Portland
719 belated?
primary 9/20 with 2nd civil war
SEE BLUE CITIES/STATES
see secret police
SEE MARTIAL LAW INSURRECTION MANTRA POD BROS
gets conflated with Minne BLM protests? cop shop burned?
dhs swat
[behind bastards notes OR longtime RW eg (neo) nazi
zelma kin chased commies out of klicitat cty WA on border? https://www.historylink.org/File/7800
Klickitat County is currently in Phase 2 of the Governor’s phased approach to the "Safe Start" plan. You can read more about the phased approach here. Klickitat County submitted the application to move from Phase 2 to Phase 3 on July 1st.
As coronavirus cases continue to increase across the state, Gov. Jay Inslee extended a pause on reopening the economy to July 28th and warned there was a “significant chance” restrictions could be put in place again.
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AN 2 26
*This is a developing story and may be updated.
Ongoing legal fights over President Donald Trump’s attempt to send hundreds of Oregon, California and Texas National Guard troops to Portland last fall over the objections of residents and state and local leaders will come to an end.
Mary Helen Murguia, chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, agreed Tuesday to let the federal government drop its appeal of a November decision from a lower court judge that barred the attempted Guard deployment.
Judge Karin Immergut, of the U.S. District Court in Portland and a Trump appointee, sided with Oregon and the city of Portland in their case against Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Her November order barring guard deployment to the city stays in effect.
Immergut found Trump’s justification for the attempted deployment — that protests outside of a Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility since June constituted a “rebellion” against the federal government and significantly impeded its functions — was unfounded. She further found that the attempt to deploy guard troops violated the federal code and the U.S. Constitution.
Federal lawyers immediately appealed Immergut’s decision. But in late January, they reversed course, asking the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a single sentence to permit them to drop the case.
Lawyers for Oregon, the city of Portland and California — which joined Oregon’s lawsuit against Trump — agreed not to challenge the request for dismissal as long as the appeals court judges ensured Immergut’s decision would stand and the federal government would be required to comply with it.
“This is a win for Oregon, and it shows that no one is above the law. The federal government didn’t have a case — facts mattered. Our communities won’t be treated as a testing ground for unchecked federal power,” Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield said in a statement. “Judge Immergut’s injunction stands, and we’ll keep defending Oregon’s laws, our values, and the safety of our cities — and if the government tries to overstep, we won’t hesitate to go back to court.”
Willamette University professor Norman Williams, a constitutional law expert, echoed Rayfield, similarly calling it a “win for the state.” And not an unexpected win. The “handwriting was on the wall,” Williams said, when the U.S. Supreme Court in December ruled against Trump in his attempt to send National Guard troops to Illinois.
The Portland ICE facility at the heart of the case is now the subject of two court cases brought against federal officers by nearby residents and the Oregon chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, on behalf of protesters and journalists, who claim ICE and federal officers have used excessive force and tear gas against them.
A judge recently temporarily barred the officers from deploying less-lethal munitions and chemicals at protesters unless the agents are in “imminent threat of physical harm.” The ruling came after agents used excessive force and heavily gassed crowds of nonviolent protesters that included children and seniors.
{2:53 pm Updated with comment from Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield.}:
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only fox tv?
USMC 2 TOURS 45% RULE TO SHOOT, PIZZA WOMAN SHAKING
INFLU INSTIGATORS then run to fox cam
MOLOTOV TENTS BURN NOT BY PROTESTORS
120 DAYS SOLD HOMES
ice enjoy cruelty; riot staged 2 feds in plain clothes w/ cams? drones? push out 4 blocks
The Truth Behind "War Ravaged Portland" | Jerrod Zisser | TMR
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The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
1.98M subscribers
Dec 31, 2025 The Majority Report w/ Sam Seder
Check out Jerrod Zisser on @theringoffire3228 Watch the Majority Report live Monday–Friday at 12pm EST on YouTube OR via daily podcast at http://www.Majority.fm Send us IM messages during the live-stream with our free Majority Report App: http://majority.fm/app Subscribe to MR's daily AM Quickie newsletter: https://am-quickie.ghost.io
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5 YR OLD B ROLL ON FOX? btb SAYS MOLO COCK ONLY BURNED FEET OF PROTESTOR, NOT BLDG? 10 25
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AN PP 11 25
When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television.
He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that place, it’s like living in hell,” he said, a comment that became an internet meme as some Portland residents juxtaposed it with tranquil images of the city.
Trump didn’t say which channel he watched; he said at one point he saw something “today” and at another “last night.”
The evening before, on Sept. 4, Fox News aired a two-and-a-half-minute segment spotlighting protests outside a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Portland. Similar footage aired the morning of Trump’s remarks. The president went on to announce Sept. 27 on Truth Social that he would send troops, saying that he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
He later said he’d told Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, that “unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down.”
ProPublica examined months of Fox News’ coverage and reviewed more than 700 video clips posted to social media by protesters, counterprotesters and others in the three months preceding the Sept. 4 broadcast.
The review found that the news network repeatedly provided a misleading picture of what was happening in Portland.
As The Guardian and The Oregonian/OregonLive have reported, Fox News on Sept. 4 used footage from the 2020 protests after the police killing of George Floyd and said it was from 2025. We found two clear cases from that night as well as one that seemed to match a scene filmed at a key site of the 2020 protests. Fox also mislabeled two other dates of actions shown on screen, and one broadcast implied that a protest from elsewhere was happening in Portland.
Fox News chyrons about Portland the week of Trump’s remarks carried phrases like “violent demonstrators,” “protesters riot,” “anti-I.C.E. Portland rioters” and “war-like protests.” One host said protesters were attacking federal officers.
This portrayal of protesters as routinely instigating violence or rioting was also misleading.
As ProPublica reported last week, most clashes between protesters and police before the Fox News segment did not result in any criminal charges or arrests alleging protesters committed violence. What’s more, based on news releases from federal and local authorities, charges and arrests for assault, arson or destruction of property were almost entirely confined to a period that ended the night of July 4.
Videos after that date captured numerous images of federal officers forcefully moving in on protesters without corresponding criminal charges alleging protester violence.
A spokesperson for Fox News did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
The Department of Homeland Security did not answer requests to comment on its officers’ tactics.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said of action on the ground in Portland: “This isn’t a peaceful protest that’s under control, like many on the left have claimed, it’s radical violence. President Trump is taking lawful action to protect federal law enforcement officers and address the out-of-control violence that local residents have complained about and Democrat leaders have failed to stop.”
Here’s how Fox News’ coverage of the Portland story was misleading.
Fox News Said It Was 2025. It Wasn’t.
Protests in 2020 in the wake of Floyd’s murder by a police officer attracted large, sometimes violent crowds to Portland — along with a federal law enforcement response authorized by Trump.
The protests outside the ICE facility have typically been far smaller. Still, Fox spliced footage from 2020 into its coverage this year and claimed it was from 2025.
The Fox News correspondent in the segment that aired the night Trump was watching TV said: “On this night in late June, police used tear gas.”
The accompanying image appears to be not from the ICE building but from the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, more than a mile away. A nearly identical scene was shown in a
five years earlier. Footage that aired Sept. 4, shot at a slightly different angle, blurs out spots where graffiti was visible on the building in Fox’s July 2020 broadcast.
Almost immediately after showing the courthouse scene, the segment cuts to another image as the correspondent says, “federal police used tear gas and flashbangs.”
On screen at that moment is a U.S. Navy veteran who was pepper-sprayed and repeatedly struck with a baton. But it didn’t happen in September 2025. The video was posted on social media on July 18, 2020.
The Fox News segment about the ICE protests soon shows an American flag burning.
That image was posted on social media July 16, 2020.
The location: the base of a downtown Portland statue more than a mile away from the ICE building where protests are happening in 2025.
On the webpage for its Sept. 4 video segment, Fox News added an editor’s note at least two weeks later: “This video contains footage from protests in Portland in 2020 and 2025.”
“Still Going On”
After mislabeling 2020 events as 2025, Fox’s Sept. 4 evening broadcast explicitly drew a connection between the two periods.
“The protest chaos, which began with riots aimed at social justice in 2020, has severely damaged Portland’s reputation,” the correspondent said.
The dramatic footage at this moment shows fires in the street and was broadcast on Fox on Aug. 19, 2020, the day after a crowd smashed through windows and set items on fire in the headquarters for the government of Multnomah County, where Portland is located.
We don’t know for certain which broadcast got Trump thinking about Portland. The White House did not respond to questions about what Trump watched. But the president said on Sept. 5 that what he’d seen about Portland on TV was “unbelievable.”
“I didn’t know that was still going on,” he said. “This has been going on for years.”
The reality: Portland’s 2020 social justice protests, which resulted in hundreds of arrests and continued for months, turned sporadic by early 2021. Protests in years since have led to occasional property damage, but nothing in Portland has matched the scale of events that followed Floyd’s death.
Portland police Chief Bob Day said at a Sept. 29 press conference that the city had been inaccurately portrayed through the lens of the protests in 2020 and 2021.
“What’s actually happening, and the response we’re seeing both from Portlanders and from the Portland Police Bureau,” Day said, “is not in line with that national narrative. And it is frustrating.”
A Riot That Wasn’t
In a Sept. 2 segment featuring the video from a day earlier, anchor Bill Hemmer said it shows “riots raging.” Anchor Trace Gallagher teased another Sept. 2 news segment by once again showing the video, saying, “It’s a riot outside a Portland ICE facility.”
The Sept. 4 segment shows Julie Parrish, an attorney for a neighbor of the ICE facility, accusing Portland police of saying, “Meh, we’re just gonna let violent rioters do this for 80 straight nights.”
The physical behavior of protesters that was captured on the video is not violent. The camera instead shows federal agents advancing on them. In the moments before officers tossed munitions into the crowd, videos show, one protester was blowing bubbles. The Portland police did not declare a riot, a legal designation that allows for an elevated police use of force. (They declared a riot just once, a police spokesperson said, on June 14.)
The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought. Katie Daviscourt, a Trump-aligned commentator who filmed the clips, noted on X that protesters were having dance parties and that their main problems were “not leaving restricted areas, burning a flag, and possessing a deadly object (guillotine).”
ProPublica found a similar pattern for the three months before Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast: clashes that on most days and nights had no criminal allegations of protester violence to explain them.
After dozens of arrests and charges were announced in June through July 4, federal prosecutors accused just three people of crimes at the ICE building in the roughly two months leading up to Fox’s Sept. 4 broadcast.
During that same two-month time frame, ProPublica’s review found numerous instances of police using force: videos from more than 20 days or nights with federal officers grabbing, shoving, pepper-spraying, tackling, firing on or using other munitions on protesters.
No local arrests or federal criminal charges were announced on these days or nights, and only a handful of dates corresponded with incidents of protester aggression later asserted by federal authorities in their legal case for sending troops.
Asked whether Fox News accurately represented her footage, Daviscourt said: “I stand by my four months of accurate reporting.”
Parrish told ProPublica she had collected evidence that “shows ongoing and persistent activity” outside the facility that under statute and police directive “would be considered riotous, unlawful assembly and/or disorderly conduct.” She declined to share this evidence, saying it was privileged as part of her client’s file.
Her lawsuit on behalf of a neighbor living near the ICE facility, which sought to require police to enforce Portland’s noise ordinance, was dismissed.
The Reappearing Neighbor
A Sept. 5 “Fox & Friends” segment showed a neighbor from an apartment building confronting protesters over noise, shouting at protesters: “Turn that (bleep) down, it’s midnight! … We the people need sleep!”
Fox said it happened Tuesday, which would have been Sept. 2. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “This has been going on for months now, but a lot of this since Labor Day,” as the video shown on screen sandwiches footage of the neighbor between other scenes from the Labor Day protest.
“This is a chaotic city,” co-host Brian Kilmeade said.
The next day, the clip of the neighbor appeared again on Fox News. This time, the network said the footage was from Wednesday, or Sept. 3.
In reality, the confrontation was captured on video months before. Daviscourt published the video on June 29 on X.
On the two September nights that Fox said the neighbor’s confrontation happened, ProPublica’s review found no videos of violent clashes posted on social media, and federal authorities announced no arrests.
For example, according to a Portland police email from 11:22 p.m. on Sept. 3: “There are still about 20 people hanging around but only 4 were even on the sidewalk in front of the building.”
Misrepresentations Continue After Trump’s Guard Order
On Sept. 28, the day Trump’s order was implemented, a Fox News broadcast played a clip of Kotek saying that Guard troops were not needed in Portland, then immediately cut to a clip of a hectic scene of protesters clashing with police.
“Wish she could see some of those images,” the anchor said. Sarcastically, as a co-anchor chuckled, she added: “Look at that. Just a peaceful protest.”
A small box on the screen showed the footage wasn’t from Oregon.
It was from Illinois.
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Right-wing influencers shape nation and Trump’s understanding of Portland protests
By Erik Neumann (OPB)
:{Oct. 11, 2025
Social media personalities, conservative media outlets and the Trump administration itself are blending online content to serve the administration’s policies.
Trump supporters face off with protesters outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., Monday, Oct. 6, 2025.
Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump social media personality from Florida, announced to his followers on X that he had arrived.
“Yo, what’s up!” Johnson said Tuesday as he strolled into the airport. “We are on the ground in Portland, Oregon.”
Johnson was in town to meet with three other social media influencers and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to tour the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where protests had been taking place since June.
“The Trump administration is here today. Follow along. The Trump administration ain’t gonna have any of this,” Johnson said. “This is going to be a rowdy day.”
From there, the influencers packed into SUVs and followed Noem, passing through police lines that had been established around the ICE facility and eventually behind its gates.
Standing on the building’s rooftop, Johnson and the other influencers filmed Noem for their millions of followers online. But the day was less than rowdy.
On the street below, around 20 reporters from local and national outlets stood behind yellow caution tape, along with a handful of protesters. It was a sunny fall day in Portland, far from the burning hellscape portrayed online.
Still, influencer Nick Sortor warned Noem that she wasn’t seeing the real story.
“This is absolutely nothing as to what it is at night though. It’s really bad at night,” Sortor said. “That sun goes down and it gets totally lawless.”
Social media personalities like those who joined Noem are increasingly shaping the public’s understanding of events in Portland, where the Trump administration has been trying to deploy the National Guard in recent weeks.
While partisan online posting about protests in the Northwest is nothing new, right-wing media influencers are now being welcomed into the federal government to promote its messages. This kind of media access shows a deepening alliance between the administration and an online world willing to misrepresent facts if it means furthering political goals.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stands on the roof of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in South Portland on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2025.
*Eli Imadali / OPB
The influencers’ personal content is blended with interviews on Fox News, Newsmax and other outlets, and reposted by federal agencies at times. Sortor and another media personality on the ICE tour, Katie Daviscourt, appeared on a panel at the White House on Wednesday with President Trump, where clips were similarly repurposed and spun out to broader conservative media.
Local media like OPB and The Oregonian/OregonLive have not been given the same access to the ICE building when they requested it. In response to requests to tour the ICE building, DHS officials have asked OPB – a century-old media organization that has covered newsworthy events at the protests since their earliest days - to share links to OPB coverage of the protests before considering access.
‘Counter-protesters themselves’
The current Trump administration is working with these influencers to justify the president’s actions, according to A.J. Bauer, an assistant professor who studies media activism in the University of Alabama’s journalism department.
“The streamers are actually counter-protesters themselves who are going and documenting the protests that they disagree with. The government is actually working hand-in-glove with those folks in order to promote the government’s message,” Bauer said. “That is a new development.”
Masked-up federal agents confront the protesters outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., on Sept. 28, 2025.
*Kristyna Wentz-Graff / OPB
There are many examples over the years of mainstream journalists embedding with the government to cover major events, like during the Vietnam or Iraq wars. But those reporters were largely free to be critical of the government.
Bauer said right-wing influencers don’t follow the journalistic norms of balance, independence and not personally participating in stories. Instead, he said, they start out with an ideological vision of the world and then narrate what they see in a way that fits that vision.
“The consequences are that we have two competing visions of reality,” Bauer said.
There have been almost nightly protests outside of Portland’s ICE facility for months. Since June, the Portland Police Bureau has made at least 47 arrests, and federal officials have arrested dozens more, though not everyone has been charged with a crime.
Still, the protests span just one or two city blocks. Many nights, there are fewer than two dozen people. Dancing and whimsical costumes have been a frequent protest tactic since the Trump administration has expressed a desire to send in military troops to suppress the demonstrations.
Protesters recover after gas is deployed at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, Portland, Ore., Oct. 4, 2025.
*Alejandro Figueroa / OPB
But these influencers tell a story that chaos is rampant. And now, they are having the biggest impact possible by shaping how President Trump views the protests. They repeated a vision of Portland to him at a White House roundtable on Wednesday that many residents wouldn’t recognize.
“The amazing thing is you look at Portland and you see fires all over the place. You see fights. I mean, violence, it’s so crazy,” Trump said during the televised round table. “And then you talk to the governor and she acts like everything is totally normal. It’s almost like, are you waking up from a dream or something?”
A history of clashes
Right wing presence at protests in Portland is not a new phenomenon.
During the president’s first term, counter-protesters were a regular presence in the Rose City when residents and left-aligned demonstrators took to the streets. Provocateurs like Joey Gibson would frequently show up at protests between 2015 and 2020 to film and engage in conflicts with what they described as antifa mobs.
At times, those provocations turned violent, with people being shoved, maimed and even killed as dueling political factions took to the streets.
Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson directs people back to the west side of the Willamette River during demonstrations in Portland, Ore., Saturday, Aug. 17, 2019.
*Bradley W. Parks / OPB
Those protests also launched the careers of streamers and media personalities who focused on the conflict with a particular political view, such as Andy Ngo, a former Portland resident who now edits for the Canadian conservative outlet the Post Millennial.
With around 1.7 million X followers, Ngo is an influential voice on the right who appeared at Wednesday’s roundtable with President Trump. He also helped pave the way for the people aligning with the Trump administration against the current Portland protests. That includes Daviscourt, who brands herself on X as an investigative reporter for the Post Millennial.
While activists like Gibson have appeared at the protests outside the ICE building in recent days, the content being produced by the streamers is not restrained to their own feeds and fans, as it largely was during the first Trump administration.
On Thursday, Ngo made a post to his X account warning of an impending attack on federal law enforcement.
“Antifa in Portland have been plastering flyers around the city urging people to try and crash the DHS helicopter flying over ICE,” Ngo wrote just before 9 p.m., sharing an image of a flyer with lasers pointing at a helicopter.
Around three hours later, DHS posted a similar version of the flyer to its X account.
“Antifa domestic terrorists WILL NOT overrun our cities,” the post stated.
Facts on the ground
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, Portland Mayor Keith Wilson and most other state officials have rejected the need for the Trump administration to send the National Guard to the city. But their views seem to have little influence on the White House’s stated plans and rhetoric.
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson speaks with Beaverton Mayor Lacey Beaty at a press conference Monday, Sept. 29 in Portland Ore. Wilson and 10 Oregon mayors spoke against President Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard in Portland.
*Saskia Hatvany / OPB
On a recent night outside the ICE facility, conservative podcaster Matt Tardio was live-streaming the Portland protests. Tardio said he’s trying to capture everything that’s going on, not just the clashes between protesters and police.
“I do know that I’ve caught some coming-up streamers or whatever they were, legitimately trying to start problems and having hidden cameramen off to the side trying to capture those problems starting so that they could have their viral clips,” Tardio said. “That’s messed up.”
Tardio, who is a veteran, agrees that the situation on the ground is being exaggerated online.
“I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve said I don’t think the National Guard needs to come out here. I feel that the Portland Police Bureau can handle it,” he said.
But that hasn’t stopped other influencers from repeating the story about a war-ravaged city that gets amplified by Trump officials and repackaged across the media ecosystem.
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MMA
10/10/25
10/10/25
Right-wing media say Portland is a war zone under siege. On-the-ground coverage paints a different picture.
Local coverage has highlighted the peaceful nature of protests and the violent response of federal agents
Written by Noah Dowe & Pete Tsipis
Research contributions from Casey Wexler & Media Matters Staff
Published10/10/25
Updated10/10/25
Right-wing media claim that Portland’s protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement show a city “under siege” or “conquered by antifa,” but on-the-ground coverage, by both national media outlets and local media outlets, has revealed the opposite.
Multiple local broadcast outlets report that protests are relatively small and peaceful, with many demonstrators “in pajamas, sharing pastries, throwing a frisbee, and playing board games."
The Wall Street Journal reported that “a sergeant from the Portland Police Bureau filed his daily observations of the demonstrations outside an ICE facility. 'Saw 8 people out front and couldn’t even get one of them to flip me the bird,' he wrote. 'Very low energy.'”
In direct contrast to coverage from right-wing media, Portland residents and officials have emphasized that it's actually federal agents who have been engaging in “violent tactics” against protesters, including “shoving peaceful veterans and elderly people to the ground” and employing point-blank attacks with pepper spray and mace.
