untethered

The tale of Riot Ribs, antifa “mutual aid kitchen” and minor subplot in the story of the Summer of George, came to an ignominious end the other day:

On Saturday, November 28, 2020 at 2:33a.m., Central Precinct officers were dispatched to a report of a disturbance involving a weapon in the 1000 block of Southwest 3rd Avenue. When officers arrived they saw that an outdoor kitchen was heavily damaged (photos). An adult male victim reported that he was working in the kitchen when he was robbed by a group of about a dozen suspects. According to the victim, one suspect was armed with a shotgun. The victim said that some of his cooking equipment was stolen and other equipment was damaged. The suspects also heavily damaged the victim’s car parked next to his canopy (photo).

On July 4 a lone man with a grill showed up at Lownsdale Park where the above crime took place, and began barbequing for the crowd. This was just over a month into the siege, when hundreds occupied the parks across from the jail by day and rioted by night. He was tear-gassed that evening, legend has it. The operation grew and the originator–supposedly an original Black Panther–passed it off to a group of volunteers. More equipment was brought in, a little tent complex developed, with a free snack bar and storage for backpacks and gear (and riot implements, police would later charge); several grills operated 24 hours a day and handing out free food.

The police raided the tents at least once, on July 28, and cleared out the entire park at one point. But the park closure would not hold and the reconstituted Riot Ribs was eventually left alone, for the most part, by the police. I recall watching once as the police, sweeping Lownsdale Park after declaring a riot, going around the tents and allowing its lone attendant to remain in place. The operation started drawing donations and along with it the attention of the black thug element that had attached itself to the protests. Their story is assigned to obscurity by embarrassed antifa, but black thuggery loomed large during the heady early days, when all manner of opportunist was drawn to the movement. Before long the earnest volunteers of Riot Ribs were bailing out:

We came here to feed people, and we felt like we set up a good system. As long as the state keeps inflicting violence on people, especially people who are just trying to eat, we were planning to be out here cooking. But there was a lot of greed and selfishness that came with it. People who volunteered weren’t in it for the right reasons—they were grilling, but they were also stealing money from the tip jar. We had no authority to kick anybody out. We decided to halt operations in Lownsdale Square for fear of our safety.

So our group created Revolution Ribs. We bought two used sprinter vans, filled up their tanks, and got them grills and coolers. We have four people sleeping and cooking in each van—they have the ability to mobilize and help out other communities, so they picked up and left. They’re already in the Bay Area, and they’ll eventually head east.

A smaller tent and a few grills rose on the ruins of Riot Ribs, calling itself BLM Ribs. For weeks a pair of disheveled thugs guarded the kitchen, manning their phones as the grills sat idle, long after the crowds had gone home. That it was the same two guys, for the most part, gives me the impression they were working for someone else.

When Adam Haner was savagely beaten by a group identifying as protest security rumors swirled that they were the same group shaking down Riot Ribs. Riot Ribs’ operators claimed to fear the police but it was their own black allies that ran them out, and with relative ease. The halt described above came after the group was threatened with a gun after a period of increasing harassment. The thugs of BLM Ribs, before they got the boot, viewed themselves as the authority of the emptied-out occupied blocks, and cited it when shaking down the last miserable remnants of the summer siege.

I believe a black thug crew decided to take over the operation for themselves, but didn’t seem much interested in actually running it. They kept it open to solicit donations, and maybe just to maintain a presence–before BLM Ribs was sacked they were the last group continually occupying the park. A small tent camp attached to antifa’s Jail Support outfit, which bails rioters out and the like, was tossed by the same low-level hoods manning BLM Ribs, angry the group was getting donations–while they sat ignored.

So eventually these small fry thugs got swallowed up themselves, of course. The nature of the robbery suggests a rival black crew. But the knuckleheads in the video above no doubt set off some repercussions within the protest/criminal combine and complaints were made. Jail Support, soliciting donations for cash bail, was likely tied closer to the ACLU/Lawyer’s Guild faction. Suspiciously, such outfits were being raised up nationally before George Floyd’s death and the demonstrations. Of course in Portland the need isn’t really there–the vast majority are released without charges or bail. Whatever the case, when the boys of BLM Ribs ran off Jail Support it may have motivated the white (Jewish) leadership faction to finally protest to its black allies that this is all Bad for Business.

