Date: 2024-04-24 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00019465
US PROTESTS
PORTLAND
The Inevitable Tragedy of a Summer on Edge in Portland ... Trump Supporters clash with Black Lives Matter Demonstrators in Portland.
PORTLAND
The Inevitable Tragedy of a Summer on Edge in Portland ... Trump Supporters clash with Black Lives Matter Demonstrators in Portland.
For years, Trump supporters have tried to provoke clashes in Portland.Photograph by Alex Milan Tracy / Sipa / AP
Burgess COMMENTARY
I don't like violence ... I never have. I am comfortable with aggressive intellectual argument, but not physical altercations. I played rugby football as a schoolboy and young person at a reasonably high level, and have a bit of understanding about physical courage ... but shooting people especially with an automatic weapon has nothing to do with courage but reflects more of weakness, hate and anger. Nothing of this is to be lauded. There are a lot of good reasons for people to protest in the United States, and the summer of 2020 and the volume of police killings was perfectly reasonable. Protest needs to be peaceful, and should never degrade into the looting of business premises. Nor should protesters get provoked into violent retaliation against other protesters with different views about what needs to be fixed. There is plenty to disagree about ... but this should be the subject of debate and not the basis for deadly violence.
Sadly ... Americans have become very angry and there are many good reasons for this. Violence does not solve anything.
(Commentary added in December 2021)
Peter Burgess
By James Ross Gardner ... James Ross Gardner is a writer based in Seattle and the former editor-in-chief of Seattle Met magazine.
September 1, 2020
All through the summer, through the haze of tear gas and assaults by federal agents, amid nightly clashes between Portland police and protesters, an incident like the one on Saturday night seemed not only possible but inevitable. On the ninety-third day of protests in response to the murder of George Floyd, a bullet struck and killed. And although much remains unknown—the location of the suspect, the details of the dispute captured on grainy video—the conditions in Portland, played out on a long enough timeline, were always going to lead to the kind of tragedy that unfolded at Southwest Second Avenue and Alder Street. Thinking otherwise was self-delusion—like flipping a coin once and believing that for the next ninety-two tries it would keep coming up heads.
Even before right-wing groups reappeared on Portland’s streets a few weeks ago, the situation downtown was a high-anxiety game of Waiting for the Awful Thing to Happen. In July, I stood in front of the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of protesters, who waited every night for the federal agents inside to emerge from boarded-up portals like cuckoos out of a clock. Hours could pass with nothing much happening beyond spirited chants and drumming. Yet there remained the sense that, any minute, something very bad might go down. Could a truck find its way past the barricades and into the throng of demonstrators? There were certainly enough raised four-wheel-drives on the periphery, circling the cordoned off protest area, engines revved in taunting, thundering displays. Could a bullet pop off in the crowd, puncturing an organ or sparking a lethal stampede? We stood shoulder to shoulder, anonymous in masks. The person beside you could be anyone. The unseen coronavirus no doubt rode the currents of our collective breath.
Then, late in the night, usually after the crowd began to thin, figures costumed in camouflage military fatigues would pour out of the courthouse, firing flash bangs and tear-gas canisters, thumping demonstrators with so-called less-than-lethal munitions. The exhale of the federal agents from the building offered a strange kind of relief. State violence, yes. A violation of First Amendment rights, absolutely. Yet it felt oddly reassuring. The imagined Ford F-150 had not rolled through the barricade. The 9-mm. slug hadn’t left its casing. Everyone stuck to a script. You protest for hours; the feds come out, beat the shit out of you, make some arrests. Repeat.
My experience was limited to a few blisteringly hot summer days and nights. Indefatigable demonstrators—along with some of the most resilient and resourceful local reporters in the country—endured clashes with the Portland police for weeks, both before the feds and I arrived and after the feds more or less stood down. Then, in mid-August, an old threat reëmerged: right-wing groups, long agitators at Portland protests and counter-protests, returned to antagonize those who were peacefully assembling for Black lives. Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys, and other right-wing factions had been fixtures at local demonstrations since at least 2017, particularly after Jeremy Christian, an avowed white nationalist, murdered two men on the max Light Rail. On May 26th of that year, Christian verbally threatened two teen-age girls of color on the train, one of whom was wearing a hijab, with a violent, anti-Muslim screed. When three male passengers intervened, Christian killed two with a knife and injured the third.
