Portland, Oregon, has been one of the hotspots for political violence over the past few years, mostly due to the ongoing threat from violent left-wing group Antifa that has pretty much been granted free rein over the city, but also due to de-policing policies adopted in the wake of the police-involved death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.
Using racial unrest as an excuse, rioters have destroyed businesses and committed numerous crimes while the media insisted these were “mostly peaceful protests.” Now, The Washington Post has finally acknowledged, in a way, that this was the wrong narrative.
An article by Post reporter Scott Wilson insists Portland had a good ol’ fashioned social justice movement that was simply “hijacked” by anarchists and violent criminals, ignoring that the movement had been full of those types since the beginning.
The article doesn’t even mention Antifa’s role in the violence that has taken hold of Portland. Had the Post followed the work of journalist Andy Ngo, it would have known what has happened in Portland. But media outlets ignored Ngo or simply dismissed him as some sort of right-wing fabulist.
The Post’s mild report on how Portland violence is hurting minority communities — something the Right has insisted for years would happen — shows that maybe, just maybe, Ngo and other conservative reporters have been right all along.
The Post focuses on the past year and the fact that most of the so-called protesters are white, middle-class young people playing revolutionaries. These wannabes “have made places such as churches, public libraries, small Black-owned businesses and a Boys & Girls Club the confounding targets of their vandalism,” the Post reported.
The outlet hints at the rising violence in the city ahead of the coronavirus pandemic and Floyd’s death without mentioning the years Antifa has been active in Portland.
Police have been demonized in Portland and beyond, leading to Portland’s City Council cutting $27 million from the police budget ($15 million due to the “defund” movement and another $11 million or so because of the pandemic). The cuts have resulted in a shortage of police officers and more than 120 leaving the department.
New York Magazine writer Jonathan Chait tweeted out the Post article, bringing large-scale attention to it on social media. Now that the opening salvo has been released, it wouldn’t surprise me to see more articles from the establishment media acknowledging the detrimental effects that largely unchecked violence has had on American cities. The media’s year-long narrative that these were simply peaceful protests demanding reforms and protection against racism was never accurate, but that was the narrative the media chose and everything else was ignored. To demonstrate the disconnect, last August, the Post published an article titled “Violent protest clashes turned Portland into a ‘right-wing boogeyman.’ Here’s how it happened.” Other Post articles from the past couple years only cover the violence when right-wing group Proud Boys were involved.
The whole episode is reminiscent of the media’s sudden turn on the theory that the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Last year, when Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) suggested that maybe the virus escaped from the Chinese lab that just so happened to be studying it and where the first outbreak occurred, he was chastised as a conspiracy theorist, with liberal pundits claiming the theory had been “debunked” without enough evidence to make such a declaration.
Now that Joe Biden, a Democrat, is in office, the theory isn’t so crazy. In fact, the media is now demanding a real investigation into the origins of the virus, something that was labeled a conspiracy theory when Donald Trump, a Republican, was demanding it.
It shows that truth doesn’t matter to these outlets, only the narrative, and that narrative is dependent on whether a Democrat or Republican is pushing it.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.