have gone to bed does seem pretty inappropriate.
Even more so considering the actual area of concern is barely larger than a city block. Historically any issues at that site have happened after dark, so I get having eyes on it from above, but the excessive noise spreads up and down the river and up the hills. There are other options, and probably much cheaper.
Port of Portland has gotten more noise complaints in the past couple days than the entirety of last year, and they obviously can’t do anything about it.
The helicopters wouldn’t be there if people would let ICE do their jobs. The “protesters” are also loud as shit themselves. It is the same worn-out agitation tactics used for a very, very long time to attempt to provoke authorities into over-reacting so they can claim oppression.
Yes, the noise is annoying from both sides. However just from a pure physics standpoint, far more people are affected negatively from the chopper noise. People that were otherwise uninvolved and unaffected by what’s happening on the other side of town.
It’s CBPs choices that are causing the problem for them, not the protesters. So people who are otherwise ambivalent see CBP as the problem.
That’s mainly the point I was making about the inappropriateness. There are other options that have less collateral annoyance.
So, by disturbing a disabled, black female, aren’t those snowflake Portland liberals being racist, fascist, intolerant? Hmmmm, that situation is very confusing as they are literally doing every “bad” thing they claim that all evil straight, white, Christian males do….treat “colored” people badly.
It’s amusing that they are too stupid to realize that.
Yes. Well, maybe. It’s certainly not decent behavior. I disagree with the specific terms in a literal sense, but in the way they’re bandied about, sure.
That said, it’s no more appropriate to generalize large groups based on the actions of a few dozen people. I’m glad you used qualifiers here rather than suggesting all Portlanders or whatever.
A few bad cops doesn’t mean all cops are bad either.
I feel like that conflation of individual behaviors as being the norms of a larger group is one of the real problems.
I do. Blackhawks are pretty loud. Most people were unaffected by what’s happening in the area until the helicopters showed up.
I actually don’t think much escalation was needed anyway, it’s less than a hundred people that have caused issues historically, probably even less than that. This is a far larger jump in escalation than I think was necessary.
By “historically”, I mean since there were any protests outside the ICE facility.
I get that helicopters suck to try to sleep with, but this is a pretty expected and reasonable response to both the rhetoric and actions taken against ICE in other cities. With Portland, OR being the de facto headquarters of Antifa, you’re at ground zero of the political conflict. With Democrats campaigning on the idea that ICE is literally The Gestapo, some people will be dumb enough to believe it, then act accordingly. There’s no way to measure the number of shootings, etc, that the helicopters may have deterred or prevented.
My neighborhood is usually still quiet, but sirens and gunshots are a near-nightly thing for other parts of Lewiston. People in my town are literally asking the government to send the guard here, helicopters and all. Trump can’t do that unless the Insurrection Act is invoked, but Governor Mills can.
I think there is more than enough cause to at least deploy the Maine guard in the zones where kids don’t get bus service and have to walk to school. Those kids have seen some really, really crazy shit in the last five years that simply never happened before.
I’m not really sure what sources would suggest otherwise, or that it’s anything like a “war zone” or “like WW2”. There are videos of after-dark riot-like behavior and there were arrests. That hasn’t been an everyday or even every week occurence. The rest is mostly name-calling and literal noise (as previously mentioned).
That’s the big question that will be answered in November. I suspect it will be higher than a comparable election year, but I also suspect that the entire Democratic machine will be mobilized to vote it down. Right now they still have the entire suite of rigging mechanisms available, with plenty of translators ready to go.
Reports are emerging that Governor Mills was at the Caribou Amazon facility last week for a tour, which makes the question of how 250 ballots ended up in an Amazon box even more intriguing.
Libs of TikTok just picked the story up. So far none of our Soros owned legacy newspapers have touched the story.
Christ that video was both disgusting AND pathetic…are these liberal white woman just complete wimps/losers? Is their virtue signaling more important their DIGNITY/self-respect? I was embarrassed FOR HER watching that. Maybe she should shackle her hands/feet together and surrender herself to a black person, to be lead around on a leash and put in a dog cage. Maybe that will ease her white guilt and “show the world how sorry she is for being born white and SO privileged”. Man, that is so sad watching that. These “college-educated” (it’s important you say that, for to them that immediately signifies their superior intellect/wisdom/ & world view) white suburban liberal women are like a horrific poison to the normally red suburbs in America. Are most of them also single? I would think they would be, because what self respecting man would marry such a loser? Well, unless he’s a complete pussy, I guess that’s what would marry something like that. WTF happened white women? Did you just all decide to become self-hating, groveling losers whose only mission is to make black people “like you”? Funny thing about that….the type of black person who would expect/like you to act like that, newsflash, will NEVER like you, no matter how much you prostrate yourself to them! Those particular black folk only see skin color, and when they see you, a white woman, no matter what you do or say, they will always see you as “one of them”, the enemy, the evil privileged white woman, and they will always hate/mistrust you.
