Still Feeling Optimistic
A lot of movement, but not much in the way of resolution on several fronts.
A Busy Week
I feel hung over from all of the meetings, happy hours, and other events I went to this week. I got to meet amazing people, run into friends, and sit in a lot of rooms with folks doing great work to turn our city around.
I have jokingly complained about my horror over being the smartest person in any room.1 This week I had the pleasure of sitting with brilliant people. It has only buoyed my optimism for Portland’s future. We have the tools to rebuild this city, we just need to reach the normies. If you’ve got ideas on that - and I’ve got a few myself - send them over.
How do we get normal Portlanders 5% more involved. Just enough so we can reach them with messages of hope, abundance, and reassurance that we actually know how to run a city if they just stop electing incompetent ideologues.
The newest episode of NW Fresh premiered this week. I was the guest again as Andy and I gave our City Council a 90 Day Job Evaluation and Power Ranking.
I’m proud of this one. It’s funny and I think we both come off as our genuine selves - kind and compassionate but done with the bullshit.
We also discussed the Make Some Noise protest at the Society Hotel.
That has been my most controversial piece. I’ve gotten plenty of love but also a fair share of criticism and I want to address the most common complaint, which is a sort of fact-check from our Far Left neighbors.
The accusation is that I’ve mischaracterized relationships within Portland’s Left:
The “true” radicals (Antifa, black bloc groups, anarchists, and some of the Pro-Palestinian crowd) are not supporters of Angelita Morillo or the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Several old friends (and some frenemies) who still work with those groups have told me that they actually hate Morillo and it bothers them to be linked to her. They are anarchist and communists, after all. They don’t believe voting or holding office can fix capitalism.
So…
An Apology to Radicals
Dear Unaffiliated Occupants of “traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River.”2,
I have tried to present you in the clearest manner I could. I wanted my neighbors to understand you are not like them; the normies, shitlibs, reformists, and revisionists. The white supremacist, imperialist, genocide-loving puppets. The boot-lickers.
I tried to convey how much you hate liberals, liberal democracy, and America, but in doing so I have lost sight of something.
How much you hate each other.
In identifying you and your connections, I neglected the nuance in your organizational ties; who you support out of friendship and who you support out of a vague sense of mutual aid or common enemies. Also, who you openly hate.
I linked Councilor Morillo and The Community Free Store, but I’ve gotten several messages telling me that love is one-sided. Morillo and the DSA clearly support the black bloc radicals and the keffiyeh-clad junior jihadis but they don’t love her back. The DSA has been firmly friend-zoned.
Black bloc squads will show up to support PPOP and Michael Gilbert to attack a comment enemy3, but Gilbert is a federal contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton. He probably will not survive the revolution.
John Hacker is another good example. In the comments he denied ever being a member of the DSA or Antifa. He has maintained for years that he is unaffiliated with any of these groups. I’ve got a source putting him on the DSA member list in 2017 and seemingly endless articles connecting him to Antifa groups, but I’ll honor his request to at least have his claim publicly acknowledged.
Maybe I am being unfair. Maybe Hacker simply marches with Antifa, shows up at their actions, reports positively on them, and occasionally gets arrested for assaulting or harassing their enemies. Maybe they don’t consider him a formal member… but he (and his comrades) have been caught lying so often that I’m going to go ahead and maintain my accusation, backed by multiple sources. Antifa member, Antifa-affiliated, or just an impossible-seeming series of coincidences and mutual connections - it’s an awful lot of smoke for no fire.
Radical Portland, you are a truly diverse group of backstabbing pieces of shit and I am sorry that I have not made it adequately clear how complex and fractured your circular firing squad of a community is. Please accept my apology. I will try to do better.
Angelita Leans In
Angelita Morillo has been in more places than I have lately. She’s obviously trying to build up her support in these radical communities now that she’s a DSA member. As mentioned above, many of the most extreme still claim to hate her guts, though less than they hate you or me.
When Morillo isn’t lying about the police, encouraging mobs against local businesses, or posting cute Instagram Stories, she is giving speeches. One of these engagements is at an event alongside the American Party for Labor (APL)4. It’s a nice sounding name but they might be the craziest of our bunch of local communist parties.
The American Party for Labor is a revolutionary communist party that stands for socialist revolution, labor organization, social justice, an end to white supremacy, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, and fights for the rights of the international working class. As the only party in the USA organized on the line of anti-revisionism, anti-imperialism, and scientific socialism, the APL seeks to serve as a revolutionary catalyst in communities across the United States.
We believe that the fight for the working people is the force that drives us, and socialist revolution is the means to our emancipation. Armed with a correct political analysis of the current situation and a strong resolve, we will struggle forward to a new socialist democracy. With the power of the American working class and the workers of all countries, we have a world to win. Onwards toward socialism!
I have notes:
You can’t be “scientific socialists” and also claim you have the “correct political analysis.” Your shit is either evidence-based or faith-based. Not both.
