RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yes, they want a bloody revolution, and in Portland, the dress rehearsal is underway.  Downtown has been sacked, and the revolutionaries have taken to the streets of residential neighborhoods, terrifying residents.  The message is clear: police cannot protect you, so shut up and let the new powers-that-be run things.

Yesterday, the Portland Police Bureau seemed to confirm that message, that they are powerless to stop the revolution.  At RedState, Shipwreckedcrew wrote about the absence of police in a violent clash between Antifa/BLM forces and “Back the Blue” forces, said to include The Proud Boys:

[T]here was a noticeable lack of Portland Police in any of the videos of the two groups clashing.

Late today came an explanation for their absence — there were insufficient police resources available to the shift commanders to do anything to intervene in the incident that involved well over 100 protesters from both sides. (snip)

That, my friends, is the declaration by Portland PD that they are unwilling to intervene in a conflagration they do not believe they can stop.  The events of the past two months have slowly drained Portland PD’s resources through attrition of manpower. (snip)

[There] was an ominous development with the clash between the two groups — the presence of numerous firearms — both handguns and long guns. (snip)

Portland PD has confessed that it is running out of the capacity to deal with violence in the city on a 24-hour basis.  There are going to be some hours during the day when insufficient police resources will be unavailable [sic] to separate the two sides.  Episodes like today are likely to repeat, maybe grow in size, and involve more weapons and greater violence employed by each against the other.

The District Attorney announced two weeks ago his office was not going to prosecute “riot” related crimes.  That caused the State Police to pull their personnel out of Portland.

It sure does not appear that the local and state authorities have a plan to turn the tide here.  This may eventually come down to a steel-cage death match that each side seems to want to have.

After today’s escalation, it might come faster than expected.

Over the weekend, another group of revolutionaries symbolically spoke of their bloody intentions in unmistakable imagery: a guillotine.

Twitter video screen grab.

The victim of the guillotine here is a teddy bear, standing in for Portland mayor Ted Wheeler, whose overall capitulation to the rioters has earned him no gratitude or charity.  This is not playful symbolism; it is bloodlust, finding preliminary expression.  One of the great lessons of the Holocaust is “When someone tells you he wants to kill you — take him seriously.”

One seasoned observer who takes it seriously is Abe Greenwald, who has written a paywalled article in Commentary titled, “Yes, this is a Revolution”:

The battle for the survival of the United States of America is upon us. It has not come in the form of traditional civil war. There are no uniformed armies, competing flags, or alternate constitutions. (snip)

If it wasn’t clear in late May and early June, it should be well understood by now that we are in the throes of a genuine revolution of the most extravagant sort. Like messianic revolutionaries of the past, the revolutionary mob of the 21st century is out to “remake the world.” Their compass is “no longer pointed at one thing.” It’s aimed in all directions at once. As Thomas Paine said approvingly of France in 1791, “it is the age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.” A mission so grandiose demands the most radical assault on the current order, and changing the world begins with changing one’s country. So it was in France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949. And this is especially so if one’s country is seen as the seat of the present evil and is also the most powerful nation on the planet. This is, then, most fundamentally a revolution against the United States of America and all it stands for.

In revolutions… the purpose of confession is not to elicit forgiveness but to further the purge.

To date, not a single national Democrat has spoken out against the revolutionaries.  They think they will run things when the dust settles, apparently.  They are as foolish as Maximilien Robespierre, the French Revolutionary leader who ended up in a guillotine when the radicals outpaced him in their demands.

The upside of the inability of mobs to self-censor is that President Trump has the opportunity and guts to lay out exactly who the forces are that want to run America, and the inability of the Democrats to stand up to them.  Should Joe Biden win the election, he and the handlers who pull his strings would fare no better than the Portland teddy bear standing in for Mayor Wheeler.  Bloodlust is never sated by confession and concession, as Greenwald’s final comment quoted above instructs us.