We watched people come and go. Black and white, but mainly black. The estate was largely Afro-Caribbean, which is a problem when you’re perpetually accused of only stopping black people. A few of the pub-goers were known cannabis dealers. They saw our marked car and either sucked their teeth or pointed their fingers at us like pretend guns. “There you go,” said Stuart, nodding at a tall black man wearing a tracksuit. The man was leaving the beer garden, wreathed in sickly white smoke. “That’s my man.”

The thief-taker got out of the car and began reciting the catechism known to all police officers: “I can smell weed on you, mate. I’m gonna search you. Now, have you got anything in your pockets you shouldn’t have, anything sharp?” Then he continued with a heavily-abbreviated version of the information required under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The search led to the discovery of several wraps of crack and a quantity of cash. The man in the tracksuit was a dealer who the thief-taker had been keeping a beady eye on. And, yes, the scent of weed was the key to the door.

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I later tried the same trick myself. Stopping a suspect who smelled of weed, I searched him and found a car key. The suspect, who didn’t have a driving license, had “borrowed it”. Inside the car? A dozen freshly stolen leather jackets from a local motorcycle shop. I was no thief-taker, but then again the guy with the stolen jackets wasn’t exactly Moriarty, either.

The tactic is hardly a secret. London’s police are sanguine about cannabis use unless you’re — to put it bluntly — taking the piss. During my stint as a uniformed officer I was fairly liberal in my application of the law, but found it was a useful tool for catching bad guys. And, for some reason, petty criminals love weed. Sadly, such earthy truths offend the sensibilities of those in power. Which is presumably why Sadiq Khan’s recent review of drugs use in the capital recommends decriminalizing small quantities of cannabis for personal use. The review, which pompously treats London as an independent state rather than the UK’s capital city, was (of course) headed by an impeccably liberal lawyer and close friend of Tony Blair, Charlie Falconer. Falconer said officers use such tactics “disproportionately against black men”, and that the enforcing of drugs laws is an “incredible friction point between the police and black communities”.

The politics behind this review are typical of London’s mayor: performative, headline-grabbing, problematic for policing and designed to garner support from Labour’s base, especially younger voters. Unlike his predecessors, Khan’s support for the Met has been equivocal, despite policing being one of his only significant Mayoral powers (the other is transport).

Khan is the third London mayor since the role was created. I have been an officer under all three London mayors, of whom Khan has been the most unhelpful to policing. Ken Livingstone, despite his reputation as a Left-winger, understood the importance of robustly policing a capital city. Boris Johnson had the good sense to subcontract policing to his more capable deputies and, eventually, to get rid of the lackluster police chief Sir Ian Blair. What of Sir Sadiq? His opportunism is shameless yet instructive. How so? Delve into the small print and you’ll see how, practically, his proposals are unworkable. The Mayor said: “The report makes a compelling, evidence-based case for the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of natural cannabis, which the Government should consider.”

This is where the proposal falls apart, or perhaps the mask slips. Small quantities of natural cannabis? Patrol officers would be required to become mobile pharmacologists. All arrests for drug possession are usually “on suspicion of”, because, at the moment they seize the drug, officers can’t evidentially prove precisely what it is. Another difficulty is that, compared to other drugs, cannabis covers a wide spectrum, from brain-rotting psychoactive skunk to the sort of mellow, artisan weed smoked by surfer dudes on Cornish beaches. How, in the rain, at 2am, is a police officer meant to know the difference? This betrays the report’s likelier purpose: the police officer isn’t meant to stop and search in the first place. Just leave the kids alone! Perhaps I’m a natural cynic. Or perhaps I’m simply a keen student of Sadiq Khan’s approach to Ulez “evidence-gathering”, whereby his strident claims about air pollution and congestion were found wanting. Either way, this looks more like an attack on stop and search as a tactic.

What we should pay attention to is the direction of travel. Stop and search is a totemic issue for progressives, and always has been. Is it always fairly applied? No. Is it necessary? Yes. Is Sadiq Khan prepared to tackle the reasons why stop and search is so contested, or simply pander to his political base? I would, were I able, lock Sir Sadiq in a room and make him watch the third season of David Simon’s TV epic The Wire. Written by progressive creatives for a largely progressive audience, The Wire is nonetheless the best drama ever produced on urban policing. The episode titled “Amsterdam” concerns the consequences of an experiment in decriminalizing drugs in order to ease community tension and treat addiction as a health issue. The experiment goes badly wrong when gangs realize parts of Baltimore have essentially turned into a free-fire zone, a place where they can ply their trade unhindered by local officers.

