 Unfortunately, Portland is in the news these days not because of its beauty and not because even of the wackiness of its left-wing population. Some of you might have seen Portlandia, which was the TV show or comedy that made fun of how leftist people in Portland tend to be. But Portland is in the news right now because of the riots in Portland and because of the federal government's response to those riots, sending law enforcement agents from a variety of different federal agencies to Portland and then these stories about unmarked vans and people being put into vans and disappearing and claims that Portland is now and the federal now government is now behaving like authoritarian regimes all over the world, comparisons maybe even to China where people disappear and so on. So I want to take on the whole gamut of events, the riots in Portland, what's going on, what I think about the riots, what I think about the demonstrations and I guess applies to more than just Portland. I have in the past argued against sending in federal troops into these circumstances, so we'll talk about what I think about these agents, these federal agents going in and then how they behave and what they behave. Now, you know, and what my evaluation of that is, but let me first say that one of the things that is so interesting about this, not interesting, one of the things that's most upsetting about all this and of course, one of the things that is not surprising about this is that it's almost impossible to find objective information about what's actually going on. It's truly stunning. The difference between different commentators, even on the ground, different people on the ground commenting on this. Never mind the kind of Washington Post, mainstream media versus Fox, versus what the federal government is saying and what local authorities in Portland are saying and what everybody in between is saying, it's almost impossible to actually stitch together the story, what is actually happening over there because it is so biased, it is so distorted, it is so perverted. She can kind of get a timeline of events, but it's really hard to tell who the players are, how big the riots are, how big the demonstrations are. It depends on who you talk to, to what extent is Antifa playing a role, to what extent is it's not. It actually is, it turns out that in Portland which is primarily the youth movement that's involved in Antifa that is playing the primary role in this, but Antifa is definitely there, but it's hard, so I've been reading a lot. I can't say after all the reading I've done about what's going on in Portland, of course that's my job, is to try to take all this mess and bring you the objective information about what is actually going on, but it's really difficult. And I can't say I'm 100% confident or satisfied with my assessment. So, and I know some of you live in the Portland area and it's probably difficult for you because who do you believe? The local news, the federal government, unless you go there every night and watch and I've read some of the reporting from local reporters and it's clear that many of them are biased and some of them can't say the truth because it would be deemed as politically incorrect. So, it's difficult times. Difficult times. The country is a complete mess. Things are out of control. Our government I think at all levels and in all functions is incompetent and it is very, very, you know, very, very difficult to figure out exactly what is happening. Exactly what is happening. So, yeah, I'm getting all these super chat questions. So, let's start by giving a little bit of history about riots, particularly on Tifa-related riots in Portland. And again, I don't have dates and times and stuff like that. I haven't put a real timeline together. But over the last few years, so going back a long time, Portland has always been kind of a demonstration city. It's always been a hub of political activism. It's been quite left-wing, I believe, for a very long time. And it's a good question of why is it so left-wing? You know, I don't know. But it's a well-educated. It's a city of well-educated people. It's a city, again, it's a very beautiful place. And like Seattle and like many cities around the country, many of the cities around the country, it has become more and more and more left over time. So, Seattle has always had this culture of demonstration. It had a lengthy kind of, what is it, Occupy Wall Street. Do you remember Occupy Wall Street? It seems so tame in comparison to what's going on today. We had Occupy Wall Street in 2009. And there was a long, long time where there was a tense city in Portland, Occupy Wall Street. But a few years ago, it became basically an area where kind of right-wing racists, white supremacists of various sorts, white-wing nuts, or the wacky right, as I like to call it. It became an area of confrontation between the wacky right and the wacky left, or Antifa representing the wacky left in this case, the anarchist right, the anarchist left, you could call them. And it became a place in which people, you know, almost on a regular basis, that would be fights between these two groups. And a lot of it started with the rights, kind of the racist right, putting on demonstrations or getting licenses to do demonstrations in the park near downtown Portland. And then people would come to demonstrate against them, large numbers of people. And then within the large numbers of people who were demonstrating Antifa would always play a role. And then, you know, while the demonstrations were peaceful at some point, it became completely nutty and crazy and violent and so on. Somebody is asking if it's the Proud Boys. Yes, but, you know, I don't know much about the Proud Boys, but almost always the Proud Boys, when they do demonstrations like this, they're always accompanied by the racists, the white supremacists, the alt-right types that whether they use the Proud Boys as cover or whether the Proud Boys are part of them, hard for me to tell, but clearly the Proud Boys are not innocent here and clearly they ally themselves way too often with racists of the right and use the opportunity to make hay. So, you know, Portland, if you remember a few years ago, a couple of