Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where Free Thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself,

associate editor Toby Young and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay. You can support our podcast by

visiting Patreon.com forward slash quilette and becoming a monthly patron. By

becoming a monthly patron you'll also receive our weekly newsletter.

Welcome to the Quillett podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

In terms of population, Portland, Oregon is merely the 25th biggest city in the United States, around the same size as El Paso, Texas, and

Oklahoma City.

Yet despite that, Portland has assumed a prominent place in the modern American imagination,

in part thanks to the television comedy show Portlandia,

but also the endless fawning articles about Portland

that have appeared in the New York Times.

Perhaps more than any other American city, Portland exists as a symbol, some might say caricature,

of the American city as hipster cultural colony. But now Portland is facing a

reckoning. In recent years the city too often has been the site of street

violence involving radical groups such as Antifa, whose

supporters recently were caught on video beating up Quilett editor Andy Nago.

A rise in real estate prices has made the city unaffordable for many long time

families and businesses. And as Portland writer Nancy Romulman wrote in a

lengthy article for tablet magazine last week, the city's once tolerant live and let live culture

...