Monday, August 05, 2024

Sanity Fair

"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019. 

The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cordons at each end, like disparate, ragged Medieval armies. Well, sort of-- the field was so broad I couldn't tell what the "nazi" side was doing, and if there were more than the few dozen of them I had passed on my way to the larger crowd where I expected to find their main body.

The police stretched the no-go zone by pushing one cordon south, then let the counter-demonstrators on my side through.

 As it was they cleverly herded the Patriot Prayer group, after its quickly concluded "domestic terrorism" demonstration--calling out antifa directly this time--over the Hawthorne Bridge, which had been closed for the protests, letting them escape the advancing throng. I never got close to them, and missed the battle of bridge below;



As it was I would never see a group of them numbering more than ten after that. Later I'd read news reports estimating their number to be about a hundred--video of them marching over the bridge made the group look bigger, and I anticipate the local left's outrage over this latest favoring--in their eyes--of the right wing invaders over antifa and allies, as the very discipline forced on Patriot Prayer and indulgence allowed antifa



Not content with this failure, the left then engages in what is now par for the course, a floating, amorphous march taunting police and searching out stray right wingers, journalists and others to harass.

Outright violence is still rare. The police were as often as not nowhere to be found when small scuffles broke out



Here's someone identified as working for Glenn Beck's Blaze network, and I hope he's pleased with his newfound relevance as scourge of Portland, because his associate here had a very long day:

As I first walked up a shirtless black man emerged, making his way to the cordon, announcing himself and his attention to take on all nazis. He found a pair of them and then engaged in a mock standoff with them that would inevitably--for I saw him engage in a few of these myself--break down in anticlimactic debate.

I saw him arrested later. He turned up on the street within an hour, to cheers--everyone recognized him. He strutted and flexed and announced, like the first time: "It's me baby, it's me baby!" Behind him came another black man, a street preacher with eyes full of woe and desperation, trailed by a Mexican girl holding a microphone: "Hallelujah...conversation is meaningless...hallelujah...you're not going to solve one thing in a conversation..."



Wednesday, August 05, 2020

Friday, July 24, 2020

Siege of Portland, July 24


This happened around two in the morning.

Siege Notes, July 24: On the Fringe

The day before yesterday a lone police cruiser was moving slowly past the former Apple store, now shrine to George Floyd,  around 10 PM. Then I saw a very young woman with shimmering blonde hair, sitting in the passenger seat. I wondered for a moment if someone had gotten hold of a police car and gone joyriding. Something was off.
A single cruiser can't operate unmolested in and around antifa territory and this one was close.

"I know you ain't looking for me..." a negro bellowed from somewhere.

The girl scanned the crowd with a look of concern; the cop's bald head low and dark on his side as he gingerly made his way through the hostile ground. It only occurred to me a moment later this had to be a crime victim and cop looking for a suspect--or missing person.

I gave a homeless guy a sympathetic look as I ducked into the 7/11 on 4th and Taylor downtown. In normal times its corner is dominated by the hardest homeless cases; now it operates on the edge and sometimes in the midst of our nightly riots. Inside an ugly little black teenager, odd looking and sounding with an accent I can't place, is threatening to start breaking stuff over something or other. A motley cast of antifa and assorted weirdos line up, observing social distancing. I bought a pack of cigarettes from an exhausted Arab, watching his screen of multiple security cameras through weary, bloodshot eyes.

The panhandler had made me with that damn sympathetic look I gave him, and promptly accosted me on the way out.
"Need a light?" He asks.
"Thanks I got it." I say.
Needing a break and always looking to blend in, I sat with him for a bit. He wasn't crazy, but an absolute physical wreck. Cancer is eating him from the inside out he tells me, and he can't get treatment. He's making his pitch for charity before asking outright. There are bank-shot panhandler appeals--recently a homeless guy handed me a dime, and asked for a dollar. This guy's thing is more of a long-sell, or at least he had me pegged for it.

"These other guys, they can't prove it." He says of other panhandlers' woe. "I can." He pulls up his pant leg and shows me a withered calf splotched with little dark clouds of melanoma.
He needs fifteen dollars for a bed, he says and I give him ten.
"We should be able to raise you five more dollars." I say. He's eying the twenty I wasn't willing to give him. "Put out a cup or something. All these people."
He chortles with a rheumy thump
"These people?"
"Nobody's giving you money?"
"Hell no."
"Well there's all that food, that's pretty cool?" Antifa's "Riot Ribs" grill-tent cooks up barbecue and hands out food all day.
"I haven't gotten any. All that food and I haven't got shit. These fuckers."
He stops a light-skinned young negro but doesn't get far before the man says, with neither disdain nor sympathy, "I haven't got any money", and rolls.
"See what I mean?" He laughs, with as much good nature as he can muster.
I took back my ten, gave him the twenty, and waded back into the night.

