OT RIOTLANDIA: WHY PORTLAND HAS BECOME THE EPICENTER OF FAR-RIGHT VIOLENCE

[SlyPokerDog]

PORTLAND, OREGON IS bracing for a storm of far-right violence. In July, Joe Biggs, a former staffer at the far-right conspiracist site Infowars announced an “End Domestic Terrorism” rally in Portland this Saturday. Its aim: the local antifa movement.

Biggs, who’s encouraged date rape and punching transgender people, told followers on Twitter to bring guns, declared “DEATH TO ANTIFA!!!!!!”, displayed a spiked weapon saying that it “will be put to good use,” and posted memes about death squads murdering leftists before his account was suspended.

The “End Antifa” rally organizers include Enrique Tarrio, chair of the violence-prone Proud Boys, which is designated as a general hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and “Rufio Panman,” the alias of Ethan Nordean, a brawny street fighter whose knockout punch of an antifascist in Portland in June 2018 was used as a recruiting tool for the Proud Boys.

...

 

[SlyPokerDog]

This week’s rally was called after right-wing media personality and provocateur Andy Ngo was attacked in Portland on June 29 while filming a Patriot Prayer rally heavily outnumbered by antifa. A video shows him being punched, kicked, and hit with coconut milkshakes and silly string by masked individuals.

Since then, social media has erupted with dozens of graphic, deadly, and specific threats from the far right to “shoot to kill antifa.” A gun scope was superimposed over a photo of two Portland activists with the words “End Domestic Terrorist’s.” In another image, a knife-wielding hand bloodily slashes the throat of an individual labeled “Rose City Antifa,” one of the oldest antifascist organizations in the country.

Portland has joined Berkeley, New York, Charlottesville, and Seattle as liberal cities that have become flash points for far-right violence since Donald Trump took office in 2017. But Portland is unique in that the far right has turned the city into a regular battleground.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.

IT STARTS WITH Oregon’s history. The state was envisioned as a white utopia and barred black people from residency until 1926. To this day, Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 77 percent white and less then 6 percent black, and that racial homogeneity has proved for decades to be fertile recruiting ground for racist hate groups.

Joseph Lowndes, associate professor of political science at University of Oregon and co-author of “Producers, Parasites, Producers: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” said that “in the 1980s, for groups like Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Portland was a choice spot for their ‘10 percent strategy.’ That meant if the city was 10 percent or less people of color, the far right could organize working-class whites there as they believed they wouldn’t meet much resistance.”

Oregon currently has a disproportionate number of hate groups and militias, while in the broader Pacific Northwest, many far-right groups participated in and were energized by the Bundy family’s armed takeoverof the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon in early 2016.

Speaking of the massive brawls in Portland, Lowndes said, “There is another legacy of the anti-authoritarian left, anarchists, and anti-fascists who also since the 1980s have been a militant street-oriented left.”

 

[SlyPokerDog]

That’s where the police come in. As the far right has turned Portland into a battleground nearly a dozen times since 2017, local journalists have revealed how police affinity for the far right has enabled its violence.

Internal documents obtained by the Willamette Week, Portland Mercury, and The Guardian reveal that Portland police see the far right as “much more mainstream” than the left. Text messages between a police lieutenant and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who’s been hit with felony riot charges, show that the police fed him real-time informationabout the movements of antifa during street skirmishes, and gave him advice on how his most notorious brawler, Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, could avoid being arrested on two separate occasions. In June 2017, when The Intercept asked the police about Toese, a spokesperson claimed that they didn’t know who he was and said their real concern was about the actions of antifascist counterprotesters.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

There’s more. Portland police launched a criminal investigation against an activist based on material provided by Gibson. And during an extremist rally on August 4, 2018, police discovered Patriot Prayer members with loaded guns on a garage rooftop directly overlooking the protest. The police let them go and didn’t inform anyone for two months, including Mayor Ted Wheeler, who serves as police commissioner. In the Portland metro area, there are cops who are Islamophobes, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement private prison that employed a Proud Boy, and a sheriff’s deputy affiliated with the Proud Boys as well. All of which fits a national pattern of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

WHEN IT COMES to left-wing protests, the bias comes into sharp focus. On June 4, 2017, police unleashed less lethal weapons on leftists, illegally kettled nearly 400 people, recorded their IDs, and retained the information despite assurances that they wouldn’t. The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon said of the incident, “No other police force in America uses crowd control weapons with the regularity of the Portland Police Bureau.”

Just over a year later, on August 4, 2018, the police launched an unprovoked assault against peaceful protesters, nearly killing one when a flashbang grenade punctured his helmet, resulting in a brain hemorrhage. And on May 1 this year, 20 Patriot Prayer members led by Gibson and accompanied by Ngo attacked antifascists at a bar, fracturing the vertebrae of one woman (whose name was released by Ngo, leading to threats of violence against her, according to her friends). The bar owner claimed that it took police an hour to respond despite numerous emergency calls. The police released a lengthy statement seeking to justify why they didn’t respond until after the fight had ended despite knowledge of the attack as it was happening.