guys were stabbed to death on a tram in Portland when a racist guy started harassing two girls, I think they might have been Muslim, and these guys stepped in to try to stand up for these girls and they were knifed and killed. And then there was a demonstration because of that, you know, after this guy was caught and that turned into riots and that turned into fights and then it was almost, there was a period there where I was reading, it was almost every weekend there was this big fight in Portland between some right-wing group and some, you know, some Antifa-inspired group. If you go back to, I think this has started in November 2016, you know, right after the election when there were demonstrations in the street, anti-Trump demonstrations in the street and where, again, a group of, you know, Antifa, a group of anarchists, shattered windows, paid graffiti, went crazy, turned a demonstration into a riot and kept repeating that pattern, right, repeating that pattern. It's interesting, there's a Washington Post, because it's an opportunity for us to talk about a little bit of our bias, but there's a Washington Post article called How Portland Became an Easy Target for Federal Agents Trying to Quash an Uprising. I mean, there's so much wrong with that title. I don't think the federal agents are trying to quash an uprising, you know, if they're trying to quash an uprising, they're pretty pathetic at it and I'm not sure what's going on in Seattle as an uprising. You know, so the whole title is messed up, but it does give a bit of a history, but the history is so biased in the way it is written, right. So, when they refer to the Antifa types, it's usually referred to as a small group of anarchists. When they refer to the far-right groups, they always refer to them as neo-Nazis or white supremacists. And then they say the neo-Nazis and white supremacists have an anti-Antifa rally and they put anti-Antifa in quotes, right, as if Antifa doesn't really exist. But for two years, for two years, you know, police have been fighting these groups and they blame, according to Washington Post, all falls in these right-wing groups. Now, maybe it does, but it's just the way they treat the two groups is just funny just in the way the language they use. It's so obvious where their allegiance is. And it's always says, it's always by the way mentioned, that the far-right groups don't live in Portland. No, they all come from out of town. The Antifa guys, they all live in Portland. The left is all local. It's all native. But the far-right, they come from outside. It's like they're trying to protect their, you know, Portland is just a far-left city. There's no, there's no nutty, you know, the right doesn't belong here. So this idea of fights, protests that lead to violence, that then lead to confrontations with the police, that are violent just, you know, as being part of, sadly, very sadly, part of the Portland life for the last few years. And of course, since George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, there's basically been a demonstration every single night. Every single night. There have been 54 consecutive nights. There have been demonstrations. Most of them, most of them leading to confrontations between the police and the demonstrators. During these demonstrations, nobody's claiming, as far as I can tell, that any of the right wing out of towners are creating any problems. It's really just the demonstrators and the anarchists within, the anarchists within. Now, I read, there's a Portland reporter that has put out a, it's on Bellingcat.com, B-L-L-I-N-G, cat.com. It's called What You Need to Know About the Battle of Portland. And he basically gives you almost a day-by-day description of what happened from the beginning of the George Floyd demonstrations all the way till today. But basically, the pattern is something like this, right? There'd be a big demonstration, lots of people, peaceful, you know, and it would, they'd demonstrate, they'd march. And then at some point, these anarchists, radical leftists, however you want to call them, extremist leftists, would start creating mayhem. They'd start breaking windows, they'd start throwing rocks, and that first weekend after George Floyd, there was literally, you know, they were looting, they were breaking windows, they looted an apple store, they looted a target, they were looting all over the place. And then the police would respond, primarily with tear gas. And the demonstrators, after a few nights, kind of got used to the tear gas, the two gas would do nothing to them, so they would start beating back on the police and the police would start chasing them and chase them through the streets. And this would go on for hours, back and forth. And then the same thing would happen the next night. And again, tear gas, and then the police started using rubber bullets and other projectiles and then other mechanisms and they put barricades in front of certain buildings or being vandalized in order to try to protect them from their demonstrations and from the riots. And this just kept going on day after day. And at some point, kind of a lot of, there was a huge split within the demonstrators because they said, hey, we want to do peaceful demonstrations, we don't want this violence, so there was a whole group that split off and did peaceful demonstrations and then there were a bunch of these demonstrators who said, no, no, we want to continue harassing the police. And so there are two groups within Portland demonstrating, one that it becomes more violent pretty quickly and the other one that tries to avoid the violence and tries to stay away. And this just keeps going on day after day. And the police are combating it, they're using tear gas, they're going after them, they're beating it up, they're putting people in jail, they're letting them out. And he goes, but it doesn't stop. It just goes on and on and on and on. And it's just insanity. Don't forget, before you leave the show today to like the show, just give it a thumbs up if you like the show today. And of course, if you're not a subscriber, if you're just visiting right now, please subscribe and if you click on the bell, you'll find, you know, you'll get notification every