Another Very Heimische Zalman Bernstein TGIF: Tikvah Trumpscum Bari Weiss Promotes the Death of American Democracy (11/4)
David Shasha
Whore of Trump Bari Weiss Doubles-Down on the Next Insurrection
We are a few days away from what may well be the last fully free and fair election in America:
We have Trumpscum Elon Musk working to further corrupt Social Media platforms:
Ben Shapiro, obviously, is with Musk:
Ben Shapiro agrees!
https://jewishworldreview.com/1122/shapiro110222.php3
A day after finishing the first draft of this note, Bari Weiss provided another fully-throated defense of Musk, this one from the vile Walter Kirn:
The complete article follows this note.
Naturally, the article makes no mention of Musk’s promotion of an unfounded, Fake Trumpscum News of a Paul Pelosi conspiracy:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/30/business/musk-tweet-pelosi-conspiracy/index.html
There has been pretty much blanket Tikvah silence on the Pelosi Trumpattack:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/CCZzi2DDT2s
As there has been blanket Tikvah silence on the anniversary of the Pittsburgh Synagogue Trumpmassacre:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/fengHS_qM8o
But there is always time for Bari Weiss to Troll the Libs, as she did with Stroke Victim John Fetterman:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/BMm1hyjR90E
Seconded by Weiss ally Leighton Woodhouse in Tikvah Tablet:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-media-trains-journalists-lie-leighton-woodhouse
Promote COVID Vaccine Denialism:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/yFEfD5NYZ0E
And go full-on Norman Podhoretz on Crime:
We can also worry about Fascism in Israel:
And the impending death of Affirmative Action and American educational diversity:
The Pornographer, a strong Tikvah Rufo Austin ally, does not even know what “Diversity” is:
You can hear the Tikvah Trumpscum cheering!
Weiss mentor and ally David Bernstein is peachy keen with all that:
https://jilv.org/livestreambook/
So are the BOOKATEE twins, Loury and McWhorter:
I particularly liked this passage:
This has been a long time coming. The Court will make its decision on the merits of the arguments, but it seems to both John and I that this case exemplifies broader trends in the culture. The tide is turning against nonsensical “anti-racist” doctrines pedaled by hustlers cloaked in the borrowed finery of intellectual respectability and moral authority. Their ideas have done nothing but exacerbate racial tensions, distracting us from real problems that threaten the stability of the US. As John says, more and more people now recognize the empty rhetoric of so-called racial justice for what it is. All that remains is for these people to act on what they know to be true.
“The empty rhetoric of so-called racial justice”!
How BOOKATEE.
Just so long as it is not about Anti-Semitism:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/A5sz-cTBL_I
Just ask Ken Burns!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/doVypPkLXnM/m/iJ4zjonxCwAJ
The Tikvah Trumpscum Jews have their priorities very much in order.
Which leads us to Tuesday’s not very “Common Sense” Trumpist Alt-Right masterpiece by the aforementioned Leighton Woodhouse:
The complete article follows this note.
Rather than attack the impending destruction of American Democracy, Weiss revels in it:
“It’s single-party control,” he told me. “Things are going downhill: inflation, crime, homelessness, addiction, overdoses. Here in Oregon, look outside—you see the homelessness, people dying in the streets from overdoses, people having psychotic breaks. It’s in shambles right now. It wasn’t always like this.”
That’s right, it is the Leftist Junta in Portland’s fault!
A FOX News Talking Point:
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6314642664112
Republican gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan is all in with the QAnon caucus:
https://dpo.org/news/press-releases/drazan-perkins/
So, let’s take the Oregon problem and the Trumpublican caucus one issue at a time.
Opiods:
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/10/republicans-opioids-needle-exchange-492814
Homelessness:
Mental Health:
https://mhanational.org/blog/how-trumps-budget-will-affect-people-mental-health-conditions
Guns:
None of this changes the fact that many of the problems faced by Oregon and many other American states are deeply rooted in a socio-economic system that has in the end promoted Wealth Inequality, mass incarceration disproportionately affecting African-Americans, and a ubiquitous racism that has been exacerbated since the advent of the Trump Alt-Right Fascism.
