Right Turn
As Oregon’s conservatives grow angrier and bolder, pundits and militants are using the same red-hot rhetoric to call for revolution. But what will Oregon’s uprising look like?
By Randy Gragg
“MILITIAS?” VICTORIA TAFT winces, like the word is causing her a molten fit of indigestion. “They’re dumb. I have no use for them.”
Sitting inside a Peet’s Coffee in Southeast Portland, Taft, sporting a black blazer and a blonde bob as sharp as her air of authority, expresses her frustration with government both national (“Do you want the government to run your life, cradle to grave?”) and local (“one-party rule”; “corruption”; “Kulongoski kissing up to labor unions”; a city hall that doesn’t “want you to buy a car”). A dreadlocked girl sitting nearby puts down her copy of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack and begins blatantly eavesdropping with a look of mock horror on her face. Taft is used to the reaction.
“I don’t walk with a swagger,” she says, cordially ignoring her ever-buzzing BlackBerry. “But I’m not afraid of it, either. People have a general caricature of who a conservative is—an intolerant, gay-bashing, pro-death-penalty nutball. We’re not.”
’We just need people digging and finding out what is really going on with our governement and saying it out loud. —Victoria Taft
Portland’s appetite for Taft’s brand of punditry seems insatiable. And with liberal holdout Air America’s recent bankruptcy, conservatives now own the radio dial. Rush Limbaugh holds down the top-rated AM station, KEX 1190. KXL-AM—number two in AM ratings—is home to Lars Larson, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage. And Taft’s own KPAM pulled down a solid 2.5 rating in December, meaning that more than 176,000 Portlanders were listening to her. The competition for red radio is so intense that this past September, 970 AM changed its name to the more patriot-baiting moniker “Freedom” 970. The station plans to roll out programming from A-list right-wing talkers Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham.
“We just need people digging and finding out what is really going on with our government and saying it out loud,” Taft says. “Once they know, they’re usually pissed off because they’ve been lied to.”
The biodome’s growing conservative movement also has quieter, less visible, but no less effective, faces. Bob (who asked that we not use his real name) sits high up on the food chain of one of the city’s biggest and most well-known employers, where he works with international clients. The 37-year-old says that while coming out as a conservative might not get him fired, it would make relations at the office awkward. “Part of me would love to be able to get into political discussions at work,” he says. “But I’d take so much crap.”
That hasn’t stopped him from becoming a firebrand among Portland’s virtual activists. Flush with pride after hearing friends’ reports of the 75,000 like-minded people at the Taxpayer March on DC (what he calls the “Conservative Woodstock”), Bob flipped on the television to see news reports saying that only a few thousand protestors had shown up on the National Mall. “That was a crescendo for me,” Bob says. “We’re doing the right things to be heard, we’re not attacking, we’re generally positive, and unlike, say, a G-20 protest, we cleaned up our mess. It was a punch to the gut.”
So Bob started a Facebook page to voice his frustration. He tossed out the idea of picketing the local Portland media, which he felt had an obvious liberal bias. Within an hour, he was getting requests from other people around the state who liked the plan and wanted to do the same thing in their towns. Two weeks later, 7,200 fed-up conservatives had joined his page and his brainchild—a “Can You Hear Us Now” march on the media. Here in Portland, a mere 100 people showed up to parade from the offices of the Oregonian to KGW studios at Pioneer Courthouse Square. But Bob’s effort spawned 53 similarly loud but peaceful events all across the country.
These are the kinds of gatherings that Neiwert calls a breeding ground for militias. Maybe there’s something vaguely menacing in the handful of protesters carrying “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” signs and yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. But mostly, watching the protesters lug their handmade posters up SW Sixth Avenue, some with their kids in tow, one doesn’t feel especially threatened. “Environmentalists aren’t compared to eco-terrorists, so why do we all get thrown in with the McVeigh-militia people?” Bob asks. “I see these protests as a positive. They help give voice to lots of frustration. We’re helping people get it out of their system. We are not all wingnuts.”