Protests in Portland were described as “low energy” until Trump and right-wing media started claiming otherwise
- Protests in Portland, ongoing for at least four months, have centered on an ICE facility in the southern part of the city. As reported by The Oregonian, protesters have “numbered in the few dozens on most nights and their activity has largely been confined to a two-block radius of the building’s front driveway.” Oregon Live, [10/4/25]
- :{:{Trump announced on September 27 that he would send “all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland,” which he described as “under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Truth Social, [9/27/25]}:
- Trump’s move was seemingly encouraged by a month of dystopian coverage of Portland from right-wing media, which described the city as “under siege” and suggested it resembles “the French Revolution all over again.” Fox host Jesse Watters said that “every weekend is war” in Portland and suggested protesters “look pretty militaristic.” Media Matters, [9/29/25]
- According to The New York Times, federal officials described protests outside the Portland ICE facility as “low energy” until Trump’s post, after which “demonstrations had grown more intense … with more arrests and larger crowds than in preceding weeks.” According to the Times, reports from the Federal Protective Service in the days before the president’s post “offered no indication of a dangerous escalation of tensions, or unusual levels of protest activity that would prompt the level of alarm expressed by Mr. Trump.” The New York Times, [10/8/25]
- The Wall Street Journal wrote: “Daily reports from Portland police in the month leading up to Trump’s decision, on Sept. 27, to send federal troops into the city paint a different picture than public statements by Trump and others in his administration.” The Journal further reported: “On Sept. 5, President Trump described ongoing protests in Portland as 'unbelievable' and 'the destruction of the city.' Later that day, a sergeant from the Portland Police Bureau filed his daily observations of the demonstrations outside an ICE facility. 'Saw 8 people out front and couldn’t even get one of them to flip me the bird,' he wrote. 'Very low energy.'” The Journal also noted: “The White House has said the ICE facility is 'under siege.' Newly released police reports filed in federal court describe how the protests that began in June were dwindling before Trump’s order.” The Wall Street Journal, [10/9/25]
- ## On-the-ground news coverage highlighted that the vast majority of protests are relatively small and peaceful
- KGW reporter Evan Watson reported that the area just three blocks away from the ICE facility is “full of people enjoying picnics in the park, out here walking their dogs,” and “enjoying this nice summer evening.” Watson stated, “Every person we talked to on Tuesday laughed at the idea that Portland, and more specifically, this area near their homes and workplaces, needs federal troops.” KGW, *KGW News at 6*, [10/7/25]
- KATU reporter Jennifer Singh interviewed a protester outside the ICE facility who said Portland is not a war zone and fears that troops “will bring more violence,” not less. Singh added that the protests “have remained peaceful.” KATU, *KATU News at 6*, [10/5/25]
- KOIN reporter Ariel Salk opened a segment by showing the area outside the ICE building where there were “only a couple dozen people” protesting, including “people barbecuing, listening to music.” In contrast, Salk described federal agents “hurling can after can of tear gas” at demonstrators over the weekend, adding that the “smoke really engulfed this whole neighborhood.” KOIN, *KOIN 6 News at 6*, [10/6/25]
- Reporting outside the ICE facility, KPTV’s Makenna Marks said there were no “physical altercations or arrests” on Sunday and noted that many protesters were “in pajamas, sharing pastries, throwing a frisbee, and playing board games.” Marks also interviewed a number of residents who said the city “is not war-torn” and argued “the thing that’s harming us is the escalation tactics that Trump’s trying to use to create a narrative that Portland is this boogeyman that requires further militarization.” One resident told Marks, “If the narrative is Portland is a war zone, let’s actually take a look at who’s making it a war zone.” KPTV, *5 O’Clock News*, [10/5/25]
- :{CNN's Shimon Prokupecz reported on the ground from Portland: “The entire protest zone is less than a block long. ... The rest of Portland is not in chaos.” CNN, [10/8/25]
- }:
- ## Local coverage has also emphasized the excessive force used by federal agents on protesters
- KOIN’s Ariel Salk reported that people on the roof of the ICE facility mocked demonstrators and federal agents arrested multiple protesters while “using several rounds of multicolored tear gas against the crowd.” The correspondent interviewed a protester who said they had elderly people with them and were not expecting the tear gas. KOIN, *KOIN 6 News at 5*, [10/4/25]
- Salk later reported that she “personally saw a sniper rifle laser on a woman out here trying to drive into her apartment.” KOIN, *KOIN 6 News at 5*, [10/5/25]
- Salk reported on the impacts that the federal response is having on a low-income housing building across the street from the ICE facility, including residents enduring “tear gas spilling into their homes.” A representative from the building told the journalist, “The violent tactics that federal agents are using, including tear gas and pepper balls, are really impacting residents’ quality of life.” The journalist also noted that many residents are veterans who “are experiencing PTSD because of this tear gas, flash bangs, and helicopters that we’ve been seeing and hearing in the skies night after night.” KOIN, *KOIN 6 News at 5*, [10/6/25]
- KOIN reporter Ariel Iacobazzi said that Portland officials are accusing federal agents of “shoving peaceful veterans and elderly people to the ground, using impact munitions on peaceful crowds, and spraying pepper spray directly into protesters’ faces.” The segment then showed videos of protesters being pepper-sprayed point-blank by agents. KOIN, *KOIN 6 News at 11*, [10/6/25]
- KGW anchor David Molko highlighted claims of excessive force by federal agents, including “the use of pepper spray and impact munitions, things like rubber bullets, on an otherwise peaceful crowd.” The report included footage of a man who had pepper spray directed into the air intake of his inflatable frog costume by federal agents. KGW, *KGW News at 11*, [10/6/25]
- KPTV reporter Spencer Schacht spoke with a woman who was maced point-blank by a federal agent “with no warning, no warning at all.” The protester, Leilani Payne, called it a “violent attack” and is currently pursuing a use of force lawsuit against the federal agents. KPTV, *6 O’Clock News*, [10/6/25]
- ## Right-wing media coverage has painted a drastically different picture of Portland demonstrations, calling the city a “war zone” that is “under siege by antifa”
- The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles said, “You can see the pictures of Portland in just the last month or two — it looks like a war zone.” He added that Portland officials are “not protecting one another; you’re letting criminals roam your streets and maraud and kill.” The Daily Wire, *The Michael Knowles Show*, [9/29/25]
- Fox host Jesse Watters said that the National Guard is “on the way to do the job Portland police won't do” and claimed that “Portland has been under siege by antifa for four months.” Watters added, “A Portland police rep posted a picture of a sunrise with the caption, ‘“War-ravaged” Portland full of “domestic terrorists.”’ Well, the sun rises in Gaza, too. I don’t want to live there.” Fox News, *Jesse Watters Primetime*, [10/1/25]
- The Five co-host Kayleigh McEnany attempted to justify the deployment of the National Guard in Portland by declaring there is “a pretty clear rebellion against" the government. McEnany cited supposed acts of violence committed against ICE agents, and she additionally argued that Trump is on “strong legal footing” because “you can federalize the Guard if there's a rebellion.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/6/25]
- Newsmax host Rob Finnerty said Portland protests had “morphed into an insurrection.” Finnerty said: “This invasion of the weird is very bizarre,” adding, “Notice the foreign flags and strange tribal chants happening — again — in Oregon.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/2/25]
- OnWar Room, right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec said, “Portland as a city is now in open insurrection against the federal government.” Posobiec argued, “This is an actual insurrection scenario whereby in you have local officials that are completely defying the unmitigated right, the unlimited right of the federal government to enforce immigration laws.” He also posted on social media that the city “has fallen to Antifa.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [10/6/25; Twitter/X, 10/6/25]
- Daily Wire host Matt Walsh called Portland a “war zone” and said it’s “in a state of open insurrection.” “It's total chaos,” he said. “It's in a state of open insurrection. ICE agents are being attacked. Portland is trying to subvert the authority of the federal government, defy the laws of the land.” Daily Wire, *The Matt Walsh Show*, [10/7/25]
- Right-wing YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed Portland “has been conquered by antifa.” He added, “This is a fallen city.” YouTube, *The Benny Show*, [10/8/25]
- *Update (10/10/25):This piece has been updated with additional information.
---
// CRM, FASCISM
Right-wing media have long called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, he's now considering it
Written by Gideon Taaffe & Sage Hodil
Research contributions from Reed McMaster, Jane Lee & Alex Kaplan
Published 10/09/25 MMA
President Donald Trump recently suggested he may be willing to invoke the Insurrection Act as protests continue in Chicago and Portland against Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity and deployment of National Guard troops.
Right-wing media figures have called on Trump to use the law — which allows the military to be used for domestic law enforcement activities — in response to various demonstrations since at least as far back as 2020.
Conservative media figures endorsed using the act to “put down” Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and “restore order” to cities where demonstrations were occurring. Starting in June of this year, right-wing media renewed their support for the act's use over anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, and as similar protests broke out in Chicago and Portland, calls to “invoke” the act in Democratic-run cities grew.
Trump once again says he might invoke the Insurrection Act in Democratic-run cities
- Protests in Chicago and Portland broke out as National Guard members were deployed to aid ICE officers.Authorities have used tear gas, pepper balls and more against protesters at ICE facilities in both cities. Several people were arrested in both cases, with some facing federal charges. PBS News, [10/6/25]
- On October 6, while talking to reporters about the legal issues with sending in the National Guard to cities around the country, Trump said he would consider invoking the Insurrection Act.He stated, “I’d do it if it was necessary. So far it hasn’t been necessary. But we have an Insurrection Act for a reason. … If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I'd do that.” He also said, “If you take a look at what’s been going on in Portland, it’s been going on for a long time, and that’s insurrection. I mean, that’s pure insurrection." NBC News, [10/6/25]
- The Insurrection Act allows the military to act as a police force and make arrests.Reuters explained: “The law enables troops to take part in domestic law enforcement activities like making arrests and performing searches, functions they are generally otherwise prohibited from engaging in. The Insurrection Act can be invoked when there are ‘unlawful obstructions, combinations or assemblages or rebellion’ against the U.S. government's authority. When the president deems those conditions have been met, the law gives the president the power to use the armed forces to take actions ‘to enforce those laws or suppress the rebellion.’” Reuters, [10/7/25]
- Trump deployed the National Guard and Marines during anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles earlier this year and called the protesters “insurrectionists,” saying, in response to a question about whether he would invoke the Insurrection Act, “Depends on whether or not there’s an insurrection.”Axios noted, “Without the Insurrection Act, the troops' mission is legally limited to protecting federal agents and property.” Axios, [6/10/25]
- ## Right-wing media figures are calling for Trump to use the Insurrection Act “more liberally” in Democratic-run cities, claiming protesters are “insurrecting”
- Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe claimed Trump “should look at using the Insurrection Act more liberally in cities like Chicago or in cities like Portland, Oregon.” Boothe also remarked that “Portland is a hellhole. … Homeless everywhere, it’s disgusting.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [10/5/25]
- Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson discussed his ride-along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in Portland and stated, “I hope they invoke the Insurrection Act. I hope that's something that happens here because these people are clearly insurrecting.”Johnson also claimed that Portland “has been conquered by antifa.” Newsmax, *Finnerty*, [10/7/25]
- Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Trump “should invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy military assets to protect life and limb and property.”Fitton reacted to protests in Chicago, writing, “This is an insurrection, and @GovPritzker is implicated.” Twitter/X, [10/4/25]
- On Steve Bannon’sWar Roompodcast, right-wing pundit Jack Posobiec said that “the president has black-letter law, Title X authority to be able to deploy the National Guard” to “suppress an insurrection or a rebellion.”Bannon also claimed California Gov. Gavin Newsom is a “neo-Confederate” and claimed Los Angeles is also in “open defiance of the federal government about immigration laws, Jack. I mean, this is going to come down [to] we control the country, they control these big metropolitan areas.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [10/6/25]
- Posobiec also posted, “If Trump were to invoke the insurrection act for reasons like the situation in Portland, Americans would support it.” Twitter/X, [10/6/25]
- In response to a report of a hit put out on a Border Patrol commander, right-wing podcaster Tim Pool posted, “Insurrection Act.”Twitter/X, [10/6/25]
- QAnon influencer Clandestine said of whether Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act: “I’d argue that we are already at that point, and this is soft disclosure of what is to come.” Telegram, [10/6/25; Anti-Defamation League, 4/5/22]
- Fox News contributor Paul Mauro claimed Trump is on “very, very safe ground” to enact the Insurrection Act.Mauro claimed that the Insurrection Act is “a carve-out to posse comitatus. You can use it to protect facilities and you can use it when federal law is being obstructed — that's the operative phrase right there. ICE is trying to enforce federal law. If they’re being obstructed, you can do this. What it means is he’s on very, very safe ground.” Fox News, *The Five*, [10/1/25]
- Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino said Trump would be “on pretty solid grounds” to invoke the Insurrection Act “if it is to protect the ICE facilities” from protesters.Gasparino added, “I would love to see federal troops in downtown Manhattan — I don’t care.” Fox News, *Fox News Sunday*, [9/29/25]
- ## In June, right-wing media similarly advocated for the Insurrection Act to crack down on anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles
- Fox News host Laura Ingraham argued it would be Trump’s “right” and “obligation” to invoke the Insurrection Act if he feels the U.S. “is being threatened from within.”She said, “Now Democrats are pretending to be outraged about the prospect of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, which, of course, is his right. I’d say it's his obligation to do if — and it’s his call — if he feels the United States is being threatened from within by violent, seditionary forces.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [6/10/25]
- Infowars host Harrison Smith argued for utilizing the act during anti-ICE protests in LA, saying, “The Constitution actually provides for solutions to this. It is the Insurrection Act.” He stated, “The Constitution is being destroyed by these people making it unsafe, depriving the people of LA of the ability to live their lives and express themselves, pursue happiness, and all the other freedoms that we're supposed to enjoy are being destroyed by these people. The Constitution actually provides for solutions to this. It is the Insurrection Act. It is shutting down what’s going on with rapidity and aggressiveness to uphold the rights of the American people against this invading foreign force.” [Infowars, American Journal, 6/9/25]
- Students for Trump National Chairman Ryan Fournier posted, “TIME FOR THE INSURRECTION ACT!” in response to a post by Trump about LA.Twitter/X, [6/9/25]
- Conservative podcaster Vince Coglianese said the way to crack down on anti–ICE protests in Los Angeles is “the president wielding the Insurrection Act.”Coglianese: “It strikes me that if we're going to crack down on this using law enforcement, it's just going to have to be the president wielding the Insurrection Act. He's going to have to go in and save American cities from the leadership that's betraying them.” Rumble, *Vince*, [6/9/25; RadioLink, 4/17/25]
- Mackubin T. Owens wrote for Blaze Media that the Insurrection Act empowers the president “to act when mobs attack federal law” and the president “has the duty to restore order.”In a September opinion piece, Owens defended Trump's deployment of National Guard troops to LA, claiming he had the “duty -- and the power -- to act.” Blaze Media, [9/8/25]
- ## Right-wing media hosts and guests also advocated for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests in 2020
- Ahead of the 2020 election, Fox host Mark Levin shared his hope Trump would win and then utilize the Insurrection Act to “put down” protests.On September 11, 2020, Levin speculated that if Trump wins “he will dust off the Insurrection Act” and “he will have to use it to put down the enemy. The enemy is antifa, the enemy is Black Lives Matter.” On September 15, 2020, Levin said protesters “need to be put down” and claimed, “It's not illegal, it's not unconstitutional, it's not unethical, it's not immoral for the President to use the Insurrection Act to put down insurrections.” On September 23, 2020, Levin stated, “I pray to God Donald Trump is reelected. And I pray to God that he uses the Insurrection Act and puts this down.” And on October 28, Levin said, “These lootings and riotings and arsons need to be put down. God willing the President will be re-elected, and he'll use the Insurrection Act to bring safety, and peace." Westwood One, *The Mark Levin Show*, [9/11/20, 9/15/20, 9/23/25, 10/28/20]
- Writing for the National Review, Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy discussed the Insurrection Act — saying it “expressly” empowers the president “to suppress domestic violence” — and called on Trump to “restore order” to cities where Black Lives Matter protests were underway, “including by deployment of the military where that is necessary.”McCarthy dismissed concerns about federalism, writing: “Although the Constitution calls for a state to request federal assistance to combat domestic violence before the president acts, that condition is more apparent than real. … When it comes to violent uprisings, though, federalism concerns are beside the point. Washington has an express constitutional obligation to protect the people of the states, and the republican form of government, from attack.” National Review, [5/31/20]
- Conservative lawyer Jeffrey Clark said onWar Roomthat former Attorney General Bill Barr “participated in using the Insurrection Act” in 1992 in LA and asked, “Why wasn’t that same aggressiveness used against the riots that were used all across the country in the summer of 2020?”Real America's Voice, *War Room*, [7/3/23]
- Right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson urged Trump to “invoke the Insurrection Act immediately” during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.Twitter/X, [5/31/20]
- Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro suggested in 2020 that Trump should invoke the act if states failed to get protests under control.He said: “The Insurrection Act is generally invoked when local authorities are not doing their jobs and protecting the civil rights of their citizens. So the president does have the authority to do this sort of stuff. … And the president, by the way, didn’t say he was going to do it. He said if you don’t get your cities and states under control, then I will do it. And guess what? He should. He should. Because guess — because you're an American taxpaying citizen. You have civil rights. Your civil rights are being abridged and violated when you are locked in your home so rioters and looters can roam free.” The Daily Wire, *The Ben Shapiro Show*, [6/2/20]
- Blaze Media senior editor Daniel Horowitz wrote that “Trump should use the Insurrection Act” and “deadly force” against Black Lives Matter protesters.Blaze Media, [6/1/20]
- Ryan Fournier posted, “President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act to stop the terrorism happening in Seattle.”Twitter/X, [6/11/20]
//
10/08/25 1:26 PM EDT
10/08/25 5:11 PM EDT
10/08/25
---
---
A Trump-appointed judge just demolished right-wing fearmongering about Portland
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 10/06/25 MMA
Fox News propagandists cheered last month when President Donald Trump directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to send 200 National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, claiming the move was necessary because, in host Jesse Watters’ words, the entire city “has been under siege by antifa for four months.” But a Trump-nominated federal judge blocked the deployment on Saturday, noting that protests in the city have been “small and uneventful” for months and writing that the president’s order “was simply untethered to the facts.”
After Trump deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., in August and suggested he would do the same in other U.S. cities, right-wing media spent September trying to turn Portland into the president’s next target. They created and fed the narrative that Portland is a “chaotic city” consumed by “civil insurrection” in which “every weekend is war.” While news reports from the city portrayed the protests as minor, MAGA pundit Steve Bannon told his audience, “Antifa's burning down Portland every night. … They've taken control of Portland.”
The president responded to the overheated commentary of his most zealous supporters. In a September 27 post to Truth Social, Trump ordered Hegseth to send troops to protect “War ravaged Portland” from “Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” and claimed he was “authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”
But after Hegseth directed 200 members of the Oregon National Guard to the city over the objection of Gov. Tina Kotek, the state of Oregon and the city of Portland sued in federal court, arguing that the president had exceeded his legal and constitutional authority.
District Court Judge Karin Immergut — a stalwart of the GOP legal community who worked on Kenneth Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, served as a U.S. attorney under President George W. Bush, and was nominated to the bench by Trump himself — agreed. On October 4, she issued a temporary restraining order which blocked the deployment.
Trump-appointed judge: Portland protests “were small and uneventful”
Immergut wrote in her ruling that Trump had not met the standard under the statutory authority he invoked, which only allows the president to federalize National Guard units in cases of invasion, rebellion, or when the federal government has been rendered otherwise unable to execute the law.
She explained that contrary to Trump’s depiction of the situation in Portland, her review determined: “As of September 27, 2025, it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland. During this time frame, there were sporadic events requiring either PPB monitoring or federal law enforcement intervention, but overall, the protests were small and uneventful.”
The judge added that the federal government produced “only four incidents of protesters clashing with federal officers in the month of September preceding the federalization order,” calling these “inexcusable, but they are nowhere near the type of incidents that cannot be handled by regular law enforcement forces.”
She further wrote that the standard the federal government tried to set “would allow the President to call in the National Guard whenever one law enforcement office receives support from another office, which is a routine aspect of law enforcement activity. If the President could equate diversion of federal resources with his inability to execute federal law, then the President could send military troops virtually anywhere at any time.”
Immergut concluded that Trump lacked the statutory authority to federalize the guard in this case “because the situation on the ground belied an inability of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal law,” adding: “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”
That’s not how Fox presented Portland to its viewers
Fox hosts pulled out the stops to present the city as a violent hellhole crying out for the federal intervention the president had ordered.
“Left-wing terror is at record highs,” Watters declared on his September 29 broadcast. “They're shooting at Teslas, Trump, Charlie, and ICE. After sending in the Guard into L.A. and D.C., Trump is going for round three — Portland.”
“This weekend, he directed the secretary of war to send 200 National Guardsmen to protect war-ravaged Portland, and he is authorizing them to use full force if necessary, because federal facilities in Portland have been under siege since the start of the summer,” Watters continued, adding, “Every weekend, antifa has been on the warpath.”
Watters claimed two nights later: “Portland has been under siege by antifa for four months. The Guard is there to get things under control, but Portland Democrats say they want to deport the Guard because the protests are mostly peaceful.”
