What's Going On In Portland?

Conflicting reports have come out of Portland, OR on the status of ICE enforcement, violent protests, attacks on and arrests of conservative journalists, and the Trump administration's reaction. For context. the YouTube video embedded above gives an idea of the day-to-day routine downtown.

The restaurant owner conducting the tour attributes much of the problem to major businesses that allowed office workers to work from home during the pandemic, but never required them to return to the office afterward, abandoning public space to the Lumpenproletariat, who in the video look like nice college kids who are nevertheless all nodded out.

The political alignment in Portland appears to be an entitled bourgeoisie aligned with homeless but middle-class-looking young white druggies and violent leftist radicals, against the working class broadly defined.

A conservative journalist, Katie Daviscourt, said she was attacked Tuesday night by an Antifa-affiliated protester who gave her a black eye.

The local police department, she claims, refused to do anything to help.

“I immediately ran to a Portland police officer, hunted down the suspect, chased her through the streets and said, ‘This is my assault suspect, can you guys finally do something?’ and I had eyes on her for about 35 minutes,” she said.

“Portland police refused to come in and make an arrest and I had three officers just standing there, watching me try to hunt down the suspect,” she told [Fox anchor Jesse] Watters.

The Portland Police Department issued a press release Wednesday asking for the public’s help in identifying the suspect — but police denied that they refused to help the journalist.

One of the department’s “dialogue liaison officers” followed the suspect and confronted her, police said.

“The Dialogue Officer attempted to talk to the suspect to hear her side of the story. She would not stop, so the DLO told her she was being detained. She refused the lawful police order to stop and she fled,” police said.

Police said they met with the victim and that the case is being investigated by its Major Crimes Unit.

A woman, possibly the same one, attacked another conservative journalist, Nick Sortor, Thursday night. Accordinbg to the AP,

Sortor, 27, who’s a regular guest on Fox News and whose X profile has more than 1 million followers, was arrested Thursday night with two other people outside the city’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office said it was reviewing the case and would make a decision on whether to proceed with charges before Sortor’s arraignment Monday.

What led to the arrests was not immediately clear. Portland police said they moved into the crowd to make arrests as fights broke out. They arrested Sorter and two others.

All three were charged with second-degree disorderly conduct. Sorter was released Friday on his own recognizance, according to Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office’s online records.

But as of Thursday morning, Fox News was reporting a completely different situation:

For the first time in months, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency building here was not besieged Wednesday night by Antifa creeps, who have clearly been scared off by the Trump administration’s increased presence on the ground.

It's a funny thing, just as in President Trump’s crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C., once there are consequences for breaking the law, things get awfully quiet.

It was obvious as I approached the facility just before nightfall that something had changed. Gone for the most part was the menacing gang of masked Antifa with their sticks and flagpoles that I had seen prowling the previous night.

It sounds as though the rejoicing was premature, and the menacing creeps were back Thursday night, along with the dialogue liaison officers, who were apparently there to dialogue, not to enforce the law. By yesterday,

The U.S. Department of Justice says it will launch a widescale probe of the Portland Police Bureau following the arrest of a conservative online journalist and influencer Thursday.

. . . Speaking to the media later Friday morning, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the arrest “extremely troubling,” claiming that Sortor was “ambushed by antifa and was defending himself.”

Sortor said the investigation will be led by Harmeet K. Dhillon, who is serving as assistant attorney general for civil rights, and in earlier years represented Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at The Post Millennial, in civil litigation.

On social media, Dhillon posted a letter addressed to the city attorney and Police Chief Bob Day, warning the city may be using its policing powers to engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”

The letter cited as evidence the arrest of Sortor, the lack of the arrest of a suspect in the assault reported by Post Millennial reporter Katie Daviscourt at a Tuesday protest, as well as recent moves by the City Council finding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in breach of its land-use permit.

