So, where we’re at in Portland:

• The sheriff’s department has reversed years-old policy to now book misdemeanants through prison rather than handing them a citation and releasing
• Someone is going around targeting houses with those virtue-signaling yard signs for arson
• It’s May Day, when for years the anarchists predictably get together and get rowdy

So I am wondering if we’ll advance the plot today

The Strangest Election in America Right Now Is This Portland School Board Race

Portland’s school board is set up so that candidates are eligible for the particular seat they live in but voted on districtwide. I did not know that.

Watching local left Twitter freak out now that our mayor gave his “make it hurt them a little bit” conference the other day, convinced the freikorps is coming for them and noticing no one else really wants to stand up for them

Roping in the dumbest shit, past even normal 2010s idpol shit, that was all put on the line already last year, but like from “as a Jew this triggers my epigenetic Holocaust trauma!” to (no shitting) “the former mayor dated a teenager! Creep!” (Which said ex-mayor is obliquely counterpositioning as an unremarkable gay thing)

And like yes, yes, now that you have maneuvered yourself into a box canyon and the local establishment has committed itself to whatever turns necessary to crush you be my guest, rub the smell of that shit allllll over as thoroughly as you can

Like I repeat, of the places I thought we might be now from the vantage point of like 2014, we are easily at 85th or 90th percentile right now.

priceofliberty:

priceofliberty:

Californians should not be permitted to speak on the state of the country; their experiences are not universal to literally the rest of Americans, despite what they believe. As far as I am concerned, they don’t even live in the U.S.

The same is true for:

• All of New Jersey
  
• Austin, Texas
  
• New York City, Manhattan, and Long Island
  
• Minnesota

Also in the running to be excluded:

• The entire southern half of Florida
  
• Portland, Oregon
  
• Seattle, Washington
  

Like Portland west of 82nd.

(When I showed up the line was still Cesar Chavez)

The subtle touch here is this is on a major commuting route into Portland from the redneck/sunbelty suburbs of Clackamas

The 1890s one

Now that I think of it I don’t see that bearded lumberjack look or backyard chickens that much anymore.

Like so much about Portland it isn’t directly related to the recent street stuff, rather about how we moved away from a lower income/lower rent mode over the last decade

Austin was the setting of Slacker, the city Portland stole its “Keep X Weird” thing from. I get the sense that from the 90s there wasn’t anything particularly… wrong with them, like “inner-city ghetto” or “Rust Belt”, it’s just changing economies and settlement patterns since the moonlight tower era left them with a disjunction between their job market and their housing supply.

Which meant that it was tough to make it big, and you might have less of things marketed and priced nationally, but you could sustain a life on undemanding part-time service work, and ultimately this favored skilled local labor and creative community as a source of value.

One subtlety is that some of the types of people moving to Portland now were all along the types to move to the metro area for the last 3 decades just now they favor the city rather than the suburbs – “favored quarter” Hillsboro to the west, “basically Florida” Gresham to the east, redneck/Sunbelt Clackamas to the south, whatever’s up north in Vancouver if you can make it across the bridges. I’m puzzling out what that means, do you think it’s similar in Austin?

Completely asinine, assembles points in a nonsense order so to make their narrative of Portland a synecdoche of their real narrative of America’s loss of cultural confidence in the last decade.

Portland Left Twitter is going wild because last night on local civic group public livestream press conference someone finally publicly made the point to the mayor they all wanted to, which was “we will continue this mayhem until you finally yield to what we’ve been demanding”

And, friends

So with the weather warmer (sometimes) and the fence around the courthouse taken down they tried resuming the protests yesterday but it’s down to the hardcore; yesterday they just boarded it back up and cleared it out pepperball guns blazing; rn they just “kettled” them, surrounding and confining the crowd, only letting favored ones leave individually processed

Fight Club’s theme of “fight IKEA-shopping yuppiedom through the power of class-inflected masculine redemptive violence direct action” made so much more sense when I realized it specifically came out of 90s downtown Portland.

For that matter, Palahnuik being gay probably explains how it’s about bros using a woman as a prop to deepening their relationship and building an all-male brotherhood where they construct intricate rituals to touch the skin of other men as a way to call attention to the power and potential of their male bodies

From the perspective of a trans era the way it treated “growing breasts under the influence of pharmaceuticals” and “surgically removing the penis and testicles” is worth meditating on too, I suppose

Portland left Twitter (public defenders’ branch) was like “I can’t believe the Portland establishment is featuring this connected black pastor to bless their approach after people were saying he fucked them as teens under his care!” and I’m like that guy’s still around? and nope, totally different guy, from years ago.

