Last August, teen sensation Greta Thunberg was aboard a sailing vessel heading across the Atlantic for the United States.
Powered by winds of rage, she was the international “it girl,” with her pigtails and scrubbed cheeks and righteous indignation, and would soon be named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
We noticed an uptick in the wearing of pigtails last summer amongst young girls. Greta taught them to say, “How dare you!” with conviction. It was a wearisome time for parents of teenage girls.
Climate change was, in the summer of 2019, the most urgent matter facing our planet. We know this because the media told us so. Forest fires fueled the narrative across the West that we were burning down the house. TV footage of burning forests were the proof.
How quickly we forget.
This summer we are living in the world the climate change activists envisioned — commerce is crippled, people live off the government, and no one is allowed to have a good time.
This summer, few recall Greta and her climate strikes. Forest fires burn, as they normally do in the West, and no one cares.
Now, Black Lives Matter is the new “it girl” in school. It’s the police who are the global menace. The young have moved on from wanting a more green and cool planet to wanting a more cans of spray paint and commercial-grade fireworks.
After these many weeks of race riots in Portland, where more than 80 percent of the residents are white and fewer than 3 percent are black, the city is still unsafe and the blocks around government buildings are still war zones. Violent crime is at historic highs, as it is in Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.
The rioters are mostly white, mostly educated, and as “woke,” as a generation of kids who won participation trophies can be. They’re not part of an underclass by any means, but are the fingerlings of our ailing education system and parents who themselves have been protesting Donald Trump’s presidency since the day he was elected. The homes of these rioters are no-doubt filled with pussy hats left over from the protests against Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court.
Portland Antifa is keeping the fires burning under this anti-American movement, as riot organizers hope to warm enough of the embers until the next outrage sparks a new wave of street fighting. After all, school will not be in session and the endorphin rush of being part of an important movement is intoxicating for this generation, which has hormones and boredom to spare. Always a deadly combination.
Mainstream media continues to describe the mayhem as “mainly peaceful,” and consumers of the media are lacking fulsome pictures from these riot scenes.
Over the weekend in Portland, the riots settled to skirmishes, but criminality still ruled the downtown district:
Around 9 p.m. on July 31, Oregon State Police reported a crowd forming at the Multnomah County sheriff’s office building in the Southeast section of the city, a sprawling area of homes and businesses.
By 9:32 pm, 150 protestors were on site, demanding entry into the building and alternately chanting they wanted to burn the building down. The police declared it an unlawful assembly, somewhat of an understatement.
A short while later, the crowd had moved back to the federal Hatfield Courthouse, where for several weeks rioting has been the order of the day in the liberal city along the Willamette River.
Roughly 700 protesters surrounded the courthouse, and spread themselves throughout Lownsdale Square, Chapman Square, Terry Schrunk Plaza, and the Edith Green Federal Building, where someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the building, according to the U.S. Marshal. An Antifa was seen walking through the crowd with what federal officials called an AR-15 rifle.
Sometime during the course of the evening, rioters shot paintballs at courthouse security cameras. Others blocked the vehicle entrance to the Edith Green Federal Building and threw bottles at the windows.
Department of Homeland Security officers, trying to protect federal property in spite of the Portland mayor’s wish to burn it down, conducted no arrests and reported no new injuries during the evening.
Portland saw a record number of murders in July, and August is shaping up to be another violent month in the city.
It’s hard for everyday Americans, who are just trying to survive in these coronavirus times, to keep perspective on the unfurling of the events that cross their news feeds.
But when the Portland School District said it would not dock students for skipping school last September so they could participate in a nationwide climate change strike, the school administrators themselves were setting the stage for this year, when the activists moved on to their new target: Police.