Nine days later, while the city still mourned, the founder of Patriot Prayer, Joey Gibson, who lives across the Columbia River, in Vancouver, Washington, led a “Trump Free Speech Rally.” Others joined. “Proud Boys show up in big numbers. Oath Keepers and Three Percenters also show up, and then you’ve got all these neo-Nazis there,” Joseph Lowndes, a professor at the University of Oregon and the co-author of “Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity” told me. Similiar rallies continued for the next two and half years in parks and other public spaces around western Oregon and Washington, often resulting in bitter fights with anti-racist and anti-fascist demonstrators. Gibson’s club in particular seemed to relish the brawls—often literal fisticuffs—Lowndes said.
This summer, the right-wing cliques had been conspicuously absent during the protests for George Floyd and against the presence of federal agents in Portland. That changed last month. With the feds mostly out of the picture and the crowds smaller, the groups started showing up again. On August 15th, they blasted anti-racist protesters with paint-ball pellets; the driver of a Toyota Corolla fired two rounds from a handgun but didn’t hit anyone. On August 22nd, members of a pro-police rally clashed again with Black Lives Matter protesters near the Multnomah County Justice Center, paintballs firing in both directions.
Then, a week later, came the caravan. On Saturday afternoon, for what was billed on Facebook as “Trump 2020 Cruise Rally,” nearly a thousand vehicles, most of them four-wheel-drive trucks festooned with Thin Blue Line and Trump reëlection flags, assembled in a mall parking lot in the suburb of Clackamas. The planned caravan route was along the interstate and highways that loop Portland. Yet many drivers broke from the parade and rolled into downtown, their truck beds filled with rowdy Trump fans—paint-ball guns and bear-spray canisters at the ready.
The trucks belched through the city streets, past gauntlets of antiracist protesters and left-wing groups, blitzing them with pellets and mace. The protesters returned fire by throwing water bottles and other objects. One demonstrator on the sidewalk lit a Trump flag ablaze. A truck struck a handful of protesters who managed to scramble out of the way before being run over. (Retweeting footage of the violence against peaceful protesters, President Trump said that the “big backlash going on in Portland cannot be unexpected.”)
I observed these scenes via live stream and on social media, but I imagined that the people on the ground experienced what I did back in July: the bad thing, seemingly creeping toward Portland all summer, must have felt imminent. And it was. “We all saw this coming,” the mayor, Ted Wheeler, would say at a press conference the following day.
Around 8:45 p.m., near the corner of Southwest Third Avenue and Alder Street, a videographer captured what looks like an altercation across the street. In the footage, we hear indecipherable shouting, then two pops of a gun. People scramble and a white man in a black T-shirt and light-colored shorts takes a few steps and crumples onto the asphalt. Street medics rush in to help. Police arrive soon after. The man died at the scene. Photos of the body reveal that he wore a Patriot Prayer baseball hat.
The victim was identified as Aaron (Jay) Danielson. Gibson, the Patriot Prayer founder, told an Associated Press reporter that Danielson was a “good friend” and a Patriot Prayer supporter. On Facebook, Gibson mourned him, writing, “God bless him and the life he lived.” Trump mourned, too: “Rest In Peace Jay!,” the President tweeted.
A suspect has been identified as a forty-eight-year-old white man who on social media describes himself as “100 percent Antifa.” The details of the confrontation are still unclear. But the known facts are enough to greatly exacerbate tensions in Portland and around the country: a self-described antifacist is alleged to have killed a member of a right-wing group after a pro-Trump rally.
As I write these words, I keep stopping and slipping back into an old habit, one that I thought I broke. I check the President’s twitter feed to see what he’s saying, in this case about the shooting. It’s not good. “Portland is a mess, and it has been for many years. If this joke of a mayor doesn’t clean it up, we will go in and do it for them!”
At least two things have been inevitable all summer: the conditions in Portland would likely lead to a loss of life, and the President and his allies would pounce on it. Now that both have happened, we head into a new season, one even more volatile and less predictable.
James Ross Gardner is a writer based in Seattle and the former editor-in-chief of Seattle Met magazine.
----------------------------------------------
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
Why Hong Kong’s Protests Exploded