As ever, though, British politicians trail their American counterparts by five to 10 years. American cities have experimented with varying degrees of drugs liberalization in cities such as Portland and Los Angeles, with predictably dystopian results. The criminal ecosystem, the real one as opposed to the one described by academics, thrives on weakness of any kind. A city weakening its stop-and-search policies for small amounts of drugs, as the Americans discovered, has a cumulative (if not intended) effect as users and dealers drag with them their associated social problems. Portland was transformed from an artsy, bohemian city into an open-air drug market and refugee camp for the addicted homeless. Los Angeles and San Francisco, with their lax prosecutors and defanged police, became lawless paradises for shoplifters and robbers.

Even San Francisco, America’s most liberal city, has had enough. Its Democrats have rediscovered the benefits of robust policing, prosecution and sentencing. The lax policing was an inheritance from the academic revulsion at the “Zero Tolerance” policies of the early Nineties, whereby law enforcement targeted minor offenses. The approach was viewed by criminologists as oppressive and ineffective, a verdict that ignored the “lived experience”, usually so respected by academics, of people living in communities blighted by criminality and antisocial behavior.

This light-touch style of policing is finally going back out of fashion. Naturally, the academics concerned have yet to admit they were wrong — just that their pet policies “haven’t been implemented properly”. Predictably, the milquetoast British College of Policing also reviles Zero Tolerance law enforcement.

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Alternatively, closer to home, Sadiq could simply Google Brian Paddick, the real-life police commander who posited legalizing cannabis in the interests of “community relations”. This isn’t to unnecessarily disparage Brian, who in my experience was a fundamentally decent man. Serving in Brixton in the early Eighties, he became evangelical about reforming stop and search. The results of his experiment in what I’ll call “Total Tolerance” are disputed, but like the Mayor’s review, it was about much more than implementing drugs laws. It was, again, about a direction of travel, part of the ouroboros of a debate between “robust” versus “soft” policing. The answers are, of course, situational, complex and uncomfortable. This reality is too often lost on policymakers.

My experience suggests that drugs laws are like speed limits. If you set the motorway limit at 70mph, invariably the police (although not money-grubbing cameras) will usually turn a blind eye until you hit 90-ish. Why? Resources. Discretion. Common sense. It’s the same with minor drugs offenses. Politicians like Sadiq Khan don’t really like stop and search. They don’t trust the police, either. Why doesn’t Khan simply say so? Or would that involve opening fresh cans of worms about police funding, training, recruitment and leadership? Including, of course, the Mayor’s. He is, after all, the de facto Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater London.

The wheel goes round and round… and where will it stop? We all know, actually, but that never deters progressives like Khan from trying another spin. In the meantime, the Mayor has his headline for the day. The quangocrats of his drugs review board will have been paid their stipends. The slow, inexorable creep of progressive policymaking continues, only ever heading toward one destination: failure.

Meanwhile, for operational police officers, the mood music is clear. It’s also clear to the activists seeking to undermine or even defund the police. All parties know that stop and search is something frowned upon by the powers-that-be. Should something go wrong, an officer is unlikely to be defended by those at the top. All this means that thief-takers like Stuart are no longer welcome in London’s police. Parts of London already resemble cannabis-stinking favelas. Perhaps, until Sadiq Khan notes the lessons from Portland and elsewhere, that’s where the city’s future lies.

Decades ago I changed my position on the issue of “gun control”. Even though I still believe liberals are correct about the unfortunate predicament created by our founders, I now hold that we must tolerate privately held guns and all that comes with them. That may sound like a paradox, but once you understand the tensions internal to the mind of an armed American liberal, you will understand something fundamental about the American experiment.

Portland, where I live, is an absurdly progressive city on the compulsively liberal Pacific coast. But that isn’t the whole story. Washington, Oregon, and California, the three left-coast states, vote as a Democratic block. But that’s not because we lack for conservatives. We have lots of them. They are just consistently outnumbered and outvoted.

I should probably explain here that, although I believe that liberals are right about the unacceptable cost of our second amendment rights, conservatives are closer to correct, as I see it, about the governing of our cities — a fact that becomes glaringly obvious if you visit Los Angeles, Seattle or San Francisco and compare it to any major city in conservative Texas. American liberals don’t seem to understand that their values cannot simply be implemented locally. That’s partly why I’m armed like a conservative despite my liberal values. But I digress.

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That day at the gun shop, most of the people I stood in line with were conservatives who felt like they could use a bit more firepower. And I couldn’t fault them. So did I, apparently. I imagine they sized me up and read me as a liberal. I’m pretty sure I look like one. But I felt welcome, or at least as welcome as one can in an environment where there is a run on guns and ammo.

And there was indeed a run, as there always is when the population is on edge. When Americans worry, they buy guns. Some of that is irrational, as the guns they bought in previous panics are likely to last a good long time. Some of it is people arming themselves for the first time. And some of it is intuitive — the result of a somewhat vague reassessment of the level of need.

