The Unintended Consequence of Troops in Portland

A September 27 report by FOX 12 and Associated Press noted that President Trump was going to send federal troops to Portland to protect the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility that has been under near constant attack by the terrorist designated ANTIFA and other allied domestic terrorists for most of the summer. The attacks by ANTIFA and other domestic terrorists in Portland have become so common that yet another one is hardly news. And the fact that President Donald Trump is sending in federal troops to protect property of the federal government has become so regular that it too is hardly worthy of note. But this time it send chills up my spine. And here’s why.

I’m old enough to remember the protests by the leftists over the Viet Nam War and, in particular, the tragedy of a protest at Kent State in which four students were killed by gunfire from the local National Guard. It was May 4, 1970, and I was a student at the University of Montana School of Law. Even today – fifty-five years later – controversy continues to exist over the specific cause of the shooting. (For those of you interested I commend you to an article researched and published by Kent State University which can be found at the URL https://www.kent.edu/may-4-historical-accuracy.) However, there is little doubt that the shooting itself was a galvanizing incident leading to anti-war protests on college campuses and community squares throughout the nation. Those protests signaled the beginning of the end for support for the Viet Nam War.

The important fact here is that the Kent State students and other protesters were not armed. That doesn’t mean that their protests were peaceful. They in fact were violent – arson, property destruction, physical confrontation and injury, and riotous confrontation. The protesters had bats, broom handles, assorted objects for throwing and fire – lots of fire. But they did not have guns – long guns, shotguns or hand guns and thus were unarmed.

If any of this sounds familiar it is because it is virtually identical to Portland’s Summer of Love along with every other violent protest between then and now. Lots of physical confrontation, lots of thrown objects, lots of sticks and bats, and lots of fire. But not long guns, shotguns or hand guns. But those similarities end with a physical description of what the mobs possessed.

The reason that there were no firearms at the Kent State protests is two-fold. First, these were primarily students and whatever firearms they might have possessed were back home and out of reach. Second, and just as important, those who had access to firearms back home knew their purposes and their dangers. (I have had firearms since I was twelve, I went to high school where every other pickup truck had a shotgun and/or a long rifle in the rear window rack. All without incidents because we were trained by family members, scouts or school on the appropriate use of firearms.) The protesters at Kent State weren’t there for the “revolution” bur rather as a protest to a specific thing – the conduct of the Viet Nam War.*

ANTIFA is not a spontaneous reaction to a specific policy. It is well organized, well funded and are there, not for the fight, but just to start it. They care little about the “cause” they are protesting as evidenced by the fact that it is the same group of miscreants, encouraging the same violence, at every riot.

You would think with the relatively easy access to guns (both legal and illegal) that serious revolutionaries would use firearms to defeat their foes. Bu they learned from the lessons of Kent State that public sentiment could be supportive as long as ANTIFA was not the cause of armed insurrection. That the politicians, the useful idiots and the mainstream media would not only tolerate but give aid and assistance to the rioters if they don’t carry guns. (Here think of the penultimate useful idiot, former Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler who marched with the hordes in a show of solidarity only to have them turn on him and try to burn his home down.) Without guns they could be victims even when they were the perpetrators.

It also meant that these domestic terrorists could organize, encourage and direct the riots and then fade into the crowds when the police intervened. They knew that the police would not pursue them when the violence was underway unless they were brandishing firearms. And even if they did, the local prosecutors in cooperation with judges appointed by nearly four decades of appointments by progressive governors, would not prosecute. But a far more sinister element has been injected into the riots.

ANTIFA and the other domestic terrorists are encouraging the police to use their weapons. Now in the videos of confrontation you will see protesters emerge from the crowds reaching under their shirts or jackets, pulling their hands from under their clothing while they charge police lines, aiming their hands held now as mock guns and imitating firing complete with yells of “bang, bang” and the jerking response or recoil from firing. It is designed for no other reasons than to tempt law enforcement into a split second erroneous decision to fire in return. Nothing will galvanize support and sympathy more than the picture of unarmed civilians lying dead in the streets of Portland as the result of gunfire from law enforcement and/or National Guard troops.

It is different in Portland than in say Chicago or Los Angeles, or New York. There you have armed street thugs – members of gangs – interspersed with the professional extremists like ANTIFA. And while ANTIFA might be able to control the presence of firearms by protesters in Portland, the same cannot be said in Chicago. In those cities gunfire will most likely be in response to gunfire from within the protesters. Not so in Portland – at least not for now.

The point here is that law enforcement and National Guard troops must meet protesters with the same weapons – no guns for those in direct confrontation. Do not repeat the mistakes of Kent State. Do not let ANTIFA and the other domestic terrorists goad law enforcement into an armed response.

The residents of Portland – at least the voting majority of the residents – steadfastly refuse to demand accountability from the people who govern them through decades of elections. Each group of morons is succeeded by a new group of morons that are materially worse. The members of the mainstream media cheer each succeeding group as if they will be better than the last despite the fact they arise from the same cesspools of ignorance. Each succeeding group seems to think that the previous groups just weresn’t progressive enough, just didn’t appreciate their fiddling while Portland burns. Why would we want to waste resources and court a violent disaster on a city that care so little for itself.

Leave Portland alone. Let it slide into it predestined demise. The value of Portland to the nation is that it is a demonstrable lesson as to why the progressive/socialist movements will always fail.

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*Some protested because they were nihilist, some protested because they believed we didn’t belong in Southeast Asia. Some protested simply because they were young and those making the decisions were old and didn’t appreciate that it was the young people’s time. And others, like me, protested because their friends and family were trucked off to fight and die in a war where the nation’s leaders lacked the will to win but fought on anyway so as to avoid blame for losing. My generation was cannon fodder for the misadventures of politicians who sought to avoid responsibility.