America's Cultural Revolution by Christopher F. Rufo

Author:Christopher F. Rufo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

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

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