After Ngo was attacked in June, the Portland police tweeted out disinformation that coconut milkshakes being handed out by antifascists were laced with concrete. Conspiracists like Jack Posobiec helped the tweet go viral; it was turned into fact by right-wing media, treated as credible by mainstream media, and incited angry right-wingers to deluge antifascists with death threats. Days later, Portland City Hall was evacuated after a bomb threat, possibly related to the incident.

Police bias against the left is nothing unusual in America. The difference is that Portland lacks a counterbalance. Following the June 4, 2017, rally, someone who worked closely with Wheeler told me, “The mayor’s office is scared of the police.” The source explained that inside the police control center that day, police said not to interfere with tactics even when members of the mayor’s staff said “that looks like excessive use of force.”

 

[SlyPokerDog]

“There’s fear inside of the mayor’s office [that] if they pushed on the police, there would be a police slowdown or strike,” the source said. “Within the police department, there are institutional biases toward Patriot Prayer and white supremacy.”

Eileen Park, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, said, “Those allegations are false. The Mayor’s Office has always respected and supported the work done by the members of the Portland Police Bureau,” adding that “they are true professionals and can always be relied upon to do the right thing to protect our city.”

Contrast this with New York City. When 10 Proud Boys assaultedantifascists in Manhattan last October, police “stood by doing nothing,” according to the New York Times, and failed to arrest any of them. But in a city that is majority minority and home to more than 3 million immigrants, politicians were swift to blast the police inaction, forcing the New York Police Department to start identifying suspects and making arrests.

In Portland, however, political cowardice is the rule. Evidence indicates that the Multnomah County District Attorney, which has jurisdiction over Portland, has been as lax in prosecuting far-right lawbreakers as police have been in arresting them. It’s not because the office doesn’t know who they are: Antifacist researchers in Portland have identified dozens of right-wing extremists who instigated and participated in streets fights on June 30, 2018, including Tarrio, the current Proud Boys leader. More than a year later, not one of those identified has been arrested in conjunction with that rally. And Tarrio appears so unconcerned about arrest that he is listed as a leader of Saturday’s rally.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

Media coverage hasn’t helped. Other than the alternative weeklies and The Guardian, reporting on the far right has been “both-sidesism” at best and cringeworthy at worst. The editorial board of The Oregonian, the main daily newspaper, has castigated anarchists as “punk fascists” over relatively minor property damage (revealing that no one there apparently knows the history or definition of fascism), while allowing one of its columnists to act as a useful idiot for Gibson by calling him a “modern-day prophet” preaching “love” and “unity.”

Lowndes said the problem of silence about the far right is pervasive in the state. “There has been nothing coming from the legislature, the governor’s office, congressional representatives,” he said. “It’s a white political culture that has a high tolerance for far-right and white nationalist organizing, and seems reluctant to address it for fear of alienating conservative voters.”

If violence is averted in Portland, it may be because of the white nationalist who allegedly massacred 22 people in an anti-Hispanic rampage in El Paso earlier this month. That appears to have motivated the FBI to visit Biggs, who then reportedly said that “he wants a peaceful demonstration and has told his followers to keep their weapons at home.”

Days after the El Paso shooting, police began arresting Gibson and five members of his band for attacking antifascists at a bar in May, despite the fact that their faces and actions had been public for more than three months. This week, the leader of the Oath Keepers announced that his Northwest militia was quitting the rally, citing as one reason the work of antifascist researchers compiling violent threats.

Kristian Williams, author of “Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America,” said, “If this crackdown is in response to El Paso, this fits a pattern of police giving latitude to right-wing violence until a threshold is crossed. The violence is allowed to go on much longer and cause much greater damage than would ever be allowed on the left.”

 

[SlyPokerDog]

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/16/portland-far-right-rally/

 

[SlyPokerDog]

I broke it down into small parts to make it easier to discuss.

 

[TorturedBlazerFan]

I broke it down into small parts to make it easier to discuss.

I think the real reason is you dont think our attention span is very long.

 

[SlyPokerDog]

I think the real reason is you dont think our attention span is very long.

 

[TorturedBlazerFan]

Thats basically my 3 year old, she cracks me up. Everything little thing distracts her. .

 

[BlazerWookee]

"since Donald Trump took office," lol...

 

[Natebishop3]

The “End Antifa” rally organizers include Enrique Tarrio, chair of the violence-prone Proud Boys,

That name screams white supremacy to me....

 

[Natebishop3]

Far right violent protests....

 

[SlyPokerDog]

That name screams white supremacy to me....

Members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing demonstrators march across the Hawthorne Bridge during an 'End Domestic Terrorism' rally in Portland, Oregon on Saturday. The group includes organizer Joe Biggs, center in green hat, and Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, holding megaphone

 

[Natebishop3]

Members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing demonstrators march across the Hawthorne Bridge during an 'End Domestic Terrorism' rally in Portland, Oregon on Saturday. The group includes organizer Joe Biggs, center in green hat, and Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio, holding megaphone

Damn white supremacists!