Perhaps BLM Ribs was sacrificed for its transgression after some negotiations. I imagine a scene, like in a movie where diverse bad guys convene to hash something out; our political/criminal Combine must be a riot of color and gender confusion around the table. A clown at its head proclaims: “BLM Ribs has got to go. Sorry, Shaniqua.”

One thing’s for sure. The present movement follows the pattern of the sixties: demagogy as black civil rights bringing enthusiasm to a fever pitch, then black thuggery and incompetence bringing it all crashing back down to earth.

Plus ca change.

No proper history will likely come out of the George Floyd riots. I have a hard time imagining capable and honest first-hand accounts years from now from former antifa, like those of old sixties radicals. Despite the attention given sixties protest, much of it remains obscure. Aside from the media’s rehabilitation of former Weathermen and black political terrorists–after decades of muting their criminality and mediocrity–there’s a big hole where there should be a whole sub-genre devoted to leftist political terror. Brian Burrough’s oft-referenced Days of Rage is almost alone among popular history books on the subject.

The deliberately bowdlerized popular narrative of the sixties recasts a movement with radicals committed to America’s overthrow at its core as one of patriotic reformers bringing America belatedly to fulfill its Constitutional promise. In this narrative America only begins in earnest in the sixties–a notion helped along by the vanity of the generation that participated in both the protests and its subsequent mythologizing. The reality hindsight reveals is the sixties are the beginning of the end of America, and the present movement is the end of the end, if they get their way.

Today antifa proudly proclaims the overthrow of America as their goal, while the media now performs historical revisionism in real time rather than retrospect; “that didn’t happen” has become “this isn’t happening”.

This indulgence the original radicals were never allowed. In hindsight sixties radicals’ dreams of taking over can be seen as childish delusion. Today’s radicals are much less impressive, given freer reign and their delusion is not that their “revolution” won’t succeed–it already has, without them–but that there’s any real place for them in it.

The sixties and the present insurgency are related like the two world wars. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, I see the sixties and the present insurrection as a generational one-two punch, the first one sending the original Constitutional order reeling, this one now here to finish it off and bring on the post Constitutional order. BLM’s eventual victory–thankfully not ensured, despite the media’s determination to cast it as such–will be the raising of the glove of the new order and champion.

People don’t write any more and can’t be trusted to write honestly any way, but what’s happening now will be documented in ways to an extent previously unimaginable, with the profusion of cameras. The abundance of lurid video documentation stands in stark contrast to the dull restricted written documentation in the media’s account. What once took years of propaganda is now wiki-ed up overnight with the speed of the internet and the enthusiastic labor of the gaslit, whose tweets are like religious invocations of the original archetype.

It’s a weird, dystopic world; “peaceful protests” like a chyron on a loop over endless video of snarling mobs–the un-quantifiable mass out there on all those phones, never to be fully gathered together except, perhaps, by the NSA.

It falls to us to tell this story.

Could it be that Donald Trump leaves office, if indeed he leaves, a more impressive figure than the collective image of his opponents? I think so.

Here Andrew Klavan in the Daily Wire praises his balcony moment:

It was, one pollster told me, an electoral disaster for him. It seemed to confirm the narrative being sold by the media: the narrative that any gathering that was not specifically dedicated to destroying America with anarchic violence and racial animus was a super-spreader event that would strike us down in our millions. Trump rallies were especially dangerous. Their pure evil doubled COVID’s strength. We had to be afraid. We had to wear masks. Full-body leather outfits like the one in “American Horror Story” were preferable. Wear them loose so they don’t stop you from shivering in your shoes.

And now Trump, a walking co-morbidity whose enormous frame was mostly composed of old French Fries, had caught the death-dealing WuFlu just as they warned he would. In a tight campaign, his approval rating dropped several points in mere days.

Then he was fine. Good treatment worked. He shook off the Great Death like a dog shaking off water. He was back home in a couple of days, looking great.

“One thing’s for certain,” he told America. “Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re gonna beat it.”

Then he walked out onto the balcony and tore off his mask like a boss.