Anti-revisionism is, essentially, the belief that Soviet Russia was awesome until jerks like Nikita Khrushchev came along and fucked it up. This is not “real communism has never been tried.” This is “we tried it, it worked great. We want to do it again, here. We need to do a better job murdering our enemies so they can’t mess up the recipe.”
They do not want DSA-style “revolution” at the polls. They fantasize about shooting those of you they can’t get into the reeduction camps. They won’t accomplish this, because they are LARPing children, but I think you know my feelings on this sort of rhetoric and its place in a free society.5
Also, is their logo a cog and star with the fist of Sauron?! This is some real “are we the baddies?” energy.
The different chapters even have fun names like the Fidel Castro or Ernst Thälmann Divisions. Our local group is named after John Reed, one of the only Americans buried in honor as a hero of the Soviet Union.
And speaking of groups Morillo supports…
Trouble in the Free Palestine Movement
A big split occurred among two of the bigger “Pro-Palestine” groups in Portland.
Letters for Palestine PDX (recently rebranded as From the River PDX 😟) accused Portland for Palestine of using the Palestinian cause as a recruitment tool for… communism. Shocking, I know.
From the River 🤢 is the group who led the Society Hotel protest. I’ve received claims they aren’t actually connected to the Community Free Store in any formal way. It’s just that both groups are staffed by weirdos in keffiyehs and KN95s, dripped out in military chic, and running their orgs like a trap house.
I can believe that. It’s entirely possible for this many groups to suck this much concurrently, without coordination.
Here is the response, if you care to read it. The story itself isn’t very interesting, except as a demonstration of exactly what I outlined above. These people cannot build things, through incompetence or by design, and they drag everything they touch down with them.
A Few Short Things
→ Olivia Katbi (alongside a number of other DSA members appeared at the District 2 Budget Listening Session to voice her Fund Families, Tax the Rich platform.
→ Dunphy, Morillo, and Novick are proposing an increase to the Clean Air Tax on large retailers to “plug the city’s budget hole.” Thanks to our councilors for living up to the grade I gave them.
→ The Saturday Hands Off protest is a big-tent affair sponsored by 50501 and Oregon Indivisible but also featuring groups like Rose City Indivisible and some of the less savory communist orgs. Angelita Morillo will be there, speaking. I covered a lot of this in Why I Tore Down a Women’s March Poster and it will likely be a persistent issue throughout the Spring and Summer; normal causes co-opted by horrible people. That’s kind of their M.O.
→ Stay tuned for asks around public testimony. The budget conversation is coming to a climax and the DSA has made it clear they are coming for the Portland Police Budget and Mayor Keith Wilson’s Homelessness Plan.
→ There is much more to the Angelita Morillo, Andre Miller formal complaint story. Keep an eye out for that as it develops.
→ For anyone hoping I would weigh in on the Society Hotel story, NW Examiner’s coverage of it, or John Hacker’s video (which featured me) - I think Alan at the Examiner got the story wrong, Hacker’s take was… creative, and I’m still glad more violence didn’t occur. There’s much more to say but some of the parts need additional context and the conflict, for now, has quieted down.
Get out there today and swing by the Blossoms and Bites Street Fair if you can.
This should never happen in a political context. We are in trouble when I’m the “smart” one.
From the Portland Parks Foundation. Also, that’s a lot of different tribes for a small area. I bet there’s an interesting story there…
Normal Portlanders who ask them to be accountable.
Website: https://www.americanpartyoflabor.com, Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/apl.pnw/
Marginalize it, mock it, and use it an example for children of how not to act. Free speech all day, but stop tolerating these people in elected positions.
Max, you are the Hubbel space telescope of Portland's political reporters and pundits, retrieving and synthesizing facts about the players and the political cross currents that no other source is willing to do or capable of doing. It's not the observer's fault if the actors don't provide a playbill and synopsis.
Seriously, Portland's political history for the period 2020 on, most particularly the harm done by activists and figures like Tevis "Ted" Wheeler and Mike Schmidt, is an unfocused blur. The Oregonian went to the riots and brought back stories about undifferentiated "demonstrators" and "protesters." Did they really not make the connection between the flood of tweets announcing the date, exact time and place where certain someones were going to "be water" and kick off a "direct action," and the nightly performances by the black-bloc umbrella troupes? The free weeklies (looking at you, Mercury) probably had much more granular information but weren't telling.
In a city where the newspaper of record wasn't self-censoring out of white liberal guilt and other writers weren't privately cheering on the badass plate-glass window smashers, we might actually have a nuanced and damning history of the violence that left Downtown a boarded-up and tagged shell of its former self.
We cannot let a new generation of extremists who are at best indifferent to the needs and will of the city's 600,000-plus hard working voter taxpayers and more likely downright hostile to normies use the city's levers of power to pursue their own nefarious agendas to the detriment of the rest of us.
a delightful, hilarious post Max-- and "how do we get normal Portlanders 5% more involved" is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night! would love a full post on just that.