It is unclear what Oregonians will do, or whether the Democratic Party will take steps to address these obviously pressing issues.
But what is crystal clear is that Bari Weiss and her Tikvah Fund allies are intent on helping to promote the next Insurrection, as our Democracy stands in peril.
Addendum: Michelle Goldberg vs. Bari Weiss
Lo and behold, after finishing up the previous note, I read Michelle Goldberg’s take on the Oregon situation in The New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/opinion/oregon-governor-race.html
You can compare and contrast the two articles, and see how the Homeless crisis in Oregon has turned into a gargantuan mess, and who is best prepared to solve the problems.
Much of it has to do with Trumpist COVID corruption and a dearth of funding for social services in the wake of the lockdowns.
The argument will certainly not pass muster with the Tikvah crowd, which is intent not only on restoring Trump and Trumpism to power, but to continue the Reagan vision of America as a way to exacerbate Wealth Inequality and racism.
Nothing really changes when it comes to the bastard children of Zalman Bernstein.
Take us back to Neshoba County!
David Shasha
Free Bird: On Elon Musk and Twitter
By: Walter Kirn
Let me tell you about my strange time on Twitter, a so-called “social-media platform” of the early 21st century. In what I suspect is the increasing likelihood that digital records of our lives now will someday be erased, mislaid, or virtually composted in such a way as to make them irretrievable, the little story I’m about to tell may make little sense to future generations. It takes place during the period when the American establishment sought to control the flow of information in much the same way it once pursued dominion over resources such as land and oil.
This power grab caused a sort of virtual cold war, and I, as a consumer, a producer, and a conduit of information, got caught in it. Here is how the experience felt and how it went and a statement of what I hope will happen next, now that the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk promises a better, freer day.
I joined Twitter in 2009, finding it a worthy novelty: a bulletin board for stray thoughts and observations, the spillover of my hyperactive mind. The writer Gertrude Stein once said that “remarks aren’t literature,” but I have always disagreed (ironically, Stein is best remembered now for two such quips, the other one being “there’s no there there”), so I set out to make remarks to my new audience. It was small in the beginning, consisting of my wife and a few friends, but it grew as I pushed on.
The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.
The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.
I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.
The next illuminating incident happened while I was reporting on the 2012 Democratic Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. The political magazine I worked for, The New Republic, had reserved a row of seats in the upper reaches of the stadium in a press section used by several publications. When the then First Lady rose to speak, I watched my colleagues, who had their laptops open, log in to Twitter, almost to a person. They monitored the reaction to the speech, chattering among themselves when they found comments that suited the directions of the columns and opinion pieces they were already typing into their machines. Within minutes, a consensus formed that the speech was a triumph, moving, eloquent—perhaps the best such performance of its kind in living memory.
Not being on Twitter, just focused on the words I was hearing, I found these conclusions unjustified. But the tide of superlatives kept swelling. An extra step had been added to the process of commenting on political events: consulting the chorus, excerpting its views, and rolling them into a tidy super-narrative. When I couldn’t bring myself to see what others saw, I felt distinctly isolated, particularly after spitting into the trend and publishing my sour reaction online. Remember the playground scene from Hitchock’s the Birds?
My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal , Harper’s,I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory—or at least he was doing much better than predicted—and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.
The official election results were still unknown—Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory—but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.
It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional—that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.
I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.
My forebodings were confirmed with the launch of the “Russiagate” investigation. I doubted its premises highly from its inception, but when I voiced these doubts on Twitter curious things occurred. My tweets on the subject, my followers reported, often were invisible to them, and yet, to my eye, they drew engagement. Strange. The Twitter users who “liked” my tweets tended to have tiny followings, I found, and they didn’t follow me. Their profile photos were often stock images. I ran an experiment one night and sent out a tweet of a controversial nature which I expected would be suppressed or screwed with, and then, when it was, I used screenshots of the mischief to prove to my followers that Twitter was dishonest.
