How to Restore Order to Troubled Cities

After over sixty straight days of rioting and destruction,
Portland, Oregon has had a dramatic reversal in its
sorry fortunes. What happened?

Portland, like some other major U.S. cities, have seen
violent outbreaks after the death of George Floyd, the
black man who died when a white Minneapolis police
officer kneeled on his neck in order to restrain him,
but cut off his oxygen in the process resulting in Floyd's
death. Portland's mayor, Ted Wheeler, prior to the
violence there, had in effect given control of Portland
to radical groups not adverse to relying on violence in
order to get what they want, refused to let the city's
officers do their jobs and quell the rioting and looting.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown likewise refused to dispatch
the state's National Guard to Portland to restore order.
So President Trump stepped in, sending federal marshals
to Portland to do the work that the local police should
have done had they not been ordered to stand down by
Mayor Wheeler.

In the short time that the marshals were there,
they succeeded in preventing any further attacks on the
federal courthouse as well as any subsequent rioting
and general violence. After this episode the local
police were then freed up to do their jobs, and have
been keeping a lid on further mayhem. Acting Homeland
Security Secretary Chad Wolf hailed the relative calm,
tweeting that "stepping up and doing the right thing should
not take 60 days."

With President Trump's intervention in Portland, as well as
similar ones in some other cities (including your Peasant's
Milwaukee), he is letting city residents know that there is
nothing making shooting, looting, and burning unavoidable,
that it is the result of the horrible choices to let it all happen
by the mayors and other public officials who couldn't care
less about the safety of their cities' residents. These same
officials then criticize the actions of the president and the
feds sent to their cities instead of the rioters.

This summer has had some parallels to the summer of 1968
in which a riot broke out in Chicago, just outside the site
of the Democrats' national convention. There were riots in
other cities, Milwaukee included, in reaction to the Vietnam
War and to racial tensions. The American people reacted
by electing Republican Richard Nixon president, steering
clear of the Democrats and the view of what the country
might have looked like under their governance. One big
difference here is that Republican Donald Trump is the
incumbent seeking a second term, and the electorate is
seeing the contrast between President Trump's decisive
actions taken to restore and preserve order and safety in
our urban areas as opposed to the Democrat mayors and
governors enabling the forces of anarchy and attendant
crimes by sitting on their hands. President Trump
and the Republicans will reap a victorious harvest in
November, and history will have repeated itself.

This is how you restore order to the troubled cities;
you do the jobs of the local authorities in order to get
them to do their jobs themselves.


MEM