Immediately, the media began shrieking like a party of 11-year-old girls after a mouse got loose.

“What does that mean, ‘Don’t be afraid of it?’” gasped CNN Medical Commentator Sanjay Gupta. “It’s a contagious disease that kills people!”

“Everyone should be afraid of COVID!” said Wolf Blitzer.

“It’s okay to be afraid of COVID,” said Jake Tapper. “And it’s okay that it’s dominating your life because it has dominated your life!”

The message couldn’t be clearer.

Trump: Don’t be afraid!

Media: Be afraid!

(…)

My point is simply this. For all his flaws and P.T. Barnum eccentricities, there is more of the spirit that made this country great in Donald Trump’s little finger than there is in the quivering bodies of Jake Tapper, Wolf Blitzer, and Kate Brown tarred together and covered with feathers, which is not a bad idea. For their puling fear-mongering, their womanish horror at the sight of brash courage, and their “expert” attempts to demolish every tradition and tie that keeps this country strong and makes life worth living, they should, every damn one of them, make like a turkey, and get stuffed.

With God’s help, we’ll make it through the coming years of government-by-swamp. But I’ll miss the man on the balcony.

Already forgotten is the poetic ruin Covid was supposed to have leveled on Trump when it landed in the White House. Unfortunately for those trying to save democracy from Trump, nobody died. Covid swept through the White House with all the fury of the seasonal flu. No one in the media’s playing fair of course, so the anticipated political disaster didn’t redound on Trump’s opponents and become their own, as it should have. On one side was Trump, saying don’t panic, Covid isn’t the end of the world. On the other, the proponents of panic. Along comes Covid itself to settle the question in dramatic fashion. It’s a remarkable story; too bad it’s slated for the memory hole.

The political class could only denounce Trump on the balcony as political theater and note Mussolini once stood on a balcony (maskless too!), but the president had earned it. If it was political theater it was also political theater as leadership, with admirable intent–not to gin up a war or slander, say, white people, but to boost the nation’s morale. Such a gesture would have been considered a necessity even in America not long ago, and performed by a media darling would be portrayed glowingly.

The media fashioned the Covid narrative along the lines of a war effort. But comically inverted. Young men were not to answer the call but to shelter at home. Everyone must be afraid. Report those who aren’t. Take cover not courage. We will hide behind the hedgerows.

If Covid were an honest crisis, not distorted by hysterics and duplicity, Trump’s bit of theater would have been just the sort of thing expected. As such it compares most favorably with the Democrats’ own political theater on the theme of the Mask, which was to have Joe Biden conspicuously wear one; no sooner had the media settled on the theme when Joe Biden started appearing everywhere in his, a little askew at first. All of a sudden Joe Biden, infamously oblivious of others’ personal space, is beaming proudly, over his mask, ten feet away from the nearest human. Look at me, I’m compliant. A curious pitch for the job of Leader of the Free World. But honest, if you think about it: this is the president’s role now–in particular the role of Joe–to comply.

Portland’s District Attorney Michael Schmidt thanked the Multnomah County Democrats yesterday after they released a statement supporting his high tolerance policy toward rioting and antifa’s “direct actions”.

Thank you, @MultCoDems. Recently, they overwhelming passed a resolution supporting our protest policy, which presumptively declines to prosecute protesters in cases that do not involve property damage, theft or violence. (1/3)

— Multnomah County DA’s Office (@MultCoDA) November 24, 2020

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Multnomah Democrats support District Attorney Mike Schmidt focusing resources on crimes not protests | Multnomah County Democrats https://t.co/fzRTaknsqd

— Multnomah Co. Dems (@multcodems) November 25, 2020

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The Multnomah Democrats’ office was vandalized by antifa on November 9, declaring the recent election would not deter their movement.

Portland Police Bureau makes an arrest and wards off Antifa of a “de-arrest” after the Multnomah County Democrat Office’s windows were shattered by Portland protesters. #PortlandProtests #Portland #Protest #Police pic.twitter.com/qtQElnUpvW

— Independent Media PDX (@NDpendentPDX) November 9, 2020

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Young “officers” of the Multnomah County Democrats have been among riot arrestees, of course.

