There *is* a violence problem in Portland

I've been thinking about this all day. Apparently 200 marchers descended on the residential tower where Mayor Ted Wheeler lives ... and tried to set a fire on the ground floor. "The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. Police used crowd-control munitions and released smoke into the air as they pushed the crowd west."

It's easy to throw words like "terrorism" around. But.

I keep thinking of people like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City -- even though there were a number of innocent children there. And the 9/11 highjackers, who killed thousands of innocent Americans in order to accomplish their political task.

Whoever set the fire in Portland was, at the very least, willing to risk the lives of all the residents in that residential tower just to make their ire known. I don't care if that ire was earned or not. What I do know is that what they did was wrong. I think it's fair, even, to call that terrorism. Certainly, we would have if the building had burned. Maybe we'll found out this was an act of right-wing provocateurs -- and I'm willing to correct and clarify if that's the case -- but at this point that's not what it looks like. 

I'm keeping this in perspective: Right-wing violence is the biggest danger we face at the moment. Listen to Elizabeth Neumann, a former DHS official under President Trump:

When Trump finally started using the term "domestic extremism" himself in the summer of 2020, it was in reference to the violence and looting that occurred during the protests across the country against police brutality targeting Black Americans, which the president attributed to "antifa." For Neumann, this was an obvious red herring. She says that the numbers don't bear out the idea that left-wing violence is as much of a problem as right-wing violence, and arrests during the summer's protests demonstrate that.

"If you look at the people that have been arrested for that, by and large, I mean, it's the boogaloo movement or it's an association with QAnon. It's the right side of the spectrum. It is not antifa." She's unequivocal about this: "The threat of domestic terrorism is not from antifa. It is from these right-wing movements."

That's the bigger picture. Two wrongs don't make a right, though. Threatening lives -- especially innocent lives -- is wrong. It's evil.