Dhillon's letter is reported to demand:

• All bodycam footage of Sortor’s arrest and the alleged assault on Daviscourt.
• All incident reports, arrest reports, and force reports related to the events.
• All complaints filed against the PPB for its handling of the incidents.
• All internal communications regarding the decision to target the ICE facility with zoning enforcement actions.
• Any communications directing PPB officers on how to respond to ICE protests in the last 30 days.

As of Thursday, before Sortor's arrest, Fox News reported,

Federal immigration officials say their Portland, Oregon, facility has come under nightly attack, with little help from local police because of political directives from city leaders.

In an exclusive interview with Fox News’ Bill Melugin, Cammila Wamsley, director of Portland’s ICE office, said the facility has faced violence for more than 100 consecutive nights, with Portland police largely absent under guidance from the mayor and city council.

. . . She said nightly protests have escalated beyond chants and signs, with bottle rockets striking the ICE building, rocks shattering windows, lasers targeting officers’ eyes and barricades blocking vehicles.

. . . Wamsley said the Portland Police Department has been slow to respond — and sometimes doesn’t respond at all — because of city policy. She explained that assaults have occurred outside and across the street from the building, but police have either taken too long to arrive or not shown up at all.

"That is not the stance they would take six blocks from here, but it is the stance they take with us because of guidance from the mayor and city council," Wamsley said.

According to Axios,

The city and state filed for a temporary restraining order seeking to block the arrival of troops, which was the subject of Friday's hearing.

Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield also filed a lawsuit seeking to block the deployment, alleging the move violates the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using troops for domestic law enforcement.

However, there are exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, particularly the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to use federalized Guard units to suppress domestic violence that hinders the execution of state or federal law and deprives people of their constitutional rights. Given Assistant Attorney General Dhillon's letter to Portland authorities, it's likely that the Justice Department will argue that the deployment is lawful on this basis.

The judge, a Trump appointee, said she would issue a ruling later Friday or over the weekend. Thus key developments, both the judge's ruling and the District Attorney's decision to proceed with disorderly conduct charges against Sortor, are imminent.

UPDATE:

Breaking: The first of the Portland Antifa ICE rioters has been federally convicted.

Trantifa militant Julie Winters, formerly Christopher Hudson, has pleaded guilty to felony intimidation of a federal officer and resisting arrest. Other serious charges were dropped as part of… https://t.co/tMs7sAXnMr pic.twitter.com/KLpUSJ1mx6

— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) October 3, 2025

AOC Bows To Nancy Pelosi, But It Doesn't Make Much Difference

On Tuesday, AOC said,

". . . I saw some Republican members of Congress saying, ‘Oh, well, if we have this shutdown, it’s because of AOC,’” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Well, if that’s the case, my office is open and you are free to walk in and negotiate with me directly, because what I’m not going to do is tolerate 4 million uninsured Americans because Donald Trump decided one day that he wants to just make sure that kids are dying because they don’t have access to insurance. That’s what’s not going to happen.”

I read this as saying, in effect, "Yes, I'm driving the shutdown, and Republicans may as well negotiate with me directly." One person who was not amused at this was Nancy Pelosi:

.@SpeakerPelosi suggests @AOC lacks 'experience' to be Democratic leader in government shutdown. https://t.co/NhbhkYQFqQ pic.twitter.com/cv9jJ4LrUY

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 1, 2025

Her reply to the reporter's question about AOC's remarks was barely suppressed rage. "Why are you saying such a ridiculous thing?"

"She’s wonderful, she’s a real team player, and the rest of that," she told the reporter. "You started by saying Republicans say that she’s directing this. She is not, Hakeem Jeffries is, and this takes a lot of experience, a lot of unity from the caucus in terms of the point of view, and that’s what this is."

AOC implicitly walked the remarks back by yesterday evening:

Ocasio-Cortez made it clear in an interview with NBC News that Democratic leadership is driving the party’s strategy.

“They’re saying this stuff about me in the press, and the fact of the matter is I can tell you, in the seven years that I’ve been here, they [Republican leaders] have never given me a single phone call, because they know what the truth is,” she said. “They know that the people that they need to be negotiating with, and who they are negotiating with, are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer,” the House and Senate Democratic leaders, both of New York.

