‘I Am 100% Antifa,’ Suspect in Execution of Trump Supporter Admitted Online
Reported By Christine Favocci | Published September 1, 2020 at 10:03am
As Portland, Oregon, enters its fourth month as a war zone, a recent casualty and the suspect who allegedly shot him speak to a broader conflict playing out there in real time. Suspected killer Michael Forest Reinoehl, 48, allegedly gunned down 39-year-old Aaron “Jay” Danielson during violent demonstrations in the city just after 9 p.m. Saturday, The Oregonian reported.
Friends remembered the victim as “a proud American and a proud Portlander” who joined supporters of President Donald Trump that day in a car caravan of members of Patriot Prayer, a faith-based pro-First and Second Amendment group. The group has a history of facing off against the violent radicals in antifa, and before the caravan had even left the suburban mall where vehicles decked out in pro-Trump banners and American flags congregated before the rally, demonstrators on both sides clashed, according to NBC News.
The organization and police originally coordinated a route around the city, but a blocked on-ramp dumped the convoy into the downtown area and forced the caravan to split into smaller groups, which put the motorcade into the belly of the beast where Danielson was killed.
Prior to that night, Reinoehl, Danielson’s alleged assailant, was caught with a loaded weapon at another Black Lives Matter protest in Portland and fought with police officers, but charges were never pursued.
“Officers arrested a male at SW Broadway and Main St. who had a loaded firearm on his person,” the Portland Police Bureau tweeted after his arrest July 5.
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“He fought with office[r]s during the arrest.”
It was just weeks before that confrontation with police that Reinoehl published a diatribe laying out exactly what he was willing to do in the name of antifa. Nightly riots continued to plague Portland back then — as they did nationwide — sparked off by the death of Minneapolis man George Floyd in police custody on May 25.
“Every Revolution needs people that are willing and ready to fight,” Reinoehl began in his June 16 Instagram post.
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“There are so many of us protesters that are just protesting without a clue of where that will lead. That’s just the beginning that’s where the fight starts,” he wrote.
“If that’s as far as you can take it thank you for your participation but please stand aside and support the ones that are willing to fight,” Reinoehl continued.
“I am 100% ANTIFA all the way! I am willing to fight for my brothers and sisters! Even if some of them are too ignorant to realize what antifa truly stands for,” he said.
Reinoehl went on to claim that he didn’t “want violence” but that he wouldn’t “run from it either,” citing supposed police brutality against peaceful protesters as justification to respond in kind.
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“We truly have an opportunity right now to fix everything,” he added. “But it will be a fight like no other! It will be a war and like all wars there will be casualties.”
“I was in the army and I hated it. I did not feel like fighting for them would ever be a good cause. Today’s protesters and antifa are my brothers in arms,” Reinoehl said.
“This is a Cause to fight for This truly is fighting for my country! I have children that need to live in a world run by Common Sense and human decency,” he said, likely referring to his 17-year-old son and 11-year old daughter.
His care and concern for his children didn’t seem to be a factor when he was caught street racing at over 100 mph with his son in June, or when he was caught with a handgun, pills and marijuana while his daughter was a passenger in his vehicle shortly before the June 16 post, according to another article in The Oregonian.
“And I will do anything to make sure that happens,” he continued in the Instagram post before warning that missing out on this opportunity to “change the course of humanity” would have them “lost for another hundred years.”
Ironically, the loosely organized movement antifa bills itself as being against fascism, although its tactics of shutting down and using violence against people with which it disagrees gives lie to that claim. In fact, leftist demonstrators rejoiced at the news of Danielson’s death, and judging from the words Reinoehl used months before he allegedly killed Danielson, this is exactly in line with what he believed needed to happen to advance their cause.
The fallacy of Black Lives Matter and antifa engaging in “mostly peaceful protests” is exposed in every city street strewn with broken glass and burned-out businesses and evident in the number of police officers killed or injured. These organizations are out for destruction and bloodshed — maybe not to the extent of unhinged folks like Reinoehl, but vandalism and violence are, after all, fruits of the same poisonous sociopathic tree. 
There’s no telling whether the people who commit violent crimes were already primed to do so before the opportunity presented itself, or whether they have been pushed from word into deed by the current permissive climate for that sort of action. Either way, a segment of the population has crossed the threshold into criminal behavior because politicians have been unwilling to stop their cities from descending into chaos.
Black Lives Matter and antifa are telling Americans exactly what they’re all about through violence, whether it is against property, police officers or other individuals. State and city leaders need to take heed and restore law and order before their rhetoric is taken to its fatal conclusion again.
Reported by 
It was not enough for bakery shop owners Melissa and Aaron Klein to pay more than $136,000 fine to the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. The state has now wiped out all cash from all their bank accounts too – and 
Still, closing the business and issuing a gag order was not enough for 
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Several politicians have recently been offering free goodies to voters. One of the most popular of these, oddly enough, is something that several state governments have already tackled: free college tuition.
The details vary by state, but Oregon, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and Louisiana (among others) all use tax dollars to pay for at least some of their residents’ college tuition.
Louisiana provides a great case study for advocates of similar federal policies. Louisiana just so happens to be in the news right now because the governor is threatening to suspend his state’s version of free college tuition for everyone.