I looked crazy. Concerned DMs arrived. One accused me of grandiosity for thinking I mattered enough to provoke intervention from on high. Innocence about Twitter still prevailed then; its cheerful bluebird logo still charmed the public mind. We had yet to learn, as we finally did this week (in a manner which confirmed my worst suspicions) of the hidden but direct coordination between Twitter’s management and the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, to suppress and guide opinion on topics from war to public health. (“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure,” one government official put it.)
One definition of “paranoia” is suspecting the truth too early, before your therapist reads it in The Times. I spent years in this uncomfortable state, imagining what I couldn’t prove and occasionally doubting my own doubts. Then Covid struck, Biden was elected, the era of the “current thing” commenced (meaning the sanctioned mania of the moment), and there followed an all-out culling of the platform, championed by the prestige press, for instances of wrongthink, large and small.
It was around this time that an old friend, a guy I’d known since college, phoned my wife and worried aloud to her that certain irreverent tweets I’d made about the sainted Dr. Fauci suggested I’d lost my mind. I called him back to prove I hadn’t, patiently responding to his charges in mature and modulated tones. By avoiding the use of keywords that triggered the algorithms installed to weed out oddballs and dissenters, I had survived the Twitter purge, but not the secondary old-buddies purge. My friend and I haven’t spoken since.
The end of this period of Twitter—with its creepy secret agents, sponsored mob attacks, whipped-up propaganda drives, and canned applause tracks for approved ideas—could not have come fast enough for me. I’m a cynic by nature, but I see no good reason—for now, at least—to question Musk’s proclaimed intention to turn Twitter’s claustrophobic dungeon back into an airy public square. I expect the transition will not go smoothly, though it does seem to be going quickly. Musk has already fired the company’s C-suite and dissolved its board. Users, however, may need time to adjust to the less inhibited new platform. Emerging from the dimness of Plato’s Cave into the dazzle of daytime may take a while—we grew sleepier than perhaps we even knew. I say let the wild rumpus begin.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, November 2, 2022
Why Lifelong Democrats in Oregon Say They’re Ready to Vote Red
By: Leighton Woodhouse
PORTLAND, ORE.—Christine Drazan—a pro-life, pro-gun rights Republican best known for fighting a state climate-change bill—is in a dead heat to become the next governor of Oregon.
I repeat: Oregon.
Oregon, where Democrats have controlled the governor’s mansion for four decades, and the state legislature for 15 years. Oregon, where medical marijuana has been legal since 1998 (trailing only California) and assisted dying is a birthright and hippies have long been a major constituency. (In 2013, the real-estate blog Estately ranked Eugene the No. 1 city in America for hippies.)
If you want to know why super-progressive Oregon is thinking about voting red, consider one small community of people living in houses floating on the Columbia River.
Linda Donewald is one of them. She moved here from the Phoenix suburbs because her husband dreamed of living on the river. They’re not especially political. They love Portland for the same reason most people love Portland. “The downtown area is filled with history and a variety of restaurants, shops, theaters, and an awesome Saturday Market on the Waterfront,” Donewald said of the Portland she knew a few years ago. Now, she said, downtown Portland “looks like a war zone.”
Until recently, the city’s biggest homeless encampment stood just across the street from the floating-homes community, in what’s called the Big Four Corners Natural Area. The camp was founded in 2018 by homeless activists on a protected wetlands site. They used to call it the Village of Hope.
By 2020, hundreds of people were living in the Village of Hope, and crime was rampant. Houseboat community residents started finding their car windows smashed in. Thieves stole their catalytic converters, and then their cars. On one occasion, a resident returned to his floating home to find someone in his bathroom taking a shower.
“We considered hiring a nightly foot patrol, but it was too expensive,” said Denise Olson, another floating home resident. “We felt terrorized.”
The sound of gunfire became routine, residents told me when I visited the site last week. One said you could smell the paint thinner-like odor of meth labs in the encampment, which burst into flames on several occasions. City firefighters refused to go into the encampment; it was too dangerous.
Then the homeless started stealing neighborhood dogs for ransom, Kevin Dahlgren, the president of a Pacific Northwest homeless advocacy group, told me. One homeless person told Dahlgren that bodies of deceased camp residents are buried in the site’s marshy ground.