Neither did Lewiston until very recently. If you use 2010 as the baseline, shooting incidents are up 1,750 percent in Lewiston. It used to be a very quiet college town with normal college town problems, now we have a gang war with child soldiers.
Then it does sound like FBI/ATF or otherwise should step up their game. National Guard seems like maybe not the right fit, but overall, I don’t disagree with an increase in law enforcement.
This is the shooting data from Portland Police from 2019. This includes all reported gunshots. It is higher than I understood it to be, and I’m not sure how the reports are clustered (e.g., a single incident may have many reports).
Shootings were so rare that they weren’t even systematically tracked until four years ago or so. Exchanges of gunfire in the streets just didn’t happen, even if occasional murders, etc did.
There are a number of Federal investigations going on in Lewiston right now, but the short term solution is well within the governor’s reach. We’ve had a number of daylight shootings during school commute hours, including one right in front of a bus. Aside from the violence, the kids have to walk past people shooting up, having psychotic breaks, and doing the fentanyl lean every day.
Unlike Oregon, Maine hasn’t walked back any decriminalization or so-called “harm reduction” policies that enabled this dramatic transformation of the city. They are succeeding in funding more of it, in fact. Our “low barrier” homeless shelter is opening soon.
I’m genuinely sorry to hear that. I wish for the best.
Regarding the drugs and homeless situation (which I think is appropriate to join together), I’m somewhat surprised there’s much there. Not from an accessibility or poverty standpoint, but literally from a weather standpoint. West Coast weather is pretty temperate year-round. Obviously weather doesn’t drive homelessness, but it does bias it this direction for those who have any mobility.
Portland’s streets and parks have significantly improved from where it was a few years ago. It can be found, but you sort of have to go looking for it. No concerns for being out and about with my kids. (Unsurprisingly most of it is on the blocks surrounding a large cluster of shelters… which have few businesses anyway.) Obviously could always be better than it is.
To the earlier point though, I’m still having a hard time understanding the escalation in federal law enforcement here. We could maybe have used more help during the post-COVID/BLM time (as the data above shows), but really not making sense of the need for helicopters + 200 troops to handle 50ish people. (Maybe it’s more than that, but I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary.) Again, nothing resembling the “war zone”/”WW2” rhetoric.
EDIT: if the intent is to dismantle the leftist extremist groups, normal FBI-ish work – cover, infiltration, evidence-gathering – seems more appropriate than military action.
The drugs and homelessness spike coincided with the shootings spike, all of which coincided with single party Democrat rule being achieved in 2019, enacting radical policies around bail reform, drug laws, homeless shelter funding stipulations, “restorative justice”, ACLU legal victories, along with being a pipeline service city during Biden’s open borders.
Ww2 comparisons in Portland OR may be overwrought, but the political and symbolic significance of Rose City Antifa is definitely a factor in the response. The federal government is absolutely sending a message that it didn’t send during the BLM riots under Biden.
Didn’t Ted Wheeler kneel in solidarity with antifa back then?
You know, I actually don’t know. As I understood it, he was primarily against the somewhat-aggressive approach taken by federal law enforcement, but not in agreement with the rioting. He was also against what was viewed as federal-overreach into a local/state situation. But I don’t know exactly.
As I also understand it, most people are glad Wheeler is gone due to a lot of his policies. (I’m not in Portland proper, so I don’t follow closely.)
I do understand the symbolism of stamping out Rose City Antifa, assuming that they have in fact been instigators of violence. I suppose I’m anti-violence, regardless of the source. Violent extremism seems like a perfectly valid target.
Even regarding the protesting, I’m not a supporter of these actions, but physically blocking ICE vehicles with your body is one thing, yelling/namecalling/slurs are another (although we can argue about which is worse). Both seem reasonable by some interpretation of reasonable. Hitting/Throwing objects is entirely different.
And I do have some issue with the actions taken in the name of “antifa”. In the face of genuine fascism, I’d imagine most people aren’t exactly a fan. All the rhetoric and actions around “antifa” seems to dilute the reasonable non-violent position of “I don’t want fascism in this country”.
Detaining citizens, using means that are in violation of applicable laws – perfectly reasonable thing to be against. Detaining non-citizens, acting within the constraints of the law, it’s not the same thing. Detaining criminals, citizens or not, again is fine. Could it be done differently for the non-criminals? Maybe.