But this doesn't change the situation on the ground, which even Chris Cilizza, formerly of CNN and the Washington Post, who now claims to be "independent" on YouTube, understands:

He says,

I think Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may be the thing, the codex that explains why we are where we are in a government shutdown. To go forward, we need to go back, back to March. In March, Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, from New York, announces that he is going to vote to keep the government open. He doesn't want to run the risk of allowing Elon Musk and his DOGE people to have a chance to cut even more federal workers by closing down the government, so he's gonna keep it open, he's not gonna get any concessions from the Trump administration.

. . . Now, Schumer probably figured he was gonna take some flak for that, but I do not think he thought he was gonna take the amount of flak from the left that he took. . . . And one of the voices that was most promenent in speaking out against that was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . Chuck Schumer, . . . who is up for reelection in 2028 to a fifth term, looks at the landscape, and he says, "All right, well, we need to get something from Republicans this time around and Donald Trump. So I'm going to say we need to get the extension to these health care subsidies for Obamacare."

I think Schumer knows it's very unlikely he's going to get that. Trump is in control, Trump thinks a shutdown is fine for him. . . . Chuck Schumer has been in the Senate since 1998. . . . He is currently 74 years old. He'll be 76ish in 2028. . . . Schumer hasn't said whether he wants to run for another term or not, but I think he absolutely wants to keep that possibility open. . . . He doesn't want the narrative to be in 2028 that he retired to run away from certain defeat in a Democratic primary. He wants there to be a credible, plausible opening for him to run for another term.

. . . He looks at the situation, he looks at the outrage from the left. . . and he says, "If I don't get something big and deliverable for Democrats out of this showdown, I'm screwed politically, I will lose this race. So I am going to go forward with this shutdown, and I'm going to keep my Democratic caucus in line, and I'm going to make sure we don't give the Republicans the seven votes they need to keep the government open." He does all of this in large part because of the worry about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. . . . But the thing is, AOC is 35 years old. She is 40 years Chuck Schumer's junior.

In the end, although Cilizza doesn't go that far, Schumer's problem is the clock, and what is true of Schumer is even more true of Pelosi. What Cilizza has said here is that Schumer is letting AOC set his priorities, but she's forced him into a game he's bound to lose. Whatever he holds out for from Trump, anything he could potentially point to as an important deliverable, Cilizza thinks he won't get it -- but Schumer's the one who's going to lose, not just to Trump, but to any primary oppenent in 2028.

Meanwhile, AOC is 35. This is just as much Pelosi's problem, or even more so. We must assume Pelosi threw a behind-the-scenes tantrum and forced AOC to walk back her implicit announcment that she was running the shutdown, but that doesn't change the fact that Schumer is at the end of his career, and although Pelosi has formally retired as Speaker, she's continuing to run the House through Jeffries, who is little more than a ventriloquist's dummy. I asked Chrome AI mode about this, and it answered,

A narcissist's refusal to acknowledge the passage of time is a defense mechanism rooted in a fear of losing their inflated sense of self. To a narcissist, the physical decline and diminishing social influence that come with aging are existential threats to their core identity, which is built on a fantasy of superiority. They may use a range of tactics to deny reality and cling to a distorted, timeless past where they felt most powerful.

But if we're talking about refusal to acknowledge the passage of time, we're right back to where we were with Joe Biden. Somehow all the senior Democrats are living in a fantasy world where they're still powerful, and they're refusing to acknowledge that things have changed.

I Think Bp Barron Was About To Get Involved

Via The Pillar:

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin declined on Tuesday a lifetime achievement award he was scheduled to receive from the Archdiocese of Chicago’s office of human dignity and solidarity.

Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich issued an announcement on the subject at the same time senior leaders at the U.S. bishops’ conference were confidentially preparing to release a statement on the Durbin award, and had already informed the Vatican’s U.S. representative of their plans, according to several sources close to the process.