On September 29, host Laura Ingraham similarly claimed that Portland was “getting a dose of Trump-style safety” because an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility and “the areas around it have been under siege regularly in Oregon, and it continued this past weekend.” She added that Oregon was “rushing to court siding with criminals and against public safety.”
The same night, host Sean Hannity accused Oregon and Portland of “typical radical, predictable left-wing sanctuary state and city lies” because officials there supposedly won’t acknowledge that the “city’s on fire” and consumed by “a whole lot … of violence, lawlessness if you ask me.”
Their arguments are wildly overstated on the facts. But there’s so much more at stake, as Immergut pointed out in her ruling.
“This country has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs,” she wrote. “This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: this is a nation of Constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of this nation.”
Fox’s star hosts apparently disagree, and are standing with Trump as he tries to send the nation hurtling toward martial law.
//
08/14/25 10:52 AM EDT
- ### Right-wing media’s dystopian Portland coverage feeds into Trump’s threats to deploy National Guard
09/29/25 5:48 PM EDT
10/06/2
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asshole aT MAY DAY BURN BLG PORTLAND?
QUORA: How-many-buildings-were-burned-in-Portland
Was the Portland, OR federal court house set on fire?
No.
There are lots of claims on right-wing media that it was, and there’s a photograph floating around Facebook and Twitter that claims to show the courthouse burning. If you do a Google Image Search on that photo, it’s actually an apartment fire in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2018. (God bless Google; it makes fact-checking so easy.)
Some protesters have set off fireworks near the courthouse, and the courthouse has been spray-painted with graffiti. The building itself, however, has not been set on fire.
If you happen to have friends or family passing around the photo on social media that claims to show the courthouse in flames, now would be a good time to teach them how Google Image Search works. :)
---
MMA
October 6, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Five
KAYLEIGH MCENANY (CO-HOST): When you look at the DOJ filing -- I bring my primary sources when I'm on with Jessica always -- the 169-page DOJ filing requesting an emergency filing to reverse that judge. What you find in it is this: their legal authority is 10 U.S.C 12406. They say in two cases Donald Trump can federalize the National Guard. One case: you're unable to implement the laws of the United States. You cited the laws of the United States. It's immigration law as passed by Congress. Unable to enforce that because ICE agents are being targeted.
Number two: you can federalize the Guard if there's a rebellion against the authority of the government. Well, ICE is government. There's a pretty clear rebellion against this authority. Go ask the Dallas ICE agents who were targeted with anti-ICE bullets. This is a rebellion against US government sources.
And also, what's interesting, you only have to get ten pages into this lawsuit, here's what you find, just to add to Jesse's list here. There's someone who wielded a firearm at ICE in Portland. There's an individual -- you mentioned the rocks, the sticks. Listen to this, officers have been bitten, kicked, shot with paintballs, threatened with a machete and a knife, and assaulted with potentially blinding lasers. The protesters literally lit a material on fire up against the courthouse and other protesters threw accelerants on the fire. That's just one fire, there was another fire too. That one was done with motor oil over the building in Portland ICE.
Donald Trump is on strong legal footing. I can't speak to the one federal judge. I think they're going to get reversed. The ninth circuit sided with Trump once, I think they'll do it again. You can't be biting ICE officers and lighting their building on fire.
---}:
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AN COMM DR 10 25
Top Trump administration adviser Stephen Miller was accused of spreading dangerous “propaganda” Saturday night regarding the federal judge who ruled that the White House could not deploy 200 National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon.
The White House deputy chief of staff accused US District Judge Karin Immergut, who was appointed by President Donald Trump during his first term, of “legal insurrection” after she found that the president’s claims about violent protests at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland were “untethered to facts,” and that residents’ expressions of opposition to ICE do not meet the high legal standard for calling the National Guard.
Miller claimed authorities in Oregon and Portland are aiding “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers” by refusing to aid ICE agents, and claimed Immergut was attempting to assume the role of “commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces” by siding with state officials and issuing a temporary restraining order blocking the National Guard deployment, which was expected to begin this weekend.
Immergut said the state had provided “substantial evidence that the protests at the Portland ICE facility were not significantly violent or disruptive in the days—or even weeks—leading up to the president’s directive.”
Portland residents who oppose Trump’s mass deportation agenda began holding nightly demonstrations at the ICE facility over the summer, with some trying to block vehicles from entering and exiting the property. Crowds have dispersed quickly during the daytime, while at night federal officers have sometimes used tear gas and other weapons to move people away from the building. The Portland police have reported 27 arrests since early June at the protests, and at least two dozen people have been arrested by federal officers.
While the president has described Portland as “war-ravaged,” Immergut said that the protests fall far below the threshold for ordering federal troops to Portland, which the president has the authority to do only in times of foreign invasion, a rebellion, or when local authorities are unable to maintain order.
“The protests have been such a minor issue that the normal nightlife in downtown Portland has required more police resources than the ICE facility,” said Immergut.
The judge added that the US “has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs... This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power—to the detriment of the nation.”
Miller’s accusation that Immergut was taking part in a “legal insurrection” by rejecting Trump’s false claims about the nature of the protests was “reckless,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“It’s authoritarian propaganda, plain and simple. Stephen Miller should be fired,” said the Democrat.
New York Timescolumnist David French added that Miller’s claims put Immergut in potential danger, as right-wing counterprotesters have arrived in Portland in recent days.
Immergut’s temporary order is set to expire in two weeks, but she is expected to rule on the state’s request for a more permanent injunction barring the deployment of the National Guard.
The Trump administration on Saturday night appealed Immergut’s ruling to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which previously ruled that Trump could send the National Guard to Los Angeles to stop anti-ICE protests after a federal judge had decided that deployment should be halted.
In addition to seeking the National Guard deployment, the administration has reportedly discussed sending the Army’s 82nd Airborne division, which is typically deployed in hostile foreign territory, into Portland.
On Saturday, Miller repeated claims that “there is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in this country” that is “well organized and funded” and ”shielded by far-left Democrat judges.” Immergut is a Republican.
“The only remedy is to use legitimate state power to dismantle terrorism and terror networks,” said Miller.
Since the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last month, the president and his allies have insisted that left-wing groups are fomenting violence, with Trump signing an executive order falsely claiming he has the authority to designate “antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization”—despite the fact that no “antifa” organization exists.
The president also signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”
On Saturday, Miller said on Newsmax that the administration intends to apply NSPM-7 in Portland, initiating investigations into what he called a “domestic terrorist network” whenever federal agents make an arrest at a protest.
Miller, said investigative reporter Jim Stewartson, “collapsed Democrats, ‘far-left Democrat judges’, and ‘antifa’ into a single domestic terror threat as a pretext for mass arrests.”
---
nyp
Riot declared in Portland after police station set on fire
trash can then dr frame?
nat rev
rioters-set-fire-federal-courthouse-162333860
Rioters targeted the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., on Thursday evening in renewed clashes between demonstrators and federal police.
The attack on the courthouse came one day after authorities removed fencing initially erected over the summer, in response to continued riots following the death of George Floyd, an African American man killed during his arrest by Minneapolis police officers.
Footage showed the rioters attempting to force their way into the courthouse while chanting “f*** the United States!” Later in the evening rioters set a fire outside the courthouse entrance.
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Federal police from the Department of Homeland Security clashed with rioters and attempted to force them away from the building.
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Independent journalist Suzette Smith, a former editor of the Portland Mercury, reported on Twitter that the demonstration spun off from a protest earlier that day against the extension of an oil pipeline from the Canadian tar sands to Wisconsin. Smith also wrote that protesters cited the trial against Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin, charged with third-degree murder in the death of Floyd, and the removal of the fence around the courthouse as spurring the demonstration.
Rioters gathered to attack the courthouse for weeks during the summer of 2020, and have also marched on Mayor Ted Wheeler’s home. City police spent almost $8 million responding to the riots, making over 900 arrests throughout 120 consecutive days of unrest.
Portland police announced on Thursday that they were “aware” of additional demonstrations being planned for this coming weekend.
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More from National Review
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an 921
Far-right extremism, or white supremacy, is the fastest growing ideology in the United States. The impact of white supremacists terrorizing Black communities has led to calls for serious action, even an anti-lynching bill. This alone reflects how dangerous they are.
Add to that the January 6 insurrection and the evidenced involvement of the Proud Boys, and other groups, leading to the FBI describing the attack on the United States Capitol as an act of domestic terror.
A mountain of evidence suggests that, just as Canada did (and as I've written previously for the Editorial Board), the United States should follow suit and list the Proud Boys (and others) as domestic terror groups, as part of its initiative to tackle white supremacy.
But that hasn't happened. Failure means the problem persists with the potential to worsen. The safety of Black people and people of color, and the internal security of the United States, depends on such a bold move happening. The failure to treat the Proud Boys as they should be by the federal authorities is continuing to have consequences.
Indeed, a couple of things have taken place recently that have once again brought this worrying reality into sharp focus. First, the clashes several weeks back between the Proud Boys and anti-fascists.
The scenes in Portland, Oregon, turned ugly, but thankfully nobody was killed. Here's the thing that's alarming. Prior to the Proud Boy protest and the counter demonstration, PortlandPolice Chief Chuck Lovell publicly announced that officers would not intervene. The Proud Boys are a threat, but here they were treated with kid gloves.
The lack of policing means that an approach of doubling down will be needed the next time the Proud Boys appear. Because the calculated failure to leave them to their own devices in the streets is akin to Trump's message. It's extremely dangerous, and dare I suggest, not how millions of Americans want their tax dollars spent with policing. Surely, those Proud Boys who watched events unfold in Portland at home on the TV will be salivating at the prospect of the next protest.
The plot thickens even further.
Just days ago, a judge ruled that prosecutors in the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter who shot three people at a protest against police brutality in 2020, will notbe able to play for jurors a video of Rittenhouse allegedly stating his desire to shoot people — while agreeing with the Proud Boys' tactics. The news is another example of how dangerous the Proud Boys and their ilk have become.
They can terrorize the Capitol, greenlighted by the former president, and, others would argue, in the streets, allowed to do so by a police chief in Portland. Apparently the Proud Boys were allowed to post banners around the city before the violence took place.
Their white supremacist ideology is something the likes of Kyle Rittenhouse was sympathetic to. How many more like Rittenhouse are on the sideline, "standing by" for their chance, brainwashed by the nonsense of the Proud Boys? It doesn't bear thinking about.
In recent day, the Times reported that a member of the Proud Boys who was present and took part in the insurrection was also an FBI informant and was texting his contact throughout the day.
That the FBI remained in contact suggests that law enforcement were more informed about imminent violence than previously suggested. One thing is clear by now. Law enforcement have more than enough evidence and knowledge, and means, as do the FBI, to halt the Proud Boys in their tracks beforethey carry out further serious crimes.
Trump was a dream come true for the Proud Boys. God only knows what messaging he might have continued giving to white supremacist groups had he secured another term. Biden needs to now break up the dangerous groundwork that was laid for groups like them. And ordinary Americans need to push him. The safety of tax-paying Americans, and American democracy itself, is depending on it.
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portland boycott
https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/dan-patrick-slams-planned-protest-against-state-s-anti-abortion-law/
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https://theintercept.com/2020/09/30/neo-fascist-proud-boys-exult-trump-telling-stand-not-stand/
no lnx pix twt many
Robert Mackey
September 30 2020,
neo-Fascist Proud Boys Exult Over Trump Telling Them to “Stand By,” Not Stand Down
Asked to tell white supremacists and militia groups to stay away from protests, the president told some to be on alert.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP thrilled members of the violent far-right gang known as the Proud Boys on Tuesday when he responded to a question from debate moderator Chris Wallace, about whether he would be willing to tell white supremacists and militia groups that support him to stand down, by instead telling that group to “stand back and stand by.”
While the president’s reply struck some observers as more evidence of his inability to stem the torrent of half-digested thoughts and phrases that fly from his lips in an incoherent jumble, leaders of the neo-fascist group exulted on the social media platforms Telegram and Parler, seeing the answer as a call to inflict violence on left-wing antifascist activists and protesters.
A screenshot from the Parler account of the Proud Boys founder, Gavin McInnes.]
“Trump basically said to go fuck them up! this makes me so happy,” Joe Biggs, who organized a Proud Boys rally that drew an embarrassingly small crowd of a few hundred in Portland, Oregon on Saturday, wrote. Biggs had reason to be encouraged, since Trump did stop short of actually condemning the group, pivoting instead to say: “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left, because this is not a right-wing problem… this is a left-wing problem.”
A screenshot from Parler, a right-wing social media platform.]
In response to Trump’s comment, Biden noted that Christopher Wray, “his own F.B.I. director, said the threat comes from white supremacists; antifa’s an idea, not an organization.” Wray told Congress two weeks ago that “we look at antifa as more of an ideology or a movement than an organization.”
“Oh come on,” Trump replied, clearly shocked to hear the truth — that loosely affiliated antifascist groups dedicated to confronting white supremacists and neo-fascists like the Proud Boys are not a domestic terrorist organization. “Antifa is a dangerous, radical group,” Trump insisted, echoing the core imaginary belief of the Proud Boys he was supposed to be condemning.
The Proud Boys founder, Gavin McInnes, who also co-founded Vice media, has described what the Southern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group as a “Western chauvinist” fraternal order that promotes violence against left-wing protesters, and embraces anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim bigotry that dovetails with Trump’s own beliefs.
Trump’s failure to disavow the group echoed his refusal to condemn the white supremacists who marched with torches in Charlottesville in 2017, chanting, “Jew will not replace us!” at the Unite the Right rally, which was organized by Jason Kessler, a former member of the Proud Boys.
On Wednesday afternoon, Trump tried to undo the damage by telling reporters at the White House that he really did not know what he was saying during the debate.
“I don’t know who the Proud Boys are — you’ll have to give me a definition, cause I really don’t know who they are,” Trump said.
“I can only say they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their work,” the president continued, apparently equating the violence inflicted on left-wing protesters by the Proud Boys to the work of the police.
He then continued to deflect a question about right-wing violence by his supporters with the suggestion that it was entirely justified by the behavior of protesters. “Law enforcement will do the work, more and more, as people see how bad this radical, liberal, Democrat movement is.”
On Tuesday night, however, the Proud Boys founder had posted video of himself watching Trump’s comments with excitement during a livestream.
A screenshot from Parler.]
The group’s current chairman, Enrique Tarrio, a Cuban-American from Miami who attended the Charlottesville rally, also boosted an excited comment about Trump’s apparent endorsement posted on Tuesday by another member, who describes himself as a “33rd Degree Proud Boy,” as well as a“right-wing death squad general,” an “ANTIFA Butcher,” a “Commie Killer” and a “BLM Skull Stomper.”
A screenshot of a Parler post from a member of the neo-fascist Proud Boys gang.]
Tarrio, who spent a year in federal prison for his part in a scheme to rebrand stolen diabetic test strip kits and sell them online, wrote on his own Parler account that he was “extremely PROUD of my Presidents performance tonight,” saying that Trump “did an excellent job and was asked a VERY pointed question. The question was in reference to WHITE SUPREMACY…which we are not.”
Despite Tarrio’s comments, photographs of the rally in Portland on Saturday showed him and other members making the O.K. hand gesture, which has evolved in recent years from a 4chan hoax — intended to trick the media into reporting that it meant “white power” on the internet — into a symbol actually embraced by racists in real life.
PORTLAND, OR - SEPTEMBER 26: Proud Boys flash the OK hand signal, a gesture often associated with far-right groups, during Proud Boy rally on September 26, 2020 in Portland, Oregon. Oregon Governor Kate Brown declared a state of emergency prior to Saturdays rally as fears of political violence between Proud Boys and Black Lives Matter protesters grew. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)Proud Boys flash the OK hand signal, a gesture often associated with far-right groups, during a rally in Portland on Saturday. Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty ImagesGetty Images]
Even if they don’t consider themselves racist, it is quite clear that the Proud Boys are openly antagonistic to racial justice protesters in Portland and other cities.
As my colleague Ryan Devereaux reported from the rally on Saturday, it was largely dedicated to praising two new martyrs of the far-right: Aaron Jay Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, who was shot and killed by a self-described anti-fascist in Portland last month, and Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old Trump supporter who was charged with two counts of murder for killing two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The debate moderator, Chris Wallace, had specifically referred to the way violent right-wing groups had stoked violence in both Kenosha and Portland.
Moments before he failed to condemn the Proud Boys in the debate, Trump had seemed to take credit for the police killing of Michael Reinoehl, the suspected left-wing gunman who had fatally shot Aaron Jay Danielson, a right-wing activist from a group allied to the Proud Boys, following a raucous pro-Trump caravan confronting Black Lives Matter protesters in downtown Portland.
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“I sent in the U.S. Marshals to get the killer of a young man — in the middle of the street, they shot him, and for three days Portland wouldn’t do anything,” Trump claimed. “They took care of business,” he said with obvious satisfaction.
In fact, the new, progressive district attorney for Portland, Mike Schmidt, had charged Reinoehl with murder and obtained a warrant for his arrest hours before he was shot and killed by police officers in Washington state working with the U.S. Marshals Service to track down the fugitive. While the police said Reinoehl had a handgun, one witness told The Oregonian that the officers had made no attempt to arrest the suspect, who did not seem to be armed. Antifascist activists in Portland then accused law enforcement of carrying out an extrajudicial execution of a man who was wanted for killing a member of a pro-police group.
Trump also seemed to be overstating what role, if any, he had played in the effort to detain Reinoehl. In fact, on September 3, the president tweeted a public complaint about the case — demanding that the Portland Police arrest the suspect — a full hour and 40 minutes after he had already been killed by the federal fugitive task force. The president’s tweet was sent 13 minutes after the suspect’s death had been reported by The New York Times.
On Wednesday, District Attorney Schmidt announced that a member of the Proud Boys, “50-year-old Alan Swinney is in custody and is being charged with multiple offenses for alleged crimes and assaults that involved weapons.” Swinney was charged with assault, the unlawful use of mace, threatening a protester in Portland with a gun and using a paintball gun to wound people at recent demonstrations in the city.
Trump’s praise of Reinoehl’s shooting in the debate also echoed his own previous bloodthirsty remarks, in which he sounded more like a sectarian warlord than the president of a democracy. “U.S. Marshals killed him,” Trump said of the suspected left-wing gunman in an interview with the debate moderator’s Fox News colleague Jeanine Pirro. “And I’ll tell you something, that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution,” he added.
Trump’s rush to declare the killing of the left-wing gunman from Portland perfectly justified contrasted with the staunch defense he has offered of Kyle Rittenhouse, the right-wing gunman who has become a hero to neo-fascists worldwide for bringing a rifle to a Black Lives Matter protest and provoking a confrontation that left two men dead.
At a news conference last month, Trump was asked if he would disavow the provocative behavior of armed supporters like Rittenhouse, who was charged with six crimes based on evidence gathered by the Kenosha police department. Suddenly skeptical of the police, the president said that video of the teen gunman being pursued by protesters before the second and third shootings, which was played without context in heavy rotation on Fox News, suggested to him that the young vigilante had acted in self-defense.
What the president left out of his description of the video that showed Rittenhouse, in his words, “trying to get away from” protesters who were chasing him, who then “very violently attacked him,” is that those three men were trying to disarm him because he had just shot another man in the head, minutes earlier.
“I guess he was in very big trouble — he probably would’ve been killed,” Trump claimed, ignoring the sequence of events laid out in clear detail in the police complaint charging Rittenhouse with murder.
That context was mostly absent from Tucker Carlson’s selective presentation of the facts of what Rittenhouse did, but it was carefully detailed in the indictment based on the work of three Kenosha homicide detectives. It is not hard to imagine which source of information Trump had studied more carefully. So when Trump excused the reckless killing of protesters by Rittenhouse, a young man who had been in the front row at one of the president’s rallies in January, the self-described “law and order” candidate was choosing to disregard the actual work of law enforcement carried out by Kenosha’s police department because it was politically inconvenient for him.
At another point in the debate, Trump claimed that his provocative approach to the protests in Portland was endorsed by the city’s sheriff, “who just came out today and said, ‘I support President Trump.'” While the city of Portland does not, in fact, have a sheriff, the county it is in, Multnomah, does. Before the debate was over, Multnomah County Sheriff Mike Reese had tweeted to debunk the president. “I have never supported Donald Trump and will never support him,” Reese wrote. “Donald Trump has made my job a hell of a lot harder since he started talking about Portland,” he added, “but I never thought he’d try to turn my wife against me!”
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ref
https://theintercept.com**/2020/09/28/**portland-proud-boys-rally-journalists/
the PROUD BOYS claimed that they would bring legions of dedicated patriots to the city of Portland, Oregon, in a powerful show of strength against their anti-fascist foes, but when the moment of truth came on Saturday, the right-wing gang failed to deliver.
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Despite weeks of hype and deep concerns over the possibility of severe and deadly violence, the organization, which the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a hate group, drew a modest crowd of angry men and women, whose brief gathering mostly consisted of swilling cheap beer and hard seltzers and assaulting journalists in a park on the edge of town. The absence of large-scale violence, which has so often defined the group’s forays into Portland over the past few years, came as a relief to a city that has been blanketed in wildfire smoke in recent weeks and targeted by the Trump administration as an “anarchist jurisdiction” for its nightly protests against police brutality.