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Siege of Soros: The Livestreams for July 21 through 22



5:03:03 Woman beaten unconscious on street. "She's kicking her face!" The livestreamer complains and is chased off the street. I speculated here that she had blurred the screen to protect them but I think her connection was at fault.

Courtesy of AustinZone YouTube channel.

There is almost six hours worth of various livestreams here. I'll try to go through and timestamp various points as I find time. It was an eventful and typical night. The antifa livestreamers are doing remarkable work on the ground documenting it all, despite their bias. On second thought, no one reads this blog so I won't waste the time. Go listen to livestream debates by hack YouTubers, if that's your thing. You deserve this, bastards!
I kid.

Hello darkness my old friend...


Siege Notes, Portland July 21: Good Morning Vietnam

Portland's insurrectionists are more numerous, organized and energized as a result of President Trump's surge of federal law enforcement into the city, now on day fifty-something of the Siege of Soros, but who's counting.

Contrary to Trump's claim, they have not restored order and haven't done--not necessarily their fault--a fine job. In fact at this point he's only managed to place the feds in the same untenable position the police they've come to relieve were in before--the force they need to use is used against them immediately, and so far quite effectively, by treacherous media and political leaders presenting them as military atrocities to a benighted public.

Trump and the poor grunts of federal law enforcement have acquired their own Vietnam. No, Johnny Rambo, you don't get to win this time either.

After introducing harsher riot control measures--lots of tear gas and various munitions--on the first two nights and putting antifa on their heels, the feds have retreated to their fortified courthouse. They are now pursuing the same strategy of the police earlier, ceding the streets and only clearing rioters when their physical attacks on the building get out of hand, as when they try to set the plywood fortifications on fire. Last night they managed to pull away a large section of plywood framing and start in on the exposed (but impressively sturdy) glass underneath.

Today concrete blocks are going up and welders are fusing together heavier fencing in an attempt to stop antifa from dismantling it and barricading the doors, as has become routine. The city recaptured the three affected park blocks last week, declaring them closed for repairs and fencing them off with chain link fencing that is easily removable in sections. At the same time Portland police were being withdrawn from the streets--and abandoning the feds to antifa outfitted with the mobile siege barriers they've made of the dismantled fencing, and invigorated by the victory of recapturing their after-dark autonomous zone.

The Portland Police Bureau has been forbidden from communicating with the feds, and a controversy is brewing over a violation of that after the revelation an office of the PPB has been communicating with the feds next door. Longtime progressive anti-cop activist Jo Ann Hardesty is applying it to her effort to gain control of the police bureau (the mayor serves as commissioner now, but it's not clear what that means). No one locally is questioning the extraordinary (unprecedented?) move of isolating the feds.

With the new front opened, now against Trump's putative brownshirts, antifa continues to show improvement in organization and tactics. Nightly now their teams of bikes--motorcycles, bicycles, scooters--move in rapid response teams to blockade streets and observers are stationed on the perimeter of the three-block radius antifa now claims nightly with impunity. Their autonomy is only disturbed by riot police after they've managed, after much effort, to draw the "pigs" out of their fort by setting fires and barricades and trying to break inside.

Journalists enjoy some protections from arrest and dispersal (last night I watched one of the antifa livestreamers unmolested behind federal lines as they cleared out Lownsdale Square; agents escorted her out at her request after she became nervous) as a result of a restraining order granted by a liberal federal judge and ally from within the besieged walls of the courthouse. But any journalist on the ground identified as unallied or suspect is immediately set upon by the crowd. One was beaten last night.

Another beating for unknown reasons left someone knocked out on the street. The cries of those around suggest it was a woman:



Portland's coup-complicit local journalists are glorying in their role and the national attention. "Portland journalists are killing it" one enthused after promoting another local going on national television.
So far the narrative holds and they continue to win.

Sanity Fair

"Antifascist" demonstration Portland, Oregon. August 17, 2019.  The two sides squared off across a field, defined by police cord...