The President of the USCCB is Abp Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese of the Military Services, who I'm confident is a wise, capable, and holy man, but neither his name nor his position is well known, probably not even to rank and file US Catholics. On the other hand, Bp Robert Barron is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman since Abp Fulton J Sheen. While as many as ten current Catholic bishops had already spoken out publicly agaionst Cdl Cupich's move, most appear to have waited for clearer guidance, whether from the USCCB or the Almighty Himself, and Bp Barron was probably more aware than any of the gravity of such a move.

But clearly something was in the works. From the link,

Conference spokesperson Chieko Noguchi declined to comment Tuesday afternoon, but several senior U.S. sources told The Pillar that some conference leaders were confidentially preparing a statement on the subject, which they expected to issue in coming days, presumably from the president’s office, or from the conference’s administrative committee.

And Vatican and senior U.S. sources told The Pillar that conference leaders had notified the apostolic nunciature in Washington that a statement related to the Durbin award was expected to be issued by the bishops’ conference.

It is not clear what prompted Durbin’s withdrawal or Cupich’s Tuesday afternoon announcement. Some bishops suggested to The Pillar Tuesday that a pending USCCB statement catalyzed the move, with Cupich not eager to be seen as opposed by the body of U.S. bishops, or that the U.S. apostolic nuncio urged Cupich to shut down the award before public division among the bishops intensified.

Bishop of Springfield, IL Thomas Paprocki was among the first to speak out against Cupich, and he appears also to have been the architect of the solution:

In an interview on EWTN’s “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” on Sept. 25, Paprocki called on the Chicago cardinal to either withdraw the award or Durbin himself to decline it.

A spokesperson for Durbin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Durbin appears eventually to have recognized this would be the best path:

Durbin told NBC News he was surprised by "the level of controversy" and had withdrawn from accepting the award "because the reaction has been so controversial against the Cardinal who proposed it, and I see no point in going forward with that.”

The Catholic News Agency reported that US bishops were "grateful" and "relieved" at Durbin's decision:

Arlington, Virginia, Bishop Michael Burbidge, meanwhile — who previously served as chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ pro-life committee — said on Oct. 1 that he was “relieved” at Durbin’s decision.

. . . Numerous other U.S. bishops had previously expressed disapproval over the proposed award, including Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska; Bishop James Wall of Gallup, New Mexico; and San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.

In a statement on X on Oct. 1, Cordileone extended Durbin “complements” for withdrawing from the award, which the prelate described as a “great display of magnanimity.”

“In such a contentious issue that threatens even greater division, Sen. Durbin chose to take the higher moral ground,” the prelate said. “Such an act required tremendous humility on his part. We need more humility in our country.”

So what we seem to be hearing is this: Cdl Cupich's intent to give Sen Durbin an award had become unexpectedly controversial, we might speculate in particular in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination on September 10, since Kirk, although not Catholic himself, advocated for positions on reproduction, marriage, and sexuality that Catholics also support. It appears that neither Cdl Cupich nor Sen Durbin recognized the strength of such support among Catholics.

Neither, I suspect, did all but a dozen or so US bishops, at least at first.

Durbin’s backing down from receiving the award came following a CatholicVote petition on its online CatholicVote Action Center, where users could directly message Cardinal Cupich’s office, asking him not to honor Durbin for his support of immigrants. As of Monday, more than 20,000 had signed; by Wednesday morning, signatures had surpassed 40,000.

It sounds as though, by last weekend, the US bishops felt the need to get ahead of the problem. If more bishops began to speak out against Cupich, this would at minimum be an embarrassment, but pressure from rank-and-file Catholics was apparently rising, enough for the USCCB to report to the papal nuncio that there could be an issue, and they might be forced to make a statement. And if the USCCB made a statement, this could well provide cover for Bp Barron to make an observation of his own, however cautiously worded.

This would amount to an enormous loss of face, principally for Cdl Cupich, who simply doesn't have the prestige of Bp Barron, and any statement Barron could make short of unwavering support for Cupich would detract from Cupich further. But then, Cupich was a clear Francis favorite, and this would be a blow to the Francis faction in the Church, when Leo, at least at this point, wants to avoid schism and keep the Francis faction more or less on the reservation.

