Is Portland America’s Armageddon?

ATrump-supporting 80-year-old retired lawyer neighbor shocked me by carrying on about how communists were taking over the USA unless President Trump sends the U.S. Army into my neighbor’s home town of Portland, Ore. (26th largest American city).

Oregon, which once passed laws that Blacks could not live in Oregon for more than three years, is the flashpoint of First Amendment-protected protesters clashing with authorities. They clash with Trump high school-graduates untrained in crowd control who are Customs and Border Protection agents, who normally man booths on the border with Mexico and Canada asking if the car’s passengers have anything to declare.

Portlanders are countering Trump-ordered, camouflage-clad civilian agents with lines of “moms” and “vets.” In a word, Trump is upping the “ante” and creating more protesters and, coincidently, more damage by a tiny number of violence-prone white men clashing with law enforcement.

They are today’s Weathermen. Like the Weathermen of half-a-century-ago, they are mostly white, mostly middle class and all cowards. Weapons? “Molotov cocktails” — bottles filled with gasoline and rag fuses, and they are mostly socialist/communist in their limited thinking, like the “Capitalists-are-pigs” type.

Back to my neighbor. He is very upset. He gets all his news from Fox News and from OAN (One American News). He thinks what he sees on Fox/OAN is happening in every American city, cities such as Seattle (mostly white), Oakland (mostly Black), Minneapolis (mostly white), New York City (mostly Black and Hispanic) and Washington, D.C. (mostly Black).

Notice Chicago is not on this list of politically-charged protest cities. The reason: Its problems are not political.

Its 1.7 million Mexican origin people aren’t killing each other. That citywide phenomenon is reserved for its large and numerous criminal Black gangs.

The truth is that what my neighbor and his like-minded Trump-supporting white folks are seeing on Fox/OAN is not occurring in cities outside those mentioned. It is not happening in Texas cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, or in places like Phoenix, San Diego, San Jose or Los Angeles.

These are seven of the 10 largest U.S. cities; they are The Big Seven. They have large minority communities. If one combines the populations of Minneapolis, Oakland, Seattle, Portland and Washington, D.C. they would all fit in Los Angeles alone with room for more.

In the Big Seven, buildings aren’t burning by the hundreds, people are not being slaughtered by police, massive crowds are not gathering every night, government agents in “mufti” are not infiltrating protesters and arresting and transporting them in unmarked vehicles like they are Cuba’s secret police.

The USA is not collapsing under the weight of “violence-oriented” demonstrators protesting criminal treatment of American Blacks, despite what Fox and OAN push in their newscasts. I know.

In 1992, when the Rodney King riot began in Los Angeles, I drove the 130 miles from San Diego to Los Angeles to witness journalistically what I expected to happen when the Simi Valley jury astonished the world and declared four very-guilty LA police officers not guilty of their criminal beating of one Mr. Rodney King, a giant Black man who was bludgeoned for traffic violations.

I spent three nights and days watching Los Angeles burn around me and millions of dollars worth of “stuff” looted from small to giant department stores, food markets and disturbingly, gun shops. I also watched impotent LA police stand around watching looters. It was what I expected from a department run by the worst police chief in history, Darrel Gates. He was so incompetent, he hadn’t spoken to LA’s Black Mayor Tom Bradley in 18 months before the riot, or what Congresswoman Maxine Walters described as an “uprising” and a “rebellion.”

Los Angeles burned.

The police wimped out. California

Gov. Pete Wilson called out the National Guard but couldn’t supply ammunition to “soldiers.” They hit the street without ammunition. The situation was so bad around me, the governor requested federal troops from President George H.W. Bush; President Bush sent the U.S. Marines.

Marines with ammunition brought peace back to Los Angeles.

Marines are not needed today because the “troubles” we see are nothing compared to the Battle of Los Angeles, 1992, where battalions of arsonists and rioters flooded out of South Central Los Angeles burning and/or looting everything in their way. 53 people died and billions worth of buildings burned to the ground. Portland is nothing. Fox and OAN make it look like something but it is not. I know.

More than a quarter-century later, I still smell the smoke of Los Angeles burning.

My neighbor can relax, until multiple cities including the Big Seven are burning as Los Angeles did in ’ 92, the country won’t collapse; Los Angeles didn’t and Portland can’t compare to Los Angeles in any respect.

Raoul Lowery Contreras is the host of The Contreras Report – An Hispanic View of the USA and The Contreras Report – Business Mexico. Both podcasts are available at https:// empoweringcontent.news/the-contreras-report/