And in fact, in a sign of the rapid maturation of the Tea Party movement, it’s already held its first national convention in Nashville this year (with Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker), while in Florida, Marco Rubio—a rising star on his state’s Tea Party circuit—will duke it out in the Republican primary for the right to a spot in the US Senate. So far, Oregon’s Tea Party is holding to a policy of not endorsing candidates. But three Republicans—Doug Keller, Rob Cornilles, and John Kuzmanich—running for Oregon’s 1st Congressional district seat (now occupied by a vulnerable Democrat, David Wu) have aggressively courted the partiers’ audience. All three spoke at the Labor Day Tea Party. Last September, when Keller announced his intention to run, his reasoning typified the movement: “Instead of just complaining, I decided that it was time to step up and do something.” Tucked underneath his campaign logo—a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag—is his motto: “Join the resistance.”
Somewhere in Garden Home, William Krause must be smiling at Keller’s moxie. “A lot of the general public is willing to live in a socialist society and have the government run everything,” he says. “But America is supposed to be ‘by the people, for the people’—not by the government, for the government.”
Published: March 2010
When the government takes my income and gives it to others, it creates a moral hazard. The recipients don’t see my sacrifice to provide for
their family, my support is taken for granted.
I will help them but what will they learn? Will they learn I was compassionate in their time of need? Will they understand I have been making
moral or financial decisions that allow me the choice of helping others?
Will they know I took from my family to support their family?
What will be their response? How can they thank me? Will they make changes in their life, so they can return my favor by supporting others in
need?
Do they expect me to be there next time?
I am tired of families on assistance with fancier cars, flat panel TVs and iPhones. I am angry that I support them and they have only a sense
of entitlement.
This must change.
Why dont you come down to Applegate conference center in Turner on March 13 for the Oregon 912 Project convention. You will see a different group of people. Everyday people just trying to survive this economic mess. I dare you to show up.
Blasengame, do you claim any neutrality? you said: “something like the successful Cash for Clunkers program”
Just curious, why do you call that program successful? what was successful about it?
Attempts to “understand” the Tea Party movement kind of crack me up. Attempts to demonize them as racists, hateful, and any other negative stereotype are just ignorant. Personally, I don’t think the Tea Party ideas break down well into signs, slogans, or talking points. But they are far from new ideas. Frédéric Bastiat pretty well laid it all out back in the 1800s:
“Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter — by peaceful or revolutionary means — into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.”
-Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Bastiat even clarifies how to identify “legal plunder”:
“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it."
-Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
Clearly the moron who wrote this believes that without Glenn Beck, none of us would be able to form any opinion at all. After all, we can’t SEE with our own eyes what’s going on. Only after Beck and Fox news say something do Americans have enough vision, brains and motivation to know or care what’s happening? What an insult. What a completely self righteous condescending ass.
What I don’t understand is why everyone is so upset now? How come everything was hunky dory for the last eight years when Dubya was spending us into oblivion? Unrest only becomes newsworthy when a Democrat is in the White House?
Cutting edge journalism like this might explain why Portland Monthly is laying off staff and bleeding ad revenue.
Equating right-wing activism with militias is complete nonsense, and as old and tired a cliche as exists in American politics today. My opinions are tainted compared to the authors, because I have actually attended these events instead of depending on the drooling idiocy of tools like Charles Johnson, every Liberal’s favorite conservative. I’ve volunteered at at few events, and generally get around and talk to people. I haven’t seen anything like this energy and singularity of purpose since, oh, the Viet Nam war protests, also attended. Except I haven’t seen any TeaPartiers throwing flaming bags of human excrement at the Police, like the Yippie brats did in Chicago in 1968 (I was there, too). In fact, there are no police at the Teaparties because everyone behaves civilly.
Dbags like the author have to write this tripe because the simple truth, that joe sixpack is generally right of center and that peaceful, hard-working very plain, average Americans are pissed off enough at their “leaders” to get involved and work to turn the bums out, does not fit the progressive narrative.
Liberals have completely misdiagnosed the Teaparty syndrome, and are in for a rude shock come election day. I’ll be laughing my ass off at the so-called “intellectual” class coming up smelling like turds again.
Red, White & Blue can come in many shades.
Keep Portland Left!
Can’t we all just get along?