How Bad is Portland?

 The left is starting to screech that the riots in Portland are confined to just a few blocks; it is really not that bad.  7/31/20 New York Times promotes this narrative:

The clashes with federal officers were largely confined to a two-block stretch of downtown Portland. The mood tended to follow a predictable pattern, with large, peaceful gatherings in the evening turning to chaos later at night.

The problems these riots are causing are not limited to downtown.  8/2/20 Fox News:

A shooting rang out about 11:08 p.m. Friday outside an apartment building near the 600 Block of NE 87th Avenue. The Portland Police Bureau said in an update Saturday that more than 150 rounds were fired and bullets struck at least eight occupied apartments and seven vehicles. One round struck a woman in the arm, and responding officers applied a tourniquet before she was transported to the hospital by ambulance with injuries that were not life-threatening. 

“This is America and it’s a war zone with 150 shots in an apartment complex close to a Christian university. How can we explain that?” Aragon Marks, who lives at the building, told Fox 12 Oregon.

Though it was not immediately clear whether the shooting was linked to demonstrations seen in Portland nearly every night since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May, another resident, Kemoh Sulimani, connected the violence to the city’s efforts to defund police.

“They had a gang violence task force that are no longer funded, which is unfortunate because as soon as that defunding happened all of this really peaked up,” Sulimani told Fox 12. 

Remember that the goal of BLM is abolition of police departments, at which point gangs take over black neighborhoods, killing far more blacks than police ever would and no national news coverage.  (I am guessing that Kemoh Sulimani is not a white supremacist.)

Nice photo in that article of the anarchist graffiti on a wall.  As usually, these people have not a clue what anarchy means.  It means shopkeepers buying belt-fed machine guns and mowing down these mobs.  Without a government to regulate machine gun sales or a government to prosecute shopkeepers anarchy turns into a blood bath of progressives.

As I posted a few days ago, their compatriots in Seattle are already demanding that whites move out of black neighborhoods and give up their homes.  There was a time when this happened with whites threatening blacks into leaving "white" towns.  

Making excuses for racism just increases the risk that some of these black racists will start pulling a modern version of the 1921 Tulsa race riots.  This will end badly, probably worst for blacks who know better than to engage in this race hatred; when {white, Korean-American, East Indian, Jewish} people are being victimized in the name of social justice for blacks, the response of hotheads is unlikely to be selective as to who is the enemy.  There are no good endings to race hatred, regardless of the color of the rioters.