The Child Soldiers of Portland
There are few places on earth where political radicals and their children ritualistically burn the American flag and chant “Death to America”—Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, Ramallah, and Portland, Oregon.
The city of Portland, a grim and cloud-covered metro on the south bank of the Columbia River, has developed a reputation for the colorful sloganeering of its political protestors. Anarchists, communists, ecofascists, and a variety of other agitators regularly denounce the police, politicians of both parties, and the American state itself; flag-burning has become part of the regular syntax of the protest movement.
During the summer riots in 2020, teenagers associated with the Youth Liberation Front escalated the rhetoric with chants of “Death to America” and months of violence to avenge the death of George Floyd.1 Children as young as three or four years old marched with the crowd to the federal courthouse, raising the Black Power fist and chanting “Fuck the Police! Fuck the Police!”2
The irony isn’t difficult to identify: Portland is famously the “whitest city in America,” and yet it has become the headquarters of race radicalism in the United States. The city has elevated white guilt into a civic religion. Its citizens have developed an elaborate set of rituals, devotions, and self-criticisms to fight the chimeras of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.” The ultimate expression of this orthodoxy is violence: street militias, calling themselves “anti-racists” and “anti-fascists,” are quick to smash the windows of their enemies and burn down the property of anyone who transgresses the new moral law.
It might be easy to dismiss this as the work of a few harmless radicals who are “keeping Portland weird” and, for the most part, represent a minority coalition of the malcontent and the mentally deranged—a quick glimpse through the Antifa mug shots released by the Portland Police Department will confirm this impression. But in recent years, the underlying ideology of Portland’s radicals has become institutionalized. The city government has adopted a series of Five-Year Plans for “equity and inclusion,” shopkeepers have posted political slogans in their windows as a form of protection, and local schools have designed a program of political education for their students that resembles propaganda.
The schools of Portland have self-consciously adopted Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed” as their theoretical orientation, activated it through a curriculum saturated in critical theory, and enforced it through the appointment of de facto political officers within individual schools under the cover of “equity and social justice.” The internal documents from three local districts—Tigard-Tualatin School District, Beaverton School District, and Portland Public Schools—reveal this revolutionary shift. Administrators and teachers have combined theory, praxis, and power in service of left-wing political activism.
The results are predictable. By perpetuating the narrative that America is fundamentally evil, steeping children in the doctrine of critical pedagogy and lionizing the rioters in the streets, the schools have consciously pushed students in the direction of revolution. In the language of the Left, the political education program in Portland-area school districts could be described as a “school-to-radicalism pipeline”—or, more provocatively, as a training ground for child soldiers.
This is not hyperbole: some of the most violent anarchist groups in Portland are run by teenagers. Dozens of minors were arrested during the long stretch of the George Floyd riots. They have attached their political cause to climate change, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and Black Lives Matter—whatever provides the pretext for violent “direct action.”
The movement is unmistakable: out of the schools and into the streets. And contrary to those who believed that the end of the Trump presidency would usher in a “return to normalcy,” the social and political revolution in Portland has not stopped with the ascendance of President Biden—it has only accelerated. On the day of Biden’s inauguration, teenage radicals marched through the streets of Southeast Portland, smashing the office windows of the state Democratic Party, and unfurling large banners with their hand-painted demands: “We don’t want Biden, we want revenge”; “We are ungovernable”; “A new world from the ashes.”3
The children of Portland, intoxicated by revolution and enabled by their elders, have escaped the chain.
* * *
Tigard, Oregon, is a placid suburban city southwest of Portland. The city’s historic main street is a pastiche of coffeehouses, boutiques, repair shops, and small-town restaurants. Historically, the city’s political squabbles have been focused on zoning and land use issues, with developers fighting the city, preservationists fighting developers, and neighbors fighting one another—in other words, the typical political patterns of an affluent, predominantly white American suburb.