Also a mayor of Seattle was scandaled for fucking teen boys in 80s Portland, and of course mayor-governor-US Sec. of Transportation Neil Goldschmidt fucking his 14yo babysitter in the 70s was apparently an open secret in power circles to the point couples were going to costume parties as “Neil and the babysitter”

Every time I try to get grumpy about the city changing I remember “being pissed off about unworthy yuppies living overdomesticated lives in Portland condos” was quite literally the premise of Fight Club and “lament for the Portland neighborhood dive bar” was like, several episodes of the Simpsons

Portland has volcanic/flood deposit soil and a mild climate so a lot of stuff will grow here (but we’re north enough to limit the season, so the Wilamette Valley specializes more in growing seeds and starts)

One thing though it lacks wildlife to nibble sprouts away or hard frosts so the main thing weeding out tree branches are strong windstorms from when ocean and interior air fronts sweep down the gorge and meet

So trees are given to get too bushy with tons of stubby branching while more elegant stuff gets torn off

So to let you know how the leftist uprising is going in Portland

• After the election there was like three days of street noise squelched
• The council besides Hardesty and the local media aside from the cranky millennial alt-weekly are clearly ready to close ranks around moving on
• One straight-outta-1981 leftist gadfly lawyer (seriously, he looks like the Tom Tomorrow bearded caricature) is raising donations to recall the mayor and one councilor
• I think his snottiness will raise enough to show off with some shitfiling but not generate enough signatures
• Minor points work their way through the courts but after-the-fact and the Oregon judiciary is honestly pretty deferential to establishment imperatives
• There’s a lot less energy and morale coming through in tweets
• Street energy is now up in the cross-river suburb of Vancouver, WA re: a fatal police shooting of a black guy but they aren’t really sustaining conflict (in a less indulgent culture) or generating momentum
• Also there’s apparently some drama over the relative authority of black-as-anti-antiblack and Jewish-as-anti-far-right leadership?
• Some are instead pivoting to housing issues
• So far they have failed to stop several homeless encampment sweeps
• Currently they are failing to stop the eviction of the I-guess-anarchist-squat that’s become a movement HQ in the last few months

Commissioner-Elect Mingus Mapps Blisters Portland Protesters, Referring to Some as “the White Mob”

It’s happening

slatestarscratchpad:

kontextmaschine:

So after the dust settles from Election Day, it seems that the lasting impact of the protests was to shift Portland politics and government in the most conservative way possible

Can you explain? When I Google I just get articles on Portland’s election-related riots, plus lists of “nonpartisan” candidates.

Hm. OK. So to set the scene, Portland is governed by a five-person council who are each assigned portfolios of city departments to oversee. They’re elected citywide on staggered 4-year terms, one is the mayor, which mostly just means they assign the portfolios.

The last few mayors and honestly consensus-focused councils have been fairly tied to a downtown establishment, including the PBA (our chamber of commerce), property owners, old money timber heirs in the west hills, etc.

Incumbent mayor Ted Wheeler, a fairly technocratic centrist who assigned himself police oversight, was himself a timber heir turned establishment fixture.

Portland has a liberal reputation, city elections are formally nonpartisan but broadly Democratic, but lately that had mostly cashed out as sunny good government, a Scandanavish concern for welfare (retrospectively enabled by cheap real estate prices), and a co-option of inner eastside nonprofits

The left had been getting more restive as the cost of living rose, though. 4 years ago elected an outsider Chloe Eudaly to council on a renters’ platform, 2 years ago harder agitation from the outer eastside and minority activists helped lift a black ex-state legislator named Jo Ann Hardesty onto the council

Wheeler, realizing he’s kind of on the outside of this, grabs onto Orange Man Bad #Resistance rhetoric, a little clumsily, to paper over the gaps, meanwhile the street leftists seek to run rightists out of downtown, which just reinforces their drive to show up there, and Wheeler has to balance his ra-ra rhetoric with his duty to keep the city safely open to all political expression

Meanwhile this whole time there’s this smug goody-good on Portland political Twitter named Sarah Iannarone. She was a public policy grad student at PSU - which is kind of like a 4-year community college training the cadre for public service, and it shows, taking snotty potshots at people not adopting her preferred Goodthing!Policy and not at all engaging with how you would possibly assemble the support for it

She had run for mayor in 2016 I think, and again this year, and only got like 26% in the primary as the only rival really trying but that was #2 and Wheeler didn’t break 50% so she advanced to the runoff.

