Bill Monroe, Mule Skinner Blues

You Never Go Full Retard, and You Never Go Any Part MLK

Here one of the pro-Trump libertarians, in his infinite naivete--and there was quite a bit of that on the pro-Trump side--tries to talk a Black Lives Matter militant down from the frenzy she's determined to work up by invoking the old "what would MLK think".
Bad move. The young woman, who looks as likely as not to have a white mom back home in Snohomish, doesn't miss a beat, improvising a sound-byte quality lament that could only have been better if she'd broke into tears. I don't doubt she was trying. The reaction of those around was interesting. The whites were kind of reverentially amused, somehow, and you can see the black kids have their own typical obliviously smug reaction.
But watching the girl work herself up self-consciously (I mean whipping off the glasses is great for the broad middlebrow of your audience, but the more discerning critic finds it a bit much) and the reaction of her mates, what we see is a longtime motif of black-white relations, the tendency of blacks to perform for whites in such situations. Blacks performing for whites goes beyond the stage.

Theorists would, probably have, run this through the white privilege shredder as just more oppression but that's a hard sell when you consider Barack Obama essentially performed his way to the presidency in this fashion. But Mr Libertarian deserved it, indulging that hoary cliche. "But I like Martin Luther King!" he protests at some point. Schmuck. The rhetorical subject of MLK is like the so-named boulevard: avoid it if you can.

This Skagg 3 guy's hilarious analysis of the first Portland State student Trump supporters' meeting shut down by volunteer social justice auxiliaries provides the backstory for the larger confrontation in downtown Portland the following Saturday:


 

Diary: "Bernie, Bro!"

The James Cromwell-lookalike with the siren spent a good hour following around and drowning out pro-Trump speakers (for a frail old player he was effective boxing out in the Paint, I mean Hate). I broke away from him here and from across the square I see this guy heckling Trumpenproles and I can't help but mess with him. I didn't even realize the extent to which we were talking past each other there until watching this later.

I don't know that he and his friend there count as true Bernie Bros. They were bystanders, not involved in the counter protests. I think the first kid was trying to describe himself as a nihilist.
I'll lift my response from the Big Lebowski, wherein the Dude, seeing a man passed out in a cuckold's luxurious swimming pool, empty fifth floating alongside, described as a "nihilist": that must be exhausting.

Things were starting to get more hectic at this point, so I turn into a sputtering prick. Re-watching this I have to suspect I start stuttering and making no sense precisely at the point I say "Israel" because I'm chickening out. A few people were gathering around, fixated on what I was saying. I was flattered. I don't even care if they thought I was nuts. But the looks on their faces didn't suggest that. They suggested something else. I mean, we've got people ranting on the street here everyday. This was something different.

So here I am standing in my town's central square raving about the myth of terrorism and Israel. I always knew it would end this way.

I'll manage it better next time.

America, Hate it or Leave it

More footage from the fracas.
I would be willing to match dollar for dollar the Go Fund Me to help the loudly suffering welp at the start there to Go Fuck Off. If Trump wins we could start a sort of manumission society for those weary of America's lash; we could set them up for years in the dirt-cheap socialist paradise of their choice, by the thousands.

At some point elsewhere I actually had a polite conversation with the big Mexican kid and his not unattractive in a Chloe Sevigny-kind-of-way girlfriend you see there at about 1:24. Those sorts of exchanges were happening here and there, but the hardcore activists were dominant on their side and determined to simply drown out anything and only engage to cast invective, as you see in the InfoWars footage below:

 

Anarchy in the PDX

 This is some footage I took from competing pro-Trump/anti-Trump demonstrations in Portland.
Note the amped-up kid at the beginning reassuring his friend, apparently, that he won't go overboard because "my facemask is off." Puh-leeeze. There's an Alex Jones video of the event out there that features an Iranian immigrant, pro-Trump grandmother, and I'll be damned if I don't recognize his affected voice when a masked "anarchist" responds curtly to her gentle pat on the shoulder: "please don't touch me."

Sorry about the annoying black dude talking over my witty repartee with bystanders about that same kid's hopeless run-on chants at the end there (later I suggested to him maybe a protest chant couldn't pull off a subordinate clause, to no avail).

Better stuff to come as soon as I figure out how to work the Internet.