Nevertheless, the educators at the Tigard-Tualatin School District have gone all in on radical pedagogy and the social justice trinity of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
In 2020, at the height of the George Floyd riots, Tigard-Tualatin superintendent Sue Rieke-Smith and board chair Maureen Wolf signed a proclamation “condemning racism and committing to being an anti-racist school district.” The preamble to the document recited the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, which has become a penitential rite in social justice circles, then confessed that the district’s “students of color, and Black students in particular, still regularly experience racism in [their] schools.” To rectify this situation, the superintendent pledged to become “actively anti-racist,” “dismantle systemic racism,” implement a “collective equity framework,” establish “pillars for equity,” deploy “Equity Teams” within schools, create racially segregated “Student Affinity Groups,” and use “an equity lens for all future curriculum adoptions.”4
The following month, the district announced the creation of a new Department of Equity and Inclusion and installed left-wing activist and critical pedagogist Zinnia Un as its director.5 Un quickly created a blueprint for overhauling the curriculum at Tigard-Tualatin schools. The document explicitly called for adopting Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.” Following Freire’s categorizations, Un argued that the Tigard-Tualatin School District must move from a state of “reading the world” to the phase of “denunciation” against the revolution’s enemies and, eventually, to the state of “annunciation” of the liberated masses, who will begin “rewriting the world.” For Un, the first-order targets of denunciation were not capitalism and colonialism, as they were for Freire, but the new set of targets for the modern West: “whiteness,” “colorblindness,” “individualism,” and “meritocracy.”6 These are the values of capitalist society, to be sure, but more deeply, they are the values of white society, which, to the second-generation critical pedagogists, is the primary axis of oppression.
What is the solution to pathological whiteness? According to Un and the Tigard-Tualatin School District, the answer lies with a new form of “white identity development.” In a series of “antiracist resources” provided to teachers, the Department of Equity and Inclusion circulated a handout of strategies for “white identity development,” which were designed to “facilitate growth for white folks to become allies, and eventually accomplices, for anti-racist work.” The process, which is couched in the language of personal development, begins with the assumption that all whites are born “racist,” even if they “don’t purposely or consciously act in a racist way.” In order to move beyond this state, white students must do the work of reformulating their identities according to the dictates of “anti-racist” ideology.
The first step is “contact,” in which white students are confronted with “active racism or real-world experiences that highlight their whiteness.” The goal is to provoke an emotional rupture that brings the subject to the next step, “disintegration,” in which he or she feels intense “white guilt” and “white shame,” eventually admitting: “I feel bad for being white.” Once the emotional hooks have been established, the training outlines a process of moving white students from a state of “reintegration” to “pseudo-independence” to “immersion” to “autonomy,” in which whites can finally serve as “allies” for the oppressed.
This is an explicitly political project: at the early stages, the district encourages students to participate in activities such as “attending a training, joining an allies group, participating in a protest.” Later, white students are told to analyze their “covert white supremacy,” host “difficult conversations with white friends and family about racism,” and use their “privilege to support anti-racist work.” At the final stage, the trainers plumb the depths of the students’ individual psychology to ensure that pathological “whiteness” has been banished from their psyches. Students must answer a series of questions to demonstrate their final commitment: “Does your solidarity make you lose sleep at night? Does your solidarity put you in danger? Does your solidarity cost you relationships? Does your solidarity make you suspicious of predominantly white institutions? Does your solidarity have room for Black rage?”7
This is not a pedagogy of education; it is a pedagogy of revolution.
The “identity development” program also follows the textbook cult indoctrination process: persuade initiates of their fundamental guilt, present a remedy through participation in the group, manipulate the emotions to achieve compliance, identify an amorphous scapegoat, demand total loyalty to the new orthodoxy, proselytize through personal circles, isolate from old friends and family, and keep the ultimate solution always out of reach.