Trying to get the city to do something about it was useless.
Residents said they got bounced from one unresponsive government agency to the next, until they finally got a meeting with an aide to their state representative, Democrat Zach Hudson, Olson told me.
The aide told the houseboat owners that their homeless neighbors “just need a hand-up.” She suggested they organize a barbecue for the homeless. A barbecue?! The houseboat owners were stunned.
“I've never experienced anything like this,” said Donewald, who, with Olson, created a neighborhood security committee. “There’s been a failure of leadership.”
It seems like everyone here is talking about “failure of leadership” right now.
The outgoing, term-limited governor, Kate Brown, a Democrat, is the least popular governor in America. In April, a poll showed Oregon voters preferring a generic Republican over a generic Democrat by 18 points.
For most of October, Drazan led her Democratic rival, Tina Kotek, by a few points. In the last week, the race has tightened, with both candidates now at 39.1 percent. They are joined by third-party candidate Betsy Johnson, a moderate Democrat, with just under 14 percent. (Drazan and Kotek overlapped in the state House, with Kotek serving as Speaker from 2013 to 2022, and Drazan serving as Kotek’s counterpart, minority leader, from 2019 to 2021.)
Homelessness is the number one issue among Oregon voters, particularly in Portland, followed by drugs and crime. The gubernatorial race has become a referendum on political leaders’—and, really, Democrats’—handling of these issues, and on the general deterioration that has taken place on their watch.
Signs of that deterioration are everywhere.
The murder rate is surging in Portland, especially among those living on the street. In a recent survey of Portland residents, 84% of those polled said they felt unsafe downtown at night, and 61% felt the same way during the day. Eighty-two percent want more police in the city.
Drug addiction is as bad as ever. “There is no evidence that Measure 110 has reduced drug use, drug-related crime, or overdose in the state,” Keith Humphreys, a psychologist who specializes in addiction and served as a senior advisor in the Obama administration, told me, referring to a progressive 2020 initiative that decriminalized drug possession. Meanwhile, Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel is active in “every corner of the state”, as The Oregonian puts it. (Police in Eugene recently seized 18 pounds of fentanyl in a single traffic stop, enough to kill most of the state of Oregon.)
And, for the first time in over a decade, Portland is shrinking, with young adults leaving in particularly large numbers: between 2020 and 2021, the county that includes Portland had a net loss of more than 4,000 residents between the ages of 25 and 29. Oregon as a whole has experienced one of the biggest slowdowns in population growth in the country.
All of which has led lifelong Democrats to reassess their loyalties.
Angela Renteria, a longtime Portland resident who used to work for a downtown branch of U.S. Bank said she’s watched Portland “completely turn to shit.”
“The homeless situation has skyrocketed,” she said. “Mental health has gone downhill.”
The decline has cast a pall over public life. Renteria is a smoker, and every time she lights up a cigarette outside, she said, she’s accosted. “I work really hard for my $10 pack of cigarettes,” she said. People come up to her and ask to bum one after another after another. When she says no, they call her “a fucking bitch,” she said.
“The biggest thing to me, though—the most off-putting thing, is open defecation,” she said. “I’m walking down the street with my kids going to a bookstore, and someone is squatted on the sidewalk taking a shit.”
“My kids, there are times they want to go to Portland and check out shops,” Diana Sapera told me. “Now, I don’t feel comfortable doing that. My kids are scared, seeing grown adults yelling, hitting things, throwing things. They see needles and are like, ‘What is that?’”
“I don’t know one person who says ‘I want to go downtown today, want to come?,’” said Olson. “Nobody wants to go there.”
Sapera, a social worker who has voted Democratic her entire life, said: “It feels like night and day from even just this last year.” She cast her mail-in ballot for Drazan.
Sapera’s husband, George Carillo, was similarly disgusted with Portland’s spiral. Like his wife, Carillo has been a lifelong Democrat. Now he’s not so sure.
“It’s single-party control,” he told me. “Things are going downhill: inflation, crime, homelessness, addiction, overdoses. Here in Oregon, look outside—you see the homelessness, people dying in the streets from overdoses, people having psychotic breaks. It’s in shambles right now. It wasn’t always like this.”
