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It was the perfect coda to my visit to Portland, Oregon, when my phone lit up as I sat at the airport. Lyft was letting me know that my driver, who had spent 20 minutes lecturing me about how President Trump has laundered money for Russia for decades and that Antifa doesn’t exist, had registered a complaint claiming I had discriminated against him — presumably because I disagreed with his hectoring screed.
The most amazing thing about Portland isn’t actually how far left-wing it is. Everyone has seen episodes or clips from the TV show “Portlandia.” It’s how sure the people there are that everything is fine — that occasionally walking past dead bodies on the sidewalk is a normal American experience.
DAVID MARCUS: IN DEMOCRAT PORTLAND, LUXURY, VAGRANCY AND TOTAL DISORDER
And how sure they seem to be that not only is anyone calling themselves a Trump supporter wrong, but immoral.
Tara Faul is a Portland-based photographer who has done excellent work documenting (and often feeding) the homeless addicts in her woebegone hometown. I was struck by something she posted on X while I was there.
“At a Portland concert last night, I heard a guy give the ‘every city is like that, bro’ to an out-of-town couple who had a rough experience in our city,” she began, adding, “The wife was like, ‘No, I work in downtown Detroit, and it’s not like that.’ I was there this year and agree. It’s much cleaner.”
This perfectly summed up the feeling I had — that the people in Portland are rather like a frog in boiling water. Even as the temperature rises, they cannot seem to feel the change.
Jackie, a bartender whose family has lived in the area for a century — and who is as nice as can be — told me, “You’re only talking about downtown. The rest of the city isn’t really like that.”
Sure, every city has nice neighborhoods and not-so-nice ones. But the downtown area is what everyone shares. It’s the face of a city, and in the Rose City, it almost feels like Dickensian London.
Portland is very fashion-forward. There, you’ll see natty three-piece suits, handlebar mustaches and hair colors of such variety that, when in large groups, the heads appear almost like an open bag of Skittles.
Much like the elites of a Charles Dickens tale — tapping walking sticks in their finery while using a nosegay to mitigate the stench of the masses — in Portland, human misery fades into the background, like the quiet but incessant rain.
I could almost hear the hipsters mutter to themselves, “Are there no soup kitchens? Are there no safe injection sites?”
About a quarter of the storefronts, by my count, are vacant. What remains is all expensive. Outside of a class group in a museum, I’m not sure if I saw a child the entire four days I was there. There’s just no life in the place.
But, having said all that, the pickle at the end of the day is that, from what I can tell, most people in Portland think things are fine — great even. And if that’s true, then who are we in the rest of the country to tell them they’re wrong?
That’s where the warning comes in for every American city. When you hand local government over to the far left, and it refuses to maintain order, you wind up with something like “Blade Runner,” where the wealthy and protected flourish, the vagrants languish and die, and everyone else stays the hell away.
This is how you end up with a city where the local police arrest journalists for daring to cover the fact that Antifa has been given control of the streets — because in Portland, if you are anything short of a committed leftist, you can start to feel a little less than human.
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The message I got from Lyft at the Portland airport instructed me to reply by saying I acknowledged the vague complaint against me. Instead, I wrote something to the effect of, “Your driver lectured me about the evils of Donald Trump and was quite rude.”
When I arrived at Dulles and tried to use the Lyft app, no drivers would appear for me. I actually laughed — and then just used a different app.
But it isn’t actually funny, because this is how social credit systems work. If you say something supposedly offensive, you can’t have a bank account or get a car. And I do think many, if not most, Portlanders would deep down agree that expressing conservative views deserves punishment.
I can say with certainty that I have no desire to return to Portland, but I can also say, with great trepidation, that I’m a little worried Portland may be coming to me — and to all of us.
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