In the run-up to the rally, Gov. Kate Brown declared a state of emergency and established a law enforcement task force led by the Oregon State Police, which reportedly deployed approximately 500 officers to police the event. At most, several hundred people turned out for the demonstration, a far cry from the 20,000 participants and observers the Proud Boys had estimated in their request for a permit — the city denied the request, citing coronavirus restrictions that cap group gatherings at 50 people.
“The events over the weekend show that law enforcement knew how to keep the far-right groups from unleashing violence in Portland all along, they simply chose not to in previous instances,” Michael German, a former FBI agent, now at the Brennan Center, said in an email to The Intercept.
What the event lacked in numbers, it made up for in paranoia and talk of persecution. Billed as demonstration against “domestic terrorism,” the day’s speakers focused their rage against the left broadly and against the anti-fascist movement known as antifa in particular. Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who was charged with two counts of murder after killing two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounding a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, came up often, as did Aaron Jay Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer, who was shot and killed by a self-described anti-fascist in Portland last month.
''This is a war, folks, and we have got to fight back,” Carol Leek, the founder of Oregon Women for Trump, told the crowd. Connecting the day’s events to President Donald Trump’s reelection efforts,Leek railed against the threat of encroaching Marxism and the dangers of “Black supremacy,” while self-styled Proud Boy security guards roamed through the crowd questioning journalists about their affiliations and attempting to intimidate those whose answers they found unsatisfactory.
Police in tactical gear were mustered near overpasses outside Delta Park on the northern edge of the city, but with the exception of occasional visits from a handful of liaison officers, the Proud Boys were largely permitted to police themselves. Attendees were well-armed: carrying rifles, sidearms, knives, bats, bear spray, and at least one electrified Taser shield. Nearly all of the demonstrators wore some type of tactical gear. The letters “RWDS,” an abbreviation for “right-wing death squads,” were commonly seen on patches, and there was an abundance of pro-police “Thin Blue Line” flags fixed to pickup trucks, body armor, and the merchandise table.
A handful of gunmen ran a checkpoint near an entrance to the park, and an RV in a Walmart parking lot appeared to serve as a weapons and body armor depot for some of the protesters. Neither attracted attention from the police. Demonstrators also received a load of branded shields from a man driving a box truck who said he was with a group called American Wolf. One of the shields was scooped up by a man who looked to be a middle-aged skinhead, dressed in heavy black boots with white laces. Another shield ended up in the back of a truck that was later pulled over by police. Law enforcement seized several guns from the vehicle and a third shield spray painted with the words “FUCK BLM.” Two of the men in the truck were given criminal citations for possession of loaded firearms in public.
Authorities also said they were investigating an incident in which a man was filmed kicking a livestreamer in the face — one of at least three instances in which demonstrators were recorded putting their hands on members of the media. The victim said he was also punched in the head and received a concussion. The assailant, who was also photographed chatting with state police, gave a casual TV interview after the attack.
German, who has closely tracked law enforcement response to far-right violence in Portland under the Trump administration said the means for protecting the public have been long clear. “It’s not as if it required aggressive police action, just proper planning, a presence, and a few token citations and weapons seizures made a huge difference,” he said. “Yet, law enforcement still left room for criticism. Allowing the militants to man armed checkpoints and harass and beat journalists and others without interference reinforces the idea that the police condone these armed out-of-state groups coming into Portland and intimidating, threatening, and assaulting residents.”
Days before the Proud Boys rally took place, The Guardian and Bellingcat, an investigative journalism organization, reported on a trove of leaked chats obtained by anti-fascists in Eugene, Oregon, which showed a network of Pacific Northwest-based pro-Trump and pro-law enforcement activists planning to engage in acts of targeted political violence, including the assassination of elected officials. “People will get shot, stabbed and beat,” one of the members of the so-called Patriot Coalition said in a leaked message. On Saturday, one of the participants in the chat group, a man named David Willis, who had identified legal advocates and the press as “targets,” threatened a reporter while holding a paintball gun. Shane Burley, the experienced Portland-based journalist and author whom Willis targeted, later described the demonstration as “the most paranoid far right-rally I have ever been to.”
Read Our Complete CoverageProtests for Black Lives
Despite the low turnout, the Proud Boys sought to paint a picture of a mission accomplished. Standing on the stage with a sunburned face and wide grin, Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs said the rally gave him a “boner,” while National Chair Enrique Tarrio opted for a more measured tone, praising the governor’s decision to declare a state of emergency in interviews with reporters. Both men were involved in ordering the physical removal of an independent journalist. According to a detailed, firsthand account published by Courthouse News Service, the two men and their organization engaged in extensive collaboration with law enforcement throughout the day, including meeting with the FBI Saturday morning to discuss the violent chats that had leaked online. Biggs told the news service “They’re not with us,” referring to participants in the chat, and said the meeting with the bureau was part of an ongoing dialogue with the feds.
“We’ve talked to state and federal law enforcement for every event we do,” he said. “The feds say, ‘you’re the only group out there that’s willing to sit down and tell us stuff.’ They know every move we do before we do it because we tell them.”
The demonstration wrapped up ahead of schedule and many of the Proud Boys drove across state lines to celebrate their demonstration in Washington state. Two separate anti-facist and anti-racist demonstrations a short drive from the scene drew considerably larger crowds.
Last month, a caravan of amped-up Trump supporters drove into downtown Portland and opened fire on counterprotesters with bear spray, paintballs, and live rounds. As day turned to night, speculation swirled as to whether the Proud Boys would return to the city in similar fashion — they did not.
[Portland police disperse a crowd of protesters on September 26, 2020 in Portland, Oregon.
Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images]
In the end, it was the local police who were responsible for violence in the streets, as dozens of riot cops chased protesters and the press from Multnomah County Justice Center downtown and pummeled them with fists and clubs following an order to disperse. Ahead of Saturday’s rally, roughly 50 police officers assigned to the Portland Police Bureau’s Rapid Response were deputized as federal marshals, allowing members the local police to bring federal charges against individuals accused of assaulting an officer. The move is seen as an end-run around District Attorney Mike Schmidt, who in August established a policy in which his office would decline to prosecute certain protest related offenses.
“The perception that the police favor the far-right agitators was further informed by the sharp contrast with how the police treated those protesting police violence and racism later that day,” German, the former FBI agent, said. “That they would modify the law enforcement command structure specifically to avoid restraints on police violence ordered by courts and local political leaders demonstrates complete disregard for the law, democratic restraints on police power, and the security of Portland residents from unaccountable law enforcement actions.”
Among the members of the media who received the worst of the authorities’ treatment on Saturday night was 73-year-old John Rudoff, a beloved local photojournalist, who was tossed onto the concrete on video. In a statement posted on Facebook Sunday, the veteran journalist said the helmet he was wearing may have saved his life.
“The cops need to understand that an action like this — shoving a guy down on the cement with no warning — can fracture a hip or an arm or a skull, and can be a life-ending or career-mobility ending move,” Rudoff wrote. “Actions have consequences; and they should gauge some of their less-warranted actions accordingly.”
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kpfa 9/30/20 jrnl hand brike by baton (not cop?)
federalize local cops to avoid aunlethal weapons regs see GUK
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GUK
https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/23/oregon-portland-pro-trump-protests-violence-texts
no lnx
Revealed: pro-Trump activists plotted violence ahead of Portland rallies
Patriots Coalition members suggested political assassinations and said ‘laws will be broken, people will get hurt’, leaked chats show
[pix Far-right organizers clashed with counter-protesters at the Justice Center in Portland, Oregon, 22 August.
Jason Wilson and Robert Evans
@jason_a_w
Wed 23 Sep 2020
Leaked chat logs show Portland-area pro-Trump activists planning and training for violence, sourcing arms and ammunition and even suggesting political assassinations ahead of a series of contentious rallies in the Oregon city, including one scheduled for this weekend.
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The chats on the GroupMe app, shared with the Guardian by the antifascist group Eugene Antifa, show conversations between Oregon members of the Patriots Coalition growing more extreme as they discuss armed confrontations with leftwing Portland activists, and consume a steady diet of online disinformation about protests and wildfires.
[Facebook removes Patriot Prayer pages in bid to halt 'violent social militias'
Read more]
At times, rightwing activists discuss acts of violence at recent, contentious protests, which in some cases they were recorded carrying out. At one point, David Willis, a felon currently being sued for his alleged role in an earlier episode of political violence, joins a discussion about the use of paintballs.
Where other members had previously suggested freezing the paintballs for maximum damage, Willis wrote: “They make glass breaker balls that are rubber coated metal. They also have pepper balls but they are about 3 dollars a ball. Don’t freeze paintballs it makes them wildly inaccurate” [sic.]
Willis did not immediately respond to voice and text messages sent to his listed cellphone number.
Another prolific poster is Mark Melchi, a 41-year-old Dallas, Oregon-based car restorer who claims to have served as a captain in the US army.
Melchi has been recorded leading an armed pro-Trump militia, “1776 2.0” into downtown confrontations in Portland, including on 22 August. At several points in the chat he proposes violence in advance of those confrontations, and appears to confess to prior acts committed in the company of his paramilitary group.
[Rightwing demonstrators chase a Black Lives Matter protester after a pro-Trump caravan rally at the Oregon state capitol on 7 September 2020 in Salem.]
In advance of the 22 August protest, Melchi wrote: “It’s going to be bloody and most likely shooting, they’re definitely armed… so let’s make sure we have an organized direction of movement and direction of clearing or other Patriots will be caught in the possible cross fire. When shit hits the fan.”
He advised other members to ignore weapons statutes, writing, “I saw someone say bats, mace, and stun guns are illegal downtown. If you’re going to play by the books tomorrow night, we already lost. We are here to make a change, laws will be broken, people will get hurt… It’s lawlessness downtown, and people need to be prepared for bad things.”
Following these comments, several rightwing demonstrators were recorded using gas and bats on 22 August, where Melchi and his militia were also present.
In other remarks ahead of the day, Melchi draws on what he claims is his group’s history of traveling to multiple states to engage in violence at protests.
“My Group 1776 2.0. Has been fighting Antifa in Seattle, Portland, for months”, Melchi writes, adding “this won’t be a simple fist fight. People will get shot, stabbed and beat.”
He also claims police cooperation in interstate violence, writing “Yes, going after them at night is the solution… Like we do in other states, tactical ambushes at night while backing up the police are key. You get the leaders and the violent ones and the police are happy to shut their mouths and cameras.”
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Melchi nevertheless recommends that members disguise themselves to avoid the consequences of homicide.
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“We must be ready to defend with lethal response… Suggest wearing mask and nothing to identify you on Camera…to prevent any future prosecution.”
[We are here to make a change, laws will be broken, people will get hurt
Mark Melchi]
In response to detailed questions about these contributions, Melchi responded with an email that falsely suggested his comments might have been photoshopped, and concluded with direct threats.
Melchi wrote: “I suggest you don’t threaten combat veterans sweetheart, might get a little uncomfortable for ya big guy!”
Melchi’s sentiments in the chat logs were in keeping with fantasies of, and plans for, violence, which are constantly discussed by group members.
Although some members are connected with extremist groups or militias, on the whole they describe themselves as “patriots”, and they express no clear ideology beyond a hatred of the left, and a preparedness to use violence. The shared allegiances expressed in the group are mostly to the police, the United States and Donald Trump, a person whom some say they are prepared to kill for.
Ahead of 22 August, a user “Paige” says “I’m waiting for the presidential go to start open firing”.
Melchi, the militia leader, responds, “Well Saturday may be that go lol”.
Alex Newhouse, the digital research lead at the Center for Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute, said of the group that “the main mechanism that makes these communities so dangerous is the incessant desensitization to the idea of political violence”.
Newhouse said that the ideas expressed in the group were entrenched in“extreme nationalism – that a few strong men with guns can together take out an evil that is at once imagined as an existential threat, and pathetically weak”. Newhouse added that the group’s discussions “fit within a broader trend of rightwing extremists becoming more accelerationist over time”.
[Rightwing and leftwing protesters battle with mace, paint balls and rocks near Justice Center in downtown Portland Saturday, 22 August 2020.]
The chatlogs became fractious at the peak of Oregon’s recent wildfire emergency. While some members said they had gone to rural areas to “hunt” imagined antifa arsonists,others became concerned about the dangers.
As early as 9 September, the baseless idea that the fires were a coordinated arson attack was treated as settled fact, with Melchi writing: “People have officially died from these Antifa Fires. I’d shoot them on site” [sic], and another user, Dub, responding: “Yes sir if I see them they are getting dropped where they stand.”
When adverse consequences of vigilantism became evident, leadership attempted to bring the group back under control. After a member of the group reported that an associate had been arrested in Lane county for “holding [someone] at gunpoint”, the group’s administrator, who used the user name Patriot Coalition, wrote “STOP HOLDING PEOPLE AT GUN POINT- STOP PULLING YOUR WEAPONS… VIDEO- TAKE PICTURES AND CALL 911.”
Mary McCord is the legal director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, which on Wednesday released a series of fact sheets on anti-paramilitary laws in all 50 states.
Given details of the content of the chats, McCord said that “this is the kind of thing that might allow authorities to take action”, and that members of the group may “already be in violation of Oregon’s anti-paramilitary laws”.
The group also talked about coordinating at the rally with the Proud Boys, an extreme rightwing group. One user, identified as Bravo91 and a part of the group’s leadership, spoke of phone calls with the Proud Boys.
Along with antifascist demonstrators, Democratic politicians are also the target of violent fantasies in the chats. In particular, Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, is demonized and nominated as a possible target for assassination by the group.
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On 24 August, a user identified as “Trent-Medford” writes, “Fuck wheeler… guess what soon as we are done with these punks. He’s next freakin coward !!!!!!”
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User T Durden went further. In response to news that an alleged arsonist had been released on bail, and without encountering disagreement, they wrote: “Maybe we need to start taking care of the justice ourselves!”, adding, “Start with justice on our DA and then move on to the governor. Maybe by the time we get to the first judge, they will have changed their tunes.”
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stand down" --> stand back and stand by --> new logo sir we're ready to deal w/ antifa b/c x won't? christian picolini says calls to arms/violence DN
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/watch-fox-news-host-grills-trump-spokesman-on-his-proud-boys-remark-and-tells-her-theyre-celebrating-it/
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https://yyy.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/26/proud-boys-rally-portland-oregon-kate-brown-ted-wheeler-trump
no lnx
proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, draws smaller crowd than authorities feared
Pro-Trump group say event supports free speech and police
Protests and counter-protests have previously turned deadly
[pix Members of the Proud Boys and other rightwing demonstrators rally on Saturday in Portland.
Jason Wilson and agencies in Portland, Oregon
@jason_a_w
Sun 27 Sep 2020
About 1,000 supporters of the rightwing Proud Boys group, some armed, rallied in Portland, Oregon on Saturday in a largely peaceful event that drew far fewer followers than organizers forecast and state authorities had feared.
The rally in a north Portland park ended after a few hours of speeches and chants, many against anti-fascists and Black Lives Matter groups which held a nearby counter-protest.
The Proud Boys had forecast a crowd of at least 10,000 and Portland’s police chief on Friday said he saw chances of a “very, very large” gathering.
['We are never safe': Breonna Taylor’s family condemns Louisville police as protests enter third night
Read more]
The state governor, Kate Brown, had declared a weekend state of emergency for Oregon’s biggest city, saying “white supremacist groups” were traveling from out of state to attend the rally called by the Proud Boys to “end domestic terrorism” in Portland.
The Proud Boys, which theSouthern Poverty Law Center calls a hate group,said they were hosting a free speech event to support Trump and the police, restore law and order and condemn anti-fascists, “domestic terrorism” and “violent gangs of rioting felons”.
“This is a critical moment,” said Brown, a Democrat. “We have seen what happens when armed vigilantes take matters into their own hands. We’ve seen it in Charlottesville, we’ve seen it in Kenosha and, unfortunately, we have seen it in Portland.”
She was referring to deaths in Virginia, Wisconsin and Oregon during clashes between right and left.
“The Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer groups have come time and time again looking for a fight, and the results are always tragic,” Brown said. “Let me be perfectly clear: we will not tolerate any type of violence this weekend. Left, right or center, violence is never a path towards meaningful change.”
On Friday, the Oregon Justice Resource Center launched a $1.25m civil suit against three named men, and 50 more yet to be identified, over a rally on 22 August at which rightwingers fired paintballs into a leftwing crowd. The same day, ajournalist’s hand was broken by a Proud Boy wielding a baton. One man, Alan Swinney, said on social media he had been indicted.
Also on Friday, the Portland mayor, Ted Wheeler, published a “letter to the community” in which he invoked for the first time state anti-paramilitary laws, a move the Guardian recently reported experts were urging.
“Oregon law prohibits paramilitary activity,” Wheeler said. “Organizers of and likely participants in the 26 September event have openly discussed tactical operations and military-style formations that lead us to believe that they are operating as an unauthorized private militia.”
Over four years in the city, provocations by rightwing activists have culminated in violence while Trump and rightwing media have scapegoated local officials and anti-fascists.
On 29 August this year, a pro-Trump truck convoy made its way downtown, firing paintballs and mace and attacking protesters with vehicles. A Patriot Prayer associate, Aaron Jay Danielson, was shot dead. A self-proclaimed anti-fascist, Michael Forest Reinoehl, admitted the shooting in a media interview, then was shot dead by US Marshals on 3 September in Lacey, Washington.
Saturday’s rally came after months of anti-police protests in Portland and a wildfire emergency in which rural residents engaged in vigilante actions.
“The lawlessness has culminated with the assassination of our friend and Trump supporter Jay Danielson in Portland,” the Proud Boys said in their permit application, which was denied. “Portland leadership is unwilling to stop the violence. They have been blinded by their hatred of our president and will not allow outside help stopping the violence.”
The application mentioned Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged in the shooting deaths of two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse’s attorneys say he acted in self-defense.
On Saturday in Portland, the approaches to Delta Park – part of a complex of open green space on the northern edge of the city, where the Proud Boys rallied – were dotted with clusters of officers, their cars bearing the insignia of Portland police, the Multnomah county sheriff’s office and the Oregon state police.
A traffic sign a few blocks from the park entrance flashed: “Hate is not welcome here. Black lives matter.”
At the parklands’ southern entrance, a barricade was manned by six Portland officers. At the fringe of the rally, a rightwinger stood guard in camouflage body armor and a combat helmet, armed with an assault rifle.
Many more men openly carried guns, milling around near cars and trucks, most festooned with flags expressing allegiance to the US, the “thin blue line” of the police, and Trump. Among them was David Willis, who, the Guardian revealed last week, planned armed violence at the 22 August rally.
A police officer speaks to supporters of the Proud Boys on Saturday.]
During the afternoon Willis, who leaked chats have revealed as having described “press, ACLU, and [National] Lawyers Guild” as “targets” at a previous rally, shouted threateningly at freelance journalist, Shane Burley, while holding his paintball gun according to Burley. An OPB journalist interviewed Willis while he was holding the paintball gun he was filmed firing into a crowd of protesters on 22 August.
Burley said in a text message that it was “the most paranoid far right-rally I have ever been to” and that in the moment of confrontation “I felt like anything could happen”.
Elsewhere,Proud Boys organizer Joe Biggs was filmed ordering men to remove a local photographer from the rally.
Oregon State Police announced on social media that they had issued several citations and confiscated paintball guns and firearms from attendees at the rightwing demonstration.
Police said they were investigating an assault of one person documenting the Proud Boys rally and a total of four people were arrested.
Two miles away from the Proud Boys rally, in Peninsula Park, a counter-protest of about 1,500 people – perhaps three times as large as the Proud Boys gathering – went ahead, and a series of speakers denounced the far right group’s incursion into the city.
That counter-protest, one of three held in the city during the afternoon, was not positioned, as previous protests have been, in direct physical proximity to the far right group.
Of that decision, a spokesperson for long standing local antifascist group Rose City Antifa said: “We wanted to bring organizations together and establish an anti-fascist space on Saturday where community members could access needed resources, connect with each other, and learn from each other without the constant threat of hundreds of unmasked, armed reactionaries literally watching them across a field.”
Anti-racism protesters in Portland want the city to take millions from police and reallocate it to the Black community. Some are angry with Wheeler, also the police commissioner, for allowing police to use teargas and aggressive tactics. Wheeler has refused to cede control of the police to a Black councilwoman with a decades-long résumé of activism for police reform.
This week, protesters hurled firebombs at officers in the wake of the Kentucky decision not to charge officers with killing Breonna Taylor, a Black woman shot in her home.
Trump has repeatedly attacked Wheeler. Over a two-week period in July, thousands of protesters squared off with federal agents sent by the president from the US Department of Homeland Security, to protect a federal courthouse.
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Portland becomes first US city to ban corporate use of facial recognition surveillance
Jake Johnson / Common Dreams September 10, 2020
In a historic move that privacy advocates said must be replicated nationwide, the Portland, Oregon city council on Wednesday unanimously approved a sweeping ban on the use of facial recognition…
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c de v
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/expert-on-the-radical-right-warns-that-vigilantes-are-preparing-to-launch-a-coup
in the Age of Trump, Portland, Oregon, is no longer just another city. Now it is a symbol and almost a Rorschach test for the country’s deep and explosive political divides.