Carillo became so frustrated with the status quo in Oregon that he ran for office for the first time in his life in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. After dropping out, instead of going with his party’s nominee, he threw his support behind Christine Drazan.
Drazan has positioned herself as a moderate—unlike many Republicans, she acknowledges that Joe Biden is the freely and fairly elected president of the United States—but the caucus she comes from is far from it. Last year, a Republican state representative opened the doors of the state Capitol to allow armed, anti-lockdown protesters inside. The protesters pepper-sprayed cops and attacked journalists. A month later, the Oregon GOP called January 6 a “‘false flag’ operation” and compared it to the Nazis burning down the Reichstag.
Even so, 13% of undecided voters leaning toward Drazan are registered Democrats, according to a recent poll. (Among undecided voters leaning toward Kotek, only 4% are Republicans.) In an era of hyper-partisanship, that degree of party disloyalty is remarkable. According to a Pew study from 2020, only 4% of voters that year cast ballots for a major candidate of the opposite party.
Key to her appeal is Drazan’s break with the status quo on homelessness—rejecting the Housing First philosophy that has become orthodoxy in progressive cities up and down the West Coast. Housing First posits that the main reason people are living on the streets is lack of affordable housing, and the best way to solve the problem is to build more of it.
Drazan thinks the real problem is drug addiction—not high rent. She wants to “end encampments,” repeal Measure 110 and expand addiction-treatment services, in addition to building more housing. “We have to help Oregonians get sober and stay sober,” she said in August in response to a series of questions posed by Oregon Public Broadcasting.
If Drazan wins, it will be “a shock to the system,” said Parker Butterworth, a Democratic consultant who works frequently for Oregon candidates. Democrats will be relentless and myopic in positioning themselves to win the seat back in four years. “Right at the beginning she has to make the case to Democrats, to the center left, that she’s not an enemy. She needs to tap into that old Oregonian way of independence and populism.”
George Donnerberg, the developer behind the floating-home community, has seen this return to political independence among Portland voters firsthand.
Donnerberg, who traces his family history in Portland to 1864, lives in one of the floating homes himself. The mayhem he has witnessed from the Big Four Corners camp compelled him to run for state representative—as a Republican. His district, like pretty much all of the Portland area, is overwhelmingly Democratic—“I'm walking a tightrope on this thing,” he told me. But, he said, he keeps meeting disillusioned Democrats while knocking on doors.
One of those disillusioned Democrats, a self-described “union guy” from a union family, told me that nearly every vote he’s ever cast has been for Democrats. This time, he’s voting for Drazan. He insisted on staying anonymous out of fear of drawing attention to himself.
“There’s a stunning amount of violence from Antifa,” he said, referring to the self-styled radical “anti-fascist” activists who are particularly numerous and active in Portland.
Antifa has become the most dramatic symbol of the city’s lawlessness.
Angela Renteria’s old job, at U.S. Bank, was near where the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 happened. “They had to shut down the branch—people were blocking the streets, throwing trash cans at cars,” she told me, adding: “Right after Columbus Day, they spray-painted our bank. Our higher-ups and security instructed us on what to do if things got out of hand: you’re going to lock yourselves in the vault.”
She said the entire time she worked at the branch, she saw “maybe two police cars the whole time. I saw ambulances, fire trucks, but no cops. They just let them do their thing.”
Denise Olson, the floating-house resident, echoed Renteria. “A solid year of rioting—daily, nightly,” she said. “The city of Portland allowed that rioting to go on for so long.” She believes the rioting contributed enormously to the crime in her neighborhood by tying up the police downtown and leaving the rest of the city to fend for itself. “If there wasn’t an immediate life or death situation you weren’t going to get a response,” she said.
The question is where all these people—these newly unaligned voters—go next. After the midterms are over. After 2022.
“The Republican Party has almost nothing to offer me,” the unnamed “union guy” told me. He described himself as a “1960s Civil Rights type,” the kind of person who believes that “the best way to end discrimination is to end discrimination.” In 2016, he voted for Bernie Sanders. Now, he said, the Democrats are all about dividing the world into victims and oppressors. “It seems to be their goal,” he said. “They want more division.”
