NANCY ROMMELMANN: The Dream of the ’90s Died in Portland.

Wheeler, who’d squeaked past openly pro-antifa challenger Sarah Iannarone to win reelection, issued an anodyne press release, thanking voters for giving him a second chance and stating that Portland “is not a perfect place, and we have many historical inequities to repair, but this is a very special place.”

There were other signs people had had enough of the violence. Commissioner Eudaly, a favorite of the activists, was unseated by someone backed by the police union. And when I asked a local news editor, whose paper had pretty much been in the bag for the protests, if he had a contact at the PNW Youth Liberation Front, he wrote back, “If I had the names of the little criminals who run PNWYLF, I would have published them! [If they] were all torn apart by bears, as in the book of II Kings, I would consider that the work of the Lord.”

The situation in Portland did not improve after the election. Activists kept marching nightly. They swarmed the house of a newly elected city commissioner because he’d voted against the latest measure to defund the police. They vandalized 27 businesses along a six-block strip in Northeast Portland. They established an “autonomous zone” called Red House, ostensibly in support of a black and Native American family facing eviction. And on New Year’s Eve, they used Molotov cocktails and other high-powered incendiary devices to cause tens of thousands of dollars in damage in downtown.

Long but well worth a read, to see a leftist-monopoly city implode gradually, and then suddenly, to paraphrase Hemingway on bankruptcy.