Louisiana’s Tuition Program
Louisiana’s plan is called the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students, or, more commonly, TOPS. This extremely popular program uses tax dollars to pay full tuition (and some fees) at any of Louisiana’s public universities. Other than residency requirements, all high school students qualify as long as they have a C average (2.5 GPA) and at least an 18 on the ACT.
So the Taylor Opportunity Program for Students doesn’t cover every student’s tuition, but it ends up covering it for a large chunk of middle-/upper-class families.
How It Started
The program started out in the late 1980s as the brainchild of oil tycoon/philanthropist Patrick Taylor. The program, which wasn’t originally named for him, started out as a tuition assistance plan only for low-income individuals.
In 1997 the state removed the income caps. At that point, all Louisiana students, regardless of financial need, were made eligible for “free” tuition at any Louisiana public college. Once in college, students had to maintain a C average to keep their TOPS awards.
As of 2010, approximately 70 percent of Louisiana’s high school graduates headed to college within one year. That’s nearly 20 percent higher than the rate in 2000.
Who’s Paying for It?
It’s easy to call the program a success because of this increase, but it’s just as easy to point out that the program doesn’t really provide free education. In one way or another, someone pays for it.
The eventual implosion of the program was easy to predict back in 1997 for the same reasons that pretty much any similar subsidy is destined to fail. Subsidies don’t really lower the cost of products and services; they only lower the up-front price that some people pay.
(In 1997, this program inspired my very first public critique of a government policy. Back then, I thought it was a terrible idea.)
No Such Thing as Free Tuition
A person receiving “free” tuition may not see it (or even care), but subsides actually raise the total cost of an education. The core problem is that they remove the paying customer—in this case the student—from the equation.
Without the subsidy, the paying customer receives the direct benefit for the service and bears the direct cost. If that person doesn’t think the cost is worth it, they don’t pay.
Louisiana’s program replaces this paying customer with groups of government officials. These officials neither receive the direct benefit nor endure the direct cost of obtaining an education. These groups do, however, benefit a great deal from obtaining more of your tax dollars.
And they rarely bear any direct cost from either increasing your taxes or delivering a substandard education product. (The incumbency rate is fairly high for politicians.)
On a practical level, Louisiana’s program converts tuition payments into a state budget item. In other words, a large chunk of each school’s “tuition” becomes nothing more than revenue sent in by the state bureaucracy.
In Louisiana, four separate higher education systems—each its own bureaucracy—fight over these “tuition” payments. Smaller schools inevitably get the smallest shares, but that’s kind of another story.
A Burden on University Resources
When the influx of students hits—more people going to school when tuition is “free” is pretty much a foregone conclusion—it strains universities’ existing resources. So the transfer of money has the natural tendency to lead to expanded facilities, faculty, and staff.
But these increases call for a permanently higher level of funding, and all of these effects tend to reinforce each other. That is, school officials have a built in reason to ask for larger transfers, and politicians have a built in excuse to raise taxes.
When the state’s coffers are not flush with cash, the schools’ budgets get cut. Thus, universities have every incentive to raise more money from students who are not a part of the Taylor Opportunity Program.
Of course, for any given level of Taylor Opportunity Program students, a higher posted rate of tuition results in a larger transfer from the state. If the program covered full fees and tuition for literally every student, then taxpayers would bear the full cost. But it doesn’t, so non-TOPS students bear some of the cost.
(Pretty much every student ends up paying higher fees directly, too, but that’s almost an aside.)
Non-subsidized markets don’t work this way—prices can actually fall in response to changes in demand and supply. Subsidized systems, on the other hand, are destined to result in higher—not lower—tuition.
Recent numbers support this explanation. The Taylor Opportunity Program has nearly doubled in cost since 2008, and most of that increase has been due to higher tuition.
What I failed to fully appreciate in 1997 was how bad of a deal the Taylor Opportunity Program would end up being for the smaller schools. Then I spent almost a decade teaching at Nicholls State University, a regional state school in Thibodaux, La.
Small Universities Are Hardest Hit
In one sense, the Louisiana program amounted to a cruel trick for these institutions. Smaller schools are the ones least able to sustain the permanently higher costs associated with the new TOPS-generated revenue stream.
When the state budget goes south—and it always does in Louisiana—smaller schools get slammed. (Louisiana State University has more than 25,000 students, so small changes in per-student fees go a long way).
No matter how much we want it to, subsidizing something simply doesn’t make it more cost-effective.
The Taylor Opportunity Program does give certain people a better deal on tuition at one point in time, but then it makes up for it somewhere else.
Ironically, the earlier waves of Taylor Opportunity Program graduates are among those about to get hit with a tax increase. That’s what politicians mean by free.
Aside from the subsidy/cost issue, there are many other reasons why this is bad public policy.
First of all—and I know this sounds crazy—everyone should not go to college. Some people simply aren’t cut out, and many just don’t need to. Yes, people with college degrees tend to earn more than those without, but it does not follow that everyone should go to college.
When the program was started, Louisiana public universities offered students a good value because they were relatively inexpensive. Now that Louisiana taxpayers have spent more than $2 billion on the program, tuition rates are out of reach for many students that don’t qualify for the program.
While the best solution for Louisiana would be to get rid of the program altogether (unlikely since politicians love the program), the best residents can hope for now is an increase in the program’s academic standards and some form of means testing. At least these changes would better direct subsidies to academically prepared students with more financial need.