Olson is likewise disillusioned with the party she grew up in. She was born and raised in Portland, in a Catholic family, and she mostly voted Democratic. Now, she felt embarrassed to admit where she came from. When people asked, she’d say, kind of sheepishly: “I’m from Port…land.” Everyone in her floating home community agreed that it was great that the city recently cleared away the homeless encampment across the street, but it took ages, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t come back, and if they did, you couldn’t rely on the old Democratic leadership to take action.
Olson’s politics are shifting. The first time she voted for a Republican was in 2016—for Donald Trump. She couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton. “The Democrats will stay with the status quo, and nothing will change,” she said of this year’s election. “Kate Brown has had eight years, and I can’t recall one thing that was a good thing that she’s done. I’m voting for Christine Drazan.”
Diana Sapera told me that she had hoped to be able to support Tina Kotek. She was a social worker, after all. Social workers vote for progressives. But she couldn’t do it.
Because of the three-way race, whoever wins next week will almost definitely have less than 50% of the vote, Butterworth said. The victor will have a lot to prove. Symbolism and ideology won’t be enough—voters need the kinds of results they can see with their own eyes in places like downtown Portland. Speaking of the mood of Oregon voters, he said, “This sort of tribalism—I’m left, you’re right, we have nothing in common—has got to go.”
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, November 1, 2022
If Oregon Turns Red, Whose Fault Will That Be?
By: Michelle Goldberg
PORTLAND, Ore. — An ad for one of the candidates for governor of Oregon begins with shots of trash and the tarp-covered tent encampments that line many of Portland’s streets. “Nobody in Oregon would say, ‘Let’s keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing,’” says the candidate. She continues, “I called for a homelessness state of emergency nearly three years ago, while Kate Brown” — the current Democratic governor — “did nothing.”
It’s not a surprising message in a campaign in which homelessness and crime are central issues. What’s surprising is the messenger: Tina Kotek, the former Democratic speaker of the Oregon House, running to succeed Brown.
Kotek’s ad is a sign of the indefensibility of the status quo in one of the country’s most progressive cities, and of the unexpected political peril Oregon Democrats face as a result. Most polls show that her opponent, Christine Drazan, the former Republican minority leader in Oregon’s House, has a slight lead in the race. If Drazan wins, it will be a sign that no place is immune to the right’s message on public disorder, whose resonance is also making Gov. Kathy Hochul’s race to keep her post in New York uncomfortably close.
A Republican hasn’t won the Oregon governor’s race in 40 years. And while progressive states electing G.O.P. governors is nothing new, Drazan — like New York’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Lee Zeldin — is far more conservative than the Rockefeller-style Republicans who lead Massachusetts and Vermont. She has an A rating from the N.R.A. and an endorsement from Oregon Right to Life, meaning that just months after the end of Roe v. Wade, Oregon could end up with an abortion opponent in charge.
Some Oregon Democrats argue that Drazan’s competitiveness is a fluke, a product of the well-funded spoiler campaign being run by Betsy Johnson, a centrist ex-Democrat who has received $3.75 million from the Nike co-founder Phil Knight. But that doesn’t explain why so many Democrats are willing to defect to Johnson in the first place. (FiveThirtyEight’s polling average has her getting 13.8 percent of the vote.) Nor does it explain why Democrats are struggling in congressional districts neighboring Portland. The Cook Political Report rates Oregon’s Sixth District, which went for Joe Biden by 13 points, a tossup, even though the Republican nominee is, like Georgia’s Herschel Walker, an abortion opponent who reportedly paid for the abortion of a woman he dated.
“Four of our six House seats could end up in red territory,” Senator Jeff Merkley told me after a rally here with Kotek and Bernie Sanders. The fact that Sanders was in Oregon in the first place — Biden and Elizabeth Warren have also come through — is a sign of how shaky things are for Democrats in the formerly safely blue state.