The gun shop was visibly strange in those early pandemic days. It looked like it had been stripped. The wall behind the counter that would normally display perhaps 100 different models of handgun had maybe 20 — guns no one really wanted but would eventually be reluctantly purchased by some Johnny-come-lately. But it was the state of the ammo that was most striking. In the major calibers there wasn’t any, a pattern that everyone in the shop knew was repeated all over town, and indeed across the entire country. Ammunition manufacturers couldn’t keep up. When a crate of ammo was occasionally delivered to the shop, it was target ammo, not ideal for self-defence, and it was rationed to one box per family, per week. Welcome to America.

In the gun shop, no one was troubled by novices, or even liberals. Explanations were patient. It’s a surprisingly courteous, agreeable, and highly technical culture: no one knows more than gun enthusiasts about the hazards that come with firearms, and such people take a very dim view of those who treat guns casually.

I suspect the notable courtesy was at least partly the natural result of the level of armament. The staff were surely all armed. So too, I would guess, were the clientele — it is legal in Oregon to have a concealed handgun given the proper, easily obtained permit. In such an environment heightened tensions are quickly noted, and de-escalation is an ever-present priority. It is, in some sense, the opposite of Twitter, where no one is armed and people are routinely terrible to each other.

There was one woman behind the counter, who had the unenviable task of running background checks for every firearm purchased. In most cases that meant she had to disappoint customers and tell them it would be days or weeks before they will be able to collect their weapons. She had been ringing up and disappointing people, non-stop for weeks. As I neared the front of the line I heard her say to the room: “I don’t get it. Do they think they’re going to shoot a virus?”

“It’s not the virus they’re worried about,” I offered. “It’s their neighbours if the food runs out.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and I was glad to have brought something useful to the party. But looking back, I don’t think my explanation was complete. In fact, I’m sure it wasn’t.

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Most of those stocking up on guns and ammo belong to a culture, and like every other culture, it has its beliefs, suppositions and fears. That culture believes that tyranny may descend on us, even here in the freedom-loving United States of America, and that privately held guns are the key to fending it off. I’m not a member of this culture, but I believe they may well be right about this.

In a country where politicians are increasingly prone to withdraw or stand-down the police to curry favour with confused constituents, it is easy to see how things can quickly escalate as they did in Kenosha, Wisconsin the night Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in self-defence at a riot. To be clear, I do not believe Rittenhouse, then 17-years-old, should have been there with his AR-15. But I also don’t believe the streets of American cities should ever be ceded to violent ideological bullies — a now familiar pattern that set the stage for Rittenhouse’s actions.

To understand why private guns may be decisive in a fight against tyranny, let’s take a moment to revisit what is assuredly the most inscrutable section of the United States Constitution, the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

It’s almost like a deliberate non-sequitur. In fact, after decades of pondering the question, I’m now fairly convinced that that is exactly what the founders gave us: an intentionally vague pronouncement designed to force the question into the future, to ensure it would be repeatedly reevaluated to keep up with changing weaponry and circumstances. Near as I can tell, it’s a place holder for a principle they could not tailor in advance.

They clearly didn’t want to give the legislature or the courts complete latitude. They tied our hands; our representatives are not allowed to disarm the public, even if a majority desires it. And the founders gave us a strong hint about why — something about the need to protect a “free state” from, you know… stuff. But they didn’t tell us how much firepower citizens should be allowed to have. And thank goodness they didn’t, because muzzle-loaded weapons are no better a model of modern weapons than a movable-type printing press is for an algorithmically personalised infinite scroll.

The second amendment contains two conundrums, one novel and one original. The modern trouble is relatively straightforward: What does it mean not to “infringe” on the right to bear arms? In the 18^th century that was far simpler because, although guns have always been a force multiplier for an individual, the factor by which an individual’s force was multiplied was so much lower. Back then, within reason, a person could be trusted to buy the guns they wanted to own.

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On first glance, the original puzzle also seems uncomplicated: The state is going to need a fighting force if it is to remain free. But the longer one stares, the stranger this pronouncement seems. What militia, regulations and state were they even referring to? Is it a reference to the Army? No, the Army already existed and could have been referenced if that was their intent, having arisen first as the Continental Army that fought and won the revolution after it was formed in 1775, later to be re-founded as the United States Army in 1784 — seven years prior to the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights with its “well-regulated militia” riddle embedded in its second amendment. So if it wasn’t the Army protecting the “free state” they meant to invoke, then it must really have been the people — but against whom? And what is “a well-regulated militia” and where is it going to come from and in what way is it to be regulated other than “well”?

As a young man I regarded the second amendment as the founders’ biggest blunder. As we head into 2022, my position has flipped — I now believe history may well come to regard it as the most far-sighted thing the founders did, not in spite of its vagueness, but because of it. It’s like a mysterious passage from a sacred text that forces living people to interpret it in a modern context. The founders believed the people needed to be able to defend their free state — with deadly force — whether that refers to a geographical state, or a state of being, or both.