time you'll get, I'll go on live, you'll find out about it. And of course, those of you who are not supporters, appreciate the support. So, you know, you get this, this, you know, what do they call it? They call it a cycle of violence. The police are violent against the demonstrators, then demonstrate the police brutality from the night before and then they start shattering windows and doing graffiti. And the funny thing is that most of the attitude of the people that write about this, it's like, yeah, they shatter windows and they do graffiti, who cares? Of course, they set fire to buildings when they can. Many of these buildings are now so protected, well protected they can't actually, they can't actually get into them, but if they would, if they could, they throw, you know, fireworks, which can be fairly dangerous. So, these demonstrators are clearly, rioters really, are clearly acting in ways that are violent. This is violent. This is what the police is for. It's to stop them. Now, this is accelerated to some extent and starting really in July 4th when it was mayhem in the streets of downtown Portland and it was unbelievably destructive and, you know, crazy, that the federal government decided to send, so the federal government, I learned this today, right, the federal government has a agency whose basic job is to protect federal buildings, right? So, they deploy security guards in federal buildings to protect those federal buildings, courthouses and other functionary federal buildings. And one of the main targets of the demonstrations have been the federal buildings in downtown Portland. So, the federal government has sent now agents from at least three or four different agencies down to supposedly protect these federal buildings. One is they've sent security guards from, they're all technically police. They're all, you know, I don't know, deputized as federal police. So, they sent them from this agency that secures buildings. Then they sent two different units from basically the border control. But it's interesting. These are like military trained, almost SWAT-like, uniformed, you know, special forces of the border control. So, one of the things to consider is the scariness of the number of different police forces we have in the United States. The amount of training these people get and kind of given the size of government, the roles that they land up playing is kind of spooky. Watch all this. And then, there are some federal marshals down there. Now, I'm not sure why federal marshals are deployed, but again, again, I don't know, one of my favorite TV shows in the last few years was justified. And justified was about federal marshals in Kentucky. And federal marshals, at least according to the TV show, do a lot of different things in support of local and federal law enforcement. So, federal marshals are down there as well. So, there are four different, I think, four different federal law enforcement agents, in addition to the FBI, which is they're just broadly trying to figure out who is funding these rioters, who's behind them, is the organization, is it planned, is it spontaneous, all of that. That's kind of the FBI's job, is to really investigate. These four agencies are responsible for protecting the federal buildings and for prosecuting people who attack the federal buildings. Now, you've seen video of people being, I don't know, taken away in unmarked vans. And according to these federal agencies, yeah, they use unmarked vans, partially because they, you know, if you're marked, then you become a target of the protesters. The protesters come and they will, they will, you know, attack the police car. We've seen this all over the country. But in addition to that, they say it's a pretty standard process. Nobody is being arrested without having their rights, you know, be mirandized, having their rights told to them. Nobody's being held in secret jails. Everybody's being charged or not charged and then being released. You know, nothing, according to the federal agents, at least, nothing weird is going on here. Other than they kind of appeared out of nowhere. Nobody knew they were coming. Nobody knew what they were doing. Nobody knew their role. The federal government didn't bother to tell us any of this. So when people started capturing this on film, it looked really, really weird and really, really scary. A lot of these people are asked to come into the vans for questioning. And the way they choose the people is they say, they were explaining this in a press conference today, is they're constantly monitoring the riots. They identify certain people within the riots. Then when those people leave the large groups, because the federal agents don't want to go into the large groups and engage in hand-to-hand combat, basically, when these people leave the groups, that's when they are arrested or questioned or, you know, brought to wherever, to be questioned about their activities. There are about 40 people that I think have been charged. I think according to what they say, and again it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, it's hard to get any facts, and it's hard to tell who we do believe, they have not been that many people detained who have not been arrested by the federal agents. And of course, at the same time, this is done is inflamed the riots and brought more people, maybe people who typically wouldn't riot, out into the streets to demonstrate. So now you have this mothers or whatever who are protecting the rioters. And it's just a circus. It is mayhem. It is a complete, unmitigated disaster. And I think to draw out of this a few things, because the bottom line is, what's going on in Portland is insane. What's going on in Portland is the breakdown of the rule of law. What's going on in Portland is a failure. A failure of local and federal officials to deal with the situation. A complete failure of policing. And of course, it's an emboldenment and has been for months, maybe years, the worst elements on the left, the Antifa types, who think this is a game? Because they never seem to suffer the consequences of the game that they are playing. And at the same time, the federal government is absolutely incompetent. You send agents into the field