As President Joe Biden preached unity as the nation’s healer, rioters in Portland and Seattle apparently failed to read the memo, making it tough to unite a divided country when even the left is split, The Washington Post reported.
“Portland is going to continue to be a microcosm of the political divides, especially among the left, that we’re seeing across the country,” Portland Forward’s James Ofsink told the Post.
“The idea that middle-of-the-road Democrats can say with a straight face that we need to take things slowly or do things in a very deliberate way rubs a lot of people the very wrong way.”
It is almost as if the only unity to come out of Biden’s call for it is opposing sides united in extremism, according to Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Director Seth Jones to the Post.
“There is additional danger coming down the road where we have this extremism almost feeding on each other, almost inspiring one another,” he said. “Based on recent trends, we can expect violent, far-left networks to conduct explosive, incendiary and firearm attacks against police, government, and corporate targets.”
The extremists might even have more unity than a divided government, according to Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist’s Handbook,” noting a “fair amount of overlap” among far-left and far-right groups.
“Broadly speaking they want directly democratic, self-managed communities at the regional and macro-regional levels,” the Occupy Wall Street organizer, Bray, told the Post. “They want decision-making from the bottom up versus the top down. They reject capitalism.”
The Biden-era rioting in Portland does undercut Republicans’ claims the protests were an attempt to overthrow President Donald Trump.
“There have been so many efforts to link Biden to the radical elements of the left, including antifa,” the Anti-Defamation League’s Oren Segal told the Post. “This demonstrates a disconnect between that messaging from the Trump administration and elected officials, who tended to lump together the left more broadly with these radical elements.”
By Eric Mack