 

[UncleCliffy'sDaddy]

So.....the Portland Police Department is populated with right wing, rascist thugs. Sounds exactly like the Portland Police Department that has existed for most of Portland’s history. Or at least the Portland I have known since 1954. Not sure why it’s news now......

 

[CupWizier]

That name screams white supremacy to me....

Are you a white supremacist follower? You sure seem to be defending them.

 

[Road Ratt]

Far right-wing hate groups want to use Portland as a base of operations and are throwing a tantrum because Antifa beat them to the territory.

That is what I get out of the article.

 

[MarAzul]

Those guys probably didn't travel too far. Surely not all of them.

 

[Lanny]

Why Portland? The city presents a unique mix of past and present white nationalism; policing that enables the far right; weak political leaders; and a legacy of antifascist organizing. Combined, these elements allow the far right to stage violent spectacles with few legal consequences against their ideological enemies — antifa, liberals, so-called PC culture, cities — while using social media to glorify the violence as a recruiting tool and proof of their racial and masculine virility.

IT STARTS WITH Oregon’s history. The state was envisioned as a white utopia and barred black people from residency until 1926. To this day, Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 77 percent white and less then 6 percent black, and that racial homogeneity has proved for decades to be fertile recruiting ground for racist hate groups.

Joseph Lowndes, associate professor of political science at University of Oregon and co-author of “Producers, Parasites, Producers: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” said that “in the 1980s, for groups like Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Portland was a choice spot for their ‘10 percent strategy.’ That meant if the city was 10 percent or less people of color, the far right could organize working-class whites there as they believed they wouldn’t meet much resistance.”

Oregon currently has a disproportionate number of hate groups and militias, while in the broader Pacific Northwest, many far-right groups participated in and were energized by the Bundy family’s armed takeoverof the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon in early 2016.

Speaking of the massive brawls in Portland, Lowndes said, “There is another legacy of the anti-authoritarian left, anarchists, and anti-fascists who also since the 1980s have been a militant street-oriented left.”

Beaverton had a law on the books that made it illegal for a Black to spend the night within the city limits. This law lasted until the early 70s. This was relayed to me by the former president of Oregon's John Birch society when we worked alongside each other at Tektronix.

 

[barfo]

Those guys probably didn't travel too far. Surely not all of them.

They came all the way from the early 1900s.

barfo

 

[tlongII]

Beaverton had a law on the books that made it illegal for a Black to spend the night within the city limits. This law lasted until the early 70s. This was relayed to me by the former president of Oregon's John Birch society when we worked alongside each other at Tektronix.

I believe that is false. As far as I know all black exclusionary laws in Oregon were repealed in 1925.

 

[oldfisherman]

The real reason Portland became the epicenter for both left and right wing violence.

Because a long line of weak ass Portland mayors would not let the police do their jobs.

 

[Lanny]

I believe that is false. As far as I know all black exclusionary laws in Oregon were repealed in 1925.

"The Oregon black exclusion laws were attempts to prevent black people from settling within the borders of the settlement and eventual U.S. state of Oregon. The first such law took effect in 1844, when the Provisional Government of Oregon voted to exclude all black settlers from Oregon's borders. The law authorized a punishment for any black settler remaining in the territory to be whipped with "not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes" for every six months they remained.[1] Additional laws aimed at African Americans entering Oregon were ratified in 1849 and 1857. The last of these laws was repealed in 1926." However, I believe the last of those laws repealed was done by state law and not city.
I seem to recall that the city code was not revised until the early 70s. It left a lasting impression on me.

 

[barfo]

I believe that is false. As far as I know all black exclusionary laws in Oregon were repealed in 1925.

I don't know about Beaverton, but it is certainly possible that a local law could have remained on the books (but unenforced and unenforceable) until much later.
The exclusion laws themselves were unenforced and unenforceable long before 1925, due to the 14th amendment to the US constitution.

barfo

 

[UncleCliffy'sDaddy]

When I was living in Oregon City in the mid 70’s there was still a law on their books that stated blacks must be off the streets by 6pm. It was never enforced that I know of, though I had black neighbors who were highly offended regardless.

 

[MarAzul]

I don't know about Beaverton, but it is certainly possible that a local law could have remained on the books (but unenforced and unenforceable) until much later.
The exclusion laws themselves were unenforced and unenforceable long before 1925, due to the 14th amendment to the US constitution.
barfo

Thank you barf! That probably answers the question I had. How can it be?

The MarAzul is anchored this evening at the mouth of the John Day River where flows into the John Day channel at Tongue Pt. Good Bass fishing river I am told.
Today we pasted some land marks on the Columbia river, Jim Crow Point that juts out into the river prominently, covered with big Spruce, a hansom land mark. Near by is Jim Crow creek, and on the opposite side of the river is Jim Crow sands.
Yep! These are all named in honor of black man, resident of Astoria back in the 19th century, not sure when exactly, but the question I had was, how can it be if Blacks were not allowed in Oregon? I know they had the law, but when was it enforced?
Oregon became a state in 1859 and the 14th came into being in 1868. It doesn't seem to have affected old Jim Crow.