One veteran teacher, who requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, said the new movement led by Un and the Department of Equity and Inclusion led to a “big change” in the district. The focus shifted immediately from academics to politics—and employees were expected to fall in line with the new ideology. The veteran teacher described one professional development training that left some of her colleagues in a neighboring school devastated: “They had teachers actually crying because of their ‘whiteness.’”8
Which leads to the final plank in Tigard-Tualatin’s new pedagogy: enforcement. As soon as Zinnia Un ascended to the position of director of equity and inclusion, she formulated a new “hate speech” policy designed to prevent legitimate discriminatory speech—and to pathologize any political opposition to the new regime. In an internal memo sent to teachers, the district outlined a clear policy that right-wing symbols and opinions were forbidden, while left-wing symbols and opinions were tacitly encouraged. As an example, the document described the “Make America Great Again hat” as a “symbol of hate or oppression” and recommended that teachers explain to students that the hat “makes [students] feel afraid” and “causes a substantial disruption to the learning environment.”9
This is deliberate. The district requires teachers to celebrate one political movement and condemn another. “I almost feel like we’re walking around on eggshells. You have to be careful what you say,” the veteran teacher said. “I’m afraid of speaking up for fear I might lose my job. . . . I mean, what would happen if I said I’m a conservative Republican Christian? How would that go? How would that slide?” When asked how the new political education program had affected her personally, her voice broke and she said quietly: “I don’t want to go back to work. I don’t believe in this. It goes against my faith system. It’s downright wrong. We’re all created as equals in God’s sight and this is just wrong, the way we’re teaching our children. I don’t have to be embarrassed because of my skin color.”10
* * *
The city of Beaverton was born with the arrival of the Oregon Central Rail Road in 1868. Since then, the small farming community has transformed into a busy and affluent suburb. Commuters fight their way to the Nike corporate headquarters on Southwest Murray Boulevard and through traffic to the Intel research laboratories in nearby Hillsboro. Like Tigard, which borders the city to the south, Beaverton is a predominantly white and Asian-American community; just 2 percent of the city’s population is black.11
Beaverton shares another important similarity with Tigard: its public schools were consumed by the racial panic following the death of George Floyd. Following the same educational theories as in Tigard, Beaverton teachers designed and began implementing a new curriculum for every grade level, beginning in kindergarten. The general language for these lessons seemed innocuous—“Diversity,” “empowerment,” “change-making,” “culturally responsive teaching”—and most parents, busy with the demands of everyday life, would normally glance at the syllabus during parent-teacher night and forget about them.
In 2020, however, many parents had been keeping closer tabs on their children’s education because of the coronavirus lockdowns and remote learning requirements. The curriculum, they discovered, revealed its radicalism in the details.
One family, which had moved to Beaverton in part for the city’s highly rated public schools, collected a folder of lessons being taught to their third-grade child. The social studies module on race began innocently enough: the teacher asked the eight- and nine-year-old students to think about their “culture and identity” and join her in “celebrating diversity,” set alongside pictures of a world map and cartoons of smiling children. The subsequent lessons, however, became more pointed. The teacher explained to students that “race is a social construct” created by white elites, who use those categories “to maintain power and control of one group over another.” This, the teacher said, is “racism,” which “can determine real-life experiences, inspire hate, and have a major negative impact on Black lives.”
The next module focused on “systemic racism” and the history of the United States. The teacher told the students that racism “infects the very structure(s) of our society,” including “wealth, employment, education, criminal justice, housing, surveillance, and healthcare.” To accompany the lesson, the teacher included a video presentation in which the speaker directly accused the children of being racist themselves: “Our society speaks racism. It has spoken racism since we were born. Of course you are racist. The idea that somehow this blanket of ideas has fallen on everyone’s head except for yours is magical thinking and it’s useless.” The speaker then told the students that if they did not convert to the cause, they would “affirm the status quo of certain bodies being allowed resources, access, opportunities, and other bodies being literally killed.”
The final modules presented the solution: students must embrace the principles of “revolution,” “resistance,” and “liberation.” The teacher introduced these principles through a series of photographs of child activists, the Black Power fist, and Black Lives Matter demonstrations, as well as protest signs reading “White Silence = Compliance,” “Black Lives > Property,” “AmeriKKKa,” and “Stop Killing Us.” The goal, according to the curriculum, was for students to become “change-makers” and “antiracist in all aspects of [their] lives.” They must actively fight “white supremacy, white-dominated culture, and unequal institutions,” or else they would be upholding these evils. In the final lesson, the curriculum instructed third graders to “do the inner work to figure out a way to acknowledge how you participate in oppressive systems,” “do the outer work and figure out how to change the oppressive systems,” and “learn how to listen and accept criticism with grace, even if it’s uncomfortable.”12
Families who learned about the curriculum were outraged.
One mother, who originally emigrated from Iran to the United States, said the lessons were “absolutely unacceptable” and reminiscent of the political indoctrination in the Islamic Republic. “I moved here because this is America, because of the rights and the opportunities that we have. And this is not where I want my country to go,” she explained. When asked about her own childhood in Iran, she broke down in tears. “I remember when we would line up in the morning in an assembly. We had to chant ‘Death to America.’ I remember being in elementary school and thinking, ‘I don’t want to chant this. I have aunts and uncles in America. I don’t want them to die.’”
