>When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Koreng

>When we see Border Patrol agents wearing camouflage and helmets, carrying M4s with optics, rigged up like they’re about to go on patrol in Ramadi or the Korengal Valley (or deal with a migrant caravan in the southwest), that’s empire coming home. The federal agents in Portland are using technology to reduce harm. Over 50 nights they have had mobs trying to come in and destroy a federal courthouse, but instead of reenacting the Boston Massacre, at worst there has been non-life threatening injuries. Empires and countries grow weak when they divide against themselves. This is obvious, and the main way power structures fall apart. Articles like this are trying to further this division by suggesting that trying to keep a mob from destroying courthouses is authoritarian. Would Putin be so patient as to allow mobs to lay siege to a courthouse for 50 days? It's unbelievable how hyperbolic the rhetoric has gotten on this issue. My guess is that people like the author are not actually seeing what's happening in Portland. He's seeing what the federal agents are doing, but not what the mob does to provoke these responses. I won't go so far as to say the city is burning down, but if the federal agents left the courthouse to the mob, it would be burned to the ground that very day.