It’s not that I don’t see the terrible carnage which comes from ubiquitous guns. I do see it, and I detest it just like every other decent American. I know that a single deranged or careless person can rob us of anyone, at any time. No American is exempt. Not our families, nor our leaders. It is a terrifying realisation. With modern weapons an individual can kill dozens. It has happened many times, and it will happen again.

I find none of this remotely acceptable as a human, or an American. Remember, I said at the beginning that I believe that the liberals are basically right about the staggering cost of ubiquitous guns. Further, I don’t believe the net effect of ubiquitous guns during an average year, or decade, or century is a reduction in harm. It’s a complex picture, but many Western nations have managed crime as well or better than the US without the population being armed. On long timescales, however, I suspect this trend reverses. A nation’s descent into tyranny can kill millions, and it can drag continents, or the world as a whole, into war.

The terrifying carnage that derives from the right to bear arms must, in the end, be compared to the cost of not having that right, not only for the individual, but for the republic and its neighbours at a minimum. If you imagine that tyranny cannot happen in America due to some safeguard built into our system, or by virtue of some immunity residing in the population itself, then perhaps there is nothing left to discuss.

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For my part, I don’t believe it. In fact, I believe I know better, both as a scholar and as someone who was falsely accused of racism and hunted in my own neighbourhood — with the police withdrawn in a foolish attempt to appease the mob. And I suspect that if we put the question to a vote, the fraction of the citizenry who believes tyranny could happen here is rising rapidly, even if we don’t necessarily agree on its most likely source. Of course, the fact that tyranny may happen anywhere is not sufficient counterweight to the unacceptable cost of ubiquitous modern firearms. To imagine that cost is outweighed, one must also believe that an armed population is in a position to fend off tyrants.

This, I admit, is by no means clear. Many will correctly point out that no matter how many semi-automatic weapons are in private hands, it will never be a match for the firepower of the guns — including fully automatic guns — in the publicly funded arsenals that, the argument goes, are in danger of finding themselves at the disposal of tyrants. When you add to that the incredible range of weapons and weapon-systems for which the public has no answer, it’s a slam dunk: in a head-to-head conflict between a treasonous, tyrant-led US military on the one hand, and freedom-loving Americans on the other, the military would trounce any number of militias, no matter how “well-regulated”.

But that isn’t really a persuasive argument, for two reasons. First, who decided this would be a fair fight? How many times will the US military have to find itself stalemated by inferior forces before we incorporate the lesson of asymmetric warfare into our national consciousness?

When our family lived in Olympia, Washington, we frequently saw foxes in our backyard. We learned not to worry about our cats because the foxes seemed to simply ignore them. Here in Portland, we have coyotes instead of foxes and neighbourhood cats are constantly disappearing. Does this imply that a wild fox can’t beat a housecat while a coyote can? As a mammalogist I’m sure that’s not it. A fox would almost always win a fight to the death with a domestic cat. But a house cat is capable of doing enough damage on the way out to dissuade anything but a desperate fox from trying it. An armed populace might not be able to defeat a tyrant’s army, but they could well punish it into retreat.

The second reason an armed population might succeed against the military-gone-rogue is that it is exceedingly unlikely the entire military would accept immoral orders. Either they would divide over the question, and the armed populace would end up fighting alongside the hopefully large portion of the military who remained loyal to the Constitution and their fellow citizens. Or those who would naturally resist immoral orders would have been purged from the uniformed ranks under some pretext that discovers and discharges those with independent minds, returning these non-compliant souls home to their well-armed families and neighbourhoods. Either way, private gun ownership might well prove decisive in a periodic contest between “patriots and tyrants”.

I expect this argument will prove unpopular. Are we really that near the brink of tyranny in America? I don’t know. I think it’s plausible enough that it would be irresponsible not to discuss what might happen.

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I also think it is worth taking a brief look at Australia to discern whether it has any lessons for us. Australia is, after all, a nation with many similarities to the US: it had its own permissive gun ownership laws and culture until the 1996 massacre in Port Arthur, Tasmania, in which 35 people were killed. The alterations in Australia’s gun laws and the gun buyback programme that followed are frequently held up as a possible model for American gun reform. And they make a strong case that massacres and other gun violence can indeed be greatly reduced by such a programme. But at what price?

I have to tell you, I’m finding it very difficult to make full sense of events in Australia at the moment. I see things that look a lot like tyranny reported from there. I have friends — people I know personally and trust — fleeing Australia due to what looks to them and sounds to me like tyranny. And I have interviewed Australians who describe absolutely tyrannical encounters they are having with governmental authorities.

But I also see respected people assuring me the picture we are getting is distorted. Whatever the truth, as the ideals of the liberal West spread like wildfire during the 20^th century, I fear we Americans were lulled into a false sense of complacency as freedom caught on in region after region and appeared to become permanent. I don’t know if we will ever fully discern our founder’s intent with respect to the second amendment. But I strongly suspect their understanding of freedom, freshly won, was much more realistic than ours.

