by Robert Bridge, Strategic Culture:

By now it is abundantly clear that the Democrats will do just about anything to ensure Trump’s defeat in November. That would include the proliferation of violence in major American cities to provide optics to the narrative that the US leader has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States. Will Portland, Oregon become Donald Trump’s Maidan?

During the public grilling of Attorney General William Barr on July 28, the Democrat’s pushed one argument above all others: Democratic cities had been enjoying their ‘summer of love’ that saw righteous folks peacefully protesting against police abuse until Darth Trump and his ‘storm troopers’ crashed the party with tear gas and pepper spray.

To quote Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.): “The protests began to wind down before you marched in and confronted the protesters. And the protesters aren’t mobs; they are mothers and veterans and mayors. Now you are projecting fear and violence nationwide in pursuit of obvious political objectives.”

Of course that was a deliberate distortion of reality that pretends riots were not happening every single day. The situation in Portland has been out of control since May, and was getting progressively worse. Here is a snippet from local Oregon media, dated May 31^st detailing the aftermath of a public vigil service to George Floyd.

Activists were outraged after a “trans femme protester” was arrested by plainclothes officers in an unmarked vehicle. https://t.co/vGL1074PT5

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) July 29, 2020

“As the march moved south, protesters began to break windows and graffiti buildings along Martin Luther King Boulevard and eventually, when they reached downtown, some began torching cars and public buildings, breaking windows and looting stores.”

The Portland Business Alliance estimated that between the property damage, looted inventory and lost wages from that ‘protest,’ Portland’s businesses and community suffered “tens of millions” in damages.

The peaceful protests did not end there, as clashes between the local police and rioters continued through the torrid month of June. It should be remembered that during this time, protesters were calling for police departments to be defunded and even disbanded altogether. Eventually, the city fathers got their wish. The Portland City Council passed a budget in late June that cut some $15 million from the police bureau. Now, when a Portland resident places a 9/11 call in an emergency situation an “unarmed, trained responder” will likely appear at their door. In other words, an actual deterrent to criminal behavior – the knowledge that a would-be offender might be arrested and sent to jail for his or her actions – no longer works to prevent illegal activities. Lawbreakers will come to the conclusion, and sooner rather than later, that they may act with a large degree of impunity.

As if that were not enough, days later, the activist group ‘Don’t Shoot’ won a temporary restraining order against the Portland Police Department, which stipulated that law enforcement officers were forbidden to use non-lethal munitions in crowd-control (i.e. riot) situations. Thus, the police lost their ability to confront looters and lawbreakers with the FN-303 anti-riot gun, flash-bang grenades, pepper spray and Long Range Acoustical Devices. Ironically, short of confronting the looters and rioters with deadly firepower, the exact sort of scenario the protesters were said to be protesting against, the police were left with no other options when it came to restoring law and order. No surprise, then, that local, state and federal property in Portland, like the federal court house, became a natural target of the mob.

A lawsuit put forward by the ACLU on behalf of aggrieved protesters described the situations as follows: “They are intentional acts by a lawless president, who has sent his paramilitary forces to shoot up the streets of Portland, choke downtown in a haze of toxic chemical fumes, and generate reelection soundbites – in blatant disdain of public safety, the rule of law, and the most fundamental principles of our Constitution.”

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