DJT & PDX: Dumb & Dumber
While not a war zone, Portland, OR is one of the most inhumane places in the modern world.
If Portland, Oregon, is a war zone, it’s photojournalist Tara Faul who spends her days in the trenches.
Since at least 2021 (according to her X bio), Faul has been ‘boots on the ground,’ walking Portland’s streets, capturing images of humans enduring apocalyptic, inhumane conditions as they live houseless and, more often than not, substance-dependent, and sharing those images on her X feed.
Most of Faul’s images are difficult to look at because they’re a brutally honest capture of life on Portland’s streets. But if you’re a decent person, an honest person, the least you can do is look, the least you can do is acknowledge the levels of depravity that have somehow been deemed acceptable in the City of Roses.
But of all the moments Faul has captured, one picture stood out to me when she shared it last week. It wasn’t the shot of two beautiful young humans, strung out like zombies on the sidewalk. Not the image of one man doing fentanyl on the sidewalk next to another man who was pleasuring himself. It was the image of two men—both relatively well-dressed in sweaters, headphones in their ears, perceivably on their way to work or some moderately productive endeavor. One man is holding his cellphone and walking a little dog. The men’s faces are focused, perhaps on the day ahead. Between them, a form lies motionless on the soft ground adjacent to the sidewalk, amidst some scrubby shrubs. A grey wool blanket covers the form; beneath it, a human. A human being comprised of skin and lungs and blood and bones—just like you; just like me. But the busy, self-important men in motion pay the form no mind. They’ve likely got dragons to slay at their tech jobs, where perhaps they sit in expensive meetings in corporate boardrooms, posting about how they “believe in Portland” on LinkedIn.
Image credit: Tara Faul. Follow her street-level reporting on X @tarafaul503
The above image stood out to me because it perfectly captures why I left Portland.
That apathy—the outright unwillingness for people to stop in their tracks and proclaim such depravity unacceptable in a first-world city—was too much to bear.
After some asshole stole my car from the parking garage where I paid $200+ a month to park, I was shocked when one of my coworkers laughed and said, “Oh, yeah, I’ve had my car stolen twice.
“The first time, it was just some addict who probably wanted to sleep in it. The second time, they only drove it like, a few blocks, then stole the tires.”
This coworker told me this story with a chuckle, as if it were no big deal.
Meanwhile, my experience felt like a very big deal. A big fucking deal. It was time-consuming. It was expensive. It was stressful. Most of all, it was devastating. I’d worked so hard to pay off that car. It wasn’t anything fancy—a Honda Accord. It had 70,000 miles on it—I was going to drive it forever while depositing the amount I’d been spending on car payments straight into my savings. No more car notes!
After years of grinding through corporate America in full-time roles that required 60-hour+ weeks, I had finally, FINALLY clawed ahead financially. And by ahead, I mean I was able to pay off a mid-range car, was dropping money into savings every month, and could go to the grocery store without checking my bank account beforehand. For a Millennial, I’d darn near made it!
Then, someone stole my car. And my coworker laughed, as if it were an everyday experience—something to shrug off.
“That’s Portland for ya.”
Portland, Oregon—the city that will tax you out of a savings and steal your standards.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. On my morning runs around all the city’s infamous bridges, I ran past countless homeless souls sleeping on pieces of cardboard, in tents, or on the ground. A handful of times, I stopped and nudged a boot or a shoe with my own to see if someone was breathing. They’d grunt or flinch, and I’d take off on a dead sprint, glad they were alive, scared they’d be mad at me for disturbing them. But never did I see the folks buzzing by on fancy fixed-gear bikes, or running in head-to-toe Nike or Lululemon, stop to check on a homeless person or even give them a sideways glance.
It was as if the elitism granted by their biker status, corporate labels, or progressive politics gave them herd immunity, permitting them to ignore the surrounding societal decay. It was as if they were running and biking through the downfall of society, hell-bent on looking cool while virtue signaling, as if that were all that mattered.
What ultimately made me want to leave Portland wasn’t the homeless population; it wasn’t the syringes on the street or the screams from the mentally ill man having a breakdown in the middle of the neighborhood on any given Sunday: it was the apathy from the upper-class elites and youthful ideologues lolling about, proselytizing the virtues of socialism, demanding their employers implement stronger DEI initiatives, bragging about their new EV in corporate boardrooms, all the while ignoring the human beings suffering at their feet every single day.