The district attorney has himself been targeted at home, though the story appears to have been buried locally and everywhere except at the cop blog Law Enforcement Today:

On Nov. 6, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt was allegedly the “victim” of a group of people who were in front of his house, throwing rocks. Law Enforcement Today was notified by a source who advised us of the incident…

According to dispatch information, officers were sent to Schmidt’s house. According to the caller, three people were allegedly in front of Schmidt’s house allegedly making threats, saying that “BLOOD IS ON HIS HANDS,” with another one holding a “BLOWHORN.” The caller had no description of the individuals.

Another notation in the MDT (Mobile Data Terminal) said, “COMP CAME INSIDE OUT OF FEAR, AT LEAST 3 PPL, HAVE A MEGAPHN. HARD FOR COMP TO SEE (illegible) SINCE DARK, YELLING “ALL LIVES MATTER. IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT.”

“PER THE HAZARD FLAG 2 CARS TO 4215 SE 29^TH DIST ATTY MICHAEL SCHMIDT

it appears that two officers were dispatched to the call. The air unit reported that there were five people outside, then left the scene. The last report showed between 5-10 people; however, it was thought that some may have been neighbors.

Police received another call reporting that protesters were back out front, throwing rocks, and also said “THEY HAVE MOLOTOV COCKTAILS” and that “DA THAT LIVES HERE SHOULD THINK OF HIS FAMILY”

Dispatch showed that another caller was texting with someone named Clare Schmidt via Facebook Messenger who was inside the home with two children. The dispatcher advised that caller to “HAVE CLAIRE CALL 911 NOW.”

Police arrived in the area and it was noted that “PROTESTERS LEFT, NOTHING GOING ON”

It reads as if Schmidt’s wife and children were in the home alone. Whatever the case Schmidt’s reluctance to call the police on antifa is understandable–but if these were genuine rightwing protesters I would think he couldn’t resist. Antifa is just greedy, and perhaps stupid, enough to go after a well-place ally. The few cases Schmidt is prosecuting are outrage enough for them. For the time being the thing is obscure.

Schmidt was elected in a landslide over a mainstream progressive who tried to temper his relative moderation by declaring he’d vigorously prosecute rightwing demonstrators. He’s a recipient of Soros bucks (the first to call to congratulate him on his win was San Francisco’s red prosecutor Chesa Boudin) but it doesn’t seem to take that much: his campaign appears to have been financed on less than 250 thousand dollars.

Schmidt has weathered the summer politically. The November elections were as much of a refutation of the riots and BLM as Portland can muster, with hapless Ted Wheeler winning reelection over antifa candidate Sarah Iannaronne and anti-cop councilmember Chloe Eudaly getting blown out by an establishment progressive. Mike and his “restorative justice” policy–applying the same high tolerance for political violence to street violence–were not exposed to a public referendum.

Law Enforcement Today updated their story on the Siege of the House of Schmidt:

***UPDATE***

Since our original article, we have received additional information from our sources, who tell us that Schmidt DID initiate the call, then called Vasquez and told HIM to call the Portland Police Bureau to respond to his home after he refused to do so himself. 

Why? Because Schmidt himself has refused to prosecute similar cases and he didn’t want to be outed as the hypocrite that he is. Schmidt is a typical liberal…”good for thee, but not for me.” 

Our source said that when Vazquez called, the situation was likely referred to a supervisor, sergeant or above, who made the call to handle the incident at “precinct level” as opposed to sending in the Rapid Response Team (RRT) which it protocol for so-called riots. 

The information we received is that Schmidt was trying to make it appear to be right-wing extremists because that fits into his narrative. He needed the police to respond to his home, but didn’t want to be outed as a hypocrite. 

Who knew Ramzy Kadyrov was so sage?

Chechnya’s authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov has ordered images of American comic superheroes at children’s centers and playgrounds to be replaced with “real heroes” of the North Caucasus republic.

The November 20 announcement came after Kadyrov earlier this week visited a new high-rise residential complex in the city of Kurchaloy, where he criticized American comic and film figures painted on the walls of a children’s center.

“We need to remove the images of these fictional characters, these are fantasies,” Kadyrov said of the images of Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and Superman during the November 16 tour of the new facility. “In the history of religion and people, there are many real heroes from whom you can and should take an example, otherwise children think that only these heroes exist.”