For Trumpists, Republicans and members of the far right, Portland is all that is wrong with “the Left” and “Liberals,” a chaotic nightmare zone where Black Lives Matter, antifa and other“enemies”are running amok while they attack “patriotism” and “real American values.”
To TrumpWorld, Portland and other Democratic-led big cities (which of course is virtually all of them) are hives of scum and villainy, overrun by criminals and “rioters,” which must be conquered by Trump’s enforcersand armed vigilante supporters.
Trump’s “law and order” politics, and its inherent racism and violence, are believed by many to be his path back to the White House. In this view, Portland and other “Democrat cities” and communities are targets of opportunity for the Trump regime.
writing at Washington Monthly, David Atkins explains Trump’s mindset:
He sees the violence as politically beneficial, a useful cudgel against Democratic nominee Joe Biden — even though the violence is happening while Trump himself is president, not Biden.
Trump’s election theme is that Americans won’t be safe in a Biden presidency. The opposite is true. Americans won’t be safe as long as a white supremacist president is leading a movement of bigots to incite a civil war, and attempting to ensure that the majority of Americans with cosmopolitan, egalitarian values remain politically disenfranchised and under the thumb of those who fear and despise them.
Trump’s campaign of racial authoritarianism and stochastic terrorism, as well as overt threats of “law and order,” resulted in a group of his supporters driving into Portland last weekend, armed with mace and paintball guns, to seek out confrontations with Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist protesters. During one such encounter, a member of the right-wing militia group Patriot Prayer, Aaron Danielson,was shot and killed. On Thursday night, the apparent shooter,Michael Reinoehl, was himself shot and killed by U.S. marshals in Olympia, Washington.
Despite this lamentable violence — for which Trump and the right must bear ultimate responsibility — for progressives and other people of conscience Portland is a symbol of resistance and hope. As part of the nationwide people’s uprising sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protesters have been outside the Portland federal courthouse for more than 100 days.
The protests were largely peaceful until Trump and acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf deployed federal police forces to the city in July. Their presence, as designed, escalated the tension and led to increasing levels of property damage and incidents of violence.
Previewing Trump’s plan for other parts of the nation, these federal shock troops made journalists and reporters a special focus of their violence. They also kidnapped protesters and other “enemies” of Donald Trump’s regime off the streetas though they were operating in a banana republic.
Much of the mainstream American news media’s coverage of the recent events in Portland lacks meaningful context. Writing at Medium, a Portland press collective describes one such example of this “parachute journalism”:
One night last week, during one of the smaller demonstrations, a tall white man in a clean ballistic helmet and brand-new plate carrier emblazoned with “PRESS” strolled through the crowd in front of the Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. He stopped by a gaggle of other journalists, most out-of-towners. “I’ve only been around for the last week,” he said, “but the protests in Portland feel a lot more performative than the ones I’ve seen in other cities. Less genuine.” A local journalist mentioned having been present for over 50 nights of the protests, starting in early June. “Yeah, I can only speak for what I’ve seen this week,” said Clean Helmet. “I’m flying back to DC tomorrow.” … Clean Helmet was on the ground in Portland, by his own description, for less than a week. This means that he was present for approximately 1/10th of Portland’s BLM protests, thus far. I’m sure he got some great footage.
The Parachutes (as we have come to know them) come with money, and zero community connections. Their goal is the clip that can make the nightly news. They want a story that will dominate the news cycle. They do not know what is happening in Portland, and they do not care. They are coming to a city with a vibrant, scrappy community of street-level journalists. By and large, they do not want the context that those journalists can provide. And soon they will come to a city near you. When the Feds and the Parachutes come to your town, you’ll want everyone to understand the context there, too. And they are coming. Clean Helmet is already back in DC, and on to the next assignment.
The important context which “the Parachutes” usually omit includes the way Portland is depicted as a liberal oasis in America’s popular imagination. In reality, Portland is a very race and class-segregated city. As historian and activist Walidah Imarisha and others have richly documented, the Oregon territory passed laws in 1844 explicitly excluding Black people from the region under punishment of whippings and other violence. The state of Oregon formally included white supremacy in its constitution, explicitly banning nonwhites.
To this day, Oregon remains a redoubt of white supremacy, where white supremacists and other right-wing extremists have a large presence in the state and surrounding region. Portland itself has a long and ongoing history of right-wing violence.
Alexander Reid Ross is a doctoral fellow at the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. His most recent book is “Against the Fascist Creep.” Ross has also completed new research which documents more than 500 incidents in which white vigilantes and other right-wing extremists have confronted Black Lives Matter protests. This includes hundreds of acts of intimidation and other threats as well as dozens of examples in which right-wing extremists have assaulted or attacked Black Lives Matter protesters.
In this conversation Ross shares his firsthand experiences with the recent George Floyd protests in Portland. He also provides some context for those events and the police and federal response. Ross also details the long history of right-wing paramilitaries and political street gangs in Portland and their relationship with local police and other law enforcement.
Reid warns that Portland, the right-wing vigilante killings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and the hundreds of other attacks by right-wing extremists on Black Lives Matter protesters is just a preview of the massive violence that Donald Trump and his movement may unleash before and after Election Day — perhaps including the arrest or imprisonment of prominent Democrats, journalists, and others deemed to be enemies of the state.
Q: After almost four years of Trump and his regime’s authoritarian, neofascist behavior, some voices in the mainstream American news media now use that correct and appropriate language to describe the reality of the situation. Why was there so much fear and denial about the obvious? Even when they use the correct terminology, the coverage is largely superficial and avoids serious discussion of the dire implications.
You must also take into account that many so-called left-leaning voices have also been interfering with bringing that truth to light. There were writers at the Guardian, for example, who were trying to sound the alarm about the dangers of right-wing extremism and fascism in America, but they were derided by their peers across the political spectrum.
I also believe that publications such as the Washington Post and the New York Times saw themselves as being aloof from questions of the mob and political violence in America.There is a tendency among elite voices to want to say that, “We’re above political violence here in America and we resolve our differences through conversation. Therefore, let’s give everyone a hearing and let’s debate these issues, regardless of how extreme they may be. That is what a democratic country should act like.”
In a sense, they put their faith completely in some abstract idea of “democracy” instead of taking the temperature of what is really happening on the ground.
You live in Portland. How is your experience different from the narrative being offered by the mainstream American news media and other outside observers?
We in Portland have been dealing with right-wing extremists and police abuse for a long time. Portland has experience with the likes of right-wing extremist groups such as Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys. This is not new to us.
I would go out to protests and see how the political violence is not a result of the breakdown in the monopoly of violence held by the police. The political violence was a result of theProud Boys and the police effectively acting as two different elements of the same side. It wasn’t that the police had lost the monopoly of violence. It was the police were shooting us in order to allow the Proud Boys to march through the city without proper permits.
Most mainstream news media coverage of the protests which have taken place here in Portland, recently and before, totally fail to acknowledge or even fathom the police involvement in the rise of the far right in this community. That failure has cascaded to the point that we are now at a point where the press is painting the current crisis as some type of grudge match between the feds and the anarchists. In fact, the protest movement is a very diverse group of people — especially by Portland standards — who are coming out night after night and making extraordinarily clear demands and being absolutely brutalized in the streets every night.
What too many reporters in many cases are trying to do is figure out how to resolve the situation, rather than understanding it and properly explaining to the public what is really happening and the context for it. By doing so, too many reporters are creating false equivalencies regarding the various forces at play here in Portland.
What does Portland exemplify, in terms of the protests and the Trump’s regime’s reaction?
It is an example of Donald Trump attempting to rise to the level of a right-wing political strongman. Donald Trump is using classic authoritarian tactics that one does not often see in a healthy democracy. Donald Trump is deliberately undermining the Constitution by using federal law to circumvent local governments’ control over their police forces.
Trump and William Barr’s de facto secret police are literally disappearing people off the streets of Portland and in other parts of the country where the Democratic Party is in power. How do you explain what is happening to people who do not live in those communities? Who are not being targeted by Trump and his henchmen?
The specific federal forces involved are BORTAC — the Border Patrol Tactical Unit — and the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and others, under the coordination of the Department of Homeland Security. BORTAC have been in Portland shooting at people and launching tear gas. BORTAC is not trained for crowd or riot control. They are trained to engage in raids against migrants and to separate children from their mothers. That is what BORTAC does. They pride themselves on being the most militarized branch and group of the U.S. law enforcement community. BORTAC members are extreme Trump supporters. What is happening in Portland and other parts of the country is the border closing in on the citizens of the United States.
BORTAC is loyal to Donald Trump and that’s why he is using them.He’s not using them because they’re the most skilled and adept at riot and crowd control management. That also explains why there are so many incidents of people being shot in the face and otherwise abused here in Portland and other places where BORTAC and other such forces are being deployed by the Trump administration.They don’t know what they’re doing at all.
BORTAC is being used because Trump feels that they are his most loyal forces. That is fully in keeping with the tactics of authoritarian leaders who cultivate secret police whose main function is to serve as the government leader’s private force, one that operates outside of any restraints such as internal review.
The [former] Chilean dictatorship is explicitly supported by Trump’s own supporters, who wear T-shirts that say, “Right-wing death squad” and “Pinochet did nothing wrong.”The American mainstream news media is far too charitable with its narrative that “Trump is playing to his base.”
During the recent protests in Portland, were there moments where you feared that the federal forces were going to start shooting the crowd with lethal rounds?
The fear is very real and it’s constant. The federal forces have assault rifles. They are loaded with live rounds. There are protesters who were throwing fireworks and things of that sort at the courthouse. What if one of the feds has an itchy trigger finger? What if a firework explodes and they then open fire on an entire group of unarmed people?
Trump and their defenders and other apologists will just say, “Well, these poor agents have been overworked for 60 days and look at all the things that have been thrown at them” and so on and so forth. We know what the narrative will be. All a person can do when protesting is to act accordingly and stay focused.
You have been documenting what are now almost 500 attacks, acts of intimidation, vehicular assaults, shootings and other threats by Trump supporters and other members of the right against Black Lives Matter protests. What do we know?
I have never seen this amount of anti-left vigilantism from the right. During the first year of Barack Obama’s administration, the Tea Party was huge, and they mobilized with events all over the country. There were also armed protests in opposition to Obamacare. But those right-wing protesters were not coming out to confront and intimidate a much smaller group of anti-racists. Of course, those anti-Obama Tea Party and anti-health-care type protesters were extremely racist and a breath away from being fascists, but there was not that same energy and menace that we are seeing today.
The idea of these right-wing protesters and militia types being “anti-government” — again, a narrative circulated by the mainstream American news media — is very uncritical, a total misnomer. They are really pro-government. They are entirely in favor of the United States government as controlled by Donald Trump. Their claim to be “libertarians” is a joke.
Those right-wing militias and others sympathetic to them are arming in opposition to Democrats, liberals and progressives.
Right-wing extremists and other terrorists, including white supremacists and neo-Nazis, are also coordinating at times with the police.
They actually say that they are at the protests to “protect the police.” Think about that claim: They are “anti-government” vigilantes who promise that they are trying to protect the police. In essence, these right-wing militias and the like are American citizens who believe it is their role not to become police, but to guard the police. Such a claim is ludicrous.It is a paramilitary force. These right-wing forces are coordinating and positioning themselves to be able to launch a coup against American democracy and the Democratic Party, if the latter gains control of the presidency and government.
The closest parallel with what we are seeing with Trump’s movement would be the “massive resistance” by white people against racial integration in the South during the civil rights movement. I am of the opinion that the United States has not seen such a mobilization of violent, far-right forces to this extent since the 1960s.
Recently, a Trumpist and right-wing militia supporter traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin and involved himself in the protests there. He apparently shot three people, killing two of them. He crossed state lines illegally with a weapon he was not allowed to own. He was only a teenager, and was radicalized online into right-wing extremism. He is now being valorized by the right-wing media machine. Trump has defended this young man as a hero who was fighting against “criminals” and “looters.” This apparent killer now has hundreds of thousands of dollars pledged to his defense.
Trump has defended Kyle Rittenhouse with the claim he was firing in “self-defense.” In essence, Donald Trump supports the right-wing vigilante movement, which represents the disintegration of the rule of law.
We are witnessing an erosion of democratic norms in this country by Republicans. They accept breaking the law as being viable if it supports “traditional values” — meaning racism. As a practical matter, Donald Trump is spearheading the movement of the Republican Party into a full-on violent racist organization that encourages vigilantism.
In terms of engaging in the worst type of “both-sides-ism” and false equivalencies that helped Trump win and now keep power, the American mainstream news media is now advancing a “mutual combat” narrative in its coverage of Trump’s supporters and the violence in Portland last weekend. How does that narrative contradict what really happened in Portland?
The “mutual combat” framing is inane, legally a non-starter, and obviously supportive of the aggressive party, which is typically the Trump supporters. Their strategy is to provoke fights and then call for “law and order” intervention from a corrupt president.
Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibsonhas not been leading protests in Portland for a long time. He is a marginal figure, but the American news media has suddenly selected him and lifted him up for no apparent reason other than that he participated in an aggressive and bellicose Trump “caravan” last week during which right-wing vigilantes tried to run people over with their trucks, shot protesters and bystanders with paintball guns, and used pepper spray to attack people.
Should Black Lives Matter, antifascist and other human rights and social justice supporters stop protesting in order to deny Trump’s supporters and other right-wing hooligans a narrative that could hurt Joe Biden nd the the Democrats? In essence, should they make a tactical withdrawal to deny Trump a strategic victory, because of how events will likely be distorted by the media to his advantage?
I will not say what protesters should or shouldn’t do. I do not think what they choose to do or not do will matter much. What is significant is that the far right will deepen its insurgency against the left the more that Donald Trump falters and as he continues demanding “law and order.”
The left would be remiss to engage them on this level. The left is not in the streets to spark a civil war or escalate violent encounters to the point of breaking civil society into protracted sectarian warfare. The left is in the streets to make life better for ordinary people, and to present a version of the future that would be better and more prosperous for everyone. The more the left maintains its sanity against overwhelming odds, the more the right’s paranoia and hysteria will marginalize it in American society. This will create new spaces for progressive causes and movements.
What do you want to warn the American people about? What do you think happens next?
I am worried about crackdowns by Donald Trump and his forces against their direct enemies. This would involve dragging Democrats in front of kangaroo courts and starting to criminalize dissent such that the average American who has a bumper sticker or other affiliation with the Democratic Party or liberal or progressive causes becomes a target for Trump’s zealots.I worry that Trump will find some way to round up the leaders of the Democratic Party and put them in jail or execute them.
That is the future that right-wing conspiracists such as the QAnon people want. They are the crowd that Donald Trump is signaling to. I do not believe that there is much stopping Donald Trump from following through on his extreme impulses. At this point Donald Trump is desperate. If Trump wins again it will just be more fuel on the fire for his followers. The right wing will follow through on his cues and start attacking regular people, not just protesters, who they believe are Democrats.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-start-a-civil-war
wa mo
in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech, Barack Obama said: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.” If it was true then, it certainly isn’t true now. We are a nation on the edge of an increasingly hot civil war, one in which white supremacists are invading American cities, fomenting violence, and the overtly racist president they support sees the violence as benefiting him politically.
For the last two decades at least, Democrats have labored under the notion that if they were just reasonable enough, they could heal sharpening political divides in America. Meanwhile, Republicans spent the same time period inflaming every cultural resentment they could, maximizing racist, sexist and homophobic resentments among primarily white men. Republicans worked overtime to try to set urban and exurban populations against one another, disempowering and disenfranchising city dwellers through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
Donald Trump added kerosene onto the flaming bonfire built by Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes. He won the GOP primary not be being something radically different, but by accurately reflecting the existing dispositions of the Republican base. He embodies their ethos heart and soul, and they reward him with intense loyalty even as the economy begins to collapse and 180,000 Americans die in a pandemic he has ignored.
Many like David Neiwert have long predicted this would end in violence, but were largely dismissed. Conservatives are now both more desperate and more cocksure than ever before. As more Americans started living in cities, as the racial complexion of the nation diversified, as young people locked out of housing, trapped in debt and forced into dead-end jobs realized the need for a radical rethinking of the social and economic contract, and as a larger percentage of white people went to college and by extension became increasingly inoculated from the very worst forms of bigotry, the hold of conservative elements over the country has weakened. The Right has lost the culture war. American corporations, solicitous of the economic patronage of younger trendsetters and growing families, have established ever more left-leaning branding (at least on social and environmental matters.)
at the same time, however, political structures designed to empower the minority of conservatives in America to rule over its liberal majority are maintaining an apartheid-style government. The electoral college has put a conservative in the White House twice in the last two decades despite losing the popular vote, and threatens to do so again. The Senate majority belongs to conservatives who nonetheless control mostly rural states with a minority of the U.S. population, and the presence of the filibuster makes real change all but impossible even if Democrats were to retake the chamber. Gerrymandering ensures that the House of Representatives and state legislatures are stacked in favor of exurban dwellers and conservatives, with the result that even when Democrats do attain victory, those legislators are perforce more moderate than the majority of the Democratic base. And, of course, widespread voter suppression maximizes the disenfranchisement of urban progressives. Protected by these structures and with Donald Trump as president, conservatives feel that they are empowered to rule regardless of what majoritarian democracy would suggest.
The protests against police violence are reflective of this broader trend. Most police do not live in the cities they serve. They tend to be extremely culturally conservative and out of touch with the values of the taxpayers who fund them. In New York City, one of the nation’s most progressive enclaves where the president no longer dares to tread, the police union defiantly endorsed Donald Trump. Police violence against racial minorities has been a longstanding problem for decades, and one that has started to receive national attention through the diligent efforts of activists and through the presence of ubiquitous video technology to capture actions that in years past would have been sanitized in one-sided police reports. But it’s also the reality that in the age of rightwing radicalization, a large segment of the police have come more than ever to see themselves as occupying warrior forces in cities whose culture is threatening and alien to them. And the citizens of those cities know it and feel it– as psychological torment, legal harassment, financial hardship from court costs, and as scars on their bodies.
Protests in this context are inevitable. And why not? The people of America’s cities have a right to demand action from their city leaders. It’s a problem for America’s cities to sort out, as citizens demand that their representatives fear their political power as much as they do that of the police organizations.
But conservative white supremacist extremists are not content to allow that to play out. An empowered urban citizenry is a direct threat to their power, an acceleration of their loss of control. The “Boogaloo” movement wants to instigate a civil war along largely racial lines precisely to settle accounts before they suffer any further cultural or demographic declines.
So a few days ago a radicalized Trump-supporting teenager drove across state lines armed for a violent confrontation against protests, and murdered two people and injured a third. He did so after being welcomed by local police, given water, and ignored when he attempted to surrender. He is being celebrated in right-wing circles for doing so, and so-called “Christian” groups are funding his legal defense.
Yesterday, convoys of out-of-town trucks and SUVs bearing Trump flags stormed into Portland with the intent of creating confrontation. They allegedly rolled through groups of protesters in their vehicles, shooting projectiles and pepper spray into the crowds. In the ensuing violence, one of the far-right Trump supporters was shot and killed.
The Portland murderer should, of course, be brought to justice. There is no excuse for deadly violence. But all of this is happening because white supremacists are invading American cities with the express intent of starting a civil war. President Trump sees them as “very fine people” who are on his side. He sees the violence as politically beneficial, a useful cudgel against Democratic nominee Joe Biden–even though the violence is happening while Trump himself is president, not Biden.
Trump’s election theme is that Americans won’t be safe in a Biden presidency. The opposite is true. Americans won’t be safe as long as a white supremacist president is leading a movement of bigots to incite a civil war, and attempting to ensure that the majority of Americans with cosmopolitan, egalitarian values remain politically disenfranchised and under the thumb of those who fear and despise them.
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Portland mayor rips Trump: ‘It’s you who have created the hate and the division’
Aldous Pennyfarthing / Daily KosAugust 31, 2020
Somehow Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler got hold of my bile duct and squeezed out all my personal feelings about Donald Trump like it was a very unfunny whoopee cushion. After…
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stokes violence then sez only he can stop THOSE PPL:
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trumps-signal-to-his-followers-is-clear-violence-and-chaos-are-my-only-hope/
no twt vid link
prez trump’s signal to his followers is clear: Violence and chaos are my only hope
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 31, 2020
President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.
He repeatedly insulted and mocked Joe Biden, of course, and Portland, Oregon Mayor Ted Wheeler will undoubtedly have to change his phone number after the president of the United States posted it on Twitter so his followers could call and demand his resignation.
He also showed support for one of his fans in Wisconsin:
[]
It was a manic tweet spree and one that couldn’t have show the president’s state of mind any more clearly. Biden has said Trump is “rooting for violence,” and I don’t think anyone can reasonably argue with that.
In fact, Trump’s surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News’ Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselorKellyanne Conway’s assertion that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.” Lara answered, “Well, I think it paints a very clear picture.” She might as well have said, “You go, boys!”
