Riots have continued in Portland, Oregon, for several nights despite the withdrawal of federal law enforcement officials, as left-wing activists from Black Lives Matter and Antifa have attacked local police and battled them in the city streets.
On Wednesday night into Thursday morning, for example, the Portland Police Department declared a riot as left-wing extremists attacked the department’s East Precinct, disabling security cameras and attempting to set the building on fire.
Video footage showed police pursuing rioters as they moved through residential streets.
Some residents were unhappy to see them, according to oregonlive.com:
Neighbors were mixed in their reaction to the crowd. At least other two bystanders got into shouting matches with protesters after screaming “all lives matter” at the crowd. One man who claimed to live in the neighborhood walked toward police, held out his arms and shouted, “I live here. You need to leave!”
These were only the latest such disturbances, as rioters in Portland have targeted local police in recent days.
The night before, rioters targeted the local police union, and blocked traffic. Shots were reported at one location. A local driver in a pickup truck dragged a motorcycle that had been placed in the road by a rioter to stop the truck from leaving.
Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell — who is black — spoke out earlier this week:
“Enough is enough,’’ Lovell said. “This is not forwarding the goals” of the Black Lives Movement, he said.
Lovell said it’s one thing if people have a desire to speak out against racial inequities, but “if you’re trying to burn, burglarize buildings or throw Molotov cocktails, rocks or other things that injure officers … to me, there’s no message there.”
As of last week, it was axiomatic on the left and in much of the mainstream media to pretend that the violence in Portland — which had raged nightly since late May — was President Donald Trump’s fault, as the administration sent federal officers to protect the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse from constant attack by so-called “peaceful protesters.”
However, over the past week, violence has continued to be a feature of nightly demonstrations, even though some of the protests — according to local police — begin with nonviolent demonstrations (albeit without permits from authorities).
Mainstream media outlets — including the Wall Street Journal — persisted in describing the demonstrations “mostly peaceful” after a weekend of violence, including attacks on local police.
In a Senate hearing earlier this week about the violence Portland, Democrats refused to condemn Antifa specifically when invited to do so by Republicans.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.