Indeed. American culture is toxic, sadly, and America is a cautionary tale for those outside the West. 

Those of a certain age can recall when we learned about and celebrated genuine America heroes and legends, and many of them actually deserved it.

Gregory Cochran has said we used to have heroes of achievement, now we have heroes of suffering. It’s as if we turned on a historical dime from a mostly Hellenic to perversely Christian culture. Note how even the spandex heroes in the movies must suffer, from pangs of conscience, from abuse, from repression, from childhood trauma, from the oppressive nature of their gifts.

Comic book heroes don’t seem to be replacing the genuine historical heroes for us, but replacing the very idea of heroism. Kids don’t emulate these characters; even the very young now are too sophisticated not to view them with jaded understanding. The beauty of this product for those who seem determined to cram it down our throats for eternity, is precisely the absurdity of the characters and their unreal nature; they are not an affront to a slacker like me. We live in the age of affront, and minorities taking offense at more and pettier things is maybe just part of that; the individual takes more and more as an affront, and there is no greater affront than another’s superiority.

Teddy Roosevelt actually did amazing things. Emulating such characters isn’t easy. Emulating Captain Marvel means you dress the role for Halloween.

Comic book heroes serve a purpose, deliberately or not: they are here to destroy heroism. That could be seen as very beneficial to a powerful elite invested in a docile and distracted populace.

Steve Sailer on schools throwing out SAT requirements:

But this need to improvise new rules empowered the current year’s ignorant, science-denialist ideas about “racial justice.” No longer could the people running American colleges just kick the can down the road on college testing’s race gaps because now they had to make some changes. And they wound up making extremely destructive permanent alterations, with many colleges junking a testing system that had evolved intelligently during the Depression and Cold War when Americans needed to make smart choices.

Boldface added. With the ascent of Trump the gloves came off. Heretofore any social concern or project, even emergencies–such as a response to a pandemic–must serve the progressive project to remake America, to consolidate a revolution effected by near-stealth over a half century of media manipulation, to “rebuild” and “reimagine” whole institutions in its vague and unrealistic image. Every utilization of resources, every project now must follow this pattern, the nap in the fabric of decline.

Rest assured, if and when the giant meteor comes to claim earth, our moral superiors will adapt it to the Narrative and the time we have remaining they will conspire to dedicate to “black lives” or some similar comedy as they cling to power and wealth to the bitter end.

You almost want to see it.

We can next expect to see the fiscal austerity that will follow this year’s Covid restrictions and rioting doing what political demagogy couldn’t achieve. When your Democratic city needs to cut tens of millions of dollars next year, it won’t be looking first to its various diversity grift schemes but to the police.

Our not-yet-named revolution unfolded over the last half century with the steady conditioning of Americans with propaganda that hectored, shamed, seduced. What they have managed to do is to turn an entire culture against its own, against the family and against the individual. If no single individual or distinct group is responsible–and this is the conventional view, absent, “conspiracy theories”–does it somehow become less tragic, less catastrophic, less evil? 

There is no public interest any more. There is only this consolidation. What is the public, after all, when 70 million of them, in voting for Trump, are considered irredeemable–as determined by the rabbinic scholars of CNN and MSNBC, compiling a Walmart Talmud of our new order.

But I want to consider conspiracy and culture. Where one ends and the other begins is never clear.

“Conspiracy theories”, the trope, serves a purpose for the conspiring, after all (and I believe it was none other than Bugman non pareille Cass Sunstein who once openly proposed creating and releasing them to confound conservatives and other troublemakers) in delegitimizing dissent in the eyes of the ever-distracted normie. But you shouldn’t need a Council of Elders to criticize Jewry, or a global pedophile ring to fight Globohomo. In their introduction and easy refutation conspiracy theories provide little pockets that swallow up popular energy like black holes and distract from the reality in its complexity. The conspiracy is everywhere, after all, when the class of people in charge of media and money have taken up against those without.

I had taken to flippantly saying we’re up against “a culture not a conspiracy” often; but the culture is the conspiracy now, has been for a long time, and if the individual disdains to fight because of its totality–who can blame him? If it was merely a question of a cabal somewhere that could be gotten at; well, that’s something with a chance. But when his very culture and institutions, his co-ethnics, his family, are against him; where does he even start?

