Intensely Peaceful

Another six hours monitoring livestreams last night. Courtesy of:
AustinZone
LiveNow Media
JacobSnakeUp

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.

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.

Last night, antifa black bloc militants beat up a pro-Black Lives Matter photographer accused of communicating with Portland Police. In the past seven weeks, several people with cameras have been assaulted while covering the riots. https://t.co/76o7manECa

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) July 22, 2020

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.

My life is reporting on beautiful block parties until the feds turn it into a warzone and then it's taking footage of war on and off for hours until we're back to reporting on drum circles in the park and free food. What. Is. This. Life.

— Griffin - Live from the Justice Center (@GriffinMalone6) July 20, 2020

.@brianstelter on the riots in Portland: “Right-wing media ramped up its coverage of scattered unrest in Portland, Oregon...Evidently a small group of self-described anarchists suddenly deserved national news coverage.” pic.twitter.com/ZKsrWZ6Uez

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) July 20, 2020

So far the narrative holds and they continue to win.

Siege Notes, July 20: Keep Portland Cruel

Salmon Street in between 4th and 3rd Avenues is very rough during the day. Antifa hangers-on and homeless crazies predominate on the short block bordering what is in effect antifa occupied territory--Lownsdale Park across from the US District Court.

Homeless schizophrenics and the like are attracted to the camp with its free food and excitement. Ranters are pleased to have a somewhat captive audience, and can be seen inveigling, completely ignored, among the crowd.

I was in front of the federal courthouse on Sunday when I heard angry shouting. Nothing unusual here and now, but it persisted so I made my way over to the corner of Salmon to have a look. Someone was taunting someone over getting "knocked out".

An older homeless man lay propped up on an elbow in the middle of the street surrounded by protesters. I think someone offered to get an antifa medic when he shouted defiantly.

"I want an ambulance. I want 911."

A pair of women watched with me for a moment. I told them what I knew. A thirty-something nice liberal lady, clearly distressed but apologetic, pointed out the homeless man was a troublesome character who'd been clashing with people for days.
"He needs help." I said like an idiot. "I mean, professional."
She nodded under eyes arched in concern. I walked away thinking to myself, yes, help from, you know, police and paramedics.

And it fell to the most wretched to expose their hypocrisy and bear their wrath. 

--not in the Bible, as far as I know

 Paramedics and police would normally have been on hand in ten minutes and would have handled the situation with the care and restraint determined by the terms of an Obama-era lawsuit and ensuing consent decree.
 This after an investigation by race man Eric Holder's Justice Department couldn't contrive enough evidence for Jo Ann Hardesty and other local anti-cop activists to warrant a finding of racial bias. Certainly that wasn't for lack of trying.

I was surprised and concerned to see an hour later from the other side of antifa-occupied Lownsdale Park the confrontation with the homeless man was still going on. Someone restrained from attacking him a scrawny kid who flailed away in the air furious, or pretending to be. The old guy had lost his pants I could see. Various people were shouting.

"Are they getting violent over there?" a big guy, a suburban dad with a tribal tattoo, had gotten out of his car, phone in hand.

"Yeah." I said, restraining the urge to say "You appear normal. So am I."

His wife pleaded with him to get in the car.

Another fellow, a stout biker/hipster type walking a muscular pit bull with huge spike collar--sympathies uncertain--got out his phone and, probably, called 911. The confrontation there had been going on almost an hour at this point. A bus was stopped for a time and I thought, stupidly, the driver would take the old guy away.

I ventured into the middle of Lownsdale and watched the standoff for a while, afraid to film in the midst of antifa and sympathizers, who own the park now by day as well as night as a result of their inspired redoubling in the face of the feds attempts to restore the city.

I went back to the sidewalk and headed north, thinking I'd come wide around to observe, maybe dare to film, when a wiped-out looking kid, tall with greasy locks and a nose ring that looked like it was fashioned out of a paper clip, approached.

"What's this?" He asked, pointing to my hand, without hostility.
"It's my selfie stick. I use it to take pictures and video."
"Can I see it?"
Against my better judgement I handed it to him.
"I'm an artist." With the stick he indicated a poster on the ground with a couple of letters and crude shapes. I rested my hands on my knees and made a show of appreciating it.
"Cool."
A spectral negro sidled up to us, his eyes between the mask and dark cap he wore took me in with that familiar black look: wide-eyed and wary. I took out a cigarette and gave one to the kid--who turned out to be 28, by his account. I offered one to the black; he took it wordlessly.

As I spent some ten minutes sitting on the sidewalk listening to the young man's story, a homeless man standing nearby streamed a continual narrative to the oblivious stream of people passing by.