Her husband immediately sent a letter to the Beaverton School District blasting the curriculum as “presenting racist material under the guise of ‘antiracism.’” He said the district was trying to conceal the materials from families. “They’re trying to indoctrinate the children,” he said. “And they’re doing it very carefully and very slowly.” He believed the ultimate intention of the new pedagogy was to turn child against parent. After the lessons began, his own child became torn between the word of the school and the word of the family, sometimes crying out of confusion. “They’re slowly going to get behind their defenses, get behind the parents’ defenses, and create little social justice warriors,” the father said. “They’re trying to hyper-empathize and hyper-emotionalize the children in order to get them to be more receptive to . . . some sort of revolution.”
Eventually, the mother and father decided to pull their child from the social studies program and made plans to transfer to another school the following year. Although they were able to opt out of the program temporarily, they feared that, left unchecked, the campaign to turn children into the “pointed sword for revolution” could lead to wider social consequences.
The mother pointed out that many Iranians initially supported the Islamic Revolution in 1979 in order to depose the shah and usher in a better world, only to be bitterly disappointed. The revolutionaries promised a new utopia but ended up transforming their country into a bone-breaking tyranny. “They have absolutely zero rights,” she said. “They hang people in the streets. They make them disappear. Not only them, but their families. They are for months tortured in the political prisons and then killed.”
And, she believed, it could happen in America: “I’m fighting this at the school and even at my work, because I see this country going that way.”13
Unfortunately, the kind of teaching in Beaverton is no longer the exception in the state of Oregon—it is fast becoming the rule. In 2017, Oregon state legislators passed a bill that overhauled the state curriculum and installed a mandatory “ethnic studies” program that reflects the emergent racial orthodoxy,14 which, in the language of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association, promises to deconstruct, dismantle, abolish, eradicate, resist, and interrupt the component parts of the liberal order.15
According to drafts of the new Oregon state curriculum standards, kindergartners will be required to learn the “difference between private and public ownership” of goods and capital, and “develop understanding of identity formation related to self, family, community, gender, and disability.”
In first grade, they will learn how to “define equity, equality, and systems of power,” “examine social construction as it relates to race, ethnicity, gender, disabilities, and sexual orientation,” and “describe how individual and group characteristics are used to divide, unite, and categorize racial, ethnic, and social groups.” By third, fourth, and fifth grade, students will learn to deconstruct the US Constitution, uncover “systems of power, including white supremacy, institutional racism, racial hierarchy, and oppression,” and “examine the consequences of power and privilege on issues associated with poverty, income, and the accumulation of wealth.”
If the elementary school curriculum sets the premise—the United States is the great oppressor—the middle and high school curricula deliver the conclusion. The learning standards read like an old left-wing pamphlet. Students must internalize the principles of race-based “subversion, resistance, challenge, and perseverance.” They must fight against the “structural and systemic oppression” of capitalism, authority, religion, and government. They must commit to the “pursuit of social justice.”16
As the internal documents from the Oregon Department of Education make clear, the point of ethnic studies is not academic achievement, but “social change”17—education is the means, politics is the end.
* * *
If the cities of Tigard and Beaverton represent the categories of theory and praxis, the city of Portland represents their conclusion: power.
In recent years, Portland has emerged as the leading hub of America’s left-wing radical movements. The city’s loose network of Marxist, anarchist, and anti-fascist groups has turned the street riot into an art form. After the death of George Floyd, Portland’s radicals attacked police officers and laid siege to federal buildings for more than one hundred consecutive nights; they armed themselves with rocks, bottles, shields, knives, guns, bricks, lasers, boards, explosives, gasoline, barricades, spike strips, brass knuckles, and Molotov cocktails.18 Following the chaos, many downtown businesses closed their doors and insurance companies began to raise premiums or refuse to issue policies because of the risk of ongoing property destruction.19
The same philosophy that animates the street radicals also animates the bureaucrats at Portland Public Schools, who have institutionalized the philosophy of social justice and incorporated political activism into every aspect of the education system. In recent years, administrators have pledged to make “antiracism” the district’s “north star,” promising to build “an education system that intentionally disrupts—and builds leaders to disrupt—systems of oppression.” The superintendent reorganized the bureaucracy around these goals, hiring a new equity czar and announcing a “Five-Year Racial Equity Plan,” which promises a dizzying sequence of acronyms and academic catchphrases such as “intersectionality” and “targeted universalism.”20
It’s hard to overstate how deeply left-wing political ideology has been entrenched in all aspects of the Portland public school system.