Let’s say his situation is in fact hopeless. Are those responsible for this blameless? Justified? Is there someone responsible for this? Or, is individual agency so diffuse, so spread out in vast cultural shifts, and the individual so in thrall to the culture, for it is all he knows, that there is no moral failing here at all, no sin? This is how we tend to think of it, how we’re encouraged to think of it: the form humanity takes is morally indifferent, like continental drift. Responsibility doesn’t exist; agency is an illusion. Convenient story, if you’re the elite, and easy for obscure me to believe in my powerlessness.

For us Westerners–despite critical race theory’s slander–morality is seen more through the lens of individual rather than group responsibility. We find ourselves nearly defenseless when up against a culture that conspires against us. An individual white can be shamed into guilt over George Floyd but will never resent for a moment his black neighbor for the hell of black culture.

Covid hysteria and the George Floyd hoax make for a useful comparison in considering conspiracy and culture. The former I take to be a “real thing”, that is there’s a real pandemic there (unable to trust Western media, I trust in the reaction of China and others to it, hilariously) that was utilized, in the way Sailer describes above, to advance any elite agenda it could. George Floyd’s homicide on the other hand was not “real” from the start–not a real national crisis in the absence of media manipulation. The conspiratorial element in the Covid response is adaptive; the conspiratorial element in the George Floyd hoax is causal.

The point is we shouldn’t care. If you’re wrecking my world, I don’t care if it’s an accident. I don’t care if the destruction of decency and order is incidental to the machinations of that class of people who are in power. Like I said: is it then no less a sin?

Six six six the number of the beast
Hell and fire was spawned to be released

–Iron Maiden

Multnomah District Attorney Mike Schmidt is Portland’s representative of the class of progressive prosecutors financed by Soros bucks ahead of last summer’s nationwide Black Lives Matter agitation. Elected in a landslide and taking office early as the retiring incumbent got out of Dodge just as the Summer of George was kicking off, Schmidt announced right away he would prosecute only the most extreme cases brought before him and has kept his word, disdaining to charge, among other things, felony rioting:  

Between May 28 and October 5, Portland police referred 974 cases to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s (MCDA) office related to alleged criminal activity at protests. The DA’s office has so far rejected 666 of those cases, on the grounds that they are either not severe enough to warrant prosecution, or there is insufficient evidence to prosecute them.

Boldface added. Schmidt is a proponent of “restorative justice”, which seeks to keep black criminals out of jail with intervention-style meetings between victim, criminal and “community members”; it sounds like the notorious Marquis Love, deranged mulatto and aspiring placekicker of the Adam Haner beating, got a light 20 month sentence under such a scheme:  

 Today, Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced that 26-year-old Marquise Love received a 20 month prison sentence after pleading guilty to assault in the third degree and felony riot.

The resolution of this case resulted after months of pretrial negotiations and a judicial settlement conference.

I would love to ask the DA just what someone caught red-handed has to negotiate with. His precious (half) blackness, I guess.

Law Enforcement Today is reporting a group turned up at Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt’s home on November 6 to harass him:

This account suggests the demonstrators were right wing, or posing as right wing:

Apparently Schmidt would not call police himself. If he wasn’t in the house his wife and two kids were in there alone–if this report is accurate:

So something interesting has happened here, in that right wingers have expanded their tactics by targeting Schmidt, or antifa performed a false flag operation. Schmidt has prosecuted some criminal cases brought to him and antifa is unforgiving, to say the least. 

The political embarrassment for Schmidt in calling the police on progressive agitators is obvious–but I think he might welcome the chance to call them on right wingers. Whether this is an antifa hoax or not, Schmidt is probably now inclined to throw the book at any patriots he gets his hands on.

One thing has been made clear to the DA–he and his family are not safe at home. That’s okay Mike, whatever happens, we’ve got Restorative Justice waiting at the other end to make it all right again.

The problem with Black Lives Matter is all the blacks.