Lightly stated: Portland, Oregon, and its progressive populace proclaiming to “believe in Portland” while refusing to demand anything resembling real change from city leaders, belong to one of the most inhumane and collectively delusional hives of the modern world.
Does that mean I think Trump should send in federal troops? Absolutely not. But I don’t believe the trash is going to take itself out, either …
In my opinion, Donald Trump saying that Portland is a “war zone” is proof that he loves saying inflammatory, incorrect shit that sends the media and its consumers into a frenzy.
It’s irresponsible and exhausting.
I also think it’s grotesque for him to say such a thing when people throughout the world are living in actual war zones … especially war zones where US-funded countries/alleged “allies” are reportedly committing genocide.
Conversely, I believe the Boomer protesters flocking to Portland to protest the presence of Federal troops at the ICE building are equally ridiculous.
Oregon Congresswoman Maxine Dexter took a break from lobbying for the rights of the ‘Maryland father’ Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who turned out to be a legitimate human trafficker who hits women), and popped up with her merry band of boomers in downtown Portland yesterday, to pretend like life’s all roses in Oregon’s biggest city.
These people worship at the altar of their political ideology—that’s the only reason they’re acting like it’s 1972 and they’re singing songs like absolute fucking buffoons on a strategically safe and clean city block. These people don’t care about the Portland community. If they did, they’d be insisting that a city with the second-highest tax rate in the country implement legitimate life-enhancing treatment and housing solutions for the thousands of substance-dependent, mentally unwell homeless people who exist on PDX streets.
According to OPB, in early 2025, the homeless population in the Portland metro area was approximately 14,400 people.
“In January 2024, the county estimated its homeless population was around 11,400. A year later, and that number has grown 26%, to 14,400.”
PDX Mayor Wilson’s primary response to the homeless crisis is more shelters, although he rarely offers specifics for how the city might pay for such infrastructure. City leadership always points to housing as the culprit for the city’s homeless challenges—a lack of affordable housing—which I believe is a one-dimensional cop-out sort of argument akin to how progressives always blame a gun when a mentally ill human pulls its trigger. But in a town where taxpayers casually bike past other humans who are in the midst of life-threatening crises, why would city leadership need to acknowledge the correlation between complex issues like a shitty economy, limited industry and diminishing job opportunities, drug availability, substance dependencies, and homelessness?
If anything, Trump’s insane claims and administrative overreach and the collective delusion of Portland’s progressive class are proof that our society is spinning out in extreme directions.
If the saying ‘two wings; same bird’ is a fair representation of our polarized populace and the fools we pay to represent us, then the bird has lost its fucking mind and is choking itself to death.
While I’m no Tara Faul (she’s world-class—nobody is), I am sharing some images below that I’ve captured across the years I lived and worked, then just worked in Portland. It’s not a war zone, but it’s not a city with acceptable standards for quality of life or community, either.
When you gotta go, you gotta go … and look, I get it. As a runner, I understand that our bodies don’t always cooperate. I was actually out on a run one afternoon when nature hit this poor gent, and apparently, shitting on the sidewalk was his only option. Maybe we’ve all been there? No, I didn’t stick around to watch.
Greetings from Scenic Portland!
This young man needed a lunchtime hit on a Tuesday, so he found a quiet corner on my office’s front porch and tended to business. He had a handsome young face, and I wondered how many people in this world love him, and if they were wondering where he might have been on that day, and how their hearts might have been hurting for him.
Came upon this man while walking to grab a quick lunch. Got close enough to see that he was breathing, but then he started screaming at me, so I skedaddled.
Also in front of my office, a man getting his grown-up dose for the morning.
This scene hit me hard. I snapped this picture from the commuter bus I rode from Corvallis to Portland for a year after I’d left the city. I assume this person was disabled, judging from the wheelchair. The materials and filth surrounding the box made me feel ill, like I needed to throw up for the lack of humanity.
They found my car after a couple of weeks … did you know that it’s your responsibility to have your car towed and demolished after someone steals it? That’s what you get for working hard and having standards in Portland, Oregon: a $400 parking ticket for a stolen vehicle, and a hefty tow fee.