This is what gun ownership comes down to, whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. If there is a way to protect liberty from spasms of tyranny that does not condemn us to the spectacular cost of regular gun violence, I’d love to know it. But if the dynamism of the West, the productivity, the ingenuity, and the quest for fairness can only be protected from tyrants at the point of a gun, then so be it.

But take a moment to read the sign on the shop’s window as you enter, and it soon becomes clear that Petunia’s has been drawn into a far darker chapter of the Portland story; one that tells of a city in free fall due to an almost accidental anarchist takeover, where residents have as much to fear staying home as going out and even the most harmless of shops is liable to have its windows smashed in.

The sign is Petunia’s special take on a Portlandian phenomenon that my wife Heather has come to call a “don’t-hurt-me wall” — a now-widespread attempt by local business owners to make anarchists think twice before vandalising their shop or café.

“We are a small, women and locally owned business,” Petunia’s sign pleads. “We are struggling like so many of us in this hard time, and love our community. Please don’t cause us any damage.” Welcome to Portland; the progressive dream that has turned into a nightmare.

When Heather and I moved to the city three years ago, after being spectacularly driven from our jobs at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, there was little to suggest that municipal embrace of anarchy was on the horizon. We considered moving to more than a dozen cities across the US, Canada and Europe — but in the end Portland won. With the city’s proximity to nature and world-class food culture, it seemed to provide the perfect balance. And then suddenly last summer, with the confluence of the George Floyd protests and the Presidential election, Portland came unmoored.

For what it’s worth, Petunia’s “don’t-hurt-me wall” is more explicit than your average Portland business. It has, for example, resisted the urge to simply and loudly proclaim that BLACK LIVES MATTER, presumably because its owners know that Portland is entirely composed of people who already agree with this obvious decree — including the police.

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But its attempt to reason with the anarchists — by highlighting how it is a struggling small business, locally owned and run entirely by women — speaks volumes about day-to-day life in my home city, where negotiating with vandals has become an essential skill. Indeed, Portland is full of signs in windows and on lawns pleading with anarchists to move on and hurt someone else. These residents know they cannot depend on the police to either prevent crimes or arrest those who commit them, and who can’t manage to come together and face down a small but violent mob of misanthropes.

The streets of downtown Portland, once a bustling home to independent boutiques, are now lined with boarded-over windows and closed businesses. No neighbourhood is secure from the current wave of terror; the breaking of shop fronts, arson and harassment of sleeping citizens in their homes are all commonplace.

Rioting has occurred like clockwork, and often anarchist “direct actions” are announced in advance, so the police are never taken by surprise. And yet the city’s officers, under the command of our cartoonishly liberal mayor (who is also our police-commissioner), have stood by and — night after night — allowed the city to descend into chaos. Last September, rioters even targeted the Mayor’s own apartment building, breaking in and setting a fire in the lobby. The Mayor’s response? To announce that he was moving out of the building to keep his neighbours safe, a move any competent parent would recognise invites more terror. The anarchists have gained a strange kind of control over the city in their fight against Nazis and white supremacists they appear to have conjured in a quest to give their anger meaning.

America may be being torn apart by the tension between Democrats and Republicans, but that is not what afflicts Portland. The problem in Portland, as in so many the cities along the West Coast, is that the progressives have fully defeated conservatives, and without any opposing political force, their liberalism has become unhinged.

Anarchism has deep roots in the Pacific Northwest, but until 2020 it largely persisted on the fringe — they would blockade the federal ICE facility, or take over an occasional intersection, harass drivers and direct traffic. This, of course, caused them to be regarded by most Portland citizens as an irritant.

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But that all changed last summer when, during the Black Lives Matter protests, the city’s anarchists discovered that, so long as they shouted certain slogans, citizens who once grudgingly tolerated them would now cheer them on with gusto. Suddenly, the absurd claim that “All Cops Are Bastards” became a mainstream belief, and “Abolish the Police” went from being a threat to a policy proposal.

Of course, all reasonable people understand that black people have faced oppression in North America since their ancestors were brutally imported as slaves. Liberals can be justly proud of our role in fighting this evil, from abolition to the civil rights movement and beyond. But as the current situation in Portland demonstrates, “the right side of history” has now been ceded by voices of reason on the Left to extremists who deliberately conflate a demand for racial justice with a desire to burn civilisation to the ground.

And this has put those of us who consider ourselves “of the Left” in a dangerous predicament. I am not a gun enthusiast. I never wanted to own guns, but I do — for the same reason I would if I lived in a war zone. The civil authority has abandoned the law-abiding citizens of Portland, and in so doing it has created a new Wild West in which we are each responsible for protecting ourselves from bands of roving bandits.

Sometimes, their threat is purely symbolic, as when they topple public monuments. In these situations, the city responds by helpfully removing the offending statue. But in other cases, these habitual rioters attempt to exert power, both directly and indirectly, over their fellow citizens. Graffiti in downtown Portland calls for the killing of local journalist, Andy Ngo, who continues to report on Antifa violence regardless. Having failed to intimidate Ngo, the rioters succeeded in shutting down Powell’s Books for several days when Ngo’s book went on sale.