On CNN on Sunday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., agreed with Trump that the shootings by a 17-year-old Trump fan last Tuesday night in Kenosha were understandable:[]
What the president did was he offered to surge manpower and resources so the violence could end. The governor did not accept that that day, that night tragically two people lost their lives because citizens took matters into their own hands. I’m not for vigilantism. I’m not sure that’s what was happening. People felt, because the governor — local officials were looking for help.The governor did not accept the help, and so there was not the resolve to end the rioting, and so people took matters into their own hands, and that’s what ended up happening. People die.
Johnson is confused about everything, as usual. Trump publicly berated Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers for failing to call in the National Guard hours after Evers had already done so, telling his followers that Evers wasn’t protecting the city. Johnson basically said that people felt they needed to take matters into their own hands because the president had lied to them and told them the governor wasn’t protecting them. Yet somehow he’s against vigilantism. Everything about that is a grotesque inversion of anything one could call “law and order.”
Trump was at it again later on Sunday, tweeting in response to a press conference by Wheeler, the Portland mayor. Trump called him a “dummy” and ranted on, saying, “He would like to blame me and the federal government for going in, but he hasn’t seen anything yet. We have only been there with a small group to defend our U.S. courthouse, because he couldn’t do it.”
Conway’s little gaffe in which she admitted that the White House and the Trump campaign believe street violence is good for them illuminates the president’s fanning of the flames. He has finally grasped that he cannot unilaterally sending in a bunch of federal cops, as he did in Washington to stage his photo-op last June. Instead, he’s not-very-subtly signaling to his gun-toting fans that they are going to have to take action on their own if they hope to scare people into voting for him. Leave the propaganda to him, just ramp up the chaos.
He tweeted that MAGA “protesters” who came to Portland in a caravan on Saturday night were “Great Patriots!” and later explained why their behavior was understandable:
The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein wondered on Twitter whether “suburban voters look at these pictures and say, ‘yes, where I belong is in the same political coalition as men who crowd into pickup trucks w/guns, as in Bosnia 1998 or a Third World dictatorship?'” (Those huge flags flying behind them reminded me of men crowded “into pickup trucks w/guns,” as in news photographs of ISIS fighters.)
It’s a jarringly familiar sight, but it doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen in America before.
There was an actual shooting that night and someone died. It’s unclear what exactly happened. But it is very clear that this kind of confrontation is something that Trump and his henchmen are actively stoking for political gain.
As I wrote on Friday, this is hardly the first time Trump has deployed crude, racist fear-mongering. He’s been doing it for years, going all the way back to the full-page Central Park Five ad. If it isn’t marauding gangs of Black teenagers, it’s Muslim terrorists or Mexican rapists or left-wing anarchists. There’s always some bogeyman coming to get you.
The only thing he knows how to do is point a finger at “the other” and then promise people that he’s the only one who can save them. He feels confident that he’s got the troops to back him up, one way or the other. He gave an interview with Breitbart back in 2019 in which he made this explicit:
You know, the left plays a tougher game, it’s very funny. I actually think that the people on the right are tougher, but they don’t play it tougher. Okay? I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump — I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.
Yes, it would be very bad. The question is whether or not anyone will believe that Donald Trump is the man who can save America from all this mayhem he is creating. After all, he’s been promising to do that ever since he came down that elevator. Here he is at the 2016 Republican convention:
I guess that’s yet another promise he’ll fulfill after he makes America Great Again — Again.
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Late Saturday night, armed Trump supporters descended on Portland to confront anti-racist protesters in an incident that resulted in at least one fatal shooting.
According to The Daily Beast:
Portland Police confirmed on Twitter that the shooting is being investigated as a homicide. “On Saturday, August 29, 2020 at 8:46p.m., Portland Police officers heard sounds of gunfire from the area of Southeast 3rd Avenue and Southwest Alder Street. They responded and located a victim with a gunshot wound to the chest. Medical responded and determined that the victim was deceased,” a statement says. “No suspect information is being released at his time.”
Police have also not confirmed if the shooter or victim were related to the protests, but multiple videos on social media suggest that they were.
The event, held as the city enters its third month of protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, was ostensibly meant to counter the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that have been sweeping the nation and have at times been marred by violence. But the parade appeared to only fan the flames, just hours after the latest night of demonstrations in the city ended with a fire set outside a police union building and several arrests. By late Saturday, police made several more arrests as fights broke out between anti-racist protesters and members of the pro-Trump caravan. As tensions boiled over, the street became a crime scene after a man was shot. No details were immediately available on his condition.
Kevin Escobar, a counter-protester who witnessed the shooting, told The Daily Beast there was “a commotion in front of a car” before two shots rang out.
You can read the rest of The Daily Beast’s account here.
==
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/russian-propaganda-and-far-right-media-wildly-exaggerated-story-about-bible-burnings
no lnx vid many
russian propaganda and far-right media wildly exaggerated a story about Bible-burnings in Portland — and Fox News ran with it
There was no “stack of Bibles” being burned
WRITTEN BY ERIC KLEEFELD
PUBLISHED 08/12/20 10:39 AM EDT
screen grab]
Fox News and other right-wing media were aghast last week about a story from the ongoing protests and civil unrest in Portland, Oregon, in which a crowd supposedly burned a stack of Bibles as a widely seen political statement — which now turns out to have been a vastly exaggerated event, further enlarged and distributed by Russian propaganda.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that what actually occurred was that just a few individuals out of thousands present seemed to have used a single Bible, or possibly two Bibles, among other pieces of kindling to start a fire: “None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.”
The story about a supposed mass fire of Bibles originated, however, from the Kremlin-financed news channel RT, and was spread by its online video service Ruptly with a deceptively edited video.
Apart from the Ruptly videographer, only one other journalist — a local television reporter — heard about the Bible burning, and noted it with a single sentence in a lengthy report on that night’s protests. The story, by KOIN, the local CBS News affiliate, also reported that a group of women calling themselves Moms United for Black Lives Matter attempted to put out the fire — a detail not included in the Ruptly video, which was edited to string together a number of clips from the night. (A New York Times reporter had observed a truck offering free Bibles at the protests earlier that night, though it was not clear whether it provided the book that was burned.)
The Ruptly video was further tweeted by Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing Twitter personality based in Malaysia, who wrote: “Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland.” As the Times notes, Cheong was “wildly exaggerating what the Ruptly video showed.” There was no actual stack of Bibles being burned, let along a crowd of people bringing them to a bonfire for a public burning.
Nevertheless, his tweet was in turn picked up by American conservatives including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Donald Trump Jr.
“The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its most successful,” the Times wrote. “Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident, blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the United States or Canada or Europe spread it.”
For example, The Federalist ran an article on August 1, headlined “As They Turn To Burning Bibles, Portland Rioters Show Their True Colors.” The New York Post ran a piece headlined “Protesters burn Bible, American flag as tensions rise in Portland.”
And the story got plenty of pickup on Fox News.
On the August 2 edition of Fox & Friends Weekend, co-host Pete Hegseth discussed the Bible-burning story with a Republican congressional candidate in Oregon, and even tried to grill House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) after he compared police brutality against demonstrators to what was done to the civil rights marchers he remembered from the 1960s.
“Everyone’s for peaceful protests,” Hegseth said. “They’re burning Bibles in Portland, instead of holding them on the bridge like the peaceful protesters did in the 1960s. How do you make that comparison?”
“Well, I don’t know anything about burning Bibles,” Clyburn replied.
“That’s another thing that’s out there,” Hegseth said.
Video file
02:54
CitationFrom the August 2, 2020, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends Weekend
On the August 3 edition of The Daily Briefing, Fox personality Greg Gutfeld told anchor Dana Perino that this supposed Bible-burning event was an example of “cancel culture” on the left.
“The suppression of speech is now fully accepted,” Gutfeld said. “When we were laughing about the burning of books — it actually happened this week. They actually burned books. I believe they burned the Bible; it was either in Portland or Seattle. It didn’t get a lot of press, though, because you know, it was the Bible. But imagine if it was, like, an updated version of The Joy of Sex, then it would be leading CNN.”
Video file
02:50
CitationFrom the August 3, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Daily Briefing
And on that same day’s edition of Fox Business’ The Evening Edit, host Elizabeth MacDonald lambasted leading Democrats for “staying silent about this violence” in ongoing protests. She went on: “Now, outrage is coming in nationwide over protesters in Portland, Oregon, burning Bibles and an American flag, using that as kindling for bonfires outside the federal courthouse there.”
Video file
02:30
CitationFrom the August 3, 2020, edition of Fox Business' The Evening Edit
The next morning, on the August 4 edition of Fox & Friends, Fox Nation host Lawrence Jones told Hegseth: “Average-day Black people don’t believe in this stuff. I mean, it really should’ve got America’s attention when they started to burn Bibles.”
Video file
03:12
CitationFrom the August 4, 2020, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
And on the August 5 edition of The Evening Edit, MacDonald spoke with former pro football player Herschel Walker, and the two of them tied the burning of a Bible to the practice of current NFL players kneeling during the national anthem.
Video file
01:53
CitationFrom the August 5, 2020, edition of Fox Business' The Evening Edit
On that night’s edition of Fox Business’ Lou Dobbs Tonight, guest Robert Woodson not only agreed with the eponymous host’s description ofBlack Lives Matter as “a Marxist organization,” but he added that they “are breeding terrorists, and they’re making their intentions quite obvious now. … In Portland, Oregon, they just last night rioted, burned an American flag, and dumped a bunch of Bibles on the flames.”
Woodson also acknowledged that a group of Black Lives Matter-affiliated mothers doused the fire, but he claimed this as “highly symbolic” evidence that “Black America is waking up to their being used.” He also revived another trope — that the BLM movement is “hostile to the nuclear family,” which is really a right-wing myth meant to split support off from that movement through an anti-LGBTQ agenda.
Video file
02:39
CitationFrom the August 5, 2020, edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight
On the August 6 edition of Fox News’ The Five, Fox Nation’s Jones called the Bible-burning “the biggest dead giveaway” that other elements in the protests were “hijacking what most of us want, which is a conversation on race in America, and how we can move forward, one country, equal justice under the law. That’s not what they stand for; they’re using us as a shield — those are white anarchists in the middle of that street.”
Video file
01:14
CitationFrom the August 6, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Five
On that night’s edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host declared this event — along with the closing of churches as part of the coronavirus lockdowns — part of a supposed attack on Christianity in America.
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“They were allowed to burn a stack of Bibles in Portland, Oregon last weekend,” Tucker Carlson said. “Try that with a Quran and see how long you remain free — you'd be in prison immediately.”
Video file
05:41
CitationFrom the August 6, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
On the August 7 edition of Fox & Friends, co-host Ainsley Earhardt told New York City’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan: “You know, it saddens me when I see graffiti on the side of a church, or when you see images of people burning the Bible. And maybe as Christians, we haven’t done our part to teach them about Christ.”
Video file
01:36
CitationFrom the August 7, 2020, edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends
And later that day on Outnumbered, Jones further declared: “I would also note that one thing that should be a telling point for people. When you see people in the middle of the street burning Bibles, you should think, is that really what Black moms would support? Because in the Black community, the Bible is the center of everything in our life. This is not Black people doing this. These are people with their own agenda.”
Video file
02:37
CitationFrom the August 7, 2020, edition of Fox News' Outnumbered
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escalator, activ meas
https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/how-trump-is-once-again-colluding-with-russia/
no lnx twt
how Trump is once again colluding with Russia
Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly August 14, 2020
Almost two weeks ago, a story circulated that Portland protesters were burning Bibles and American flags. It spread via social media and was picked up by conservative outlets, such as the Washington Examiner. Of course, several Republican leaders joined the bandwagon.
tp kirk --> djt jr?]
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ted cruzretweet: This is who they are.
Ian Miles Cheong
@stillgray
Left-wing activists bring a stack of Bibles to burn in front of the federal courthouse in Portland. https://twitter.com/Shelldrayk/status/1289481822414413827/video/1
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don jr
Now we move to the book burning phase. I’m pretty sure ANTIFA doesn’t actually stand for what they say it stands for. Maybe just remove the anti part of them name and it’s perfect.
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tpkirk
BLM inc arsonists just burned a stack of Bibles in Portland
The activist media won’t report on this because it’s likely they support it
Our faith is under attack.
If you vote for Biden—you vote for Bible burnings
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Two reporters at the New York Times, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes, decided to look into the story and found Vladimir Putin’s fingerprints all over it. As is often the case with effective propaganda, this story contains a kernel of truth. Apparently, some group was handing out Bibles to protesters that night and one of them was used to start a fire. An American flag was also burned. But a local paper covering the protests that night devoted just one sentence to that story in a lengthy piece about what happened.
The video news agency connected to Russia Today (RT) was regularly streaming a live feed of the Portland protests. They edited the clip of the fire and made it the focal point of their protest coverage that night. Then, RT did an entire story about it. Social media took it from there and the next thing you know, outlets like the Washington Examiner were picking it up. Here is how Rosenberg and Barnes summarized the process:
The Russian technique is a kind of information laundering, akin to money laundering.Stories originate with Russian-backed news sites, some of them directly connected to Moscow’s spy agencies, officials and experts said. They are then picked up by Americans on social media or in domestic news outlets, and their origins quickly become obscured. Often, by the time a story reaches most of its American audience, there is little to indicate that it was created to fuel grievances and deepen political divisions.
Following Trump’s press briefing on Wednesday, Hunter Walker tracked down another example of Russia’s attempt to get their propaganda in the news. He wrote about the question OAN reporter Chanel Rion asked the president.
Rion: In the last hour or so, if you googled antifa.com. it would take you straight to Joe Biden’s website, his official campaign website. Odd situation. We don’t know who’s behind that. But it raises an interesting leadership question. Should Joe Biden, the Democrat party, Kamala Harris– should they publicly denounce the Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization?
Trump: They should. I think they’re afraid to. It’s– in my book it’s virtually a part of their campaign, Antifa. The Democrats act like, gee, I don’t know exactly what that is.
Take a look at Portland. Take a look at any place you want to take a look at, and they’re all over the place. They were here. [DC?]
Basically Rion gave Trump the opportunity to claim that Antifa is part of the Biden campaign—which is, of course, a blatant lie.
Walker looked into what actually happened with the antifa.com website. Once again, as Pelosi said, “all roads lead to Putin.”
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Records for “antifa.com” in the domain name database Whoisology.com show the site was registered in the Russian Federation from 2013 through last July.Starting last November, the site’s registration was moved to Panama, The website has always been anonymously registered and its owners could not be reached for comment.
Russia set up the antifa.com website and eventually redirected it to Biden’s campaign page, allowing the president to claim that the group was involved politically with Democrats. Of course, this raises the old question of whether this was all coordinated with the president or if Trump is simply taking advantage of Putin’s efforts. The same questions are raised about the role of OAN in these kinds of Russian propaganda efforts.
So there you have two examples of how Russia is currently interfering in the 2020 election to support the reelection of Donald Trump. One thing worth noting is that if these examples are reflective of their efforts, Vladimir Putin has calculated that his best bet is to inflame the so-called “culture wars,” something that has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for decades. The Bible burning story was especially useful for the Christian nationalists who want to scare their followers into thinking that, as Trump has suggested, Joe Biden is against God and the Bible.
It is important to keep in mind that the only reason we know about these Russian efforts is because some reporters put in the time to track down the story. Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has seen what our intelligence services know about Russian interference, said that the 2020 efforts “make Moscow’s past interference and nefarious actions look like child’s play.” But the Trump administration is keeping that information from the public, while the attorney general hypes the antifa story and puts all of his energy into accusing the Obama administration of “spying” into the Trump campaign. That strikes me as the definition of collusion.
==
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/portland-protesters-are-no-longer-being-banned-from-demonstrations-after-arrests/
no lnx
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
Federal defenders and prosecutors in Portland, Oregon, have teamed up to try to end a court practice of releasing arrested protesters only after they have agreed not to attend protests — a restriction that legal experts called a clear violation of the constitutional right to free assembly.
There are early signs that the effort is working. After the joint request, a federal magistrate judge released two protesters without including restrictions on their attendance at protests or other mass events — or imposing a blanket curfew on them during evening hours. The same magistrate, Jolie A. Russo, had signed some of the release orders since July 23 that included protest bans.
ProPublica reported Tuesday that at least 12 protesters who had been held on federal charges in recent days had been instructed not to attend “protests, rallies, assemblies, or public gathering” (in the words of one order) between their release from jail and their trials. While the Trump administration has repeatedly said its involvement in Portland is targeted at violence and property destruction rather than peaceful protest, many of the affected defendants were being charged with petty offenses, such as “failure to obey a lawful order.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in Oregon, Kevin Sonoff, notified ProPublica on Wednesday evening about the joint request.
Before ProPublica’s article, defendants had often been barred from going within five blocks of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse at any hour of the day and from leaving their homes at night. However, the orders signed Wednesday allow defendants to move freely in the city at night, although they are prohibited from going near the courthouse between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
The new restrictions are consistent with standard conditions of release before trials, according to experts, which often include “stay-away orders” preventing defendants from returning to the scene of the alleged crime.
The 12 defendants who were barred from protests between July 23 and July 27 will need to have modified release orders issued by the U.S. Pretrial Services, the office of the U.S. Courts that recommends release conditions.
Those modified orders are supposed to come out in the coming days, but ProPublica is not yet aware of any previously released protesters being told they are now free to protest.
The federal government deployed more than 100 agents of the Department of Homeland Security to Portland in early July to protect the federal courthouse from ongoing protests that had included some violence and property damage. State and local officials accused the federal government of overreach and blamed it for escalating tensions in the city.
On Wednesday, Oregon and DHS came to an agreement that cleared the path for federal officials to withdraw from the city in exchange for stepped-up enforcement by the state police.
Filed under:
Criminal Justice
Civil Rights
==
720 intercept
Air Force Special Operations Surveillance Plane Is Lurking Near Portland During Federal Crackdown
Sam Biddle
An Air Force surveillance plane designed to carry state-of-the-art sensors typically reserved for war zones has been circling above Portland.
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Portland, Questions Swirl Around Local Police’s Coordination With Federal Officers
Arun Gupta
Local politicians condemned federal police actions in Portland, but evidence is mounting that the Portland Police Bureau is coordinating with federal agents.
==
https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/heres-why-the-white-house-is-sending-stormtroopers-into-portland/
In one of the most alarming developments of Trump’s presidency, dozens of federal agents in full camouflage seized protesters and threw them into unmarked cars, taking them to locations unknown without specifying a reason for arrest. It appears that at least some of the agents involved belonged to the US Customs and Border Protection (colloquially known as Border Patrol), an organization that obviously has no business whatsoever conducted counterinsurgency tactics against peaceful American protesters in Portland, Oregon. Neither the mayor of Portland nor the governor of Oregon wanted them there; in fact, they specifically requested that they leave. And now a U.S. Attorney for the State of Oregon is calling for an investigation into the arrests, even as the Acting head of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, is vowing to ramp up these actions both in Portland and reportedly elsewhere.
Needless to say, this is a chilling step toward police state authoritarian rule in the United States, one that was presaged by Attorney General Barr’s approval of an pre-curfew assault on protesters instigated in Lafayette Square to clear the way for a presidential campaign photo op. Few took it seriously when leftist organizers were warning that the border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were being culturally and structurally converted into stormtroopers for the Trump regime, equally ready to be deployed against politically inconvenient American citizens as against undocumented immigrants seeking a better life. Those warnings should be heeded now.
We should not allow ourselves to become numb to this. It is helpful psychologically–even if tired and stale as a rhetorical device–to remind ourselves what the reactions would be if a Democrat were acting similarly. Imagine if President Obama had sent in in military-garbed federal stormtroopers to round up Tea Party protesters into unmarked cars, over the top of the objections of local governors and mayors. It’s unthinkable. It’s the sort of thing that drove bizarre right-wing conspiracy theories like Jade Helm, but that if any shred of them were true would instantly have embroiled the country in a civil war.
So why is Trump doing it?
many theories abound—none of them entirely convincing on their own, but all of them deeply disturbing. One explanation is that it’s a trial run for future police state actions, partly to push the window of the possible, partly to desensitize the public to further abuses, and partly to see precisely what they can get away with and what Americans will tolerate.
This is no doubt true to a certain extent, but the challenge is that it also carries enormous downside risk. If Trump doesn’t win re-election he has less than six months left in his presidency–hardly time enough for a deeply unpopular and divisive president to engineer a police state coup. And just as with the outrage in Lafayette Square, the mere action itself will likely make Trump even more unpopular with the few undecided voters who remain.
Another convergent explanation is that making a show of supposed toughness in conducting military counterinsurgency in Democratic-controlled cities that want no part of it will thrill Trump’s base. This is reasonable to assume, since Trump’s base takes no greater joy than in seeing authoritarian cruelty exercised against their political enemies. And it’s likely true, since Trump is obsessed with his base to the exclusion of all else beyond his own personal profit. But the problem is that almost everyone in the Trump campaign’s immediate orbit beyond the president himself knows that Trump must expand beyond his shrinking base to have any chance of winning re-election. The more Trump gives aging bigots dopamine hits, the more the rest of the country falls away from him. Camouflaged stormtroopers used against American citizens will almost certainly lose him more votes than he gains.