in a situation like this without announcing it, without letting people know, without making clear what the mandate is and what their role is. Is the troops into the streets? Is this really Trump using the... What was it, the insurrection act to send special forces into the streets to bake this out? No, it turns out it isn't. This is just the Department of Homeland Security defending federal buildings. Well, do we know what their jurisdiction is when they do that? Well, yes, it turns out there's a whole legal code to determine all of this. I didn't say there was hand-to-hand combat going in Portland. I said that if they went into the crowd, this is, again, I said what I said was, what the federal agents are saying is they're detaining people away from the crowd because if they try to detain them in the crowd, if they try to go into the crowd and detain them, there would be hand-to-hand combat. I never said there was hand-to-hand combat in the crowd. I know there isn't. But it basically is demonstration and rioting going on. And there is an unorganized, uncoordinated, incompetent police and federal response to it. I don't know. Rick lives in Portland, happy to hear that if that is a misrepresentation of what's going on. Now, this is a failure of local police. This is a failure of local politicians. And this is a failure of the Trump administration at all levels to deal with the situation. I'd say it's more than that. This is a failure to deal with the whole culture of demonstration. And this is going to be very controversial, what I'm going to say. I don't think there's a right to demonstrate. You can have a right to go into the streets and block traffic. And, you know, block the ability of human beings to engage in their day-to-day activity. That is a violation of their rights. And, all right, once in a while, there's a lot of steam brewing and a demonstration goes out there and maybe some of the demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement were like this and they're going to happen and you just, you know, you got to let them happen, like the March on Washington or something like that. But to have a culture of demonstrations, to have a culture in which you're demonstrating regularly, even if it's peacefully, that you are blocking traffic or you are occupying a park where people, the park is there for people to fly kites and enjoy. Not to be occupied by thousands of people yelling political slogans. Demonstrations generally violate rights. They violate the rights of the peace-loving citizen who just wants to use the property that is there. Now, in a world of private property, you can demonstrate on your property. Indeed, you can rent a stadium and demonstrate. You can rent a private park and demonstrate. You can do anything you want. Well, not anything you want. But peacefully, you can demonstrate anyway. But once we allow demonstrators into the street, march wherever they want, close off whichever building they want, you're asking for trouble. You're basically putting the mob in control of your city. And of course, all of this is licensed. So you give a license to the neo-Nazis to come and demonstrate in the park and then you give a license to Antifa to come and counter-demonstrate the Nazis and what do you expect is going to happen? And of course, you put the police in an impossible situation because the police are there and suddenly these crazy people from the left and crazy people on the right are going at it with knives and punching each other and they're going to get in the middle of this. How are they going to do it? Do they have enough? Are they enough police to do it? What weapons can they use? What are the rules of engagement? Is any of this understood and known that the police have the training to do this? Now, if you're demonstrating a civil disobedience like the demonstrators in Hong Kong who are clearly a civil disobedience they didn't ask permission because you're demonstrating for freedom. Yeah. And I'm very sympathetic to the demonstrations of the civil rights movements or basically demonstrating for freedom. To demonstrate every little grievance and every little problem and everything goes out into the streets and yell and close the streets off and so the demonstrations all over the country closing off highways and shutting down downtowns and shutting down... I mean, we're in a pandemic so there aren't that many people in the streets. I guess it's not bad. But in a normal time this would be horrific. Shutting down people's ability to live their lives. Now, if you then answer that if you answer that that you then have violent demonstrators who feel completely, you know, no problem in spray-painting and breaking windows and throwing things at police. I don't know if you saw the pictures from Chicago where the police were standing about a sculpture of a statue of Columbus of Christopher Columbus and they're just pummeled with bottles and, you know, fireworks anything that demonstrated these rioters could get their hands on was being thrown at these police they don't have riot gear they don't have protective gear they're just being and they just stand there and partially it's because they're outnumbered there's complete civil breakdown they're outnumbered and ultimately they left and the demonstrators came by and tried to knock down this statue and they couldn't and then the police got reinforcement and chased them away but the whole thing the whole thing is just mayhem complete anarchy no rule of law the police are not given the tools to actually institute the rule of law these cities are complete in disarray and of course we have a commanding chief a president who is anti the rule of law and has no respect for the rule of law so you've got an attitude in this country and a mood in this country that's just anti any respect for the rule of law each side have their own facts each side have their own stories each side has their own narrative and there is no objective truth there's no what's actually going on there's made up stories on every side we have a country where the two political parties hate each other so much and people who associate with it hate each other so much that it's basically warfare out there the president of the