So Leo issues an official on one hand, on the other hand, dialogue, blah blah blah, Durbin declines the award, Cupich saves face, and schism is avoided. But I think the real driving factor was the threat that Bp Barron would get involved. Even Leo understands about Bp Barron. Barron understands his position, too, and has been handling it mostly quite well.

The Naval Academy Acts Like An Ivy

Welp, that's a race. https://t.co/0ADfjmlvk0

— Rich Baris The People's Pundit (@Peoples_Pundit) September 30, 2025

It turns out that the US Naval Academy's admissions and disciplinary policies have become an issue in the New Jersey governor's race:

New Jersey gubernatorial candidate Mikie Sherrill is facing fresh scrutiny following the revelation that her two children were accepted into the highly competitive Naval Academy — days after her campaign was rocked by news of her involvement in a notorious cheating scandal as a midshipman.

The Democratic congresswoman’s office announced in June that her two kids, Lincoln and Margaret Hedberg, were among nine students from her district to land spots in the Naval Academy, whichacademy Academy recordsd weerre unblemi9shed.

. . . Netizens, such as the Libs of TikTok, questioned how two of her children managed to get in at the same time in light of the highly selective process.

“What are the chances?” the popular right-wing social media account wrote on X.

Sherrill insists that everything was done aboveboard.

“In order to remove even the appearance of a conflict of interest, my children did not compete in my office’s service academy nomination process,” Sherrill said in a statement to The Post.

“Instead, they applied to the offices of the US senators from New Jersey, who also run academy nomination processes each year, and I am proud that they each earned nominations on their own.”

It is unclear whether Booker or Helmy made either of Sherrill’s children their principal nominee or if the congresswoman played any role in trying to lobby on their behalf.

Both Sherrill and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are graduates of the Naval Academy, which would make their children "legacies" in Ivy parlance. But neither mom's nor dad's academy records were unblemished.

For days, the Sherrill campaign has been rocked by questions regarding her role in a cheating scandal that kept her from walking with her graduating class in 1994.

. . . When confronted with questions from reporters last week, Sherrill admitted she was punished in 1994, but not for cheating.

"I didn't turn in some of my classmates," Sherrill said, "So I didn't walk."

Sherrill seemed to change her story on Friday while campaigning in Plainfield.

During that event, she offered this explanation: "There was a test at the school that was stolen. I did not realize it was stolen. I took the test."

Sherrill then explained that after the test was completed, she heard the rumors of it being stolen. She said she was punished because "I didn't come forward with that information."

Via the New York Post,

A source close to a rival campaign questioned that statement.

“Nobody, including Mikie Sherrill, was barred from graduation ceremonies for covering for their friends,” claimed this person, who has reviewed the documents. “That’s a bunch of bulls—. Midshipmen were, however, punished for lying to Naval investigators.”

While no evidence has surfaced that the future congresswoman was punished for being untruthful to school officials, there are also indications that she has not been up front about what transpired.

Multiple midshipmen acquired and shared answers to a Dec. 14, 1992, exam for Electrical Engineering 311, a mandatory class for all non-engineering majors. The test was administered to 663 students, according to the lawsuit that involved Hedberg.

In a 2002 episode of CBS News’ “48 Hours” that reported on the scandal, one of the students involved estimated that “probably 80% of the people who took that test had knowledge and had seen it the night before.”

The day after the test was administered, academy officials caught wind of the cheating and went on to open a series of investigations — including by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), multiple Honor Boards (disciplinary panels), and the Office of the Naval Inspector General.

Ultimately, 88 were found guilty of participation in the dissemination of the exam, the Washington Post reported at the time, with two dozen expelled and 64 receiving lesser penalties such as late graduation.

At the same link,

Democratic New Jersey gubernatorial hopeful Mikie Sherrill’s husband was also caught up in the Naval Academy cheating scandal that has rocked her campaign, court documents exclusively obtained by The Post show.