"...I was a real badass..."

As for the young man's story , it was incoherent and probably a lie--his biker father didn't want to be a hit-man for the Mob and left the life to raise a family. But he treated his son too harshly and scarred him. Doctors have told him he showed symptoms of schizophrenia, but he didn't believe it. He's an Indian he says, and practices Indian magic.

"...knew a guy, used to work out..."

A girl with a shaved head came over and gave instructions, something about keeping an eye out for something--I sat there invisible--and he assured her he would, but I think he forgot immediately after she left.

"...I'm a magician, motherfucker..." the homeless guy happens to say at some point.

"Yes, yes, we've established that." The young man responded, smirking at me and rolling his eyes in the direction of the speaker.

I worried for a moment he might try to keep the selfie stick when I got up and brushed myself off, but he remained friendly.

"Good luck." I said, shaking his hand, only later thinking of Covid.

I went to the standoff on Salmon, and joined a pair of sane-looking older Portlanders standng nearby watching with concern. No one was filming so I didn't. The old guy still didn't have his pants and bled from a cut over the eye.

"This is fucked up." A man said. I nodded in agreement.

"People called 911. They won't come here" he said. We were across and one street over from the police station.

A fat man in a late-model Cadillac, clothes and car sharing an Italian gangster aesthetic, shouted from the curb.
"Fuck him. He's been giving people shit...fuck that bastard."

"Yeah, yeah, anyway...it's just fucked up" the other guy said.

The irony of it would no doubt be lost on antifa if they were paying attention to it. The old guy refused to leave the street, just as they do, and their response was to brutalize him and humiliate him--but not too much perhaps, certainly nothing he isn't used to--and then to hand him over to the detested authorities. Eventually an ambulance and police unit extracted him after about two hours.

Siege Notes, Portland July 17: Antifa Cries Out in Pain as it Strikes You

What we're experiencing now resembles a revolutionary coup where the actual coup and transfer of power (and maybe bloodletting) comes at the end of a long period of chaotic change instead of its onset. Institutions, like individuals, that never would have assented to Current Year norms in saner times have nowhere to go after their long gradual acculturation in this theoretical lunacy. Those "saner times" themselves are the problem, after all, according to the rolling dispensation of our times.

Different components of the coup are as different components of an army. Like engineers follow infantry, the media wing follows behind BLM/antifa riots and builds to hold the ground. Antifa's hopeless zombie assaults--grunts are always screwed over--aren't meant to succeed but draw out the feds and make them vulnerable to charges of brutality.

State and local leaders here are all in with the coup, demanding the withdrawal of all federal troops, as an "occupying" army suppressing peaceful protests and establishing right-wing tyranny.

Oregon's Attorney General is suing the federal government over recent arrests quelling riots in Portland. Bloomberg:

Oregon sued the U.S. over the detention of residents during anti-racism protests in Portland, shortly after a judge ruled that journalists alleging local police had assaulted them could add federal agents to their own lawsuit.

In her suit against the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Marshals Service, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum alleges they have overstepped their powers in threatening, injuring or arresting protesters. The journalists made similar claims, saying police had assaulted them at Black Lives Matter demonstrations, coordinating their response with federal authorities.

Oregon cited two incidents it says took place in the past week. On July 12 a peaceful protester was struck in the head with an “impact weapon” and sustained severe injuries, according to the AG’s office.

On Thursday, it says, “an unmarked minivan with undercover federal agents wearing generic green military fatigues” forcibly detained a second protester, who was later released. The Oregon Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the July 12 incident, according to the AG.

As a symbol of American power and thus white oppression the US District Courthouse has been covered in obscene graffiti for these last two months. Last night rioters took the temporary chain-link fencing from around the closed and now reclaimed park blocks and piled it up as a barricade in front of the courthouse door, launching fireworks at it.

But it's a kind of kabuki; they have more allies in the building than enemies. The attacks are entirely about drawing out and provoking federal police, who are essentially defending an institution that won't defend them any more than the city defends the cops under siege next door.

 From the  New York Times

Billy J. Williams, the U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, said in a statement on Friday that he was asking the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general to investigate reports of officers detaining protesters.

Governor Brown said in an interview that she asked the acting homeland security secretary, Chad F. Wolf, to remove federal officials from the streets and that he refused. She said the Trump administration appeared to instead be using the situation for photo-ops to rally his supporters. “They are provoking confrontation for political purposes,” Ms. Brown said.

The governor's sychological projection aside, the introduction of federal law enforcement has escalated the violence--only because it's enlivened antifa, increasing their number and aggression.