United States is so despised and I'm one of them so I'm one of the people despise him so I wouldn't say it's unjustifiable but he can't even talk the chief of the homeland security the mayor and the governor of a state and coordinate a strategy without it becoming this war between them a war between the federal government and the state authorities the whole thing what we're seeing today is a crumbling and a disintegration of this country you know unity matters America used to be at least unified around the principles of the rule of law respect for the rule of law respect for the presidency and the government not acceptance, not adherence not blind obedience but respect and that is gone this reminds me of the last time we saw this kind of break up and disintegration which is the 1960s we got out of the 1960s we got to the 1980s and things got normal and sane again but it doesn't guarantee we're going to get out of this because I think what was unique in the 1960s was all from kind of a wacky left from a new left and the right was incompetent and not very good and not very principled but it wasn't there wasn't a real resurgence of the wacky right but maybe there wasn't a real prevalence of the wacky right and the racism in the 1960s was on the decline and racism was viewed as something ugly and despicable and horrible and nobody admitted to being a racist anymore the KKK was in decline white supremacists were in decline now we're in the opposite situation the left is going nuts and the right is embracing all the things that during the 1960s became kind of unacceptable so it's a truly it's a time when you know he says he doesn't want to end up like Hong Kong which is why they have been protesting the left 52s I mean that is absurd that's an absurd statement it is nothing it is indeed the right it is that are acting more like the Chinese than anybody else they are rejecting the rule of law they're imposing their authoritarian will on the rest of the citizens of Portland, Oregon who are they demonstrating, who are they demonstrating against exactly their own police who have used tear gas against them they're not demonstrating they're demonstrating how Donald Trump is this about you know the police state that Donald Trump is enforcing as bad as Trump is he is not enforcing a police state and he's too incompetent to do so and the American system government is still too fragmented to allow for that because suddenly the inclinations are there but no I don't think the demonstrators and the rioters are demonstrating and writing for anything positive for anything good for anything that's gonna make it better and I don't think the federal government knows what it's doing when it's sending their officers in there but I don't think the officers there are hiding people away and you know putting them in concentration camps or they're disappearing or they're not dying in custody as far as we know there's no evidence of that to compare them to the Chinese thugs the Chinese totalitarians and what they did in Hong Kong to compare the fate of antifa thugs trying to burn down federal buildings with true freedom fighters in Hong Kong is absurd and ridiculous the challenge here is they're no good guys the demonstrators and the antifa thugs are not good guys and these federal agents are not good guys they're protecting a building they're not bringing order, they're not bringing peace they're not resolving anything and nobody's resolving anything the mayor and the governor not doing anything the Portland police go from being super active and being incredibly violent to disappearing and lending these thugs rampage I've seen video where they're trying to break into a police precinct and the police do nothing basically barricaded in too afraid to leave this is truly what you're seeing is a breakdown and it's a breakdown because we have lost all trust in government in any kind of government and I think that's the big part because of the incompetency I don't know what the word is of the Trump administration and I think the incompetency of these mayors and these cities the incompetency of the police and these mixed messages on the one hand everybody's against police brutality on the other hand can we embolden the police to bring peace to a city can we give them the tools to be able to stop rioting in the streets whether it's in Portland whether it's in Chicago whether it's in New York it has to be some kind of response in LA in 1992 they did bring out the federal troops California asked for the federal troops and federal troops were sent and they pacified the situation is that what's really needed now have we lost controls of our cities to the extent that our local officials and local police can't actually impose the rule of law and about people so lost trust so lost belief that they feel like they have to go fight in the streets and what happens when the wacky right decides that they have to go out there and defend their city from the wacky left or just go out there and fight them because the police are not doing their job this is how you get complete civilization on collapse what we need today what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason by the intellect not by feelings wishes, wins or mystic revelations any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought before we go on, reminder please like the show we've got 163 live listeners right now 30 likes that should be at least 100 I figured at least 100 of you actually like the show maybe they're like 60 of the matthews out there who hate it I want to see a thumbs up there you go start liking it, I want to see that go to 100 all it takes is a click of a thing whether you're looking at this and you know the likes matter it's not an issue of my ego it's an issue of the algorithm the more you like something the more the algorithm likes it and if you don't like the show give it a thumbs down let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes if you like it don't just sit there help get the show promoted of course you should also share and you can support the show at youronbookshow.com slash support on Patreon or subscribe star or locals and show your support for the 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