But there is a third explanation, simultaneously dumber and yet more convincing: the Fox News effect. Trump spends endless hours watching garbage cable television, specifically One America News (OAN) and Fox News. Judging from Trump’s tweets, his entire political universe revolves around Fox News–and, more recently, the even more bizarrely propagandistic OAN when even Fox News fails to adequately toe the line.
Ever since the beginning of the protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, Fox News has been portraying liberal American cities as hellscapes of violence in which the police and the Trump Administration played the role of hero against rampaging hordes. Most Americans, of course, didn’t see it that way. But if you live entirely in the Fox News bubble, then this narrative is as self-evident a truth as the rising of the sun in the east. Most recently, Fox News has been describing Portland in particular, in the words of former Media Matters for America contributor Oliver Willis, as if it were Baghdad circa 2003. This is not the case, of course. Crime rates in Portland have been on a steady decline for decades, with the last month being no significant exception. In fact, the worst Acting HHS Secretary Wolf could point to was literally a few instances of graffiti. No kidding.
But if Fox News were the sum of your reality, you would believe that emergency action needed to be taken before the residents started to erect a Thunderdome and the services of Snake Plisskenwould be required. You would send in the troops despite the potential cost out of a belief that relieved Americans would be desperately grateful for your embrace of “law and order” (even if it were heavy on the “order” and light on the “law.”) You would do whatever it took to bring the situation to heel, and figure the public approval would follow from the new Pax Trumpiana. After all, Fox News declared it must be so.
This last scenario is admittedly ridiculous. But it’s also likely closest to the truth. While figures like Stephen Miller no doubt have a laser focus on instituting an authoritarian apartheid regime to save white supremacist Republican rule the demographic tsunami preparing to overwhelm them, they are not the president. Donald Trump is. Trump is a man of impulse, not of plans. His head is not set on the next 20 years of power, but on tomorrow’s cable news ratings. The constructed reality of Fox News is his reality. The rest of the authoritarian project follows from there.
And that more than anything else likely explains why the president is precipitating a constitutional crisis by sending stormtroopers into Portland.
==
thehill
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Earl Blumenaur (D-Ore.) released a joint statement Saturday evening condemning what they said were "egregious abuses of power" after the Trump administration deployed federal officers to Portland amid protests.
“As our nation mourns the loss of our colleague and beloved civil rights leader John Lewis, we are again reminded of the immense power of peaceful protest in the fight against racial injustice and police brutality," the congressional duo said.
"Yet time and time again, the Trump Administration shows its lack of respect for the dignity and First Amendment rights of all Americans."
Lewis, the longtime representative from Georgia, died Friday at the age of 80. A civil rights legend and champion of voter rights, Lewis was the youngest keynote speaker at the March on Washington and led activists across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala. on "Bloody Sunday."
Protests have become widespread across the country following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May.
While protesting has lessened in some cities, demonstrations have still been going strong in Portland, dominating the city's downtown area for well over a month. The demonstrations have, at times, led to damage of federal buildings, prompting Chad Wolf — acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security — to send federal officers to the Rose City in recent weeks.
Wolf in a statement Thursday described protesters as a "violent mob," though protests that night were reported to be mainly peaceful. The acting secretary was also on the ground Thursday to assess the damage to federal property in-person.
Oregon lawmakers have been against the federal intervention.
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) tweeted Thursday that he made it clear to Wolf that "we do not need or want" assistance from federal officers.
"I told Acting Secretary Wolf that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets," Gov. Kate Brown (D) also tweeted Thursday. "His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes. He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way."
Reports Friday of federal officers, clad in unmarked military fatigues and driving unmarked vans, picking up and detaining protestors on raised more red flags and drew strong pushback from the state's congressional delegation.
Blumenauer, Sens. Jeff Merkley (D) and Ron Wyden (D) and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D) asked Friday for the events to be thoroughly reviewed by DHS.
- [Federal agents deployed to Portland did not have training in riot...
- House Democrats ask watchdogs to probe federal crackdown on protests
“DHS and DOJ are engaged in acts that are horrific and outrageous in our constitutional democratic republic,” Merkley said.
“First, they are deploying paramilitary forces with no identification indicating who they are or who they work for. Second, these agents are snatching people off the street with no underlying justification. Both of these acts are profound offenses against Americans," he said.
In their statement Saturday, Pelosi and Blumenauer said that the Democratically-controlled House would not tolerate the Trump administration's actions.
“We live in a democracy, not a banana republic," they said. "We will not tolerate the use of Oregonians, Washingtonians – or any other Americans – as props in President Trump’s political games. The House is committed to moving swiftly to curb these egregious abuses of power immediately.”
==
Oregon
State law passed in 1987: "Oregon Revised Statute 181.850, which prohibits law enforcement officers at the state, county or municipal level from enforcing federal immigration laws that target people based on their race or ethnic origin, when those individuals are not suspected of any criminal activities.[169][170]
- Beaverton city council passed a resolution in January 2017 stating, in part, "The City of Beaverton is committed to living its values as a welcoming city for all individuals ...regardless of a person's ... immigration status" and that they would abide by Oregon state law of not enforcing federal immigration laws.[171]
- Corvallis[172]
- Portland[173]
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Border Patrol as Trump's Secret Police?
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History and current events point in that direction.
John Stoehr
Feb 17
Image result for bortac
A long time ago, before September 11, 2001, the right-most flank of the Republican Party tolerated the establishment’s compromise with racial liberalism, by which I mean “the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but secon…
? PreviousNext ?
© 2020 John Stoehr. See privacy and terms
Publish on Substack
==
A long time ago, before September 11, 2001, the right-most flank of the Republican Party tolerated the establishment’s compromise with racial liberalism, by which I mean “the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s,
10:46 AM · Feb 17, 2020·Twitter Web App
- to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry—in other words, white people’s definition of racism.” (I’m using here
nils_gilman’s helpful definition.)
The Collapse of Racial Liberalism - The American Interest
Both the Right and the Left have dropped the pretense of racial liberalism, and the country faces a choice.
the-american-interest.com
John Stoehr's Editorial Board
@johnastoehr
- After 9/11, that basic consensus began to break down. The GOP’s right-most flank refused to recognize its political legitimacy, even though it was white-centered.
4. They refused, because they believed the basic consensus on race, and on other areas of political difference, permitted “radical Islamic terrorists” to attack God’s country. The Republican elites were no longer partners to be tolerated. They were now the enemy.
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5. While the rest of America focused on terrorism, the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the endless “war on terror,” the right-most flank of the Republican Party focused on “illegal immigration.” This is not as random as it appears.
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6. Brown people threatened America’s covenant with God. Brown people were “breaching” the southern border. That these brown people were worlds apart was a distinction with zero difference.
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7. The Republican establishment, by which I mean people wielding real power, did not realize how diametrical the GOP’s right-most flank had become until after 2004. George W. Bush won reelection in part using this strategy—**scare the bejesus out of everyone**.
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8. The liberals were coming for your guns. The gays and feminists were coming for your sons and daughters. The heathens and atheists were for coming for your God. After the election, Bush thought he had political capital to burn. Then things changed.
- The cause of change was partly Bush’s failure in Iraq. But failing was not what most polarized the right-most flank of the Republican Party.
10.What most polarized them was President Bush stoking their white rage and then turning around to try privatizing Social Security and reforming federal immigration law. To put it one way, they wanted freedom and “entitlements,” but only for them.
- Put quite another way, the government was trying to “take away their money” and “give it to the illegals.” After 2007, when both reform attempts failed, Bush was a lame duck. The GOP became something else.
- We didn’t know what it would become until after the 2008 election. And even then, racial liberalism still prevailed. No one, not even the GOP’s right-most flank, dared use explicit language with respect to Barack Obama commonplace in public discourse prior to 1970. )
- John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 were committed to racial liberalism.) But the upward pressure was building. Obama’s victory, according to
@ArthurGoldwag
(a subscriber to this newsletter!), brought “hidden feelings to light”:
- AG: Viral, Photoshopped images of President Obama in an African witch doctor’s getup, of Mrs. Obama with her face morphed into an ape’s, of watermelons growing on the White House lawn, and...
==
'Government tyranny' is finally here, but this time it's being met with crickets from the Republicans
John Stoehr
Jul 17
I have been listening to “conservatives” blast government tyranny since I was an 8-year-old boy watching the “CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.” Every time liberals want to use government to address a problem, from enforcing civil rights laws, to protecting the environment to lifting the burden of expensive health insurance, “conservatives” have found a way to equating the federal government to evil.
Well, now we have this evidence that it was all a con.
Naveed Jamali
I’ve been speaking to fed sources about this. They tell me agents are investigating “attacks” on the Fed courthouse, and that gives them jurisdiction. But I have many questions. A thread.
July 17th 2020
Hamed Aleaziz
@Haleaziz
In this interview, Miller says the administration is planning to make an announcement next week on how they will use the "authorities" of the federal government to come to the "rescue" of "these long suffering citizens" re: cities like Portland.
Lou Dobbs @LouDobbs
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Law and Order President: Stephen Miller says there will be a major announcement next week on how @POTUS will use his full authority to rescue long-suffering citizens of Democrat-run cities. #MAGA #AmericaFirst #Dobbs https://t.co/JzEGmjmVX3
July 17th 2020
I’ll have more to say about this later, but for now, please don’t given them the benefit of the doubt. State’s rights and local control only matter when it’s good for them politically, and by “them” I don’t mean the normal people of the United States.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/donald-trumps-secret-police-portland-protesters-fear-an-unmarked-occupying-army-clamping-down-on-basic-rights
no lnx twt pix
Portland, Oregon has had numerous protests and demonstrations since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the vast majority of which have been nonviolent. But some protesters have experienced detentions by federal law enforcement even though they were never charged with anything, and the detentions — according to Washington Post reporter Katie Shepherd — are raising civil liberties concerns.
One such detention in Portland, Shepherd reports, involved 29-year-old activist Mark Pettibone — who decided to run after some men wearing military fatigues emerged from an unmarked gray minivan. Pettibone told the Post that when he first saw the men, he feared they were far-right extremists who wanted to harass protesters. Unable to get away from them, Pettibone surrendered and was detained, searched, taken to a federal courthouse and kept in a holding cell.
Pettibone told the Post, “I was terrified. It seemed like it was out of a horror/sci-fi, like a Philip K. Dick novel. It was like being preyed upon.”
The activist also told the Post: “I have a pretty strong philosophical conviction that I will not engage in any violent activity. I keep it mellow and try to document police brutality and try to show up for solidarity.”
Although Pettibone was released by the federal officers and was never charged with anything, civil libertarians are criticizing the random detentions taking place in Portland.
“Arrests require probable cause that a federal crime had been committed — that is, specific information indicating that the person likely committed a federal offense, or a fair probability that the person committed a federal offense,” Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Post. If the agents are grabbing people because they may have been involved in protests, that’s not probable cause.”
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon has been even more vehement in his comments. On Thursday, the senator tweeted:...shot in head
Over the weekend, 26-year-old Donavan La Bella, described by Oregon Live reporter Ryan Nguyen as “a regular and nonviolent presence at protests,” was shot in the head with an impact weapon.
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Wolf, on Friday, tweeted an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show in which he discussed the protests in Portland and said, “We’re not going to have theseviolent anarchists who show up about the same time every night for a series of hours…. It’s time that the local leaders here publicly condemn what the violent anarchists are doing.”
But the vast majority of Portland protesters have not been “violent anarchists.” And although President Trump has been praising the actions of federal law enforcement in Portland, Jann Carson — interim executive director of the Oregon ACLU — told the Post, “Usually, when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping. Protesters in Portland have been shot in the head, swept away in unmarked cars, and repeatedly teargassed by uninvited and unwelcome federal agents. We won’t rest until they are gone.”
Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, similarly, argued that the presence of federal officers in Portland is doing more harm than good. Hardesty, in an official statement, declared: “I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland’s streets to go home. Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger.”
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/trumps-most-fanatical-right-wing-followers-are-going-ballistic-over-impeachment-and-talking-of-civil-war
no lnx twit graf
Trump’s most fanatical right-wing followers are going ballistic over impeachment — and talking of ‘civil war’
Written by David Neiwert / Daily Kos December 27, 2019
The most fanatical right-wing followers of Donald Trump have been warning for some time that any attempt to impeach the man in the Oval Office would result in a second American civil war that will produce large amounts of bloodshed as they rise up with their weapons caches and begin murdering liberals.
Now that he actually has been impeached, they’re going even more ballistic.
“He’s not gonna be removed. He’s not gonna be removed. He’s not gonna be removed,” one attendee at Trump rally told a CBS reporter. When the reporter asked, “Do you feel confident in that?” he responded, “My .357 Magnum is comfortable with that. End of story.”
Rep. Louie Gohmert—who has talked up civil war on several previous occasions—went ballistic on the floor of the House last week, warning that impeachment meant the end of America: “This is a travesty. We’re in big trouble,” Gohmert huffed, adding, “Now it’s lowered even further, the bar. [Impeachment] will be used for political battles and this country’s end is now in sight. I hope I don’t live to see it. This is an outrage.”
Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins was even more unhinged in his similar rant last week: “They fear the true will of we the people. They are deep established D.C. They fear, they call this Republican map flyover country. They call us deplorables. They fear our faith, they fear our strength, they fear our unity, they fear our vote, and they fear our president. We will never surrender our nation to career establishment D.C. politicians and bureaucrats. Our republic shall survive this threat from within. American patriots shall prevail.”
The real action, however, has been on social media, where Facebook and Twitter posts eagerly anticipating the violent uprising to preserve Trump’s presidency have been as common as dirt.
Ex-Navy SEAL Jonathan Gilliam, for instance, used Gohmert’s comments as a springboard on Twitterfor open discussion of a shooting civil war in which conservatives begin killing liberals for attempting to remove Trump: “Like so many, I see exactly what he sees. Therefor [sic] it is time we begin considering the possibility of civil war.”
“I am counting down the days until the vigilantes take to the streets. I dread the inevitable conflict that is coming but will do whatever I can I can to support the fight against the Left,” one commenter replied. Another answered: “lol it would be a short Civil War II. The vast majority of the peace officers, military personnel, and gritty hard-working 2nd Amendment loving Americans are on our side. The snowflakes have no idea about the sleeping bear they are about to awaken.”
[pix ReneHollan.PNG]
A fairly typical response among far-right extremists has been to pledge utter fealty to Trump, even unto death. Rene Hollan, a Monroe, Wash., man who is a regular participant in events organized by Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys in the Pacific Northwest, posted a screed (later removed by Facebook) vowing that he would even detonate a nuclear bomb in a major liberal city:
As a naturalized U.S. citizen who swore the Oath of Allegiance, if President Trump orders me to drive a truck with a nuke into a city with Facebook offices or an illegal sanctuary city, and detonate it, killing myself, everyone in the city, and rendering it a sheet of glass, it would be my honor to comply.
Another Northwest far-right figure, “documentarian” Brandon Farley—long a player in the Portland-area “patriot” scene—invited neo-Nazis to start killing his critics: “Hey Atomwaffen, will you please take note of this and act accordingly?” he tweeted.
Farley3.png
A couple of days later, Farley discovered that his name came up in Twitter searches for Atomwaffen, and expressed his confusion.
Social scientist Caroline Orr collected a large cache of these kinds of comments on Twitter, noting, “It’s easy to laugh at the keyboard warriors in the mix, but there are definitely extremists using this opportunity to try to bring about social and political upheaval by issuing calls for violence.”
“Lock N Load, PATRIOTS, the demonratsjust told us what they want for Christmas: #CivilWar2,” wrote one. “Let’s make the demon rats live on the streets of their own districts!”
“ALERT!! If the Democrats impeach OUR PRESIDENT WE NEED TO HAVE A CIVIL WAR,” tweeted another. “America as we have known it will be gone and the squad will be in charge of us. I shiver thinking of it. A civil war will be the only way to get America back as we remember it.”
Of course, it’s always worth remembering that this talking point has been deliberately promoted by Russian intelligence agenciesas part of their campaign to undermine American democracy. A Justice Department affidavit released in 2018 noted that the “civil war” meme is being directly encouraged by Internet Research Agency, the Russian-financed disinformation agency that purchased 3,500 ads on Facebook during the 2016 campaign with the intent of undermining American political consensus. The affidavit describes directions given to IRA’s writers.
Forcefully support Michael Savage’s point of view with competence and honesty. Savage made it clear that any attempt to remove Trump is a direct path to a civil war in the United States. Name those who oppose the president and those who impede his efforts to implement his pre-election promises. Focus on the fact that the Anti-Trump Republicans: a) drag their feet with regard to financing the construction of the border wall; b) are not lowering taxes; c) slander Trump and harm his reputation (bring up McCain); d) do not want to cancel Obamacare; e) are not in a hurry to adopt laws that oppose the refugees coming from Middle Eastern countries entering this country. Summarize that in case Republicans will not stop acting as traitors, they will bring upon themselves forces of civil retribution during the 2018 elections.
Over at Trump-friendly Russia Today, op-ed writer Robert Bridge bolstered the civil war talk with a piece headlined “Democrats’ push to impeach Trump is just the latest chapter of US Civil War 2.0,” in which he concluded, “What is happening now in Washington DC between the Republicans and Democrats is just mere dress rehearsal for far more disasters down the road. I just hope the costumes don’t end up being blue and gray, once again.”
==
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ALT-RIGHT EXEMPLARSGrand jury declines to indict two people accused of assaulting a man for wearing a MAGA hatMARK FRAUENFELDER
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/man-in-a-maga-hat-gets-punched-in-portland-and-plays-victim-but-his-story-is-full-of-holes/
no lnx
Man in a MAGA hat gets punched in Portland and plays victim — but his story is full of holes
Written by Walter Einenkel / Daily Kos August 28, 2019
Portland media reported Sunday that two bar patrons were arrested, after a confrontation with MAGA-hat wearing Luke Lenzner left Lenzner with a black eye—but his story continues to fall apart. The Trump supporter told KPTV that he was out having a nice calm evening on a date night with his wife, when everybody suddenly started being mean to him, just because he was wearing a MAGA hat. Things escalated from verbal to physical when the couple went outside, according to Lenzner, “I got mobbed by everybody that was in that bar outside. People came from the inside out—just circled me and my wife.”
Security footage didn’t exactly prove Mr. MAGAmacho’s account to be true, but he does seem to have been assaulted by a couple—22-year-old Leopold A. Hauser and 23-year-old Adebisi A. Okuneye—who Lenzner had a conflict with during his and his wife’s brief time inside of Growler’s Taproom. The report says that Mr. and Mrs. MAGAromance went into the bar, but last call was already over and the bar was closing.
An affidavit says that Lenzner’s wife told her husband to wear the hat around to a bunch of bars, in order to see how people responded. Sort of a classic MAGAdatenight type of activity. At the time, Mr. MAGAmushybrain told KATU that “We have never felt so much hate in Portland as long as we lived here it [sic] really sad that people think they can harass people because of a hate there’s so much hate in this city and it’s sad.” According to that same affidavit, Okuneye said that Lenzner came out of the bar and yelled, “B—- do you like my hat?”She said she was pulled away, and did not know who punched Mr. MAGAafterhours.
Then, on Tuesday, new footage appeared, showing Mr. Lenzner in a yelling fight with patrons at a different bar, the Vern, just a couple of hours before he got a black eye at Growlers. In the video, Mr. MAGAdranktoomuch screams “You live in America, right? I serve for fucking you!” Mr. MAGAuniverse is then calmly asked to leave. The bar employee even says “please.”
He drops another F-bomb, while others talk about wanting to de-escalate the situation. Mr. MAGAmazing then yells “Come on outside, see what happens,” to which a couple of people reply, “No one wants to fight,” and “Nobody wants to fight you, dude.” People clap after he leaves. Later, of course, Mr. MAGAfantastic did find someone who was willing to “come on outside,” to “see what happens,” in response to his classic MAGA display of self-aggrandizing cowardice and victimhood
In the least surprising turn of events, it was soon revealed that Mr. Lenzner didn’t serve in our armed forces, any more than his revered Donald Trump has. It’s not necessarily a case of “stolen valor,” the term used for frauds pretending they are decorated military folks, but it’s the MAGA-low level equivalent. Mr. MAGAmightymilitaryman told KATU that he “regretted” saying that and blamed it on being in the heat of the moment. Let’s think about that for the briefest of moments. And … [coughs] … we’re done.
Michael Radosevich, who shot the video at the Vern, explained to the Oregonian that he rolled camera because the moment Mr. MAGAmindinghisownbusiness came into the bar, Radosevich knew he was looking for a fight. “It’s not adult behavior to go out and troll people. And that’s all this was. One giant troll.”
When asked about his outburst at the Vern, Mr. MAGAstorychanging told KATU that he and his wife had been sitting at the end of the bar, just minding their own business, when someone placed a toilet seat cover on his head. After reports of the toilet seat cover emerged, a man, known only as “Jim,” came forward. said placed it on his head, but that that wasn’t actually what happened. According to “Jim,” Mr. MAGAmakeitupncame into the Vern, glaring and “mean mugging,” everyone. “Jim” admitted that after a trip to the bathroom, he brought Lenzner a souvenir.