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Knowing the store would not be protected by police, Powell’s had already decided the book would only be sold online. Yet the unsatisfied rioters forced Powell’s to suspend operation, and the city for its part offered no defence of free speech, or of a free press, or of Portland’s iconic bookstore or of Andy Ngo, a citizen of Portland being openly threatened with murder. The city has also allowed rioters to march freely through residential neighbourhoods, where they intimidate sleeping residents by chanting “wake up, motherfucker, wake up”, shine spotlights into people’s windows and harass anyone who comes out to face them.

So long as rioters claim to fight for the oppressed, they appear to have carte blanche. If they decide they don’t like this article, if they come to my house to menace my family as they have done to Andy Ngo, Mayor Wheeler and countless anonymous citizens of Portland, will the police intercede? I honestly don’t know.

The truth is, I rarely see any evidence of even basic law enforcement here in Portland. The police are extremely slow to respond to emergency calls. The citizens and businesses have, over the last year, been left to fend for themselves against criminals thinly cloaked in progressive slogans. And given the way the Mayor and City Council have undercut the police and allowed them to be demonised by the anarchists, it is easy to understand their reluctance — they are doing a difficult job, under a microscope, where only their mistakes count.

And this is the great tragedy of Portland. As people flee New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles, Portland has everything it needs to pick up the slack and be the next booming metropolis — everything, that is, except the political will to resist following those once great cities into a self-inflicted, depressive spiral.

Instead of capitalising on those cities’s errors, Portland is making them too, and in even more spectacular form. The combination of runaway taxes and a municipal authority that sides with criminals, against working people, is sealing the city’s fate. And the needless, coming collapse will fall disproportionately on the most precariously positioned.

Portland, ultimately, is a great city headed in the wrong direction. As Heather and I watch it fall to pieces, we can’t help but feel we have seen this happen before. Portland’s meltdown is, after all, eerily similar to the collapse of Evergreen. A city’s hapless mayor hamstringing the police at the behest of a woke mob that claims to see racists around every corner; it’s uncannily similar to what we saw in 2017.

And the result will be the same, albeit at much greater scale, with much higher stakes. Once again we are left with the question: Can anything be done? And once again, I fear that the answer is no.

It makes for a bizarre dynamic, as Democratic Party pundits and politicians routinely describe avowed insurrectionists as nothing more than benign “peaceful protesters”. And since the protests came to be arrayed against the federal forces dispatched to Portland by Donald Trump, more conventional elements of the Left/liberal “Resistance” have made common cause with these revolutionary anarchists who regard the very essence of the US political system — not just Trump — as innately fascist and “white supremacist”. On a recent evening, for instance, an older white couple in a pair of matching “Resistance”-branded T-shirts could be spotted in attendance among the radical activists, as well as a man sporting the slogan “Ridin’ with Biden”.

To characterise what’s gone on in Portland as a traditional “protest” is a misnomer, however. Pay a visit to the area around the Federal Courthouse in Downtown after midnight and you are greeted by brigades of black-clad “Antifa” foot soldiers — geared up in full body armour, complete with industrial-grade gas masks, shields and even customised radio systems. Being overwhelmingly white, they are strategic about public presentation: the speakers appointed to address the nightly “rallies” are almost exclusively black, as “amplifying black voices” to whom whites must dutifully “listen” is a central tenet of the Summer 2020 protest ethos.

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By Michael Tracey

If there is any foundational idea operative in Portland, it’s to keep a frenetic confrontation with the state going for as long as possible, so as to maximise the chances that an incendiary incident might occur and catalyse a larger insurrectionary uproar — similar to the killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked nationwide riots. One fateful tear gas canister fired into the temple of a “protester” could reverberate rapidly across the country; “Portland solidarity” actions have already sprouted up as far away as Richmond, Virginia. This is by design: a former occupant of the so-called “CHAZ,” the former anarchist commune that took over a portion of Seattle in June, told me a number of people who previously set up shop there had headed south to Portland.

As I milled around one night livestreaming on my phone, a “protester” wielding a heavy-duty shield emblazoned with the anarchist “A” symbol demanded that I cease recording. When I declined to obey this command, I was confronted by several additional “protesters” — all white, of course — one of whom snatched the phone out of my hands. It was only returned after I agreed to recite the phrase “Black Lives Matter” with sufficient vigour. This friendly fellow subsequently threatened to “fucking stomp me out,” and then ejected me from the protest zone — forcing me to run, not walk, away — as another associate hurled a projectile at me. Certainly not behaviour I’ve encountered at any other “protest”.

