As many of you may  know, I lived in Portland, Oregon during the ‘pandemic’ and lockdowns.  In fact, Portland was what inspired me to develop the BreathEasy app in the first place. You’ve heard the BreathEasy origin story a million times by now, so I won’t bore you with it. But I would like to tell you about the people I left behind when I became a Conservative Refugee in Free Florida.

While Portland may be the textbook example of the inmates ‘running the asylum’ now, it was not always so.  “Keep Portland Weird” was the mantra that made the city fun and interesting.  Funny hats, naked bike rides and craft beers in iconic neighborhood bars keeps the fires of passion alive and never hurt anyone.  But Seattle’s little sister is no longer just ‘weird’ anymore; it’s downright dangerous.  And because of this, not everyone living in Portland who started out as a harmless liberal remain so today.

You have undoubtedly seen on the news how Portland has become a (literal) cesspool of itinerant homeless people, drug addicts and masked Antifa foot soldiers running rampant. The ‘mostly peaceful’ killings and destruction we all experienced personally or watched on TV are burned into our brains of what maximum permissiveness combined with corrosive political ideology will reap. Before 2020 the limits on permissiveness Portlanders were willing to extend were quite broad but held mildly in check.

But there appears to be a slow shift occurring among the ‘harmlessly liberal’ voting bloc in Portland. There are small indications that Portlanders are slowly realizing that “elections have consequences,” if even only whispered to their closest of confidences. The importance of this mild sea change cannot be understated!

Finding Fake Virtue’s Limits

To a typical Portlander, had the destructive results of Liberal dogma remained in the city center, the virtue-signaling voters felt safe in their hip neighborhoods surrounding the city.  But a funny thing happened on the way to Marxist Utopia: the drug addicts, homeless camps, needles, fires and Antifa foot soldiers didn’t stay in the city.  The Liberal cancer has now metastasized and spread outside of the ‘no judgment zone’ of the city; it is now encroaching on liberal families just trying to make a living.  Homeless camps are now popping up in quiet, ‘nice’ neighborhoods of real taxpayers who depend on property values to climb.  What’s a liberal to do?

It now appears that some Portlanders are breaking free of the Leftist Group Think that ‘anything goes’ and that objective standards of human behavior do, in fact, have value.  And for those who are indeed breaking free from this indoctrination that they have steeped in since their youngest years, we should congratulate them and nurture their slow realizations that the lies that we all have been told for so long were only there to debase humanity itself and make it more controllable.

Yes, schadenfreude is a powerful aphrodisiac and I understand the need to say, “I told you so.”  But I refuse to take part in this. How can we, as a pro-civilization movement, point our fingers at our countrymen and lambast them for believing a lie that we ourselves also believed for so long? No, it is our DUTY as a unified people to help our fellows and nurture this shift in thinking.

I am also very proud to report I have a friend who still resides in Antifalandia who is experiencing this slow awakening as I write this to you now.  Let me tell you a story.

The Education of Rebecca Portlandia

My friend (Let’s call her Rebecca) has been, for as long as I’ve known her, a dyed in the wool liberal, and I loved her for it. She is Old Portland personified. She is interesting, beautiful and always has something funny or insightful to say. Our friendship is unexpected precisely because our starting points are so different; If I’m C-3PO, she is my R2-D2.  You get the picture.

And I believe the thing that sets Rebecca apart from your run of the mill liberal is that she is thoughtful about her opinions and, when faced with the results of Liberal policies, I see her struggle. She challenges her understanding of the Lie through questions to me, her token conservative friend. And in all cases, I can report to you that my responses to her are thoughtful, friendly and always default to a Liberty position:

What Would a Free Man Do?

Regardless of where you come from, Liberty is Humanity’s lingua franca which we all comprehend.

Just the other day, Rebecca and I were chatting on the phone and she wanted my opinion on something that she had just experienced.  To make a long story short, Rebecca needed to have an introductory meeting with a professional services company in Portland but was unsure as how to proceed because, on this company’s website, they required proof of vaccination before entering their building.

Yes, you read that right. The year is 2023. “Died Suddenly” has become a sickly ironic search term. The unvaccinated are conspicuously NOT dying while the jabbed are keeling over nonstop. Given all this, this company has demonstrated that they are ‘stuck on stupid’ (h/t General Schwarzkopf) and continues to require a death sentence before they deign to meet with their own customers.

Rebecca is not stupid. In fact, she is exceedingly intelligent and is not ignorant of all we have learned over the last 3 years. She sees the results of the injections. She sees the folly of wearing masks. She rightfully asks the question:

“How can this company still require an injection after all we’ve learned?”

It appears that the Lie is falling apart in spectacularly public fashion and, if my friend is any indication, even Portlanders are starting to see through the cracks and see the light of Truth peeking through.

So how does the story end?

Rebecca actually had a variety of choices available to her. During the lockdowns, Rebecca created a fake vaccination card and she could have tried using it at this particular company. Or, she might’ve called ahead and simply asked if the business was living up to its online death threat.

But Rebecca knew that both of these options rewarded anti-Liberty behavior with her dollars. Rebecca, even Liberal Rebecca, found this distasteful and objectively not right. God bless her.

I can happily report that Rebecca, in true BreathEasy fashion, not only refused to patronize the business in question but is actively seeking alternative businesses who can service her B2B need.  And here’s the kicker: I know people in the industry she needs help from.  So I am personally putting her in touch with my contacts to help her out.

The Moral

Rebecca, and many like her who have lived their life within the Liberal cave, are beginning to learn that the images projected on the cave wall are but whispy dreams and not reality itself. As a result of these small and incremental realizations, she balked at complying with a requirement that she knew to be a lie. She withheld her dollars from this Vichy Business and even leveraged the power of NETWORK (yours truly) to find an alternative solution.  This business, by virtue (no pun intended) of their anti-liberty requirements lost out on untold thousands of dollars of business because of their blind desire for control over a Free Woman. If enough of us do this (and the BreathEasy app is your tool to do this), we will starve the beast into submission.

Rebecca’s actions lived the BreathEasy motto perfectly:

Find Patriot Businesses, Spread the Word, Live Your Life.

Sincerely,

R. Altomare

Founder, BreathEasy