JIM: I came up. I sat down my empty glass. I put the toilet seat cover next to him on the bar top, and I said “Hey man, I got you this [expletive] hat. It’ll be a step up from the one you’re currently wearing.”
KATU then went back to Lenzner, who did concede that “Jim’s” account was the truth.
Like virtually all of his fellow MAGA hat wearers, Luke Lenzner is a MAGAmess. You can watch Mr. MAGAssh*le lie below.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/far-right-journalist-andy-ngo-exposed-as-right-wing-troll
no lnx
Far-right ‘journalist’ Andy Ngo exposed as right-wing troll
Written by Igor Derysh / Salon August 28, 2019
Andy Ngo, the right-wing journalist and provocateur who was embraced by mainstream Republicans and covered favorably in mainstream media after he was attacked by antifa activists during a street fight in Portland, Oregon, may suddenly be persona non grata among conservatives.Nearly all mentions of Ngo were scrubbed from the upscale right-wing publication Quillette after a newly-released video showed him acting friendly with members of Patriot Prayer, a far-right hate group that has repeatedly sought out fights with leftists.
Ngo, who has used selectively edited videos to paint antifa as a violent, criminal group was hit with punches and milkshakes during a clash between antifa activists and members of the Proud Boys, an organization labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Many on the right rallied around Ngo after that altercation, and spread false rumors that the milkshakes thrown at him and others had contained quick-dry cement.
Ngo used his newfound fame to boost his profile, appearing on Fox News and other cable news outlets and embracing his victimhood.
Just weeks later, however, a video surfaced on Twitter showing Ngo pal around with the Proud Boys-adjacent group Patriot Prayer.
The video shows Ngo laughing as the group plans a violent attack on antifa members at a Portland bar in May. The video surfaced as part of a lawsuit brought by the bar, accusing Patriot Prayer members of causing a riot.
The Portland Mercury reports that Patriot Prayer members targeted antifa while they were celebrating a day of peaceful May Day celebrations. The lawsuit brought by the bar owners alleges that Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson and six others trespassed onto the property with the aim of engaging in violence.
The video of Ngo laughing as the group plans their attack, wrote Portland Mercury news editor Alex Zielinski, “is the clearest evidence I’ve seen supporting the claim that [Patriot Prayer] & leader Joy Gibson were intent on instigating a fight that afternoon.”
Alex Zielinski
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@alex_zee
This clip, shot right before Patriot Prayer arrived at Cider Riot on May Day, is the clearest evidence I've seen supporting the claim that PP & leader Joey Gibson were intent on instigating a fight that afternoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awN9J88j4mA&feature=youtu.be …
YouTube ?@YouTube
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The video shows members discuss their weapons and making preparations for the attack. Ngo is present the entire time and can be seen laughing at certain points.
“There’s no way he couldn’t know the group was planning on instigating violence,” Zielinski wrote.
In Ngo’s coverage of the violence, however, videos of the attack were selectively edited to remove violence by Patriot Prayer members. His tweets entirely blamed antifa for the violence.
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
- Aug 23, 2019
Replying to @RespectableLaw
And of course, Andy also posted misleading footage after the attack. He shows a woman aggressively approaching Patriot Prayer members in hysterics, and then a Patriot Prayer member hits her with some kind of club.https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1125811724932632576 …
Andy Ngo
?
@MrAndyNgo
Replying to @katemshepherd
Here is the moment that woman charged in to fight and got knocked out. Notice the masked person who went in the direction of the camera man with a blade or pick. I saw numerous patrons on the bar’s property with weapons ready. pic.twitter.com/exCiimM4cp
Embedded video
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
But as @imminentbulb pointed out, a full video shows the woman was attacked immediately prior to the start of Andy’s clip. If you listen to Andy’s clip, you can even hear one Patriot Prayer member frantically apologizing for the attack on her.https://twitter.com/imminentbulb/status/1125818772793618432 …
^,,
@imminentbulb
Replying to @imminentbulb and 2 others
Here's what happened immediately before the footage Andy is pushing. Deme Cooper, thirsty to carry out further #PatriotPrayer violence, returned to blatantly assault that person. She responded briefly in self defense, then Ian Kramer struck her after she had turned around.
Embedded video
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“As more people send me clips, it becomes clear that Andy’s work is plagued by these dishonest edits,” wrote a Twitter user who has posted numerous videos discrediting Ngo’s tweets. “For example, in this clip, he edited out some goons stomping a man’s head, and did it with a sloppy looking jump-cut in his own clip.”
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
- Aug 23, 2019
Replying to @RespectableLaw
This is the same woman who Andy had filmed and identified to his followers. She was knocked unconscious and suffered a broken neck. Andy also published her name while she was in the hospital.
Respectable Lawyer
@RespectableLaw
As more people send me clips, it becomes clear that Andy’s work is plagued by these dishonest edits. For example, in this clip, he edited out some goons stomping a man’s head, and did it with a sloppy looking jump-cut in his own clip.https://twitter.com/leftkist/status/1163913780197113856 …
Grifts Gone Wild
@leftkist
For your Andy Ngo list @RespectableLaw
Andy crudely edited out footage of Patriot Prayer associates Tiny Toese and Igor Ponomarev pummeling someone on the ground on 10/13/18.
Footage from @itsmikebivins shows what he cut.
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Quillette, where Ngo worked as a photo editor until Monday, announced after the video surfaced that Ngo was leaving his job at the site. Ngo’s name was scrubbed from the site, The Daily Beast reported.
Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann told The Daily Beast that Ngo left the site weeks earlier but the move was not publicized until Monday.
“Andy actually moved on from Quillette a few weeks ago because he is undertaking bigger & better projects, we just hadn’t updated the website and he hadn’t updated his Twitter bio until today,” she told the Daily Beast. “I haven’t seen the video,” she added.
Lehmann also said that Ngo had been on a “break” from a “brain injury” he suffered at the Portland rally.
Ngo, however, did not remove Quillette from his Twitter bio until Monday, noted National Observer reporter Caroline Orr, the same day that the Patriot Prayer video was released.
Meanwhile, Ngo’s crowdfunding campaign has raised nearly $195,000 since the Portland attack, which was even cited in a letter sent by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, to the Justice Department.
Cruz cited the Ngo incident to demand that the FBI investigate Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler and prosecute antifa members under the RICO statute. Cruz’s call was amplified by President Trump to his 63 million followers on Twitter.
“At least give Andy Ngo credit,” wrote HuffPost reporter Luke O’Brien, for “lifting $200k off some of the dumbest people alive. Right-wing writers staked their reputations on this guy. Ted Cruz based an anti-anti-fascist congressional resolution on Ngo.”
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mma 819
One day after a rally put on by the violent far-right group was met with protests by anti-fascist activists, Fox & Friends Sunday ran segments fearmongering about anti-fascist activists (“antifa”).
In these two segments, Fox News correspondent Griff Jenkins downplayed the death of Heather Heyer and claimed that Heyer was affiliated with antifa.
Jenkins would go on to suggest that new laws were needed in order to prosecute such anti-fascist protesters in Oregon as domestic terrorists. Jenkins would go on to portray all 13 arrests yesterday in Portland as being related only to antifa, even though violent gang the Proud Boys and other far-right extremists demonstrated as well (reports are still unclear as to who was arrested for what).
Heyer, a civil rights activist and a legal assistant, was killed after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville by a white supremacist targeting a crowd of counter-protesters.
This comes as Fox's link to white supremacist violence is under the microscope. The manifesto left by the El Paso shooter closely mirrored white supremacist rhetoric often heard on Fox News.
Meanwhile, while Fox focuses on antifa, multiple far-right extremists have been arrested recently for threatening violence.
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2 guys killed on train defending muslim women see below
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819
The leader of a large right-wing militia group told followers to skip a planned rally in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, saying that organizers hadn’t properly kept white nationalists away from the event and that attendees could face legal consequences.
In a statement on his group’s website, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said he owed it to his membership to disavow the so-called “End Domestic Terrorism” rally, where attendees will demand that anti-fascists, or “antifa,” be labeled a terrorist group.
“We do not believe the organizers are taking the steps necessary to ensure that white nationalist and suspected white nationalist groups and individuals will be excluded,” he wrote.
Rhodes expressed concern that threats of violence from the right could put attendees at legal risk.
Citing the work of anarchist news website It’s Going Down, Rhodes pointed to the archived posts the site has collected that show prominent far-right figures, including the event’s organizers, seemingly threatening violence.
Rhodes said that statements that can be “construed as expressing an intent to come to Portland to seek out Antifa and engage them in street fights” or “worse” could “potentially expose all attendees to possible prosecution using both an Oregon state ‘rioting’ statute and a federal rioting statute.”
Joe Biggs, an event organizer and former InfoWars host who frequently posts threatening messages and memes online, claimed in a recent Facebook post flagged by The Oregonian that the FBI had asked him to “tone down” the rhetoric about the event.
“Everyone in law enforcement is on edge after these last two shootings,” he wrote, presumably referring to the shooting massacres in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, recently.
The Portland Police Bureau said in a statement earlier this month, “Based on publicly-available information, the Bureau is concerned events on August 17 may involve persons interested in participating in criminal activity.”
Messaging for Saturday’s rally has focused on the assault of right-wing commentator Andy Ngo in Portland in late June. Video from the last time the right-wing “Proud Boys” gang rallied in Portland appeared to show counterprotesters — clad in black with their faces covered, a uniform of some — attacking Ngo and pouring milkshakes on him. The footage spread like wildfire on the right and was touted by conservatives as supposed evidence of the left’s terrorism problem, and used as fodder for Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) resolution calling antifascists a domestic terrorist organization.
But Portland has seen multiple violent confrontations in recent years between extreme right-wing groups, including outright hate groups, and anti-fascists.
Rhodes’ note to Oath Keepers membership came on the same day the leader of the ultranationalist group Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, was reportedly charged with felony rioting over a brawl at a Portland cidery on May Day. (Gibson’s attorney denied wrongdoing.) The group’s leader is one of several people charged recently in relation to the incident.
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rhet--> policy
note drop eco econ and go straight up terror (// iran republican guard):
https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/dangerous-republican-resolution-suggests-that-all-forms-of-political-dissent-could-soon-be-considered-terrorism/
no lnx
Dangerous Republican resolution suggests that all forms of political dissent could soon be considered terrorism
Written by Urie Dvorozniak / Salon July 23, 2019
Last week, Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a resolution to designate “antifa,” which the Anti-Defamation League defines as “a loose collection of groups, networks, and individuals who believe in active, aggressive opposition to far right-wing movements,” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”
In fact, antifa is a constellation of many different activist groupings, with no official leader or clear hierarchy. As the New York Times has noted, its membership count is “impossible to know.” That didn’t stop the two Republican senators from claiming that “Antifa are terrorists, violent masked bullies who ‘fight fascism’ with actual fascism, protected by Liberal privilege.”
Senator Ted Cruz
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@SenTedCruz
Antifa is a terrorist organization composed of hateful, intolerant radicals who pursue their extreme agenda through aggressive violence. Time and time again their actions have demonstrated that their central purpose is to inflict harm on those who oppose their views.
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Antifa, short for “anti-fascist,” traces its ideological roots to 1920s and 1930s Germany and supposes that if people had opposed the Nazi Party more aggressively, Adolf Hitler might never have come to power. The ADL reports that many people who act within antifa are anarchist or very left-wing, but that “since Trump’s election, some people with more mainstream political backgrounds have also joined their ranks.”
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In their resolution, Cruz and Cassidy reference the “violent demonstrations” on June 29 in Portland, Oregon, where writer right-wing Alex Ngo was assaulted while covering an antifa protest against the “far-right nationalist” group known as the Proud Boys.
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After the incident, Cruz called for a federal criminal investigation of Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, a Democrat who is also the police commissioner of the city.
Ted Cruz
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@tedcruz
To federal law enforcement: investigate & bring legal action against a Mayor who has, for political reasons, ordered his police officers to let citizens be attacked by domestic terrorists. https://tinyurl.com/y2udrv5d https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212511966441473 …
Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler Under Fire for Not Stopping Antifa Protests
Wheeler's hands-off policy when it comes to Antifa came under scrutiny on Saturday after journalist Ngo was assaulted by masked assailants.
breitbart.com
Ted Cruz
?
@tedcruz
To law enforcement: find & prosecute these violent felons. https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1145212299914952704 …
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Cruz and Cassidy also point to antifa activists occupying the areas outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, as well as posting the personal information of ICE officials online.
But the Republican senators’ resolution is little more than a political stunt.
Cruz and Cassidy’s resolution, which is entirely non-binding, won’t actually change U.S. law — because there is no existing law to change. The Patriot Act defines domestic terrorism as criminal activity that appears intended to “intimidate or coerce” civilians or influence government policy using violent methods. But, domestic terrorism is not a specific crime under U.S. law. Labeling a group as domestic terrorists give federal law enforcement broader powers to conduct investigations of other crimes, but does not itself define any criminal activities. criminal make. Furthermore, since antifa isn’t a singular group, as mentioned above, its definition under this resolution is unclear.
The designation of what “groups” are called terrorist, domestic terrorist or hate groups is extremely loose. For instance, the Pulse Nightclub shooter was charged with terrorism, while the Ku Klux Klan is legally considered a “hate group,” not a domestic terror organization. And while the federal government keeps a list of foreign terrorist groups, there is no public list of domestic terrorist groups.
Some outlets have thought it worthy to equate the confrontational tactics of antifa to political violence on the far-right. But as the ADL has pointed out, “To date, there have been no Antifa related murders,” yet “right-wing extremists” have “ murdered hundreds of people in this country over the last ten years alone.”
Just last week, James Alex Fields Jr., an avowed neo-Nazi, was sentenced to life in prison plus 419 years for the violent assault he committed during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Fields deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyerand injuring several others.
Free speech activists have expressed concerns that the Cruz-Cassidy resolution could set a precedent for more groups to be labeled domestic terrorist organizations. As National Observer reporter Caroline Orr noted, Cruz’s resolution uses the terms “antifa” and “left-wing activists” interchangeably. Most dangerously, it suggests that all manner of dissent could be considered terrorism.
Cruz’s move looks to be a transparent attempt to saddle congressional Democrats with a divisive political debate, declaring themselves either against antifa or in support of it, invariably alienating some of the party’s supporters ahead of a critical presidential election.
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ref
liquid and drink cups?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WzMZxT-41k
tucker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHIKEHCXfjU
==
ref 2 am spect bs
https://spectator.org/journalist-andy-ngo-attacked-by-antifa-at-portland-protest/
Andy Ngo, a journalist covering a clash between far-right and far-left demonstrators in Portland, was sent to the ER after being surrounded and beaten by members of Antifa on Saturday.Ngo was punched in the head, covered with silly string and eggs, and struck with milkshakes thatPortland PD later claimed were filled with quick-drying cement. Ngo’s camera equipment was stolen by a member of the group, which can be observed in this video. Ngo was recognized and attacked because of his history of documenting Antifa’s actions in Portland.
In both videos, Ngo can be seen walking among Antifa demonstrators with his camera out before he is rushed by a masked horde cloaked in black. The entire assault is captured; it happens in an instant. One Antifa-affiliated demonstrator, in disguise, pulls Ngo’s camera away from him. Ngo is then sucker-punched by another masked protester, who quickly backpedals in retreat. The crowd closes in; Ngo covers his head. He is kicked, sprayed with silly string, hit with milkshakes, and pelted with eggs. Taunts and profanity can be heard. Ngo makes his way from the street, trying to protect his head as the mob behind him cheers.
Andy Ngo was beaten for covering an anti-fascist protest against a demonstration by the far-right nationalist group known as the “Proud Boys.”Antifa and the Proud Boys alike have a history of promoting violence.A member of the Proud Boys threatened Portland’s mayor in January, and group members have participated in a number of street fights, some of which have led to arrests. Antifa also advocates the use of force against their political enemies, often clashing with right-wingers during counter-protests. Both groups embrace violence and were active participants during the “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville in 2017.[note no mention of Heather Heyer]
Antifa members wear black and cover their faces, arguing that such measures are necessary to be effective in their mission. Their stated aim is to prevent the spread of fascism. This is not the first time, however, that Antifa members have targeted observers. They rose to prominence for protesting speaker Milo Yiannopoulos at UC Berkeley, starting fires and causing approximately $100,000 in collateral damage in the process.
In a video from October 2018, which later went viral, members of the group can be seen accosting a driver during the protest of a police shooting that left 27-year-old Patrick Kimmons dead. Antifa representatives from the branch “SmashRacismDC” also gathered outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s home in November 2018; a
taken by one observer shows them chanting “We know where you sleep at night.”[he interview prof from gp john jay college after?]
There is an ideological explanation for why Antifa members attack bystanders. Per the Rose City Antifa website FAQ, “Failing to stop fascists from speaking — that is, giving them the opportunity to organize to impose their agenda on the rest of us — makes you as bad as them.” Antifa’s philosophy equates bystanders with fascists, marking anyone that does not overtly support them a threat and thus a target.
Worse than a bystander, though, is a critic of Antifa.
Andy Ngo is one such critic. He and the Rose City Antifa organization are familiar with one another. A resident of Portland, Ngo had previously described himself as “hated by Antifa” on his Twitter page, and has documented their activities in the past. In May, Ngo doxxed one of their members.“Doxxing” is a contemporary term that refers to publicly revealing someone’s personal information online without their consent. Some have argued that Ngo did so with malicious intent; he claimed the member’s identity was relevant to the story he was writing.
Antifa’s retaliation consisted of labeling Ngo, who is gay, a fascist. Ngo had been accused of promoting Islamophobia after contributing an article to The Wall Street Journal in August 2018. He was condemned for race-baiting by a London resident who disputed the claims he made in this op-ed. These claims, in conjunction with the doxxing of an Antifa member, led the group to identify him as a danger. Ngo was aware of this, announcing his intent to cover the demonstrations the night before on Twitter and noting that he had been singled out in Antifa’s message for physical confrontation.
Ngo claimed that nearby police officers did not step in to help him. Portland police have come under fire in the past for leniency in dealing with Antifa; Mayor Wheeler, a Democrat who also holds the title of Police Commissioner, was accused of instructing Portland Police officials not to respond to ICE requests during the Occupy ICE protests that took place on June 17, 2018. Mayor Wheeler strongly denied the accusation, claiming he was expressing a desire for his department to not be drawn into an engagement on behalf of a federal agency he thought “was on the wrong track.”NOTE SLIPPAGE
As of writing, Mayor Wheeler has made no statement about the harassment of Andy Ngo or the protests that occurred in his city.
Ngo has become a national figure since the video of his assault went viral. Michelle Malkin, a friend of Ngo’s, set up a GoFundMe crowdfunding page to raise money for Ngo’s medical expenses and to replace his stolen equipment. At the time of writing, the page has raised $122,000 on Ngo’s behalf. According to a statement from a legal representative, Ngo is currently recovering in the hospital after suffering from a brain hemorrhage.
The lack of action by Oregon’s elected officials and police are a disappointingly — and dangerously — tepid response to Antifa’s actions against Ngo. It remains to be seen if this violence will create a violent backlash by opposing forces or prompt the government, state-level or national, to address it.
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hospital
Harmeet K. Dhillon
@pnjaban
Trial lawyer/1A warrior @dhillonlaw, @PubliusLex founder, RNC Member,
sue city?
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Proud Boys member Donovon Flippo has accepted a plea deal after participating in a violent attack in Portland that left its victim with a split lip and a bloody nose, according to Western States Center. More details about the deal will be announced later today in Portland.
Flippo was arrested in March on a federal charge of third-degree assault and a misdemeanor charge of fourth-degree assault for an attack he participated in the prior year. The Oregonian reports that Flippo allegedly joined Proud Boys member Tusitala John “Tiny” Toese in an attack on 35-year-old Timothy Ledwith in Portland that left Ledwith bleeding. The paper reported:
Timothy Ledwith, 35, said he was punched June 8 by Flippo and Proud Boys member Tusitala John “Tiny” Toese after they exchanged words near Northeast 12th Avenue and Broadway. Toese punched him in the face, Ledwith said.
Ledwith fell to the ground, hit his head and when he came to, noticed Flippo standing over him. Another witness reported that Flippo had struck Ledwith next, according to Ledwith.
A grand jury voted to bring charges against the two right-wing extremists who attacked Ledwith earlier this year after Willamette Week reported that Portland Police had built a case against Toese and Flippo but decided not to pursue it. Text message exchanges between Portland Police Lt. Jeff Niiya and Patriot Prayer organizer Joey Gibson revealed an amicable relationship between Gibson and police.
Flippo was involved in a similar incident in Vancouver, Washington, with Toese, but the duo was allowed to leave the scene without charges. Toese is thought to still be residing in American Samoa but said on Facebook earlier this year that he would return to Portland to face charges.
The attack adds to other violent incidents involving Proud Boys hate group members across the United States.
The office of the Multnomah County District Attorney was not immediately available for comment.
Tags: violence Proud Boys
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