Now the Summer of Soros passes into what will be the romantic historiography of antifa, a lurid tale of fascists and tyrants, numinous negroes dying gloriously, of federal jackboots gassing–gassing!–peaceful protesters, of a rainbow underground where the genderfluid allied with Black Panthers.

We can expect the media to write that tale for them–and it’s a reasonable assumption the media would like that to be the end of it, with antifa standing down, dispersing, being absorbed into the establishment. The same people cheering the mob’s help in deposing Trump–if they have any sense despite all appearances–should be eying warily their erstwhile troops on one side and the decrepit, tottering Biden on the other.

Antifa for its part casts about for new targets and opportunities. Its newfound prestige and acceptance will present its own problems perhaps–will antifa restrain itself to retain this respectability, or disdain it and pursue ever-more radical projects and tactics? Or will we get the worst of all worlds, wherein they do that and the media continues to advocate on their behalf?

I wonder if it has occurred to antifa leadership: they would be very well rid of BLM and black racial activists; it may be a necessity for their cause. Our present revolutionaries are undergoing the same disillusioning experience their grandparents experienced in the sixties before the grift and buffoonery of their black allies, with the pressure to suppress this reality more intense now. By virtue of their insistence anti-black “racism” be at the center of all concern in perpetuity–they’ve gone to that well over and over because it works–and due to the racial diversity now of their movement, they have painted themselves into a corner.

Antifa’s revolutionary grandparents could go off and continue their assault on decency and common sense on behalf of blacks without any blacks getting in the way. Now there’s no room left–not enough whites and too many black, brown and other; present-day revolutionaries must hide things from their black allies and steal away just to think.

An industrious white insurrectionist can have any project seized at any time on behalf of “centering black voices” and watch it fall apart as he’s forced to turn it over to childish blacks complaining about hair products and soliciting reparations via cash apps.

All who oppose antifa should appreciate the limiting effect of this dynamic that may eventually sink their whole enterprise.

Some successful initiatives, inspiring for the antifa/BLM side, fell right away to the rapine of black activists and thugs. Antifa’s Riot Ribs and Wall of Moms franchises were taken over, by black thugs and activists respectively, though that distinction becomes less clear the closer you look, after they piled up donations and looked to go national. Comically resembling smash-and-grabs, the blacks took them, and their donations, over and promptly let them die. BLM security, dominated by black thugs, operated with impunity and produced the two most appalling violent incidents of summer, the beating of Adam Haner and the execution of Aaron Danielson. A gang of black and brown children terrorized the zone during the depths of it all, mobbing various weak people they found–and thereby clearing the area of homeless.

The homeless of downtown Portland were hardest hit by the chaos. No one paid them any mind as they went about rioting that often swept through streets where they were camped out–for they are all over. Once I recall seeing someone sleeping on the sidewalk, or trying to sleep, as rioters and police scuffled around them, oblivious. Once a group of antifa kids with shields made a show of putting up a wall around a man curled up on the sidewalk–who seemed unperturbed laying there–as if to protect him from police.

The virtual occupation of the area around the Justice Center brought in hosts of thugs and knuckleheads at the same time it attracted, at first, homeless crazies drawn to the excitement and others drawn to the free food–the aforementioned Riot Ribs which was operating a fleet of grills before the blacks shut it down. But over time the homeless disappeared from the scene, I suspect having worn out their welcome with the thugs and antifa alike–who managed to do what the city could never manage, clearing out a years-long homeless presence in front of the evil, now shuttered, 7/11 on Taylor and 4th.

One night at the height of antifa’s autonomy downtown I sat on a stub wall with a cancerous panhandler smoking. He complained about being hungry.

“Aren’t you getting any of those ribs?”

“Hell no. I haven’t got any of that shit.” He said resentfully.

“Are these people giving you money?” I asked. He laughed.

“These fuckers?” A young pale-skinned black man walked past.

“Hey brother you got–”

“I don’t have any money.” He cut him off before he could finish. The panhandler grinned and me, nodding his head as if to say “you see?”