Part of the story here is about the national political environment, but it’s also about the catastrophe of homelessness in Portland, which, as in other West Coast cities, looks very different than on the East Coast. New York has a higher rate of homelessness than Oregon, but a larger percentage of people sleeping in shelters than on the streets. By contrast, in Multnomah County, which includes much of Portland, most people experiencing homelessness sleep either in tents or vehicles. The tents line streets and fill parking lots; they are a constant reminder that we’re living through a time of widespread social collapse.
There is no reason to believe that Drazan has a viable plan to fix a hellishly complex problem. Most of her proposals, aside from repealing Measure 110, the drug decriminalization ballot initiative Portland passed in 2020, are vague. But the manifest failure of Democrats to make things better has created a runway for her and others like her. “Instead of enabling homelessness, we must balance our approach with a mind-set of both compassion and accountability,” Drazan told Oregon Public Broadcasting. It’s not surprising that this message is resonating.
Kotek is thus in a tricky position: She has to convince voters that the crisis in Portland represents a technocratic rather than an ideological failure by Brown. “The two biggest issues right now are housing and homelessness, and mental health and addiction,” Kotek told me. “And I’ll be honest, she’s been absent on that topic. It’s not been a priority for her. And when you don’t make something a priority, agencies kind of flounder, money doesn’t move fast enough.”
This might sound like a deflection, but administrative sclerosis has clearly contributed to Portland’s problems. Scott Kerman, executive director of Blanchet House, an organization that provides food, shelter and medical care to poor and homeless people in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood, scoffs at the idea that widespread street homelessness is “something that liberal hippie Portland has done to itself.” Certainly, street homelessness has always been a problem in Portland. But Kerman blames a confluence of disasters, including steeply rising housing costs, a lack of services to help addicts (one survey ranked Oregon last in the nation for access to drug treatment) and — perhaps most significantly — the pandemic for turning parts of downtown into what he called an “open-air psych ward.”
“What we’re dealing with now,” said Kerman, is the byproduct of “inattention and inaction that occurred in the first six months to a year of the Covid crisis.”
When the pandemic hit, Kerman said, many shelters and other services in the city closed. Blanchet House, which offers three free meals a day to anyone who wants them, stayed open, providing food to go. “And we very quickly went from 1,000 meals a day to 2,000 meals a day, because most locations around the city had shut down, especially on the East Side,” he said. “So everybody migrated here to Old Town. And for a good six months, it was deplorable. Outside, it reminded me of news footage of Sudanese refugee camps.”
As Kerman points out, people without housing still have routines — they may spend their days in libraries, or social service organizations, or Starbucks. Suddenly, they had to be outside all the time. He described bureaucratic hurdles that made it impossible to get portable toilets and hand-washing stations, leading to “dehumanizing, almost ‘Mad Max’-like conditions.”
The trauma of such conditions accelerated people’s mental illnesses. Many sought relief in hard drugs. There’s a perception that people end up homeless because they’re addicts, but Kerman says that for many of those Blanchet House serves, it’s the other way around. “We’ve had sort of a vacuum of services, and what has filled that vacuum has been crime and violence and drug and sex trafficking,” he said.
It’s likely that no leader could have entirely staved off this calamity, but Brown’s hands-off approach seems to have made it worse. Take, for instance, Measure 110, the drug decriminalization initiative. One reason Kotek argues against repealing it is that it funds $300 million in drug and alcohol treatment, including housing services, every two years. But bureaucratic delays meant that most of the funding didn’t go out until late September, and Kotek said service providers aren’t getting clarity from the state about whether they can count on funding in the future. “If you’re trying to hire up, you need certainty,” she said. “And the lack of operationalizing this from the state agency has been deplorable.”
There are reasons to think that Kotek, who has a reputation as an indefatigable legislator, can do better. In an otherwise tentative endorsement, The Oregonian singled out the specificity of her housing plan, and her ability to execute it: “Her exacting standards bode well for oversight of state agencies that have failed repeatedly and inexcusably under Gov. Kate Brown.”
The question is whether frustrated voters will be satisfied with the promise of better management rather than radical change. “We certainly don’t need a red state takeover to clean up the damn trash,” Kotek says in her ad. Let’s hope not.
From The New York Times, November 1, 2022