Leave it to the progressive Nation magazine to debunk, somewhat, the "kidnapping" theme, though don't expect it to go away any time soon:

For days, federal agents in unmarked cars have reportedly been snatching Portland protesters off the streets. On Thursday, video emerged of federal agents clad in camouflage fatigues and unspecified “police” patches apprehending one such demonstrator and placing him in an unmarked vehicle.

Social media lit up with speculation about the intentions—and the identity—of these agents. A memo consisting of internal talking points for the federal agency responsible for the arrest, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and obtained exclusively by The Nation provides some answers—and raises even more questions.

Dated July 1, the memo is titled “Public Affairs Guidance: CBP Support to Protect Federal Facilities and Property” and marked “For Official Use Only.” It describes a special task force created by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to President Trump’s Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence. That task force, the Protecting American Communities Task Force (PACT), has been tasked not only to assess civil unrest but also to “surge” resources to protect against it.

The Portland arrest of Mark Pettibone, first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, followed several similar arrests involving officers from a Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC)—CBP’s equivalent of a SWAT team—as well as the US Marshals Special Operations Group. A CBP spokesman confirmed to The Nation that CBP agents were responsible for the arrest, pointing to authorities under the Protecting American Communities Task Force...

While many people have criticized the alleged lawlessness of the arrests, some even engaging in conspiracy theories about them, these arrests are likely legal, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials interviewed by The Nation. And that’s exactly what makes them so troubling, explains Jenn Budd, a former senior Border Patrol agent.

The arrests did in fact play out as abductions, with feds pulling up in unmarked cars, singling out and arresting someone not engaged in criminal activity. Presumably they're identifying people on video they think are leaders or provocateurs and rousting them. Arrestees report being asked to waive their Miranda rights to answer questions and being quickly released after refusing.

Simplest explanation is mild harassment by the feds of suspected ringleaders to dissuade. But it might also serve the feds by sowing further mistrust in antifa ranks--after last week's revelation of undercover cops at riots--while fishing for snitches or voluble crazies who won't be able to contain themselves.

The Coup remains invested in the "kidnappings" theme.

The increasingly childish Washington Post:

In Pettibone’s account, when several men in fatigues approached him, his first instinct was to run.

He did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists, who frequently don militarylike outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland. The 29-year-old resident said he made it about a half-block before he realized there would be no escape.
Then, he sank to his knees, hands in the air.

“I was terrified,” Pettibone said. “It seemed like it was out of a horror/sci-fi, like a Philip K. Dick novel. It was like being preyed upon.”

Because antifa sympathizers are being relieved by complicit media and leaders of the normal risk associated with violent insurrection, America is being overthrown by LARPers.

It is like dystopian fiction. Not even its perpetrators can believe the depths to which political leaders have allowed this to go. But I suspect he doth protest too much. This is all very thrilling to participants, and local friendly media are excited to be published in the New York Times and Post. It's fun because it's so much like something we've been experiencing second-hand all our dull modern lives.

He was detained and searched. One man asked him if he had any weapons; he did not. They drove him to the federal courthouse and placed him in a holding cell, he said. Two officers eventually returned to read his Miranda rights and ask if he would waive those rights to answer a few questions; he did not.

And almost as suddenly as they had grabbed him off the street, the men let him go. The federal officers who snatched him off the street as he was walking home from a peaceful protest did not tell him why he had been detained or provide him any record of an arrest, he told The Post. As far as he knows, he has not been charged with any crimes.

Democrats nationwide pounced on the story, of course.

Authoritarian governments, not democratic republics, send unmarked authorities after protesters. These Trump/Barr tactics designed to eliminate any accountability are absolutely unacceptable in America, and must end. pic.twitter.com/PE4YfZ9Vqd

— Senator Jeff Merkley (@SenJeffMerkley) July 16, 2020

I thought we’d already covered this after the attacks in Lafayette Square: the US government should not be using unidentified federal officers as a secret police force to terrorize US citizens & violate their constitutional rights. This is outrageous. https://t.co/EIXbZmHXak

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) July 17, 2020

Anti-cop city councilmember Jo Ann Hardesty called for a vigil in front of what she's long called the "(in)Justice Center" at 7 PM yesterday. Later that night of course we'd have riots, with protesters trying to barricade the building and drawing out federal cops.

The vigil was awkward and ugly at times as one group came with its own speaker and tried to talk over her. Earnest dull white "faith leaders" shared the stage with angry black women.
Hardesty got off the street before nightfall as the mood went dark along with the day--as it has been every day for going on two months.

Here she is actually tripping over herself hustling away as the crowd gets uglier:

Footage from livestreamer Anna Noelle Green, via "AustinZone" YouTube channel

And as contrived and phony it all is, there's no way this coup's plotters have real control over their troops.