The pandemic is far from the minds of participants — in contrast with most working-class Americans. One night, I tried to put a question to Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, about the advisability of mass protest gatherings as Covid cases spike in the state of Oregon. Wheeler had ventured out in a show of support for the protesters, and was even permitted to address the rally, despite being widely loathed. “Fuck you, Ted Wheeler,” his detractors shouted, unimpressed by his pleading. Still determined to demonstrate his solidarity, however, he subjected himself to a choreographed tear-gassing from federal forces (a New York Times reporter was right next to him at the time, surely by sheer coincidence.)

“The most important thing right now is the Black Lives Matter movement,” Wheeler replied to me, at which protesters in the vicinity became enraged, accusing me of engaging in “white supremacy” and “silencing” blacks for posing a question they (the whites) deemed “inappropriate” to an elected official. “That is a premise that doesn’t concern this movement at all,” one protester said of the pandemic, as others demanded that I “get the fuck out of here”.

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Wheeler’s fallacy is imagining that any incrementalist policy reforms will satisfy the ideological core of these protesters, whose goal is abolition of the country’s entire criminal justice apparatus in addition to general insurrection. But as expected, even getting tear-gassed wasn’t enough to placate Wheeler’s critics. The following day, Jo Ann Hardesty, a Portland City Commissioner, dismissed Wheeler as “a privileged white man”. (Having received a sizable helping of tear-gas myself, I can confirm that it was highly unpleasant.)

The source of the animosity toward Wheeler is the conduct of the municipal Portland police, which a number of residents (and even officers) find genuinely baffling. “We are probably one of the most progressive law enforcement agencies I’ve ever had the opportunity to be around,” one veteran Portland Police Bureau officer told me as he monitored the protest action from afar one night, semi-hidden in an unmarked vehicle parked on a side street, with the massive booms of the “mortar”-style fireworks being fired at the Federal Courthouse crackling in the background. “And it’s just sad to me that we’re getting shoved back into this stigma of these jackbooted thugs again. All the outreach we’ve done — all the gang outreach we’ve been a part of — it’s all been taken away from us.”

Indeed, take a look at the official Portland Police Twitter account and you will find a banner image of an officer happily wearing a LGBT Pride Flag-coloured facemask. A left-wing political activist in Portland who asked to remain nameless for fear of retribution attested to having a friend in the Bureau who is a black lesbian woman with several children. “She’s one of the most thoughtful, intelligent people that I know,” the activist said, “who went into becoming a police officer because she wanted to see more people like her on the force in her community.”

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They added: “We have a lot of people running this protest who have never been outside of this Portland bubble. And the Portland bubble is very comfortable. They don’t understand what real suffering is like.”

That black lesbian woman would presumably be implicated in one of the chants that has become a staple of the protests: “A – C – A – B… ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS” — which is unlikely to be a notion dispelled by marginal policy changes of the kind politely suggested, for example, by Wheeler. Nor would the withdrawal of federal forces from the area satisfy their insurrectionist demands. When protesters chant “NO GOOD COPS IN A RACIST SYSTEM,” the “system” to which they are referring is the foundational system of governance of the United States — again, deemed inherently “fascist” and “white supremacist”, and therefore impossible to reform. As one sign wielded by a protester declared: “The Revolution will not come by asking or voting,” with the customary anarchist “A” symbol scrawled onto the cardboard. Other protest phrases visible around Portland include “Die Piggies” and “Dead Cops,” as well as calls for the assassination of Trump.

Outside the core of the Downtown protest zone, the same mass-produced “Black Lives Matter” posters which have become ubiquitous across so many other American metropolitan areas dot the front porches and storefront windows of Portland establishments. (It’s certainly more culturally fashionable than “Joe Biden 2020” insignia, although the electoral implications are roughly similar). But a trip around the city also reveals hand-made yard signs posing questions such as, “DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO END WHITE SUPREMACY?”

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One potential answer to this question might be: “elect a black head of state,” as the overwhelmingly white Multnomah County, Oregon — home to Portland — did by a whopping 56-point margin in 2008 and 55-point in 2012. But a strange feature of this protest movement is that one would barely know Barack Obama, a black man elected president in a majority white nation, ever existed. Not that Obama’s mere election was supposed to have eradicated every last trace of racial inequities in the United States: of course it wasn’t. But you’d think it would at least inform popular conceptions of the role of race within the nation’s elite power structure. Instead, Obama seems to have been simply “erased” — the significance of his tenure not even worth mentioning. Are we to believe that a country so intractably defined by “white supremacy” — a totally uncontested truism among protesters and their media allies — nonetheless elected a black man not once, but twice? Apparently.

Like so many other cities across the US, much of Portland remains boarded up as a result of riots that initially broke out in early June after the George Floyd killing — compounded by decreased economic activity brought on by the pandemic. (Again, the virus is evidently not a “premise” of “concern” to protesters.) Even VooDoo Doughnut, a popular independent Portland shop featuring items like Vegan Maple Cream, was boarded up as of July 26, after one of its windows was smashed by “BLM protesters”, according to a security guard. “We had some threats,” he said. Overtly left-wing food carts — the mere existence of which is already something of a conundrum — also report being “damaged during the protests” and indefinitely closed.