Difficult homeless people in the zone could expect none of the customary indulgence they receive from average Portlanders from callous blacks and self righteous antifa. As for the police, they were almost entirely absent. The incident below took place over a couple of hours before a squad car and ambulance showed up to extricate the man–across the street and one block over from the police station:

But as antifa looks for new targets and causes, the city’s resumption of “sweeps” clearing out homeless encampments–long overdue–is just the sort of thing they need to keep the momentum going. That it doesn’t involve listening to black people whine about how they’re not doing enough for black people is a bonus; indeed, as any cause not specifically for black people is certain to draw no black people, these actions must feel like little breathers for white antifa.

There is a company that does the dirty work of cleaning up the filth left behind by homeless encampments, and naturally antifa can’t have that:

After announcing a gathering in southeast Portland, antifa marched to Rapid Response Bio Clean & smashed up the place. The business has a contract w/the city to clean biohazards at homeless encampments. #Antifa want the cleaning to stop, saying it displaces the homeless. pic.twitter.com/6h4N3H6wrS

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) November 13, 2020

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Antifa is expanding into targeting private businesses who contract with the police and are getting away with it so far.

The tawdry tale of Riot Ribs:

A homeless man ran past the storefront window and frantically entered the little lobby where I stood.

“Only two people in the store at a time sir.” The old woman behind the counter said, routinely.

“You don’t understand!” He shouted, pleading, pulling at his jacket. “You don’t understand!” He was a few feet in front of me, wild eyed, his flaring negroid nostrils filled with snot. “You don’t understand!” He all but ran past a pair of Middle Eastern girls hustling out, embarrassed, and right around the counter, heading for the nether reaches of the little pizzeria.

The old woman blocked his way but he would not stop. He did not raise a hand or grab her, but just kept coming, squeezing past the narrow passage a little on one side and then the other, as she grabbed hopelessly at his jacket and blocked him with her body. She was losing the struggle and the other employees, some sort of transgender person and a petite young woman, stood and stared.

And I had just wanted something to eat.

I came across, realizing I had no idea what I was doing. I think I barred him with my forearm across the chest–fortunately he was no bigger than me–as I grabbed rather timidly at his coat here and there, thinking his clothes might hold God knows what filth. Still he wouldn’t raise a hand, but did not stop. He thrashed with manic strength, weaving, slipping, making slow progress against our pathetic attempts to stop him.

Finally he ended up on the ground, I think in trying to execute a pass-rusher style spin-move on the old woman, who may have collapsed on the ground behind him. Desperate now I grabbed a foot–Converse style sneakers, wet and kind of slick in my bare hands, I noted with mild disgust, and started pulling. He could have kicked me square in the face with his other foot but thankfully did not. He grabbed wildly for something to stop our progress–I was surprised to find it working, that I was actually dragging the screaming man toward the door–but the tile wall on one side offered no purchase and the little metal rack on the other side just came along with us in his hand before catching up in something else.

He kept up his desperate pleas; I think he said something about the cold, or food, but always, like a refrain, “you don’t understand!”

I was screaming myself now, enraged by his pleas, worked up by the sound of my own voice, growling like a lunatic; “motherfucker get the fuck out!” “You motherfucker! You motherfucker!”; “I’ll drag you across the pavement you bastard!” I threatened as we reached the door, held open by the old woman, then proceeded to do just that; I felt a little sick at the sound of his wailing, genuine, unrestrained, and the thought of what the pavement must have felt like. The door slammed behind us; I let go and the man bounded off, heading into the boarded-up gas station convenience store next door.

“Oh shit.” I said.

I came back in and asked to use the sink to wash my hands. “I was handling a homeless guy’s feet.” I said impatiently to the kid’s quizzical expression. The gender-non-specific one came over and complimented me on the “blocking”–must be a term in their community.

“Thanks. Draggin’ a guy across the floor’s harder than it looks” I said jokingly, looking over at the petite one, a Mexican cutie, who won’t look up; I suspect she’s terrified of me, after all the screaming.

The old woman and I hung around the boarded up gas station convenience store, unable to see what was happening inside, waiting for the police. They came along in about ten minutes; one unmarked SUV pulled up briefly, then a lone female cop in a black-and-white. Her questions evinced two particular concerns: was the man having a drug related episode and was anyone injured.

The man was not arrested or detained I learned when I checked back in later; the policewoman had explained to the old woman an arrest could not be made in this circumstance, and the desperate man wandered off into the night.