According to one veteran elementary school teacher, who describes herself as a longtime liberal, the district’s “antiracist journey” began with good intentions a decade ago but, over time, hardened into a suffocating dogma. Today this teacher must submit to mandatory anti-racism trainings each week and toe the party line in all of her instruction and communications. “From the beginning, we were told that we couldn’t question [the anti-racism program],” the teacher said. “I called human resources and asked them if I needed to profess that I believe this and if I had to teach from this perspective. And I was told that I need to understand it, I need to know all about it, [and] you could probably lose your job if your principal is super into making sure that you’re using this lens as you teach.”
At one anti-racism session, this teacher was required to participate in a “line of oppression” exercise. The trainers lined up a group of educators and shouted out various injustices—racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.—then asked the teachers who would suffer from these harms to step forward. The room was then divided into the oppressors and the oppressed, with straight white men and women forced to reckon with their identity as oppressors. The objective, according to the teacher, was to consolidate ideological power and intimidate white teachers into submission through collective guilt and fear of being labeled racists.
The anti-racism program “was the battering ram,” but the ultimate goal, according to the teacher, is the “dismantling of Western culture” and the ushering in of a new left-wing utopia. “I have no doubt that that’s exactly what they want,” the teacher said. “And dismantling means just picking it apart until there’s nothing to hold it up anymore, and then they can replace it.”21
Today, the ideology of “anti-racism” has permeated every department in the district.
Even the educators in the English as a Second Language program have begun teaching the principles of critical pedagogy to immigrants and refugees. According to internal documents, ESL teachers are told to develop “counterstories” to the dominant American culture and focus their instruction on “advocacy for racial equity for emergent bilingual/multilingual students.” As part of the curriculum, they are asked to teach immigrants that “racism in the USA is pervasive and operates like the air we breathe” and that “civil rights gains for people of color should be interpreted with measured enthusiasm.”
In order to combat the pernicious influence of their own “Whiteness,” the district recommends that teachers adopt a series of affirmations, beginning with “getting to know myself as a racial being” and then “[deconstructing] the Presence and Role of Whiteness in my life and [identifying] ways I challenge my Whiteness.” Finally, after shedding their racial limitations, the teachers can begin the work of “interrupting institutional racism” and “the perpetuation of White Supremacy.”22
This is a bewildering curriculum decision. Portland has a significant population of immigrants and refugees from countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Guatemala, and El Salvador. These families have escaped some of the most nightmarish conditions in the world, including civil war, genocide, starvation, and grinding poverty. The city of Portland is not perfect, but it is certainly, by comparison, a haven of peace and opportunity for the foreign-born. Yet Portland schools are intent on teaching the children of immigrants and refugees that they should tear down the very country that provided them safe harbor.
How does this regime of teacher training translate in the classroom? In all the ways one would expect.
At Forest Park, Whitman, and Marysville elementary schools, a teacher named Sarita Flores, who runs the information technology program, has transformed her role into that of a political inquisitor. According to leaked internal documents and whistleblower accounts, Flores holds weekly “antiracism” sessions in which white teachers are asked to remain silent, “honor the feelings of BIPOC,” and “make space for and amplify BIPOC educators.” In a series of presentations resembling a twentieth-century struggle session, Flores instructs teachers that they must “deepen [their] political analysis of racism and oppression” and “start healing with public apologies about [their] racism and then go back and apologize through an audit through an anti-racist lens.”23
During one of these sessions, according to a whistleblower, Flores denounced one of her white female colleagues by screaming “you make me feel unsafe, you make me feel unsafe” over and over for ninety seconds.24
For Flores and other teachers in the social justice wing of Portland Public Schools, the only solution is revolution. During one presentation to teachers, Flores claimed that “an educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.” In a folder hosted on the district website, Flores shared an illustration with teachers that justified the ongoing political violence in Portland: “The root cause of every riot is some kind of oppression. If you want to end the riots, you have to end the oppression. If you want to end a riot without ending its root cause, your agenda isn’t about peace and justice—it’s about silencing and control.”