While “The Feds” have reduced their visibility in recent days, that doesn’t mean the rancour will subside any time soon. Notwithstanding talk of a “peaceful transition,” one Department of Homeland Security agent told me: “There may be some unrealistic expectations. There’s never going to be a 100% withdrawal of federal officers from the federal building.” And one of the “voices” appointed to address a nightly rally last month explicitly likened Portland’s action to the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s, which lasted for 381 days.

Apart from highlighting the elevated historical terms in which these protesters see themselves, it’s an indication that Feds or no Feds, the Portland anarchists have every incentive to keep the chaos going in perpetuity. And why wouldn’t they? Clearly, their strategy is paying off.

“And then? Naked Athena appeared and the little boys didn’t know what to do,” tweeted photographer Donovan Farley, who captured the moment, as though her nakedness alone was enough to shame the armed officers. Actually, they fired pepper balls at her feet, but she remained on the street doing yoga, and according to another witness, the officers dispersed about 10 minutes later.

https://twitter.com/DonovanFarley/status/1284410621283328000?s=20

The internet being the internet and social justice being social justice, all this eventually devolved into a conversation about whether the light-skinned protestor was in fact a problematic exerciser of her white-privilege, whether doing yoga is actually colonialism, and whether she even was a she at all, or of some other more compelling identity. No matter: the image stands for itself, a little absurd in the incongruity of flesh and firearms, a lot striking in the steadfastness of her stance. Something unforgettable about it. Something about it that you already know, as well.

Female nudity as protest is as old as anything. At first I thought of Sixties counter-culture shock tactics such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece — Ono in a white gown, inviting the audience to cut away her clothing until she was completely naked, which would by some mysterious process bring about world peace. But it goes back further than that. Apocryphal Godiva, naked on her horse sometime in the eleventh century, in opposition to her husband’s taxes. Liberty leading the people, bare breasted atop the fallen of the French Revolution. These are men’s versions of women’s bodies as emblems of freedom, stamped on our common imagination.

A naked man does not mean the same thing as a naked woman. For one thing, there is a lot more of a man you can put on show without breaking any taboo — although there are much graver taboos around that bit you aren’t supposed to show. But there’s more to it than that. As John Berger said: “A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you,” but “a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her”.

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A man naked is a flasher, a threat (there’s a reason men send unsolicited dick pics, and they’re not a courting ritual, they’re an act of aggression); either that, or he’s simply ridiculous, emasculated by his exposure. His body doesn’t work as protest. A woman naked, though, is a study in defiant vulnerability. What can be done to her? Anything – she’s a naked woman. What can be done to her? Nothing that she hasn’t pre-empted with her self-display. In a limited sort of a way, she is in control.

Or to put it another way, female nudity as protest makes sense in a way male nudity doesn’t, because looking at women makes sense to us in a way that looking at men doesn’t. Despite some great steps forward in letching over men (for which, my most sincere thanks to the homosexual agenda), you only have to spend five minutes on Instagram to figure out that one sex still exists to be eyeballed while the other gets to do the eyeballing.

Feminist naked protest has tried gamely to overturn objectification, with women voluntarily stripping off to prove their bodies are their own. The Slutwalk protests began in 2011 as a reaction to a Toronto police officer who offered the rape prevention advice that “women should avoid dressing like sluts”. But the difference between having your tits out, and having your tits out ironically, is a very thin one. Activism that can safely be called “hot” probably isn’t that much of a challenge to men’s sexual entitlement.

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By Rowan Pelling

Ukrainian feminist group Femen made headlines with multiple topless stunts that went nipple-first against targets including Vladimir Putin and France’s Front National party. Then a 2013 documentary revealed that Femen was – surprise! — the creation of a man, Victor Svyatski. “These girls are weak,” he says in the film. “They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.” And how better to teach them than by getting them out of their bras? This ought to be all the depressing proof anyone needs that the political display of female flesh is directed by the male gaze.

Getting naked is intensely personal, but the moment a woman protestor drops her clothes is the moment she becomes a symbol, an object – an Athena, a Godiva – in a way that would be an indignity if you were gazing at a man. Men should remain their own selves: only women are supposed to have so little individuality that these archetypes can be impressed on them.

One more iteration of the language of female skin. There’s a power in that Portland picture, even if you know it’s a bit silly, even if you know deep down that armed police probably can’t be scared off by a vagina. It’s not a power that comes from radicalism, though, or even from transgression. And it’s not a power that can be said to belong to the woman. The one detail I can’t stop thinking about is the Twitter bio of the photographer who recorded and named Athena: the first credit he boasts of is Playboy. The male gaze business is always just the male gaze business.