If this is friendly, I'd prefer a bar fight.

How Portland's phoniest political actors skate with the help of uncharacteristically lazy reporting.

I’m calling out Maja Viklands Harris.

Maja is a writer I typically trust to do a good job. Her Rose City Reform was a valuable resource during this election. She covers candidates fairly and interviewed a diverse group of them. I’ll also extend my call out to Shane Dixon Kavanaugh and Sophie Peel; all three are journalists and writers I usually recommend.

Steven Humphrey, Alex Zielinksi, Dirk Vanderhart and the guys behind Progress Portland can kick rocks. They’re sloppy activists and paying attention to their work is bad for your attachment to reality.

On the latest episode of Maja’s podcast Stump Talk, she interviews District 3 Councillors-Elect Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo.

Fourteen open seats drew a record-breaking candidate pool, almost 120 candidates, and Portland's new electoral system inspired a new, friendlier form of campaigning. To help you understand the impact of Portland's reforms, there's no better example than Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo. As two candidates with similar platforms, running in the same district, these women would have been competitors under a traditional system. Instead, they joined forces, doubled down on their shared priorities, and canvassed together as a team.

We can’t have been watching the same campaigns. Portlanders elected four extremist candidates, including the two Maja just interviewed. Three are DSA members and Angelita Morillo is an honorary DSA Member.

Here’s Angelita in response to how “poorly” they were treated by legacy media:

Sexism and racism in media are very much real, and it’s important to analyze it! If women of color are the top fundraisers through small donors, and they have popular support, why arent they treated as top contenders? Why is white mediocrity rewarded?

@pnwpolicyangelSexism and racism in media are very much real, and it’s important to analyze it! If women of color are the top fundraisers through small donors, and they have popular support, why arent they treated as top contenders? Why is white mediocrity rewarded?

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They weren’t treated a “top contenders” because they were (and are) bad candidates. Shockingly, The Oregonian, et al weren’t interested in endorsing anyone who signed the People's Platform or tend “to describe politics in categorical terms of good versus bad” (Willamette Week commenting on Candace Avalos).

So they were populist candidates who won despite the media being mean to them and their policies being unpopular. Where have I heard that before?

Angelita transparently hates white people. Not friendly. The 2016 identity politics accusing everyone who doesn’t like you of bigotry also isn’t very friendly. How did these women win people over? They can’t take criticism.

The funny thing is, Willamette Week, the Oregonian, and Rose City Reform have gone easy on them. No mention of the DSA’s celebration of terrorism or the conspiracy theories they’ve spread. No questions about their closeness to Olivia Katbi, a polarizing communist antisemite. No quizzing them about their connections to “Don’t Rank Rene.” At least The Oregonian commented, on Angelita, “we disagree too fundamentally on many of her positions and worry they could exacerbate the housing shortage and other problems.”

When private citizens ask them to comment on these issues, the candidates avoid, block, or turn off comments. Sometimes they send the comrades like Chris Olson (a fellow DSA member) in to call everyone a Nazi.

The first candidate event I went to featured a guest appearance from DSA and Rose City Antifa Member John Hacker, a self-styled “independent journalist” who can’t seem to stay out of court rooms for alleged assaults. John sat in the corner and covertly photographed attendees.

THIS IS NOT FUCKING FRIENDLY.

One issue is that “Teacher” Tiffany, Mitch Green, and Sameer Kanal know better than to post aggressive attacks on their public campaign accounts. The other DSA members are happy to do it for them. (Angelita is less careful but we’ll get back to her.) Because these goons know how to smile for the cameras and shut up about Israel for 5 minutes while speaking to a retired homeowner, it requires just a bit of digging to get at their beliefs.

I sent messages to almost every organization that endorsed this crew, asking about the politically violent rhetoric, the antisemitism and Jew hate, the bizarre and nonsensical policies. I was ignored with the exception of Sierra Club, who blew me off, but at least replied before dumping my email into a junk folder.

Their twitter accounts (and those of their campaign volunteers) are wild. They spent November alternately mocking and denying the Amsterdam Pogrom. This month they’re posting jokes about how hot Luigi Mangione is and the importance of “keeping your mask on.” These kids lust for the political violence of the 1970s. Assassinations, street attacks, bombings. Revolution! They want to end capitalism and “western imperialism” and they don’t care if it bankrupts Portland to do it.

Every time I send links proving this stuff to a new acquaintance they are genuinely surprised that these friendly candidates of color and their ginger friend are actually weirdo communists who hate America and LARP at revolution. I know accusing people of “hating America” sounds Trump-y and fuck him for that. This crew hates America. Some of them refer to our county as “the Imperial Core” like they’re characters in a young adult dystopian book series. I’ve watched them call themselves Chavistas and lionize Mao Zedong. They are not attached to our consensus reality.

I imagine if I contacted Sally Joughin, 86 of Southeast Portland, she would be surprised by some of the things her fav Angelita is passionate about. I wonder if she knows that “smart, caring, qualified young progressives like Angelita Morillo” promote the idea that there was no meaningful difference between Trump and Harris. After all, even Obama was a horrible war criminal and our newest Congressional Rep Maxine Dexter was paid for by Israel. Or that she fired off stray shots at “white gay men” (She has a recurring obsession with white gay men and how much they suck) while posting one of her many negative videos about Rene Gonzalez. Or that she thinks theft is really no big deal because our outside neighbors are a bunch of little Aladdins and Jean Valjeans (We’re all one missed paycheck away from stealing four pints of ice cream, straws, tinfoil, and a slice of pizza from Whole Foods). Or that she pals around with activists who have financial ties to terrorist groups and fascists. Or that she is an Omnicause lunatic who thinks everything is actually about Palestine.

I could go on and on…

If you think I’m picking on Angelita, I'm just doing what she asked for. She wants us to do research on city councilors and air their dirty laundry. I do wonder if she said this before she thought she could win.

Angelita Morillo is a radical and a mean girl. She always was, and likely always will be. There’s nothing friendly about her, except the veneer when she knows normies are watching. All of the progressive councilors, with the possible exception of Jamie Dunphy, are mean girls. They’re shit-posters and trolls. They are extremely-online lefty weirdos. And that’s my wheelhouse. My brain was slowly rotted by Tumblr, Twitter, and Reddit for years so that I might serve as your Rosetta Stone.

None of this information was hard to research, but no one seems to be familiar with it. I wonder whose job that is…

Here is my request to Maja, Sophie, Shane, and the rest of Portland’s journalism and commentary community: Start asking them hard questions. Start pulling at the threads of their ideologies and funding. These people are the MAGA of the Left. Will you treat them accordingly?

Portlanders elected these councillors without understanding them. It cannot be on individual citizens to do this level of research on a giant list of candidates. 86 year old women aren’t likely to watch a bunch of videos on Tiktok and middle class parents probably don’t care who wrote The Wretched of the Earth.

That’s what the press is for. Report on what our city councilors are saying about us when we aren’t paying attention. It’s not very friendly.