By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
The Portland, Oregonian is reporting that the city has recorded 20 homicides so far this year, while demonstrators tried to set fire to the Federal Courthouse Thursday night.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, the newspaper said, will “seek $2 million in one-time funding to allow more proactive policing on city streets with greater civilian oversight to try to stem a growing wave of gun violence.”
In Seattle, a radio host at conservative KVI-AM told Fox News the Seattle Police Department now allegedly has response times to “high priority calls” that might stretch to “nearly 20 minutes.” Life-or-death situations unfold a lot faster than that. Talk host Ari Hoffman said the far left city council is considering cutting “another $5.4 million from the department’s budget,” which was already “slashed by nearly $50 million.”
Last year, Seattle logged 52 murders while police were kept busy by almost nightly protests, the takeover of six blocks in the city’s Capitol Hill district by anarchists (resulting in a couple of those murders), and the agency reportedly lost 186 officers last year while only bring 51 replacements on board.
Last year, Portland surpassed Seattle’s body count with 55 slayings, the highest number in 26 years, the Oregonian reported earlier this year. The newspaper tried to soft-pedal that number, stating “The 2020 count is still far below the peak of 70 that the city reached in 1987.” But it is a lot higher than the 36 murders reported in 2019 in the Rose City.
Meanwhile, gun sales in Washington surged last year, especially among women, according to Hoffman.
All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of far left politics in both cities, and essentially in the western halves of both Washington and Oregon along the I-5 corridor from Bellingham near the Canadian border to Eugene and Springfield in the southern Willamette Valley.
The region has gone so far left politically that both states are now considered “blue,” despite the fact that the farther one moves east in both states, the more conservative politics becomes, with a few exceptions.
Now comes the question. Have the self-anointed “progressives”—otherwise known as far left liberals—worn out their welcome? People have been fleeing Seattle and the Evergreen State for more conservative, peaceful and less expensive regions. Perhaps for the first time in history, it’s not the gray skies and rain that have driven them out, it’s the politics and declining lifestyle.
More than a year ago, Seattle’s KOMO did a one-hour, commercial-free report titled “Seattle Is Dying.” And in both states’ capitals—Salem and Olympia—liberal Democrats controlling both state legislatures are pushing more radical gun control agendas.
Just how much longer the public will accept this is a matter of speculation. Conservatives need not apply in races for the mayors’ offices or even city council positions in either Portland or Seattle, the electorate being overwhelmingly liberal and Democrats or Socialists.
In June 2019, when Hoffman was running for Seattle City Council, Seattle police and the FBI investigated “explicit online anti-Semitic death threats” against him. Hoffman was an ally of the “Safe Seattle” group, making him a target of the left and Antifa.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Seattle-based gun prohibition lobbying group, the Alliance for Gun Responsibility, also revealed itself to be drifting into other far left political arenas than just the gun control effort. The Alliance sent an email blast suggesting “gun responsibility” legislation now includes a bill “which bans police from using chokeholds, neck restraints, and ‘no-knock’ warrants” and another measure “which expands the state’s ability to decertify—or take away an officer’s gun and badge for good—in response to serious misconduct. We need to drive as much support as possible to these bills to keep up the momentum.”
So now the anti-gun movement has become the anti-law enforcement movement.