Jason Hedberg was one of about four dozen midshipmen who sued top officials at the Naval Academy, Navy and Pentagon in 1994 in a desperate bid to block an Honor Board at Annapolis from deciding whether they should be dismissed from the school.

“In compliance with the orders of their superior military officers, each named plaintiff was compelled to make inculpatory statements to Navy Inspector General investigators,” read the complaint, which charged that the students were denied due process.

The details of any “inculpatory statements” by Hedberg are unclear. However, his name is included in the 1994 commencement program, suggesting that he — unlike Sherrill — was cleared to take part in exercises some three months after the suit was filed.

This follows allegations from her opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, that she has tripled her net worth since being elected to Congress in 2018.

The question of how certain applicants are able to beat the odds in the selective college admissions process has interested me since before I started blogging. On one hand, there's clearly a Navy old-boy network that extends to the Academy -- take the example of Sen John McCain, himself an Academy graduate, largely because his father and grandfather were both four-star admirals and Academy graduates themselves. He was a legacy as much as any Ivy applicant following his own dad and granddad. His pedigree apparently compensated for his poor early performance as a Naval aviator:

McCain began as a sub-par flier who was at times careless and reckless; during the early to mid-1960s, two of his flight missions crashed, and a third mission collided with power lines, but he received no major injuries.

It looks like there have always been ways to play the angles in the Navy, and Mikie Sherrill and her husband have just found the latest version -- just like in the Ivy League. But a bigger, and much less examined, question is cheating. I asked Chrome AI Mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at the Naval Academy?" It answered,

At least three large-scale cheating scandals have occurred at the U.S. Naval Academy in recent decades, impacting midshipmen in 1974, 1992, and 2020. Most recently, renewed attention has been drawn to the 1992 incident due to a political campaign.

In the 1992 scandal that affected Sherrill and her husband, the Navy's inspector general implicated more than 130 midshipmen in the theft and distribution of the exam. Approximately 80 midshipmen admitted to cheating, and 29 were recommended for expulsion. However, the numbers at one link above suggest far more were involved -- the test was administered to 663 students, and "probably 80%" had seen it the night before. That comes out to 530 students who saw the exam before they took it.

So, why were only 130 "implicated" and only 29 recommended for expulsion? I think it's because if the true size of the cheating problem were to become known, it would be beyond embarrassing to the Naval Academy and the Navy, so it had to be minimized. It would lead to serious questions about the competence of Naval officers and the value of an Academy degree. But the mere fact that cheating scandals reoccur at places like the Naval Academy is an indication that the problem hasn't been addressed.

But why should it be limited to the Naval Academy, or even the other US military academies? I asked Chrome AI mode, "How many cheating scandals have there been at Harvard?" It answered,

Multiple cheating scandals have been reported at Harvard, with several major cases involving large numbers of students having occurred in recent decades. It's impossible to know the exact total number of cheating incidents, as many go unreported, but publicly known scandals highlight periods of high academic dishonesty.

These included the 2012 Government 1310 scandal, in which approximately half of the 279 students were investigated for collaborating or plagiarizing on a take-home final exam; The 2017 Computer Science 50 scandal, in which about 10% of the course's enrollment during the fall semester were referred to the Honor Council; and the 2020–2021 Honor Code violations, a surge in academic dishonesty cases during the COVID pandemic, when the Honor Council reviewed 138 cases that academic year, with 27 students required to withdraw.

My own teaching experience in the 1970s was that plagiarism was extremedly common, and my graduate assistant colleagues recognized that plagiarism was so rife in freshman comp classes that it simply wasn't worth mentioning. But it was also understood that if the English Department, say, were to undertake serious enforcement of the honor code, first, nobody would have time to do anything else, and second, nobody would sign up to take English courses, so life simply went on.

The upshot is that truthtellers like Mike Rowe are slowly beginning to emerge who are questioning the value of a four-year degree, and cases like Mikie Sherrill are beginning to emerge who illustrate the corruption endemic in higher education, if not in public life overall.