Mingus Mapps, an establishmentarian black guy, also goes to general against Eudaly.

Then, everything went to shit.

At first Wheeler was out of town and Hardesty locked the city down. Then, with the election hanging over him and not wanting to look like the bad guy, he kept acceding to demands to soften police response to the minimum necessary to defend the courthouse, which meant without a crackdown things were kept in stalemate just short of critical

Then the feds came in, and Wheeler had to deal with the fact for all his “#Resist Trump” rhetoric, he can’t really kick federal forces out of an American city in the name of an anti-government mob, but he can at least make some noises and get tear gassed as a photo op

So at this point Hardesty, who has endorsed Wheeler, asks him for control of the police, with the intent of remaking it. He waves her off, maybe later. At some point she retracts her endorsement, mighta been then.

So left-liberals angry that the mob of ruffians are being suppressed at all while the police force (which has never been fully made whole from late-2000s cuts) still existed at all channeled that into supporting Sarah. Also, there’s a black activist named Theresa Raiford many street types are fond of; with a history of marginal campaigns, including missing the mayoral runoff, they pump her up as a write-in

Now, the feds leave, replaced by state troopers who soon pull out in disgust the new “reform DA” isn’t even trying to prosecute their arrests, but by then the downtown courthouse has been pretty pacified speeches, but rougher types march nightly to menace police buildings on the eastside

This is where Wheeler seems to do some thinking, realizes this isn’t just some blowing-off-steam he can draft off like the Women’s March, that he can’t satisfy the left at any acceptable cost, but his straddling has both encouraged them and prevented him from cultivating the moderate base he needs to act against them.

And this part is more speculative, but you start to see signs that this centrist coalition is being built behind the scenes. Downtown businesses talk about costs incurred, or tourist authorities put out statements about reputational damage, and they get written up in the conservative-as-in-old newspaper or the Gen X centrist alt-weekly. We are made to feel the loss - as sports fans and business owners- that the protests might have cost us the NCAA Final Four. You can see the consensus being built, congruent with Portland identity, that Something Must Be Done

On council, Hardesty has moved away from Wheeler and formed a bloc with Eudaly, its clear that if Iannarone joins them it’d be a sharp leftward majority.

A September? poll shows Iannarone winning and you can see the downtown establishment realize it needs to pull Wheeler over the line and whir into action.

Just before the election Hardesty and even Bernie endorse Sarah, but Oregon’s been vote by mail for decades and most ballots are already in. Coming down to the wire, Eudaly and Hardesty push a measure to move police funding over, Wheeler and neighborhood character-type Amanda Fritz vote to hold it off, the deciding vote is Dan Ryan, who won a special election with Hardesty’s endorsement… but he goes with the establishment!

Election Day

Mapps turfs Eudaly, and returns suggest the ticket-balancing “our black guy” approach kinda worked, Wheeler beats Iannarone, but within the margin of a sizeable write-in vote. Which means:

• Ted Wheeler is still mayor, only this term he realizes he needs to position against the left and cultivate a base to do so
• After loudly staking out a left position, Hardesty is totally isolated, her allies defeated or never there, she’ll serve 2 years with 2 colleagues she endorsed against and then almost certainly face a massive removal effort, because
• The establishment has received a wake-up call that it can’t sit on its laurels anymore, it needs to put in actual effort shoring up its position
• The left is brought low by its PMC/underclass split, the people most invested in the result will receive it as a lesson against unrealistic activist ultraleftism

It’s unreal. There was an initiative reworking police oversight, though, that passed but the cop union’s gonna put it through the wringer in court. The defunding vote was rescheduled for today, the result was “no”.

So after the dust settles from Election Day, it seems that the lasting impact of the protests was to shift Portland politics and government in the most conservative way possible

Bunch of local weed stores being bought out by a Weed!!-themed weed store chain called Electric Lettuce