Flores’s message to students was similar. In a series of video lessons delivered to her elementary school students, Flores declared that “Black people were used as slaves in the US” and, therefore, students must become “justice fighters.” At the height of the protests in Portland, Flores released another video lesson telling the children that “protesting is when people hold up signs and march for justice. You’ve trained for this moment all year: the fight for justice.”25
By high school, the basic education about “skin color” and “justice fighters” turns into advanced ideological training and live-action street protesting. The curriculum is saturated with critical pedagogy. At Lincoln High, a wealthy public school with only 1 percent black student enrollment, some students take two full years of “critical race studies.” The course, taught by Jessica Mallare-Best, begins with training on racial identity, white supremacy, institutional racism, and racial empowerment, with the goal of providing “methods in which students can begin to be activists and allies for change.” During the second year, students devote two semesters to studying “white fragility,” “whiteness as property,” “the permanence of racism,” “collective organizing,” and “being an activist” in order to prepare themselves to “do [their] part in dismantling white supremacy.”26
The next step is obvious. The abstract becomes concrete. Theory leads to action. The students, steeped in the logic of racial revolution, go from the classroom into the streets.
This happened all over the city. At Sabin Elementary School, children as young as five held a mock protest and raised the Black Power fist alongside their teachers.27 At Ockley Green Middle School, the “police abolitionist” Teressa Raiford held an assembly on social justice and led hundreds of students into the streets to perform a “die-in” in the middle of an intersection—without the permission or notification of their parents.28
During the George Floyd riots, these teacher- and student-led protests accelerated. Middle school students in Northeast Portland led a public march advocating for defunding the police.29 High school students in Southwest Portland marched through the neighborhood demanding that white residents provide “reparations” to black people. Other schools held simulated rallies, demonstrations, protests, and activist campaigns, all in service of the district’s official ideology.30
This is the endpoint of critical pedagogy: the students have reached “critical consciousness” and readied themselves to take their revolt into the world.
* * *
The consequence of Portland’s educational program is a grim one: political violence. During the long summer of the George Floyd riots, Portland-area students and teachers engaged in widespread rioting, vandalism, and destruction.
The Youth Liberation Front, which was founded by teenagers and recruited heavily from Portland-area high schools, was one of the most active and violent organizations in the city. The group’s leaders divided the group into autonomous cells to avoid law enforcement infiltration and armed its members with shields, weapons, gas masks, and explosives. Following the death of George Floyd, the group organized a walkout of high school students and then rioted for more than three months straight. “We are a bunch of teenagers armed with ADHD and yerba mate,” they declared on social media. “We can take a 5 a.m. raid and be back on our feet a few hours later. We’ll be back again and again until every prison is reduced to ashes and every wall to rubble.”31
Over the course of the summer, the YLF led a youth revolt that rocked the city. Portland-area law enforcement arrested dozens of minors and young adults for protest-related crimes, including rioting, burglary, property destruction, throwing rocks and bottles at police officers, brandishing a fake handgun at a crowd, setting fire to the police union headquarters, and stomping a man unconscious.32
Portland’s teachers, too, immersed themselves in the chaos. During the same period, police arrested at least five teachers for riot-related crimes, including felony riot, disorderly conduct, interfering with police officers, and assaulting a federal officer. All except one were released immediately without bail33 and at least two of the Portland Public Schools teachers were still employed by the district a year later.34
None of this should come as a surprise. For years, administrators, teachers, and political leaders in Portland had been playing with fire. They filled the heads of the young with nightmarish visions of America and then promised fulfillment through revolution. But as the destruction following the death of George Floyd revealed, that revolution was devoid of positive values. The child soldiers of Portland had been promised “a new world from the ashes,” but the real outcome, if they get their way, will be a world of rubble—cold, empty, and salted over.
It is difficult not to see this as a cynical game: teachers and administrators, ensconced in the public bureaucracy and secured by the public trust, engage in an absurd theater of cultural Marxism, spinning stories about “the pedagogy of the oppressed” to their privileged, suburban, predominantly white students. But for all the talk about “liberation” and “critical consciousness,” they are, in truth, condemning these children to a profoundly pessimistic worldview in which racism and oppression have pervaded every institution, with no recourse but violence.
The governing institutions in Portland have reached the strange paradox in which the state, through the organs of education, is agitating for its own destruction. They have condemned the entire structure of the social order and celebrated the figures who would tear it down. They might get what they wish for, although not in the way they imagine. As the historians have warned since ancient times, democracy can easily degenerate into mob rule, which occurs when the populace loses faith in the governing system and the rule of law. The result is not utopia, but anarchy.
In Portland, they are shaping the character of the young into this regime of disorder and may not be able to withstand the consequences when the story turns. When the city’s rioters chant “Whose streets? Our streets!” in call and response, one should heed them—and beware of what’s to come.