PORTLAND’S ANTIFA MOVEMENT IS SPIRALING OUT OF CONTROL:

For antifa, it’s not enough to simply outscream their opposition; rather, those far-right forces must, in a bizarre nod to the Bush Doctrine, be preemptively denied a voice from the outset. “We are unapologetic about the reality that fighting fascism at points requires physical militancy,” Rose City Antifa’s Facebook page reads…

Shortly after Trump’s election, anarchist and far-left protesters rioted in Portland, bringing at least a million dollars’ worth of damage—and resulting, in the eyes of the Department of Homeland Security, in “domestic terrorism.” Further riots followed Trump’s inauguration, and more in the months thereafter. “Their actions—conducted anonymously but brutally—show them to be punk fascists,” wrote an editorial in The Oregonian, slamming those leading the greatest political violence Portland had seen in a generation.

“You really have to see it to appreciate how out of control some of the protesters were,” John Sexton adds to the above Politico article, at Hot Air. Scroll to about the 3:15 minute mark, where a masked, mostly peaceful™ protestor kicks in a Target department store window and then attempts to throw a flair into the store, followed immediately after by the mostly peaceful destruction of a Portland police car, including breaking its windows and slashing its tires:

That was the Portland May Day protest. But fear not, Portland residents – the city’s Democrat mayor is not taking the months of violence lying down:

Still have questions about Portland police tactics during the June 4 protester standoff? So does Mayor Ted Wheeler.

Wheeler today sent a letter to Portland Police Chief Mike Marshman that asks five detailed questions about the methods police used to drive left-wing protesters from Chapman Square and detain them in downtown streets.

Wheeler’s questions cover much of the same ground as a June 6 WW story that summarized a persistent complaint from the Sunday protests: that Portland police cracked down too aggressively on local antifascists and anarchists.

The mayor’s letter is especially interesting because its asks the bureau to defend not only its June 4 actions but explain its guiding policy on how it responds to political protests. Wheeler asks why police arrive at rallies in riot gear, and what grounds the bureau uses for deploying crowd-control weapons like stun grenades and rubber bullets. (Both were used on June 4.)

“I have heard from people who claim they were protesting peacefully and following instructions, but nevertheless were affected by the use of crowd control devices,” the mayor writes. “What steps are taken to minimize the use of crowd control devices? What steps are taken to attempt to ensure that when they are used those protesting peacefully and following instructions are not affected?”

As CBS reported in 2015, when a reporter asked Wheeler’s fellow Democrat, then-Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, “to comment on how Baltimore police responded to the protestors she said she instructed officers to allow protestors to express themselves, and that ‘we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well.’”

Evidently, that’s how Portland’s mayor is cracking down on leftwing violence in his town as well. Portland’s last Republican mayor left office in 1980; Baltimore’s in 1967. Why are Democrat-monopoly cities such cesspits of government-sanctioned violence?