\nPortland announces it will aggressively clean or remove homeless encampments
I cannot emphasize enough how much the local left shot itself in the foot last year and left the downtown business/property developers/West Hills old money establishment as the only viable governance base in town.
After they damn near shot themselves in the foot in 2012 by going with super-insider Charlie Hales instead of trying to establish an Eastside base with Jefferson Smith, I’d been wary of Iannarone for years. But now that’s all sealed away for another generation!
Like, the Trump years started with the street left trying to clear out the right from the city and rightist groups from the outskirts mounting presence-showing drives and skirmishes, and that’s mostly settled in that they’ve focused on consolidating their suburban bases.
In suburbs in the two “country” cardinal directions, Vancouver across the river to the north is where “Patriot Prayer” mounted PDX actions from all along, when there was a police shooting a few months ago and the Portland regulars tried to send a delegation to protest the cops were on them like white on rice, which is maybe good cause it bought space from the locals patrolling them in trucks with ARs.
Salem, the capitol down in the farming Willamette Valley (it’s what the Simpsons’ “Capitol City” is riffed off!) is reportedly a no-go zone for visible leftists
Oregon City, the proximate southern suburb in Clackamas and probably the most bonehead part of the region, is hosting weekly Proud Boys “flag hoist” rallies drawing like 200 people and melee weapon vendors and regularly running off the “antifascists” who come down to hassle it
One thing is these are the exact places the fringes of Portland are going to get priced out to as North and Lents level up over the next 10-15 years. A big part of local street left lore is coming together to “take” the city from white gangs in the 90s after the murder of African immigrant Mulugeta Seraw, I don’t know they’ve yet grokked the significance of priming their future territory against them in the exact opposite way
THAT’S NOT ALL, the mayor’s pushback-reconsolidation drive has made use of connected black pastors E.D. Mondain\u00e9 and Matt Hennessee and brought in played-the-mayors-aide-on-Portlandia-as-sitting-mayor-of-Portland Sam Adams as advisor (cause Wheeler really doesn’t know how to mayor. Afaik Adams’ contribution is Xanaxposting fights on Twitter)
The thing is those guys had kinda been on the outs over, y'know, kerfluffles over them fucking teenagers under their care or supervision, but all water under the bridge now.
Which is a tradition in Portland politics! It was an open secret in elite circles that 70s mayor turned Governor Neil Goldschmidt was fucking his aide’s daughter/babysitter, there was a thing with some Seattle mayor who’d made use of the kids as some 70s/80s outreach worker to homeless queer youth, they’ve been hassling some big donor in the hills and sotto voice the pushback is, like with Adams, gay people never gave up on the 70s and got weird about it
And not just elite circles. Maybe something about how Oregon was a frontier of hard-living, non-religious, very masculine-coded rural blue collar workers and rich playboy landowners whose culture really “set” in the 1970s, so there’s establishment buy-in to those values \u2013 we literally have a free expression constitutional right to full-contact nude lapdances, I’m not making that up. But like, the promotional materials for summer rock camp for girls pitching how fuckable chick rockers are as an appeal to parents re: enriching their adolescent daughters, seeing a bunch of locals get a bit drunk and trade “top this!” stories of all the teachers their friends were fucking in high school\u2026
My #sex with teenagers kick the last few years, of realizing how key it had been to everything for decades? That came from somewhere. Portland is quite literally the city Omelas, you know, “utopian city where everyone ultimately makes their peace with the fact it’s all built on child abuse”, is based on. So over and above the 2010s valence, when the answer to “how bad did they fuck up?” is “so bad they forfeited all progress with getting the establishment to stigmatize sex with ~MiNoRs~” like, they fucked up
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